Coming back to WoW -- Need advise on gear.

[Icyheat]

Hey all, I am coming back to WoW after an 8 month hiatus. All of a sudden, I really felt the urge to play again. Anyway, I'm completely lost on where I should commit my time on.

I want to mainly PvE. I will play whatever spec is currently on top (if all the same I prefer fire).

So here is the thing, I have no reputation with any faction. So should I farm some rep? And if so, with which faction? Also, I have around 1600 Valor, and 4000 JP. Is there anything I can do with all the JP? The vendors that I saw, have just Cata gear.

So yea, many many questions. If anybody here can point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Oh, my character's name is Icyheat, in the Cho'gall server. (can't post links)

[Deleted]

For JP: there is a vendor at the shado pan garnison in tonlong steppes. you can get some pieces even with neutral reputation.
The Island of Thunder has been added just recently. you can get pretty decent gear there (daylies+rep) and loads of Elder Charms of Fortune (used for bonus rolls for items in raids). via the looking for raid feature you can gear up easily for the first tier of 10 man raids. if you have trouble reaching the item lvl (460 and 470 depending on the LFR part) get szenario and/or heroic dungeon gear as usual. some crafted ilvl 476 gear can be bought quite cheap nowadays (1000g per piece on our server), this also helps alot. in theory, you can skip rep farming for items now. it may be worth getting at least friendly with some factions though.

so in a nutshell: get those elder charms of fortune off isle of thunder (rare mobs, the solo szenario, random chests etc) and use the LFR tool for the random 25 man nerfed versions of the raids. maybe spend some coin on the crafted pieces. do the world bosses: sha of fear, galleon and nalak. try oondasta too, but he spawns less frequently and is a bit harder (unless you have like 60+ players).
to get your item lvl up for LFR maybe get arena points cap and get a piece for conquest points.

and now, all this REALLY in a nutshell :P : step one: elder charms. step 2: lfr, worldbosses.

for your specc, due to some nerfs fire isn't the best choice if you don''t have acces to the new raid on normal difficulty, because you simply wont get enough crit for it to work properly. you're best off with frost in the gearing up process.

[Icyheat]

Thanks so much Netheris! That is really helpful