Let the AH be Your Thrift Store: Fashion Hunter Tips

Once you wrap your head around the idea that having an outfit for every occasion means that formerly worthless junk is now like gold to you and to others, you start to see this game very differently. The AH becomes a shoppers paradise, sorting through piles of castaway drops that others spurned but you see for the fabulous costume potential they hold. Lowbie quests you might have spurned long ago suddenly have new significance and the source for that perfect set of goggles to go with your hippie duds or sash for your pirate. The new equipment manager means you can, in fact, take more of it with you.

You still have to do your homework, so here is a brief study guide for those aspiring fashion mavens who want to be the sharpest dressed lumberjack in the Grizz.

The ability to try before you buy is one of the most useful features of WOW. Ctrl-left click is your friend and ally. If you are a heavily armored level 80 in big shoulders and with big weapons, you will want to disrobe your torso before trying on that fabulous cloth shirt you just found.

At the AH, you will spend most of your time looking at green cloth armor. You will hardly ever need to spring for rare or epic costume gear, but the green stuff, and sometimes the white and even gray trash, is where it's at. I always start with the head, because hats make the outfit. Since stats are irrelevant, you will see the same design may be available for a low level hat as for a high one. Anything designed for Northrend will make you look like a viking, which is a nice look but hardly original, so you will want to look at 70 and below.

The other source for excellent costume gear is lower level quest rewards. Depending on which you have done and left undone, there may be outstanding opportunities for costume attire waiting for you in Westfall, but how do you know whether it is worth it to acquire? The answer is the Wowhead item database, which not only gives you a compendium of what is out there but also quite frequently has screenshots. You will want to set the filter so that it shows you the greens between 1-70.

Let's say you want a miner's hat. You are not an engineer, so the Goblin Construction Helmet is out. If you look up this item at Wowhead, go to the "same model as" tab. There are six other possibilities! Three, it is true, are also limited to engineers, but you also have the option to get Underworld Helm as a quest reward Beneath Thrallmar (I vendored mine, like a fool, before I saw the light), or the Expert Goldminer's Helm as an 8% drop from the rare level 38 elite Digmaster Shovelphlange in the pre-instance parts of Uldaman, where Miner's Hat of the Deep is a very rare blue drop as well.

Many of these acquisitions will be hard to pull off, but that is what makes this whole fashion thing such a challenge and such fun. And often someone else will do the work for you and put that rare drop that is not an upgrade for them on the AH. Got my second eyepatch that way...