Tag Archives: Valor Upgrades

Patch 6.2.3: Hey, something to write about!

Hey, Hunters! Yeah I am still here. Just fresh out of stuff to talk about in this downtime and complete lack of news… until today! Patch 6.2.3 was announced today and it adds quite a bit for a minor patch. Here’s some quick thoughts on the main features:

Valor points returning

Valor is coming back purely for item upgrades. It looks like you can do two upgrades of 5 ilvl per item, for a total of 10. This isn’t something I am going to grind at all. I know I’ll get some incidentally from doing stuff and I’ll use those on my weapon, then a trinket (won’t bother using it on Mirror of the Blademaster since the on use doesn’t scale with ilvl), then the highest ilvl/stat budget pieces from there.

I don’t like that you can’t get the points from doing regular raids. I mean, I get that they want to give people a reason to do dungeons again, but it seems weird. Especially since LFR is going to reward some too. They mentioned some kind of bonus event. This may be a new event, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just replaced the Apexis event. Apexis is almost entirely irrelevant with this patch with better Mythic Dungeon rewards, and the fact that Baleful tokens can proc ilvl 695 without using an empowered fragment.

I get why they’re doing this, but it is not an incentive to me. I’ll be happy to upgrade my 720 gun to 730 and call it a day from there basically. I would probably grind these if I were still raiding regularly, of course. That’s the benefit of taking a break from raiding. No more worrying about that ilvl number.

Continue reading Patch 6.2.3: Hey, something to write about!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Hunter item upgrade priority in patch 5.4.8

Patch 5.4.8 drops today, much sooner than I expected it to be. It introduces 2 more upgrades to patch 5.4 PvE gear, for a total of 16 ilvls in upgrades. People began their mad rush to cap their valor points for the new item upgrades, but it turns out they only had a week to do so! Sneaky Blizzard. Those of you who were already sitting on 3k valor will be able to fully upgrade 8 of your items this week (assuming they all had 2 upgrades already).

If you’re in that situation then you’re going to have everything upgraded fairly quickly. If you’re not sitting on a large pool of banked valor, you may be wondering what you should upgrade first. I played around a little bit with Zeherah’s DPS Analyzer (which she just updated for 5.4.8 support) to see which gear would give the most bang for your valor point.

I knew weapons would be the largest upgrade, but I was surprised the legendary cloak was less of an overall upgrade than several pieces at normal and heroic.Ā  Sometimes we let raw item level blind us, I guess. šŸ™‚ For a raider in mostly normal mode gear, the 2 extra weapon upgrades represent about a 2% overall DPS increase. Trinkets are next on the list with about a 1.2-1.5% increase depending on the trinket and spec. Warforged gear in the Chest/Legs/Helm slots tends to come out ahead of the Legendary cloak.

Continue reading Hunter item upgrade priority in patch 5.4.8

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com