Why does upgrade finder say SSC BIS boots are a 2.77% downgrade?

Ask Mr. Robot
1

Hi, I’m playing anniversary burning crusade. The upgrade finder for Arms Warrior shows:

2026-06-07 upgrade finder
2026-06-07 upgrade finder1862×1216 269 KB

The second item are Soul-Strider Boots, those are for healers, why are they recommended for Arms?

The upgrade finder says Warboots of Obliteration are a downgrade. Yet these are Best-In-Slot, also according to the Ask Mr Robot BIS feature. How can the warboots be a downgrade?

Snapshot ID: 23ed8fd649b04832afe8b9953db1ab76

Thanks for your reply!

2

You may be getting strange results because your Arms build does not have a complete talent setup. Go to Best in Bags and ensure that each of your setups has the exact talents that you want to use, then try optimizing again. Let us know if the results look better after that, and if not, post a new snapshot and we’ll take another look.

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3

Thanks for your reply. I assumed the talents would be uploaded with the import string, so I never entered them. Now I did. Strangely, this makes the BIS boots Warboots of Obliteration even worse! They are now listed as a 4.24% downgrade. This persists even in a new browser tab. What do you think?

New bucket ID: 3b99d5fef36640368084ebdc2004008f

4

I’ll take a look – I would expect those boots to be very similar in quality to your current boots (TBC itemization is a bit wacky compared to more recent expansions, they weren’t very consistent with the item budgets back then).

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5

This turned out to be an issue with the meta gem… swapping out your current boots removed one of the required gems to activate it, causing other boot options to rank lower than expected. We actually have code to handle this but it was only enabled in the WotLK version.

Our next site update (probably tomorrow sometime) will enable this correction in the TBC version as well.

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6

Thanks for your reply! Now I’m guessing the meta gem is worth 4.24% of a pair of boots :grinning_face: Where can I find an explanation of what the percentage means?

7

The percentage is just an estimated relative increase in performance, e.g. for a DPS spec like arms, a 4% gain means we estimate you’ll do about 4% more damage. There are of course a ton of variables in a real game situation, so there are implied error bars on that. On any given fight your real gain could be slightly higher or lower.

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