People on EJ like to theorycraft these “Dream Team” gearsets that 99% of the WoW playerbase will never completely put together. Usually they start doing this when the content that drops the items and the items themselves aren’t completely implemented yet. They are understandably concerned with figuring out absolute max performance with best possible gear on a level with that available to the top 100 most-progressed guilds.
Regular players such as me and you see these idiotically-named “Best-In-Slot” castles in the sky and think that anything not on that list then obviously must not be worth spending dkp or karma or rolling on.
If you’re one of those 1% of players who can reasonably expect to gather every single item they could possibly want for their mainspec in a specific tier of content before the next content is out – then by all means, follow the “BiS” list crowd and avoid upgrades that could help you but aren’t on the list while you’re collecting the listed gear, and then possibly be optimal after you’re done, just in time for the next raid instance.
Or – you can trust Rawr to figure out what’s best for YOU. Right NOW. In YOUR situation. Based on YOUR available gear, YOUR available raidbuffs/debuffs – keeping in mind that Rawr has limitations.
…Such as not being all that for dynamic fight analysis (yet), occasionally not immediately modelling a newly-released item mechanic correctly – or an item mechanic that keeps changing, like Nibelung or Deathbringer’s Will. It’ll take a bit of time until stuff like that is correctly modelled. And there’s bugs. And it’s confusing. And it’s decidedly NOT newbie- or user-friendly, despite claims to the contrary by the developers.
Final analysis:
Educate yourself on Rawr’s model and items. Understand why people on EJ do what they do with these lists. Then make an informed decision taking into account all available data.
Just because it’s at the top of the list for your current character, as it presently stands, does not mean it’s a BiS item per the lists posted on EJ. It means that that item would give your character the most benefit for what you have set up. If you were to move stats around and drop Hit Rating, that would certainly change what showed as top of the list on various slots as that would change what items give you the most DPS.
– Jothay, Developer
BiS lists are silly. Those items are BiS in those slots IF AND ONLY IF you have all the other items in all the other slots. So really BiS lists are not terribly useful except in very long term gear planning decisions.Rawr will advise you about what the best move for your character is NOW. EJ tends to try to answer the question “What is the best set I can possibly have if I had everything”. You can answer that question in Rawr too but it’s not as simple. The models may also vary a little but that’s neither here nor there and can’t be easily quantitatively measured.
- khantal
Q: Did you ever completely fill out your “dream sheet” of gear from any one raid instance or tier of gear before the next raid or next tier was released?
If Yes – then go mess with BiS lists.
If No – then you’re with me and 99% of the rest of wow players. Not that Rawr is perfect. It’s confusing and unwieldy and a mess if you’re on a Mac like me and it’s waaaay too hard to figure out how to mess with “Gemming Templates” and whatnot. “Templates”?? Hey – I just wanna play the game, maaaan!
Another alternative is Toskk’s Dps Gear Calculator and Askmrrobot.com, but both of those have their own limitations. And SimulationCraft for the extreme computer/math guys. But that’s not me.
I love the blog Coldbear: your posts are straightforward and entertaining.
I totally agree with what you are saying here. I think most players would be surprised what a difference it makes replacing a piece of gear with something that is not “Best in Slot”.
I played as a Holy Pally during Naxx and Ulduar. I want to say patch 3.1.1, Blizzard nerfed the mana returned on healing crits. All of the sudden MP5 wasn’t a crap stat and this also made a lot of “BiS” gear crap. Needless to say, I had to spend a lot of DKP really quick.
Great video’s and awsome work on the feral dps guide. I first saw the video after doing much of the legwork on primary sources you must have done as well and thought – “sure, now I find this….”. Screw those who tell you it’s to fast – it’s digital – pause/rewind are your best friends : )
How are you using RAWR on a mac? Are you bootcamping, or is there a mac client I’m not aware of? I can’t dedicate the space to a windows partition, so would love to hear if you have an alternate approach on the mac. I’m dying to get lost trying to use RAWR, and keep hoping the web-client will appear given my mac woe’s….
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rawr+mac&l=1