Snap: c975a92bea8b46f6b1d64005048730e1
Valorstone Upgrade tells me to upgrade a head piece:
But BiS tells me I should go for another one:
Best in Bags/Upgrade Finder and Best in Slot run slightly different optimizations – you won’t always get exactly identical results.
Also, your upgraded item has an extra socket.
BiS is always my one step source of information on what to go for. This is the final result/gear I want to achieve, hence BiS.
To have it showing a different/wrong result is a contradiction in my belief.
BiS should know that I had an head piece item with extra socket, and display that one in the result in the first place.
You don’t have it equipped though – Best in Slot looks at your currently equipped gear, and then whatever your filters allow.
Best in Slot does not look at your inventory. This is something of a hold-over from the old days… Best in Slot is a free feature and thus does not have access to your inventory, which is part of the premium features.
We have considered making Best in Slot a premium feature as well, and then we could make a few improvements to it. But for now it is what it is: we have lists of all of the relevant available end-game gear, you filter it, we pick a set of gear from it that will be optimal or near-optimal based on your talents, settings, etc. If you happen to have an item currently equipped (showing on the left) that is better, we keep it. Nothing else is considered.
Then I hope it will get updated. As it is now, it yield no interesting result for me. It’s almost useless.
But thanks for the information, I’ll just stick to the upgrade finder and BiB, and ignore the BiS section then.
Best in Slot is one of those things where there are a couple of different approaches that are equally valid.
The first approach I’ll call “old school”: there is one, single Best in Slot set of gear available in the game at any given time. Determine what it is before you do anything, then go for it. Try to obtain as many items on the BiS list as possible, filling the gaps with whatever you happen to have until you obtain those 15 or 16 BiS items.
This approach gained a ton of popularity in the early days of classic WoW and MMOs in general, when there were relatively few items available, and the items were frankly balanced very badly, so Best in Slot was pretty clear.
The second approach I’ll call the “archetype” approach: instead of trying to find the one, single set of 15-16 items, you look at Best in Slot as more of an archetype for what the best set of gear will look like. For example, the archetype might be: you have the 4pc tier set, these important trinkets and special items, and about this much of each secondary stat.
There could be thousands of sets of gear that are extremely similar to that archetype – trading out 1% crit for 1% mastery, or one very similar trinket for another, or swapping out a minor crafted embellishment for an item with slightly better secondary stats… all these things are of little consequence as long as the overall quality of the gear is the same, and it stays pretty close to the archetype.
This second approach came about as a result of more modern versions of WoW: there are a ton of variants of the same items, so it is easy to make functionally equivalent sets of gear with different actual items.
Both approaches are valid, but we would argue that the archetype approach is more practical these days. It’s highly likely that for any BiS list you make, you won’t end up with exactly those items. But that’s OK – you can get something so similar that it doesn’t really matter.
All of that said, we would like to use your inventory to inform Best in Slot – it’s on the list of future enhancements, but as said above it would really require making that feature premium. I don’t think that in itself is a big deal as most users of Best in Slot also have premium, but it would take a little bit of a rework to ensure that it is functioning smoothly.
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