How to pick the best gear

There are a lot of ways to find your best gear – and that can be confusing. You are left wondering which way is best. Let’s see if I can help shed some light on that.

First, I want to identify why picking out gear seems so hard… or at least, why you can feel so uncertain about your choices.

You see, when you try to make combinations of all of the gear you own, it adds up to millions, or billions, or quintillions of combinations.

Wow, that’s a lot of combinations. Obviously, a human can’t be expected to pick out the single best set. No wonder so many of us are unsure of what to wear. It’s not due to a lack of effort or intelligence, there are just too darn many combos!

Maybe now you’re thinking, hey, let’s sim it all! Computers are smart and faster than humans. And that sounds like a great idea… except… even a super fast computer that sims 1 setup per second would take ‘forever.’

Let’s look at this problem from a computer’s perspective:

So that is surprising, right? With a modest set of gear, it would take almost 2 months to sim it all.

That leaves you asking the main question again, “How do I find my best gear?”

There are 3 ways to go about it. Simming every combination is one way, but quite impractical, as you now see. You can instead try to pick the best 50 or 500 combos and sim those. You’ll probably do well enough with that. And then there is my favorite method – Best in Bags (more on that in a bit).

Here is a breakdown at the accuracy vs time tradeoff of each method:

Which method is best?

Best in Bags is my go-to method because I’m more than happy to accept a tiny accuracy tradeoff to get an instant answer. Quite often, Mr. Robot picks the best setup, and when he doesn’t it is very, very close. It’s the most popular premium feature for a reason (premium is $12 a year, yeah, that cheap! You also get a 1 week free trial, no credit card is asked for during the trial).

Or you can do the other 2 methods for free with our simulator.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at each method…

Best in Bags

So how does this work and get an answer so fast?

Our simulator runs through a ton of scenarios in order to find your best “stat weights”. Then it simulates every item with a proc at various item levels and bundles that sim data with the stat weight report. So when you rank gear on the site, or do Best in Bags, every item with a proc gets ranked from simulation data. That’s very important since procs can’t be ranked with stat weights.

Mr. Robot uses some fancy decision tree logic to comb through all of your gear combinations and find the best set (or very, very, very close to the best set). He combines the simulation data with some statistical models to pull this off. It’s embarrassingly sophisticated and we should have probably applied this level of effort to solving world hunger… but robots just don’t understand the ‘hunger’ problem.

Anyway! Back to talking about your gear.

You can find your best gear for different setups too. Single target and multi target. Just swap between gearing strategies and the Best in Bags result will update. Here’s a quick guide on using Best in Bags:

Try before you buy! If you haven’t tried it before, everyone gets a free trial for a week. Like, really free (no credit card is ever entered during the trial). If you’ve used up your trial and want to try it again, just let us know. You can pm your username to me: zoopercat on forums.askmrrobot.com.

Sim every single combination (free)

Some of you might still want to do this, even with how long it takes. Right on – the tool will do whatever you want.

While you’re here, I’ll let you in on another little secret. You can combine gear, talents and anything else in the same ‘batch’ simulation. You can combine anything, not just gear. But of course, that makes the combinations get even crazier.

The guide to do this is the same as the one for simming SOME combos, covered below.

Hand pick combos & sim (free)

Simming every combo is impractical for nearly everyone, so now we’re considering just some combos. While this won’t be perfect, it is still fun to do… and we like fun things around here!

A lot of people like to test a combination of legendaries and trinkets, which can be kept to a reasonable number… between 500 and 5000 in a lot of cases.

I also see another common case, which is people do Best in Bags first and then fine-tune the trinkets with a hand-picked sim. Remember that Best in Bags gets you very, very close – and then if you want, you can refine it even more with a few hand picked combos.

Here’s a guide for this:

Questions?

Hit us up on our forums, we’re happy to help (here’s a thread specifically related to this article). And remember, if your free trial is over and you want to try Best in Bags again, send a pm to Zoopercat on the forums with your username.

For more fun reading: