One of the most common problems encountered by many folks in WoW is assessing whether or not a new piece of equipment (drop, AH item, etc) is an upgrade for their current character / spec.

While no site or addon can take the place of a human brain, it is possible to take much of the guesswork out of gearing your characters. Some of this discussion will apply to characters of all levels, and the rest will be applicable only to those at level cap.

Step 1 - Gearing for your Spec

Each spec has its own peculiarities. You *could* spend hours beating on the combat dummies (or healing them) to figure out the best combination of gear for your spec. OR, you could go read articles from other folks who have already done it.

PvE answers: Elitist Jerks
PvP answers: Arena Junkies

You WILL find a lot of information on these sites. Unfortunately, it can be too much information. My suggestion is to look for the area specifically devoted to your class, and check the stickies at the top of that part of the forum.

What you get out of this will be:

• Attack (or healing) tips and rotations
• Optimized specs
• Pawn values for each spec

Pawn is an addon that takes every stat on a piece of equipment, and adds in into a formula specifically tailored for a spec. Typing /pawn will bring up the pawn interface, where you can add new scales, import scales from the web, and then make the WoW tooltips use those scales.

The pawn scales can also be entered into the loot search tool at Guild Ox, to provide you an detailed list of the "best in slot" gear for your build / spec. This list will also tell you exactly where to get the gear.

Along with Rating Buster, these two addons operate only on tooltips, so will not impact your latency during combat. Having the two of them, though, can greatly speed your gear decisions. RB will tell you the exact stat change per category as you mouse over equipment v. what you are wearing now, and pawn will add the per-spec mathematicalimagic rating number, as well.

Step 2 - Gearing for Endgame

But, what do you do when you've reached cap, and the decisions now turn more toward how to optimize endgame gear in-depth? There are two fantastic web sites to help you out, Be Imba and WoW Heroes. These sites work in similar manners, but are less accurate on a per-spec basis. Instead of providing deep insight into your gear, like pawn, these web sites analyze your armory profiles for missing or misenchanted gear. Did you forget to attach an eternal belt buckle to your new piece of gear? These two sites will tell you. Did you forget to upgrade that old stamina enchant on your bracers? Ditto. It's a great sanity check, to make sure you haven't just overlooked something easy to fix in your character optimization.

In the end, nothing works as well as our brains. No tool can take all of the variables of complex play styles into account. These tools, however, ease the burden by providing unambiguous answers in a lot of cases. Pawn value for two items for your spec only differ slightly? No worries, take a look at the items and decide. Pawn values differ a LOT and you would favor the "wrong" item? Might be time to investigate exactly why the theorycrafting says one item is superior to the other.

Step 3 - Automated Gear Optimization

There are now several tools (and associated web sites) offering in-depth gear optimization, also known as sandboxing. Want to see what a specific upgrade will do for your DPS or healing? These tools can tell you. Ditto for changes to your talents, consumables, or your DPS cycles.

Rawr provides a very nice sandboxing method, although it can be hard to understand and set up properly. Its optimization engine is fantastic, though, and allows you to set up (and even import) all of your gear. The optimizer will then chew through all of the combinations of your gear, enchants, and gems, and provide you with the optimal set of gear for your target encounter. There are videos on the site to help you get started, but Jim and I are both becoming proficient in tweaking the tool to get the most out of it. For classes with a timed cycle (v. a more priority-based one), Rawr will provide you with the optimal order of casting.

WoW Sage has an updated version of the Character Profiler, which will allow you to quickly import all of your character's items and tradeskills. There is an option in Rawr to use this data in its optimization process.

Hope this helps!

D

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