HELP! GEAR DROPPED! WHAT SHOULD I DO!?

I get this question so often, even from people not my class, that it is no longer funny, nor something I can often be helpful with in a time frame they hope for (while rolling on 1 item vs another).

I could tell you that you should always grab this stat vs that stat, or to tell you to take higher item level gear, or to always use your set bonuses, or to roll on everything usable...but all of those would be wrong answers (I may try to generalize for different gear situations though in the future). The truth is, there is no "easy" way to judge what gear and stat is better (though I think it is plenty easy right now, if you understand how your character works). This is because what stat is better for you will change based on the other stats you currently have.


Let me use a real example for me from recently.
There are 3 trinkets in icc that casters care about: Dislodged Foreign Object (haste with a sp proc on cast), Phylactery of the Nameless Lich (crit with sp proc from dot tick), and Muradin's Spyglass (crit with continual refreshing stacking sp).

When I was in my 3 pc t10 and 2 pc t9, glyphed for insect swarm, my moonfire dots could crit, and my insect swarm did more damage. Now, in 5 pc t10 I'm glyphed for starfall instead of insect swarm, and moonfiire dots can no longer crit, so I don't keep dots up as often. When you look at that, and being at more than 50% crit when raid buffed now, it is no surprise that while Phylactory was by far my BiS (Best in Slot) trinket then...it no longer is, and DFO is now my BiS by a good chunk. The trinkets didn't change, but my gear, stats, and bonuses did.

That being said, since I'm still using Eye of the Broodmother...either one is a HUGE upgrade, so I should, and will, roll on both (I already have Muradin's). I'd love to go get Reign of the Dead, but it just never drops, and the one that would beat out these is the Heroic version...which I doubt I'll be going back to get anytime soon.


So, how does one know? Well, if you're not math oriented, there are a lot of tools out there to help you out. The easiest one though, which helps very quickly answer the "which is better for me now?" question is to go use RAWR. It used to be download and run only, but now has a pretty handy web interface as well (though unfortunately it requires MS Silverlight to use it that way). You can find Rawr here:

Downloadable:	http://rawr.codeplex.com
Web usable:	http://www.elitistjerks.com/rawr.php

Once you load it up, go to the file menu and choose Load from Armory, put in your realm and character, and go forth. When you want to compare things, just choose that slot from the drop down on the right (just above the gear list that looks like a bar graph).
For dps, it is pretty simple...the larger the bar, the better the item is for you right now.
For tanking it can be a little bit different, as you have threat, survivability, and mitigation. You can sort by all of them, depending on what you need/want more of at that moment, as well as how the items are overall (which uses all 3 rankings).

I'm not going to go into the details of everything you can do with Rawr at this point, likely I will in a later post...but this should allow you to look at the gear you want to compare, and with reasonable certainty, know if it is better, similar but different, or worse.

The Short Version:
Don't trust a BiS list, or that Blizard's tier items are going to be the best. Figure out the math, or use a modeling tool like Rawr, to see what is actually helping you the most.