There are a few low level items worth paying attention to as you craft gear and run dungeons. I wanted to point these out before you vendor them in a leveling craze and the made rush to getting raid-ready gear.
Save all rings & necklaces
Let me quickly explain why.
In legion, secondary stats get ‘diminishing returns’ as the item level goes up. But primary stats don’t.
Necks and rings only have secondary stats. This means iLevel often isn’t the best indicator of quality, rather you have to evaluate it based on secondary stats.
Now here’s why I advise you to keep all necks and rings: stat weights change! Whether from swapping talents, focusing on single-target or AoE damage, game-balancing changes, or bug fixes (gasp!), your stat weights may change. Because of that, it’s definitely worth hanging on to those necks and rings in case they become good later.
Crafted rings – get lucky with stats!
Crafted rings are even more special than regular rings and necks. First, they always come with a socket, which gives you either a secondary stat boost of your choice (rare gems) or primary stats (epic gems). Note that you can only have one epic gem equipped at a time, so your first socketed item can be really strong.
When crafted, the stats they get are random. A ring could have haste and mastery when crafted the first time, crit and haste the second time, and so on. And the ratios are random too, one could have high haste and low mastery, and the next time they flip to high mastery and low haste.
So I advise 2 things:
- Keep an eye out for lucky procs that have 1 stat really high. It will either be really good for you, or for someone else (a friend, or the AH?!)
- Hang on to crafted rings of any kind in case your stats change later.
5-Man dungeon 2-piece sets with stat-procs
The 2 mythic-only dungeons, Court of Stars and The Arcway, drop some 840 iLevel sets that proc a bunch of one stat.
If the stat-proc is high on your stat priority list, these can be really good items, often outranking 865 gear or higher. So these can carry you well into raiding!
Rank gear with Mr. Robot!
Stat weights:
On launch, we have stat weights generated for single target situations. We’ll be adding more stat weight options in the coming days, like AoE or a mix of the two. For raiding, we’re adding stat weights and gear recommendations for specific bosses too.
You can also customize your own weights if you’d like. Head over to the simulator, choose the ‘gearing strategy’ option. It will take 10-30 minutes to run. When you’re done, click the ‘save and use’ button. That’s it!
DPS specs are heavily tested and refined, but we’ll be making tweaks this whole week, as well as fixing any bugs that pop up . Tanks and Healers are good (not as solid as DPS), and will go through more refinement the week of Legion launch.
Artifact Paths
Your character page has a recommended artifact path for each spec, based on a single target fight. Mouse over each trait to see how much damage you gain going from 1 trait to the next.
This is just one possible good path. The optimal path changes based on your talents or if you want to fight single targets or AoE stuff. You can get a customized version on the simulator (before Monday night’s launch).
If you don’t like videos or are at work (gasp!), here are the basics (click to enlarge).
Estimate your DPS!
COMING within 1 week of Legion launch: Get your DPS for your character setup, right on the character page. There’s no need to do a complicated setup, or even download a program. Run it right on our site, for free!
READY NOW! You can load your character directly into the simulator if you don’t want to wait for the character-page integration. Or if you want to get complicated and test crazy things, you can do that too. Just head over to the simulator page, and watch my crash-course video. For more help, visit this page.
Trinkets, Relics, Legendaries & Set Bonuses:
Now ranked by simulations, not stat weights
We’ve solved the trinket (and proc item) ranking problem we’ve had in the past!
I’m going to be honest. Despite our best efforts in Warlords, you may have noticed we’ve had a hard time automatically and accurately ranking trinkets, and a few other proc things. You’ve likely seen me tell people to pick your trinkets, then let Mr. Robot pick the best gear around them. The reason is that most procs don’t translate into stats well. Take this legion Legendary as an example:
Our goal was to solve that problem for Legion. And we did it! (At least, I hope we did!) All procs are now ranked directly from simulations, customized to your character. It doesn’t get much more accurate than that!
This is one of the main reasons we built a simulator. While we did as much testing as possible, and had about 100,000 people testing it with us throughout the Legion beta, some of these results might look odd (in which case, report it to us please), or change as new information comes in on the items. For example, a handful of items still have unknowns and we took our best guesses for now.
Ask Mr. Robot’s Web-Based, Free Simulator
You can find the simulator here. If you need a bit of help, head over to the simulator help page for more resources. And keep an eye open for simulator features getting integrated right into your character optimizer page over the next few weeks.
Here’s a simulator crash-course video.