Firstly, Best in Bags and Gear Check are two different features of the website that do slightly different optimizations. In general, you should always use Best in Bags. Gear Check is very limited – it only suggests gems and enchants, and is meant as a quick check for free users of the site. If you have premium, just use Best in Bags – it is more thorough. It will look through all of the gear that you own and try to find the best combinations of gear. It also lets you save multiple setups, among other features.
You might benefit from reading the tutorial for Best in Bags:
(The short video is from last expansion, but it works pretty much exactly the same now, minus azerite powers.)
If you are using our website and our addon to manage your gear sets as described in the tutorial, you don’t ever need to directly use Blizzard’s equipment manager in-game if you don’t want to.
A short version of how Best in Bags is designed:
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Using our in-game addon, export all of your information to our website. This contains all of your equipped gear, gear in your bags and bank, soulbind and conduit information, etc.
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Use Best in Bags and create setups that you wish to use. It is common for people to create one setup per spec (you can change spec on the website at the very top, to the right of the “import from addon” button). It is also common for people to create two setups per spec: one for raiding and one for Mythic+. Or whatever you want (but you can have no more than 6 total setups per character).
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Once you have the setups and optimizations doing what you want, press Send to Addon on the Results tab for any of your setups. This will send all of your setups to the addon.
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Copy that text into the import box of the in-game addon. Now on the Gear tab of the in-game addon, you will see all of your setups. There is a dropdown box at the top of the gear table that lets you switch between your imported setups. Press the big green “Activate [Spec] and Equip Gear” button for that setup – this will change you to that spec and equip all of that gear. If you have the option enabled, we’ll also change your soulbinds and talents to match your setup.
And that’s it – whenever you get new stuff, export to the site again, press optimize, see the new results, copy them back into the game, your setups are now updated. If you don’t like opening the addon and pressing the button to swap gear, there are instructions right on the Gear tab of the addon for how to make a macro and bind it to a hotkey.
You also don’t ever need to uninstall or delete the addon, or restart your PC. If you ever feel like something is out of sync, you can follow the steps in this post to completely reset all stored data in our addon:
All of that said, you can use the Blizzard equipment manager if you prefer. Enabling the option to create equipment manager sets will create an equipment manager set that matches your setup whenever you press that “Activate [Spec] and Equip Gear” button. The equipment manager set will have the same name as your setup in the addon, which will also have the same name as your setup on the website.
The only real use I have for the Blizzard equipment manager is that on the tooltip for an item, it will show the name of the equipment manager sets that it is a part of. I find that handy – instead of recreating that functionality, we just use the game’s built-in equipment manager to get it.