Post by Deleted on Mar 12, 2014 3:57:40 GMT
I get questions on occasion from people looking where to spend their valor most effectively, but mostly I've a pet peev for watching people spend their valor poorly. So, here's some guidelines to follow:
1 - Always valor cap your main toon each week - 1k valor. There's a whole other discussion on how to reach valor cap with minimal effort.
2 - Never let yourself reach max valor (3k) for risk of going over. That's just a waste. Valor is a method of gating how fast we can level up our toons, especially at any point in the expansion when you are buying your gear from a vendor. You can only get 1k valor a week, so you can only buy vendor gear as fast as you earn valor. Not valor capping means you gear slower, while going over your total valor cap means you've wasted valor that you earned, thus wasting your time, and time is money friends. To add to this, hitting max also prevents you from earning valor towards your weekly since valor not gained is valor not earned - just learned that one today in breaking my own rule.
So, how do you spend this valor?
1 - Your most powerful pieces of gear are your weapons and trinkets. Weapons assert a high baseline of damage while trinkets proc huge stat bonuses that give you like 30-40% dps increases for their duration. If you're going to be using these for any length of time, they are your priority in upgrading as you'll see the biggest results.
2 - Upgrade any current tier gear. These are long-term investment pieces that you'll want to have around for months.
3 - Your next most powerful pieces of gear are your helm, chest and legs. If you examine any gear of the same ilvl, these will have higher stats on them, so they'll scale better from upgrading. You'll note these 3 slots are all part of tier gear. If they are tier gear great; if not, don't upgrade them unless you're close to maxxing valor since you'll be looking to replace these with tier gear.
4 - Upgrade any gear you think you'll hold onto for awhile.
5 - Upgrade anything to avoid maxxing out on valor.
I think it's best to think long term about your gear, like 3-6 months. You'll usually have about 6 month brackets between new tiers of gear being released. You want to set a goal for yourself in what you hope to get - whether that be a full set of lfr gear, flex, 10-man, or just vendor gear, whatever. You'll work best if you have a goal to work towards, because then you can devise a plan to go about getting it. As you accumulate pieces of gear in line with your goal, you'll know what to upgrade since you know that 500 valor you're investing will not be wasted when you replace the gear a few weeks or a month or 2 down the line.
If you're forming a plan for anything from a raid, spend a little bit of time looking at the gear drops from the raid, easily findable in the Dungeon Journal. If you want to be more technical, you can look through MrRobot for a very hard numbered approach. The quick and dirty approach is to identify the secondary stats that are most desirable for your class/spec. You can identify those easily enough by looking at Noxxic, IcyVeins or MrRobot. As you look through the drops in the Dungeon Journal, jot down any gear you see that has the desirable stats. For example, my hunter favors haste above all and crit second. My goal is to identify every piece of mail gear with haste on it and rule out every piece of gear with mastery, since mastery isn't a desired stat. I'll accept any item with hit or expertise, but I'll try to avoid getting too many of these since at this level it's easy to go way over cap and not be able to reforge all of it off. It's easier to reforge/gem more hit/expertise on then it is to get rid of it.
I will jot down on this list the item slot and what boss drops it, I find including the name to be non-essential. From there I will reorganize the list into something that makes sense to me at a glance. For my specifically, I will make a new list of all the bosses in a raid and then a number next to it for how many pieces of gear that boss drops that I want. I will mark a "T" next to that number if one of those is tier pieces since those are highly sought after, and usually a second mark of some kind to indicate who drops my trinkets and weapons. When I run a raid, I will have this list next to my desk and when I've downed the boss and deciding whether to use a bonus roll, I glance at my list and decide if there's enough gain. I prioritize all my bonus rolls going towards my weapons, trinkets and tier pieces. Once I've collected most of those, I'll start rolling on bosses who drop 2 or more pieces of gear for me, the rest are mop up after. This prioritizes the gear that will give me the most benefits first and I know at a glance where to spend my rolls.
The other question that comes up is when to gem/reforge/enchant and how often.
I'm of the opinion that one can go 2-4 weeks before doing this. A more accurate measure is to do so after acquiring roughly 4-5 new pieces of gear. My basis for this largely stems from number crunching through MrRobot. The way stat weights work is that those weights represent an equivalent amount of dps/output. So, when you load your character and click optimize, it'll show you the numerical change along with a %. To be clear, that is showing a loss of potential maximum dps. So, I think about that when making my decision about whether or not to reforge/gem/enchant.
How much am I willing to forego before I think it's a problem? The short answer is I wait until about a 10% short of optimization when I'm actively gearing a toon and only running lfr. Once that toon is running with the guild and their gear is changing less often, I'll optimize once a week once I'm done working with the character.
1 - Always valor cap your main toon each week - 1k valor. There's a whole other discussion on how to reach valor cap with minimal effort.
2 - Never let yourself reach max valor (3k) for risk of going over. That's just a waste. Valor is a method of gating how fast we can level up our toons, especially at any point in the expansion when you are buying your gear from a vendor. You can only get 1k valor a week, so you can only buy vendor gear as fast as you earn valor. Not valor capping means you gear slower, while going over your total valor cap means you've wasted valor that you earned, thus wasting your time, and time is money friends. To add to this, hitting max also prevents you from earning valor towards your weekly since valor not gained is valor not earned - just learned that one today in breaking my own rule.
So, how do you spend this valor?
1 - Your most powerful pieces of gear are your weapons and trinkets. Weapons assert a high baseline of damage while trinkets proc huge stat bonuses that give you like 30-40% dps increases for their duration. If you're going to be using these for any length of time, they are your priority in upgrading as you'll see the biggest results.
2 - Upgrade any current tier gear. These are long-term investment pieces that you'll want to have around for months.
3 - Your next most powerful pieces of gear are your helm, chest and legs. If you examine any gear of the same ilvl, these will have higher stats on them, so they'll scale better from upgrading. You'll note these 3 slots are all part of tier gear. If they are tier gear great; if not, don't upgrade them unless you're close to maxxing valor since you'll be looking to replace these with tier gear.
4 - Upgrade any gear you think you'll hold onto for awhile.
5 - Upgrade anything to avoid maxxing out on valor.
I think it's best to think long term about your gear, like 3-6 months. You'll usually have about 6 month brackets between new tiers of gear being released. You want to set a goal for yourself in what you hope to get - whether that be a full set of lfr gear, flex, 10-man, or just vendor gear, whatever. You'll work best if you have a goal to work towards, because then you can devise a plan to go about getting it. As you accumulate pieces of gear in line with your goal, you'll know what to upgrade since you know that 500 valor you're investing will not be wasted when you replace the gear a few weeks or a month or 2 down the line.
If you're forming a plan for anything from a raid, spend a little bit of time looking at the gear drops from the raid, easily findable in the Dungeon Journal. If you want to be more technical, you can look through MrRobot for a very hard numbered approach. The quick and dirty approach is to identify the secondary stats that are most desirable for your class/spec. You can identify those easily enough by looking at Noxxic, IcyVeins or MrRobot. As you look through the drops in the Dungeon Journal, jot down any gear you see that has the desirable stats. For example, my hunter favors haste above all and crit second. My goal is to identify every piece of mail gear with haste on it and rule out every piece of gear with mastery, since mastery isn't a desired stat. I'll accept any item with hit or expertise, but I'll try to avoid getting too many of these since at this level it's easy to go way over cap and not be able to reforge all of it off. It's easier to reforge/gem more hit/expertise on then it is to get rid of it.
I will jot down on this list the item slot and what boss drops it, I find including the name to be non-essential. From there I will reorganize the list into something that makes sense to me at a glance. For my specifically, I will make a new list of all the bosses in a raid and then a number next to it for how many pieces of gear that boss drops that I want. I will mark a "T" next to that number if one of those is tier pieces since those are highly sought after, and usually a second mark of some kind to indicate who drops my trinkets and weapons. When I run a raid, I will have this list next to my desk and when I've downed the boss and deciding whether to use a bonus roll, I glance at my list and decide if there's enough gain. I prioritize all my bonus rolls going towards my weapons, trinkets and tier pieces. Once I've collected most of those, I'll start rolling on bosses who drop 2 or more pieces of gear for me, the rest are mop up after. This prioritizes the gear that will give me the most benefits first and I know at a glance where to spend my rolls.
The other question that comes up is when to gem/reforge/enchant and how often.
I'm of the opinion that one can go 2-4 weeks before doing this. A more accurate measure is to do so after acquiring roughly 4-5 new pieces of gear. My basis for this largely stems from number crunching through MrRobot. The way stat weights work is that those weights represent an equivalent amount of dps/output. So, when you load your character and click optimize, it'll show you the numerical change along with a %. To be clear, that is showing a loss of potential maximum dps. So, I think about that when making my decision about whether or not to reforge/gem/enchant.
How much am I willing to forego before I think it's a problem? The short answer is I wait until about a 10% short of optimization when I'm actively gearing a toon and only running lfr. Once that toon is running with the guild and their gear is changing less often, I'll optimize once a week once I'm done working with the character.