Shadowlands Legendary Rankings

The Upgrade Finder has a new, special search for ranking Shadowlands legendary powers. It works a little differently than other Upgrade Finder searches – please read this so that you understand the rankings and get the most out of them!

Note: we are still improving and tweaking these rankings as we lead up to the first raid. You may see them shift slightly over the next couple weeks. And as always, whenever Blizzard does any kind of balancing patch, we will update these rankings within a day or two.

How is it different than other Upgrade Finder searches?

Most of the Upgrade Finder searches are very straightforward: if you were to get the item in question and equip it with all of your other current gear as-is, would it be an upgrade, and by how much?

The legendary ranking is different: you generally want to plan ahead. Which legendary has potential to be the best for me down the line, when I have more gear, a fully unlocked soulbind tree, and a bunch of conduits?

That’s the question we answer with the current ranking, and the ranking that we think most people actually want.

Which settings impact the legendary ranking?

Since we’re doing a different kind of ranking, not all of your Best in Bags settings influence the ranking. The only settings that matter for the legendary ranking are your:

  1. Chosen gearing strategy
  2. Talents
  3. Covenant

None of the other settings influence it (and most of them would have little to no impact anyway).

How do we calculate the legendary rankings?

Unlike other Upgrade Finder rankings that are calculated on demand for your character and setup, the legendary rankings are pre-calculated based on a very large amount of data. We run a specialized set of simulations and optimizations to try and explore the potential of each legendary – give each one a “fair shake” based on other available gear, conduits, stat distributions, etc.

We do this analysis for every combination of talents and covenants. This is one of the coolest things about these rankings – they adapt to how you want to play. Most of the other “best legendary” lists that you’ll find out there have tons of hidden and very rigid assumptions, e.g. that you will always be using a very specific talent build or covenant. We want to give you good rankings no matter what you choose.

What about the suggested slot and stats?

You’ll notice that we recommend which secondary stats to put on your legendary, and which slot to use for that legendary.

These are just suggestions.

In general, which slot and stats you use for a legendary are far less important than which legendary power you use. If you want to put it in a different slot or change one of the secondary stats from our recommendation, you will barely be able to tell the difference (if at all).

That said, our recommendation is based on a pretty extensive set of optimizations that try each legendary power in each slot with several combinations of stats. You can’t go wrong with the recommendation if you don’t have a preference one way or the other.

Why does it only show one item level of reward?

We do this to simplify the display. The item level of a legendary only changes the amount of stats on the legendary – it has no impact on the legendary power itself. You should craft the highest item level version that you are willing to pay for.

Getting the best legendary power is more important than which item level version of the item you have. Also remember that each upgrade in item level is 5 less than the previous, so upgrading a 190 to 210 is the most cost effective, then it goes down from there.

AMR rotations aren’t necessarily taking legendary powers consistently into account right now. As an example, for balance druid the default rotation isn’t looking at Balance of all Things buff windows at all, when it is widely believed (and proven in simc results) that doing so leads to better perf.

Is there any way AMR could somehow emphasize this in the rankings, e.g. giving an idea of how well rotations are currently adjusted to play around a given legendary? I’m personally comfortable digging into the rotation and understanding the limitations of the tool, but I suspect this might not be the case for all AMR users.

In general, the rotations should be making good use of all legendaries. I’m sure that there are optimizations to be done for specific cases, and I’m sure that people will find ways to make use of some of the items that we haven’t seen yet. We’ll keep an eye on things and keep updating things as appropriate.

If you have specific cases where you think the rotation could be improved, make a post and we’ll check it out.

I don’t have any other example than Balance’s BOAT since I haven’t looked in details, but the discrepancy for this one caught my eye immediately. It is widely believed to be the BiS ST option, and the current AMR ranking shows it at 4th place. I’ll look further into this (currently porting the simc BOAT rotation to AMR to try and see if this is purely rotation driven or if there are other factors) and make a separate post if I come up with something.

About the slot and stats, probably will cost you lot of computer power but I personnaly would love to have more information in the Upgrade Finder.

  1. Ranks
    First, legendary rank, Does the gap between legendary increase if ranks (iLvl) increase ?
  2. Slots
    Second Slot, Yeah be able to know the impact “overall” (Fully inclocked tree+best gear), they are probably within margin of error but i would love to see “why” belt is suggested over to the head (short answers could be their is a head from the last boss i can loot but no Belt).
  3. Stats
    I personnaly dont mind not having the real impact for stats because the “tendancy” is already showed in the BiB and i will follow the two top stat from this part :
    image

Although a legendary can be crafted for multiple slots, I’m only seeing it in the list once. Not sure if this represents the best slot or not. Example: Talbadar’s Stratagem which can be crafted for the waist slot or legs but only the leg slot appears. I suspect that both would be an upgrade for me but it’s not evident.

Read the top post in this thread – it has a section that answers your specific question.

I use your site all the time. Can you fix it so it stops telling me to upgrade to a 225 lego when I have the same lego with the same stats at ilvl 235? And I did, yes, choose 235 as my lego level. It’s just making some really weird errors.

The legendary ranking in the Upgrade Finder is different – it always shows the 225 version, and ranks all 225 versions of the legendaries against each other.

If you read the top post in this thread, it explains how that ranking is done, and how it is different than other Upgrade Finder searches.

A post was split to a new topic: Worst in Bags thinks different legendaries are the same

What do you think about having the legendary compare to each other in the same way as talent and covenant in the “guides” section ? Rather than the “upgrade finder”?
You select the covenant, and you get a color gradiante for what legendary is compare to each other. This should be duable now that we have “less” legendary by taking the second legendary included in the covenant choice ?