Today we released a few more improvements to Best in Slot, and we have also made Best in Slot a premium feature (it was our last free feature before this update). First we will describe the feature updates, then we will explain why we made it premium.
Inventory Items
Best in Slot generally works by finding the best combination of gear from all of the sources that you allow in your settings. But we also always include your currently equipped gear – I mean… it’s on your character already, so why not use it?
We have expanded this to include any item in your inventory, not just the items that we see currently equipped on your character. The same logic applies – when finding a Best in Slot set of gear, you probably want to include… everything that you already have!
Per-Slot Item Lists
After finding a Best in Slot solution, you can click on any slot in the solution to see a per-slot list of available items, and a quick rough ranking of those items. These lists are pre-determined by us: we locate all relevant end-game items and figure out which base variants of those items drop in-game.
Prior to this update, that list was very simple and static: it always shows the same list of variants for each item, and the filters default to the highest values so that you are seeing the highest quality versions available.
After this update, we have made this list more responsive to your Best in Slot settings. Firstly, the filters will be set to match what you chose when running Best in Slot. For example if you said to limit Mythic+ gear to a specific level, that setting will be copied to the per-slot item list when you open it. These filters are synchronized after each time you run an optimization.
Secondly, we modify items in the list to the variants that the Best in Slot optimizer would have used with your specified settings. For example if you said to add 2 sockets to jewelry, you will see all Neck items with the added sockets in the list now. Same idea with the Max Upgrade Threshold – we’ll upgrade all items in the list to the level allowed by your setting.
Why is Best in Slot now premium?
After making these improvements and the other improvements last week, Best in Slot is now a premium feature.
The main reason for this change is that we wanted to give Best in Slot a little more polish and make it feel like a premium feature. There were some minor technical reasons as well – we needed to integrate it with all the other premium features to open up some functionality around player inventories, for example.
We started out as an ad-supported, free website way back in the day, and Best in Slot being a free feature was a hold-over from those days. But… ads are gross, and we really don’t like advertising as a revenue model. When you are supported by ads you find yourself motivated mainly by “how can I serve more ads to more people” rather than “how can I make a good product that people actually want to buy”.