BiS, PoS, EiEiO
We always approach the term “Best in Slot” with caution, because things that have “the best stats” don’t always result in you having “the best stats”.
For instance: these boots have no Hit Rating. The boots they are replacing are the Pack-Ice Striders, boots that happen to have loads of Hit Rating.
If you equip these BotRF and don’t have the gem-slots available to recover those thirty-nine Hit Rating points, you actually could decrease your DPS by slapping these on. We had to change out four gems to keep our Hit Rating above 263, while making sure not to affect our Chaotic Skyflare Diamond Relentless Earthsiege Diamond meta-gem while we shifted everything around. If you don’t have the gold, the guild-connections, the materials, the available gem-slots, or some other way to overcome the loss of Hit Rating when “upgrading” gear, a piece of “BiS” could be, for you, a “PoS”.
iLevel ratings on gear are very handy, but they don’t always tell the entire story.
…
These are really nice boots, though, aren’t they.
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Usually, a generally agreed-upon BiS item is BiS when combined with its other BiS items. The popularly agreed-upon BiS set has enough hit to be hitcapped, but only when it call comes together.
But yeah, that’s part of the art of the class – determining what is the best upgrade for that slot at that point in time.
I agree that BiS is not always the best at the moment. You forgot the link the boots you are talking about though. I’m guessing Boots of the Renewed Flight?
Disregard last comment. I use firefox and for some reason it never shows the images you post. Too late to edit comment.
thats why i often find myself with multiple items for the same slot. Ill have an item with better stats, and an item with more hit, so if i get a new piece of gear i can compare every possibility to see what will get me the greatest current stats.
“We had to change out four gems to keep our Hit Rating above 263, while making sure not to affect our Chaotic Skyflare Diamond meta-gem while we shifted everything around”
That’s why jewelcrafting is pure win.
I agree with you. Too many people just look at stats of an item alone and deem it BIS without thinking how that piece of gear fits in with their overall existing gear or if any compensation will be done.
Of course there are certain items that are just too good but I see this all the time regardless of class and it contributes alot to loot whoring because people just don’t plain think about their upgrades.
Gratz BRK,
I agree its not always BiS we now have to play “Let me shuffle my stats around” when we get the top items for our class. The other night in Naxx 25 I got Envoy and the Tunic of Massive Suffering plus the T7.5 Helm drop, it was a great night for the two hunters in the raid. But now I’m over Hit cap by 32 and need to re-gem to drop my Hit points down to 263.
I have noticed that most of the BiS items have either Crit or Haste (with no Hit) so is that the next stat that we have to build on?
Cheers and Gratz again man
To answer you question Galorfinor, BiS will even vary depending on spec, BM doesn’t need haste(though it still helps) whereas Survival gobbles it up. If your running survival after getting mostly BiS I can safely say you’ll be hit capped as well as either haste soft capped(or pretty dang close). Its at this point the much maligned ArP gets to be viewed more favorably(with my crit and haste its better than both those stats). Downloading a spreadsheet to help gauge what each change will do is my recommendation.
cool brk thx 4 responding to my email that was the one downfall i saw with my “BiS” set and because there were only 2 gem slots
Yes BRK, they are very nice boots. Gratz!
I still have yet to kill Malygos /grumble… There is no I in Team. The competency of others can be rectified. I’ll get him eventually… =/
that was the lack of hit that was the big problem^^
Don’t be too judgmental of the idea of Best-in-Slot, now. Even if you’re under the hit cap, those boots are still BiS. You have to be far, far under the hit cap to negate the impact of the other stats that come with these boots, at which point Dawnwalkers from Heroic Anub’Rekhan become your new BiS. However, you’d be much better served by wearing these and shuffling some pieces around that are less dramatically different in value.
(I assumed this to be the case because these boots are both highest iLvL and particularly well itemized, but here are my tests with Rawr – I tried unequipping my hit trinket to drop my hit to 228, and whaddaya know, those boots are still BiS by a decent margin over Crippled Treads. Once I drop my hit to 173, however, they are slightly behind Dawnwalkers.)
Speaking of Rawr, Nick, have they made it any more stable or any less silly when it comes to MM’s calculations?
I remember the thing telling me to use Strength gems and crap.
@Rilgon
RAWR has been improved but it still does some funky stuff. For instance it shows the Meteorite Whetstone as 2 BiS for a SV hunter.
However until you reach the point of needing the spreadsheet to look at gear choices it is still a quick and easy tool.
@Nick
Again it depends on where you are at. I have Journeys End and Black Ice. At the moment Black Ice is the equiped weapon because I don;t have the hit in other places to use the stats on JE. If you were going from Blue boots to BoRF then you have a case. However if the stats are closer then you can’t just disregard the hit cap.
Cheers
Kol
i have this item, + 16 agi enchant and hit cap. You just need to find the right pieces to make it a happy relationship.
@Nick
Also the Dawnwalker (which I am wearing) are pretty damn decent boots.
Why no Relentless Earthsiege ?
I have these boots and, BiS be damned, they’re just such beautiful boots. I’ve got my hit rating from other items, it will be a sad day when I get some boots to replace these.
(unless the new boots have the same model, in which case it will be double happy)
Ok this is why i hate abbreviations,
because now i have to look like an idiot and ask -
What does PoS mean?
I’ll not go as far ask asking what EiEiO means though ;o)
Actually, you’re right; we do have the Relentless Earthsiege. Editing…
Piece of {expletive deleted}.
Just to be sure here, I’m guessing that not all four of those gems were +hit hybrids, since you get 12 hit from Icewalker, yes?
I’ve always wondered if hit from enchants ends up on the tooltip. I know hit from talents (i.e. Focused Aim) does not, can you enlighten me, BRK?
Thats also why Jewelcrafting continues to make money. Replace a single piece of gear, and you replaced 4 gems. No other profession has that.
Ah yes – thanks
see i knew i was going to look like an idiot
Malygos breaks my heart. I have stacks and stacks of items with hit on them, many of them in the bank. But Maly has only ever dropped 1 set of boots, which I passed to a fellow hunter as a bigger gear up, and has never ever dropped the Blue Aspect Helm.
On the other hand, I actually have 2 Envoy’s of Mortality, one with crit and one with hit (the ZG enchant). Envoys and Journey’s Ends drop light rain from K’T for us, but Heroic Malygos hates me.
“I HAVE BOOTS OF ESCAPING”
I picked these up last week. We’ve only seen Envoy and JE drop 2 or 3 times, and I never had enough epgp to get them. I ended up swapping out my bracers to the badge bracers, and slapping icewalker on the boots as well.
Pack ice striders are reasonably well itemized badge loot, so I’ll hold on to them if I need to regain hit somewhere else again. I do need to get rid of some of the extra gloves I have in my bank though. Grotesque handgrips and calculated risk just don’t measure up to the leather ones from maly, no matter the spec.
I agree. Gear is like a puzzle where you piece things together working towards a nice balanced bottom line.
Even if a piece doesn’t work for you right now, you should go ahead and bank it as it may come in handy later.
I’ve got a pair of Grotesque Handgrips sitting in my bank as they don’t fit my current setup.
those are some nasty boots. Happy pew pewing
I keep Eaglebane Bracers and Ring of Scarlet Shadows arround to help manage the Hit dance when I get a new piece of gear and I’m 5 valor emblems away from getting my Pack-Ice which will also help.
I would have to somehow equip rogue tier to ever replace Black Ice though :p
also these:
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?compare=46083;46085;46084;46082
look very nice in 3.1
Anyone that is doing 25 man raiding should be keeping multiple pieces of gear. I personally have 2-4 pieces of gear for each slot on my character (including trinkets and rings). If I have 4, here’s the breakdown… 1 is the best BM piece I can get for that slot. 1 is the best SV/MM piece I can get for that slot. And the last 2 are the best hit rating item I can get for a SV/MM or a BM build. I always laughed at our MT for having all this gear and having to swap pieces for each new drop.
“This shield adds a ton of stamina, but I lose a lot of mitigation, but if I switch my boots and cloak, then I make up the mitigation and keep a net gain of stamina.”
Now I’m doing that too since we are forced to balance so many stats. I kind of miss the days of Agility and Atp lol.
Anyways, I highly recommend keeping multiple pieces of gear. I find sometimes that changes the 4 gems may actually hurt me more than just switching to a ring with hit on it, or back to my hit cloak, etc etc… It’s become one heck of a balancing act, but I kind of enjoy it.
I’m talking about going from, say, Pack-Ice Striders, which are iLvL 213 epics, to the Maly boots. They’re that much better than the iLvL 213 pack. No raiding Hunter is going to see BoRF as a downgrade, because *there is no pair of boots with enough hit rating to make that situation possible.*
Going from being hit-capped wearing Pack-Ice Striders (39 hit) or Dawnwalkers (50 hit) to BoRF is still an upgrade! These are the only two iLvL 213 epics with hit rating.
Now, will that change mean that your gems are no longer perfectly optimal? Probably so. But on my gear, for example, hit is so close to agi in value per point that I raid under the hit cap (256 instead of 263) because swapping a single agi gem out for an agi/hit gem is actually an overall DPS loss, even though I’d only be overgemming for hit by a solitary point.
Always remember that hit is not a special stat in any way other than its behavior once you reach the cap. If Blizzard so chose, they could very easily create a set of gear with zero hit rating that still provided the highest possible DPS. If you’re a casual player and don’t want to do the math, shoot for the hit cap. If you want true maximum DPS, find out the relative weight of your stats and treat hit like any other stat.
What boots did you use before the Pack Ice Striders. My toon on Shandris, Chisza, is sitting at 296 right now (and sporting the Kirin Tor Rep boots). Only reason I won’t buy the striders is the hit is through the roof. ><
Why does everything have hit AFTER I’m capped?
I love your blog brk, partly because i’m slowly leveling my hunter towards 80 and partly because a lot of the points you make are very helpful for all the classes. though probably also because I like to see myself type. anyway, my main is a lock, but i play a hunter and a resto shaman as well, and i generally want to be the best i can be at the classes i play. what i see a lot is one classes rules being applied to other classes. for instance, nick is right that he might not always need to be hit capped if its a dps loss for him. i’ve met warriors for whom hit generally wasn’t there main priority.(prot i guess? i really don’t know much about warriors mechanics) and they reroll locks and also don’t prioritize hit, just thought i’d mention that the importance of always being at hit cap depends on your class and your spec within that class.
for instance, for a lock, theres 3 main specs, destro, demo, and affliction(my baby) and each one hs a slightly different ranking of priority of hit. destro is mainly a nuke spec, with some cooldowns, but if one of the twoish cooldowns misses its not a huge dps loss, still not good, but you’ll catch up again. for demo its even less a priority, for deep demo, your CD’s are mainly stuff that affects how you deal damage, and aren’t affected by hit. deep demo is even more of a stand and nuke fest, except when you pop meta and charge in, and then nuke from close up. so for some specs hit can be dropped a bit. however, for affliction its the #1 stat, mainly because of the one major cooldown we have that should be up the whole fight and while its up increases damage by 20%. if you miss with that, a few dots fall off, you can’t renew it for a while, you usually lose another important debuff, and all in all your priorities and dps die and go to hell.
anyway. after that long bit, i don’t know if raiding hunters have a similar cooldown, but i suspect that something like that is also true.
wow, i’m really sorry, didn’t realize how much of a text block that was
I keep my grim toll handy for healthy helpings of hit.
yeah, i agree completely. I got the tanking pants from 25man Sarth, and i had to do a lot of “creative” gemming to keep my meta active, and to keep my def above 540.
Why not take Focused Aim instead of taking hit gems? I go with a 4/16/51 build.
I’m sure that will be better for your dps.
Because until 3.1, Focused Aim does not effect pets, and assuming BRK is running around as BM these days, that is a massive loss of DPS.
In 3.1, however, yeah, he can spec FA all day and all night and not care.
I went from Trespasser’s Boots to Crippled Treads. Never had hit on my boots since Black Temple.
If you’re drowning in hit, try to replace a trinket or your melee weapon(s).
A BiS is best in slot when you have access to all the BiS gears in other slots. Otherwise it may not be the best in slot but it should never slip out top 10 and by a small margin.
Even if a BiS is INDEED a PoS for you at some point, you still need to grab it. Otherwise you never build up your BiS set.
Not to mention with 39 more agi and 50 more crit, you can easily swap +hit GEARS (if you have ZERO yellow/red gem slots), or swap +40 agi food with +40 hit, and still end up with overall BETTER stats than pack striders…
Yeah, I’m defnitely keeping a few extra pieces to swap in and out as required. Hooray for the hunter spreadsheet; I’d hate to have to sit down and figure out the best combo of items every time I get a new piece all by myself!
What, no Pallies for ranged DPS? You don’t want the MQoSRDPS that is… the Shockadin?
/sarcasm off
(Sorry, my previous comment was in the wrong thread and Firefox crashed and lost state right after I realized that, so I can’t go back and edit it)
Ratings buster indicates the boots have 101.2 agility. Thats 88 + 15% from Lightning Reflexes. So BRK was survival when he took that screenshot,.
What addon are you using to get these types of stats?