The Alts are Back in Town (ow-ow-ow-own!)

Praise to the Timeless Isle!

Despite being a fun expansion with plenty to do, there is one big criticism that has been levied against Mists of Pandaria: that it is not friendly to alts.

Old strategies for keeping alts geared up have fallen by the wayside. With reputation-gated valor gear (that required doing dailies as opposed to simply championing in dungeons,) the irrelevance of Justice Points after one's initial blue gear, and a lack of late-expansion dungeons with better rewards, you really had to work pretty damn hard to get a second character geared up.

Now, there have been some nice changes, like Commendations and a limited return to faction championing, but the fact was that you really had to go through most of the same process before you could gear up.

5.4 has brought about some huge alternatives. First, and more simply, all the old 5.0 and 5.1 valor gear is now justice gear, allowing you to buy 489 and 496 epics, covering every slot. And that's not to mention the fact that these are all now unshackled from reputation, meaning you can start running dungeons at 90 and be able to gear up with these options available to you.

Likewise, Shado-Pan Assault gear, while still only available for VP, is now cheaper and requires at most friendly (with the exception of the exalted shoulders, which still cost gold.) That means that with some diligent dungeon running, you can get a fair amount of 522-level gear with only a single wing of ToT completed.

But all of that is small potatoes next to the Timeless Isle. Take your main to the Isle and before you know it you'll be swimming in Timeless armor pieces. These can be sent to alts and then used to convert into a spec-appropriate piece of gear. You might have an alt who literally just hit 90, but with a little time and a little luck, you can send them a whole ton of gear, getting them most of the way to queueing for Siege of Orgrimmar when it goes on LFR next week.

The only downside of this gear is that, like the Latent Kor'kron pieces, they have randomized stats, so you might wind up with a bunch of crit for your Elemental Shaman or a bunch of haste on your Arms Warrior. Still, it's iLevel 496, which is what you need to hit the Siege next week.

And you will get a ton of this stuff. Seriously, if you look for the little moss-covered chests that litter the Isle, you're going to be drowning in it. My plate guys were all fairly well geared, so at this point I have a ton of Timeless Bracers I don't even know what to do with.

The point here is that with a little time on the Isle, you'll be able to raise the iLevels of several alts by huge bounds.

Now, I still hope that in the next expansion they'll plan to keep releasing dungeons as the patches come out, because that's a lot easier to jump into than LFR, but over all, this is going to make the rest of Mists a whole lot of fun.