Gearing for Optimal DPS

I'm not a min/maxer. I wouldn't go to ridiculous lengths or spend tons of gold to get a little upgrade when something comparable but not quite as good is a lot easier. I play this game to have fun.

However, I play DPS classes. For me doing DPS is fun. Doing better DPS is more fun. I think that anyone would agree that killing stuff faster, easier, and more efficiently is more fun than dieing. That said, even casual players should care about maximizing their abilities and utilizing their benefits.

Nowadays, at least for some classes, it can be very difficult to compare two pieces of gear. It's more than just the basic concepts of stacking Str, Agi, or AP. There's hit rating, haste, armor penetration, expertise, and more. Some clearly benefit more than others. But it is often questionable if x of stat A benefits more than y of stat B.

Most DPS classes are able to analyze benefits based on some sort of equivalency point, or EP. This basically weighs stats in comparison to a base stat. For the classes I play, physical DPS classes, that compares to AP.

This is all well and good, but even great number crunchers can't compute those comparisons on the fly and few probably want to put forth the effort of whipping out a calculator to figure it out.

Luckily, there are addons to do that for you. I'm talking about an addon called Pawn. It's nothing new, you have very likely seen other blogs explain it, but so am I. What Pawn does is it saves the EP values for various stats and gives you the total EP for a piece of gear you are looking at.

Here's a very simplified example. Say a piece of equipment has 30 Str and 30 Agi. Your EP value for Str is 2 while your EP value for Agi is 3. That'll give you a quick calculation of 150 EP. You can easily compare that to a piece of equipment that gives 45 Str and 15 Agi, an EP value of 135.

It's obviously not as simple as that, but that's why Pawn is great, cuz it does the work for you.

I'm going to split this into separate spots for each class to make it easier, since this is getting a little long.