Frequently Asked Questions

If you've ever wondered about what gear to pursue for your World of Warcraft character, this site will point you in the right direction.  The site differs from traditional item databases like Wowhead because we only list gear you're interested in.  No more confusion and no more wasted time.  To get started select a class/spec from the main site menu.

No.  For free, all visitors can view the two best items for each slot.  If you want more depth and wish to view all items you can purchase a subscription.  This subscription gives you access to stat weight filtering, all items in that slot (with ranking system based on stats), and more.  For a full overview of what you get, look below or visit the subscription page.

As of April 2011 there are hundreds of premium subscribers at WoW Best In Slot.  You join them in using the site at its full potential and your continued feedback helps improve the site.  We always deliver a subscription upon payment, and should anything happen during your transaction our support will address it almost immediately.  We have a clear privacy policy that outlines what we do with information provided on registration.  There is also a page of terms and conditions you can review.

With so many items in the game and theories about what is best, it's impossible to avoid error on a site like this.  If you see something wrong, especially with trinket ranks (the only manually ranked items on the site) or default weights please use the contact page and it will either be corrected or looked into.

The act of creating an intelligent automated listing of gear that contains a vast array of stats is a large task.  Parsing thousands of items while making sure every nitpick for each class and spec is correct is not trivial.  This site strives to make sure the wrong gear isn't listed for a class and spec while providing a useful look at all of the items available on a slot-by-slot basis.

Take into account the web hosting required to make sure everyone has a smooth experience while browsing.  This site is not well suited for a cheap hosting environment because it would be limited with the number of visitors wanting to use the full experience.  Subscriptions run this site and keep it updated since maintaining it is close to a full time job.

Since this is a new site as of January 2011, subscription fees are subject to review. The cost competes with other online WoW services such as Smoothping and Zam.

Weights are a little different here than traditional systems, mostly for the sake of simplicity and reading.  Main weighted stats can be weighted from 0 to 5.  The final score (Pointscore) of an item is calculated based on the addition of all of weight*stat products.  Items on the site are sorted by Pointscore.  If a class/spec hypothetically has only two weights: intellect and spirit (let's just say int is 5 and spi is 4), and the item we're looking at has 250 int and 175 spirit, here is the Pointscore calculation:

Pointscore = (5 * 250) + (4 * 175)

Sockets are weighted from 0 to 1000 (1000 being closest to a Cogwheel socket, ie ~200 stats from the gem times weight value 5).  Anything outside of this range is invalid.

Changing weights is available on all pages for a spec (even the overview). Each spec has its own set of weights.

To change weights, enter your own value (premium only) and hit "Apply" or "Save".  The items will automatically be ranked according to the weights.  You may reset weights and store your own weights to the site's database (for later use).  If you use the site's weights you can still change the values, but they will be reset after a certain amount of time (when you clear browser history or after a few days).

All items come with a group size label based on item level regardless if it's from that or not.  This is just to signify that it's of a certain difficulty level.  Our filters differentiate on actual group sizes properly.

Each slot is calculated individually, independent of each other slot.  Because of this, specs don't have an overall cap on any stat, but rather a static weight for a stat calculated across all items.  The "overview" page is just that, an overview of the best item for each slot.  It may not reflect the fact that you're at a stat cap after X amount of items with that stat on it.  

Why does the site lack caps in ranking gear?  Well, rarely in the real game will you ever have the exact set of gear proposed on the BIS listing.  For this reason the site rightly leaves the end choice up to the player when they're examining a slot.  If caps were implemented gear would be excluded and an unclear list of choices for you would be the result.  For very detailed theorycrafting and stat cap balancing you will want to examine sites like Elitist Jerks.

With dynamic weights that premium users have access to you can examine a slot in much more detail, for instance if you have enough hit you can bump that value down and find the best item for you at a given time.

Nothing is stopping you from using those kinds of tools, in fact if you're interested in the really deep geek WoW theory-crafting that approach may be best for you.  This site is meant to take the complex UI's, complicated math and other un-fun decisions out of finding your gear while still letting you decide which items you want to use.  Because of this we're not setting up strict gear profiles with hit, expertise and/or haste caps in place.  The site ranks gear based only on their stats on a per slot basis so you can choose for yourself if using an item with a little more expertise is ok or not.  Don't care about expertise as much?  Tweak the weight down a little bit and see if that item still turns out to be the best in that slot.  The main advantage is you don't have to spend hours configuring your profile and running complicated simulations to get an idea of what you should be using.  There are other resources out there for these things should you choose to use them.

The site rates weapons based purely on their primary and secondary stat values, thus the speed and top end are generally overlooked.  There are hard filters in place for classes that rely on weapon speed so we don't rate weapons that have the wrong speed for a main hand or offhand.

If you put great value on top end damage you can still get an idea where PVP weapons place by comparing it to a similar top-end PVE weapon.  Since the site focuses only on PVE content this isn't as great of a concern, though it could be a change in the future for classes that rely heavily on top end damage.