I’ve gathered up all of the 5.3 information relevant to your gear. Here’s the top 10 things to know:
- Guaranteed 516 item! You can do the one-time quest, Heroic Deeds, which is to complete any Scenario on Heroic difficulty. The quest reward is a Bulging Heroic Cache of Treasure, which has a guaranteed spec-appropriate piece of 516 gear. Heroic Scenarios require a premade group an an iLevel of 480 or higher, so get your friends together now! Try organizing or finding groups on one of my favorite sites, OpenRaid, which lets your organize groups across realms.
- Daily chance for 516 items: completing the daily quest for Heroic Scenarios or daily Challenge mode dungeons will reward a Heroic Cache of Treasures, which has a chance to contain a 516 item. 4 new Heroic Scenarios have been added in 5.3.
- Valor & Justice Upgrades: you can upgrade your epic gear with Valor once again. It is much cheaper now, costing 250 Valor per 4 levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 levels. You can also upgrade blue quality gear with Justice, costing 750 Justice for 8 levels. Of course, Mr. Robot will be there to help you upgrade gear wisely.
- PvP Upgrades: Season 12 gear can be upgraded at their original costs. No other PvP gear will be upgrade-able.
- Bonus Rolls: bonus roll ‘protection’ will be implemented in this patch. The exact numbers are unknown, but the idea is that every time you get nothing on a roll, your chances to get loot increase. (Be sure to use those wisely, with our bonus roll calculator).
- Off-spec gear: you will be able to queue for LFR as one role, but get gear for another. And you guessed it, Mr. Robot will give you the option to switch to off-spec gear rewards when using his upgrade finder.
- Shado-Pan Assault (SPA) Rep Items: the belts from SPA will be available to people with Friendly faction (instead of Revered). The chest will be available at Honored (instead of Revered).
- Legendary quest: This quest line continues and rewards you with a level 600 cloak. Also, the Valor required for an earlier part of the quest (5.0) has been reduced from 6,000 down to 3,000. Here’s more info on all of the legendary quest line rewards.
- Level 502 boots: a new quest series has been added: The Old Seer and Path of the Last Emperor. Completing it rewards level 502 boots.
- Level 489 item from Weekly Barrens quest: Completing the weekly barrens quest rewards you with a Radical Mojo. You can also use resources gathered during the quest to buy armor pieces, like this one. You can then turn in an armor piece and a Radical Mojo to get a piece of spec appropriate 489 gear.
- Bonus Tip: New battle pets: 20 new pets have been added in 5.3, most of them dropping from old-school raid bosses. Like the Lil Bad Wolf from the opera fight in Karazhan.
PS: So much of this information comes from MMO-Champion’s amazing coverage of patch information. Here’s more in-depth information of what I covered, and more.