At some point or another, there comes the time that you will be looking at making tiny gear changes to optimize DPS.
Last week was such a point for my warlock. I had gathered 100 or so frost emblems and spend some DKP on a warlock tier token. Up till that point, I had always picked up non-tier gear (hands and chest) and had picked up some other items in ICC's. But as I already had the head tier-piece (no other suitable head had dropped or was available before I bought it) I decided that I wanted to give the tier bonus's a go. So the decision making process begun.
I had to buy a second Tier-piece...but that would mean that I would have to replace another part. As it turned out, every part I owned was better stat-wise (tier bonus not taken into account) than any of the remaining tier parts (ilvl 251). But, I still had the token available, so I looked at the sanctified (ilvl 264) set of T10. Those items were more or less on par sadly enough, making my decision even harder. Should I exchange some haste for SP? or some haste for more crit? Sure, there are information sources which provide a priority list, but they will only get you so far.
Looking further, I could also use the token on the head, which would give more advantages statwise. But that would leave me with a second Tier piece which was worse than the item that would be replaced...
Gear set comparisons on different sites did not provide the answers, as it is very hard to calculate the added benefits of the set-bonus. The Rawr software provided the solution. It gave me a clean DPS rundown of the different options. And surprisingly, it came down to upgrading my head with the token, and replacing my shoulders with a lower-stat Tier item resulting in a substantial dps increase of about 300 (without buffs etc)...who would have guessed...
But would there have been any other way to make a decision or than a full day of theorycrafting? Trial and error comes to mind. But when you use token, or frost emblems that you worked so hard for, they are gone. Making trial and error a very slow process.
Did Blizzard make the gearing too difficult? Or does the availability of the external sites etc make things overly complicated?
Now most know that with Cata, things will be changing when looking at the gear stats. But, as far as I can see, the new 'transparent' way of dividing stats, might still be rather confusing. And as far as tier bonus's go, nothing really changes...
I do think though, that some complexity should exist in gear selection, as you should be able to find your own way in how you gear your toon...but in the current system, this is not the case. You can choose to gear in a certain way, but in general the theorycrafting will show that there is only really one way to do it right. The choices are very limited...
So, how comlex should gear selection be? And how does this fit in the end-game-gear-grind?
