BiB: How can I set upgrade level for gear?

Hi!
Example: I got new loot, let’s say chest, upgrade level tier (2/8), and I want to include this item to BiB if it would be for example Runed Crest (like in upgrade finder).
Thanks a lot and Regards,
August.

So the upgrade finder essentially does this with the Valorstone/Crests search: it will upgrade the item, add it to your inventory, then try various combinations of your other gear with it and show you the highest score that it could find.

That sounds like what you are asking to do?

Hmm… I think it’s not really what I am looking for. If I could put the upgraded item, which I added to my inventory, use in BiB, than it would be useful, but it is not working and would be complicated anyway.

For example, if I have 20 upgrade-able items in my bag and I want to know which one combinated with my gear and another items in my bags is the best in bag combination, and worth to upgrade. How to do without checking every 20 items in upgrade finder?

I’m wondering if we aren’t quite understanding each other… I believe that the Valorstones/Crests search will give you a list that tells you the answer to your exact question in your latest post.

Say you have 20 items that can be upgraded. For each item in that list of 20, the Valorstones/Crests search will:

  1. Upgrade the item (as far as your max upgrade level setting allows)
  2. Equip the upgraded item
  3. Run Best in Bags to try many combinations of gear, but require this one item to be in the solution
  4. Show you the difference between the score of the best solution that could be found that contains this specific upgraded item compared to your current Best in Bags solution

The item at the top of the Valorstones/Crests search is thus the item that will give you the best result if you upgrade it.

The “Quick Rank” search does a much simpler ranking than the other searches, and thus why it can rank so many more items at once. But the other searches like Valorstones/Crests actually do close to a Best in Bags optimization using each item in the list.

Hi again.

To be clear. You mean:

  1. Upgrade the item → in the Game or “virtually” somewhere on the webpage?

Here is a screenshot of the Upgrade Finder for my warrior:

That list in the middle shows all of my items that can be upgraded – I have 60* upgradeable items.

The box outlined in red is the setting that controls how high I am willing to upgrade any particular item – in this case I have set it to the max value of item level 639, which means I’m willing to upgrade any item to its max level. (We may change this setting in the near future, but for now this is how you control essentially the highest level of crest that you are able and willing to obtain.)

So now I press “Find Upgrades”, and this is what I see:

In the first screenshot, notice that the top item in the list is a 571 1/8 Adventurer Enkindled Locket. In the results I have outlined what it becomes once I upgrade it: a 593 8/8 Adventurer Enkindled Locket, and it would be my 6th best potential upgrade.

Were I to upgrade that particular necklace in-game, the Upgrade Finder is estimating that I could increase my Best in Bags score by around 1.12%.

So with that information I can decide which item I should upgrade in-game. In this case, I’d probably go with one of the other items that ranks higher.

*Note that 60 is a lot of potential upgrades. The ranking only actually tries upgrading 41 of them in this case. It does some automatic pruning of items that are very likely too low item level to be worth upgrading so that it can speed up the ranking.

Hello. Thank you a lot for explain.
I understand this feature, and I tryed it out. But it is not practical (for me).

I am missing “Max Upgrade Level” in Best in Bags. Something like this:

I think, with this additional dropdown it would be a lot of more easy?!

When you say it is not practical, what in particular are you trying to do?

We are working on a few updates to the cost efficiency rankings of the valorstone/crest upgrade feature – it is actually a quite difficult problem to answer well (both as a player and as an optimization programming problem). We are gathering feedback from users on what they would like to see.

Heya, I have the same question. I think you’re not understanding each other.

Essentially from what I understand, Valorstones/Crests upgrade will tell us what is the best use of our valor/crests and result in the best upgrades. This however, doesn’t include my already upgraded items.

However, what I’m looking for, is Best in Bags feature, where I can run the simulation, “assuming” i can upgrade gear in my bag to the max possible.

E.g. I have all 639 gear (for simplicity). In my bag I have an additional ring, that is currently Myth 623. I want to run BiB with some kind of checkbox of “upgrade all gear to max valor/gilded”, so that the BiB when run, will consider the ring in my bag as 636.

This way, I will truly know what’s the Best in my Bags, “if” I upgrade everything.

(Side note, raidbots has this feature, where you can copy an item and set it as max ilvl - but I prefer AMR and am a premium member!)

So my follow-up question to this: how practical is it to assume that you can/will upgrade every item that you own? I would think that most people are pretty limited in the number of items that they can upgrade?

If it is a common thing that people upgrade absolutely everything to max level, we could certainly add an option to the upgrade finder to make that assumption, or even to Best in Bags where we upgrade all of your gear and then run it. We haven’t thus far because it seems that the game is pretty stingy with the upgrade currencies, so it never seemed like quite the right question to answer…

Yep, good question. And that’s the actual reason for it.

It’s not about upgrading everything. It’s about simulating it ‘as if everything is upgraded’. That way I know what I should be upgrading, instead of wasting crests/valor upgrading stuff that isn’t my best. I can then work towards upgrading that item, as I have my crests/valor available.

Btw, thanks for insanely prompt response - I realise this thread is a bit old.

Edit: I should add, especially now, where I’m and others are gearing a number of alts. And while upgrading is cheaper (discount on valor and runed), and getting gear is common (passed from a lot of players who don’t need) - there’s still a limited supply. So simulating what’s my best and working on those first, is important.

I’m going to ask a few more things not to be difficult, but because I want to arrive at a set of options that will work for everyone. As a player I find it a pain to decide what I should upgrade in WoW, so I really want to improve our experience around that.

In general I feel like there are two approaches to gearing that people take. Some people are very “Best in Slot” oriented – they start by determining what they think will be the best set of gear that they could possibly obtain, and then go about a tier of content using that as a check list for completion. They target those specific items in each specific slot. Any intermediate state along the way isn’t a big deal, as long as they get the items on that list.

The other approach is what we call “greedy” in the programming world. Simply put: at this very moment, take the largest single upgrade available to you. We feel like the game design itself pushes you in this direction. Great vault? You don’t know what item you’ll get and you can only pick one: take the single biggest upgrade for you right now. Raiding? Whatever drops will drop: take the biggest upgrade for you right now.

The advantage of the greedy approach is that early in a tier of content you get stronger, faster. The down side is that it might lead your down a path that doesn’t quite end up at Best in Slot. What most people don’t realize though… is that taking the greedy approach almost always gets you extremely close to Best in Slot in the end.

Thus, we have always nudged people towards a greedy approach, while still supporting the Best in Slot approach for those who prefer it.

Now back to this scenario: Given a particular item that I could obtain, I want to know if upgrading it with valorstones or converting it with the catalyst (or both) would be worth it. We’ll call this upgraded/converted final version of this item “item X”. There are a couple of ways to do this ranking:

  1. Given my current inventory as-is, add item X to my inventory and run Best in Bags to find the best set of gear that I could make that includes item X.
  2. (Your suggestion): Take my inventory and upgrade every single item that I own to its max level, then add item X, and run Best in Bags to find the best set of gear that includes item X.

When talking only about upgrading items, there is another request we have seen:

  1. Given a fixed amount of upgrade currencies, tell me which set of upgrades to my inventory could produce the best set of gear.

All of these things are doable, though i would argue that number 3 is not worth doing.

The reason that we have resisted the third request is because it doesn’t really answer the correct question. It assumes a fixed amount of upgrade currencies, when in reality a player is always getting more each week. We have some ideas for how to give people a better answer to this “efficiency” problem, which is a slightly different problem than the one we’re talking about here.

So looking at options 1 and 2:

I see the appeal of option 2, but my concern is this: by upgrading every item in my inventory in order to evaluate item X, I’m creating a hypothetical situation that will probably never come to pass. I’ll never get enough currency to that, and I’ll probably obtain a bunch of other items between now and then, so this inventory with just my current gear fully upgraded is doubly unlikely. Do I really want to rank an upgrade in a context that I’ll never obtain?

The advantage of option 1 is that I get a ranking that is immediately useful: I can see exactly how that item will perform along with my current inventory. The disadvantage is that maybe I’m planning to do 2 or 3 upgrades to my gear, so will it rank the same after I upgrade a couple other items too?

Neither approach is perfect, and it is tough to say which would give a better result in the long run. My intuition after doing gear optimization for 15 years is that were you to choose your upgrades only using option 1 or only using option 2 for an entire tier, you’d end up with sets of gear that perform so closely in-game that it wouldn’t matter.

Any other thoughts? This is where I’m at in my thinking right now on the various requests that have been presented to us.