Whats next for upgrades?

There is a new-ish site which indicates which item on your character will benefit from Valor Points the most according to your class and spec stat weightings. Wowupgrade.com.

Cool stuff, and a great idea. Check it out.

That said, the best use of Valor for me is buying new gear, not upgrading. I suppose it should be obvious, but I jumped straight at the tool to see where the bang-for-buck was, and initially forgot to consider the purchase.

eg. 1500 VPs to upgrade a 476, or 2200 VPs to buy a 489? Get the 489 every time, as it can be upgraded later to even higher. Then once all the purchasable VP gear is obtained, then start the upgrade spends as per the site’s recommendations.

This week if I cap the 1000 pt limit successfully, then I’ll be darn close to the 3000 hard cap as well. A spend is a must do. This is a great problem to have, as I can replace either a set of 476 Bracers or Legs.

The choice then becomes between the two items – the bracers have Exp and Crit, where the Legs have Mastery and Haste. No brainer – Legs. I have no idea what the dps increase will be by upshifting 13 item levels, but it moves to what are almost perfect DK stats. And when they get replaced by 5.2 stuff the Mastery might be re-used in a Tank set.

I’m soon off to spend VPs – Wheeeeeee.

Happy Killing.

Related articles

• Gearing up for an adventure (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• Patch 5.1: Upgrading your gear with valor (wow.joystiq.com)

Mathy question on DK set bonuses and gear item levels

On first drop I was stoked – the tier gear is something that I crave due to the old days when the BiS gear was almost always Tier only, and all the rest of the gear was a poor shadowy reflection of the Tier gear. And the Tier generally was a great looking matched set and transmog was still a gleam in the lead dev’s eye.

I had the pleasure of getting a few Tier tokens from kills (four items in two weeks – DPS LFR Chest and Normal Gloves, and also LFR Chest and Gloves) and now have a ponder-some issue for DPS gear is due to a difference in item level between my current Chest item (489), and the Raid Finder DK set Chest (483).

TLDR = To get the Tier 14 2 set bonus I have to drop the chest item level down 6 item levels. Is the set bonus of +10% damage to key dps abilities better than 6 item levels of stats other stats?

I’m really not sure. It is likely an overall dps loss, but if so by how much? Does that DPS loss become mitigated by the 4 set bonus if I can get those drops instead? Hmm.

In thinking through the solution I compared the 489 Tier 14 with the 489 Breastplate I was using and they are almost on par, with the current one (King’s Guard) a smidge ahead. This however does not include the benefit of adding either of the Tier bonuses themselves, which I’d argue makes the Tier Breastplate at 489 better.

• A Wowhead Comparison of the two items:
  • The Breastplate of the King’s Guard (489)
  • Breastplate of the Lost Catacomb (483)

By comparison the items show a clear difference, which is to be expected with 6 ilevels.

Left is the LFR T14 Chest, and the right column shows the 489 King’s Guard chest.

Overall gains of 62 Str, 590 Mastery, and 186 Haste vs the 694 Crit is the point of differentiation, as the Stamina and Armor is moot.

So then I thought to apply the stat weightings for  Frost DKs via Wowhead. The goal was to see what difference for teh item alone was, in terms of marginal upgrade or significant upgrade.

This showed the combined weighting value of 156,784 pts for the T14 LFR Chest, and 161,280 for the 489 Chest; meaning a difference of only approx 3% in the two items. Ignoring that this is probably not the way to use item weightings (?) it shows that the LFR item is only a minor downgrade.

It also made me realise that even if I know what the weighting is for the items themselves, I do not have a dps value to compare too, as I cannot ratify a specific DPS figure increase against items level without a set of repeated simulations (like SimCraft).  I don’t know a way to settle what the difference is. Fark.