Restoration Druid - optimal gear choices for season 4

This blog assumes two things:

You are a restoration druid who cares about picking up the best gear going into season four.

You have full season 3 restoration gear already, or you are prepared to grind full season 2 restoration gear and then upgrade it to s4.

If neither of these apply to you, you will not find this blog relevant. It's pretty much just the personal math I did to figure out where I wanted to spend points on my druid - I figured I'd post it in that it'd be useful to anyone else playing a restoration druid.



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Essentially, all gear is not created equal. You do not have an infinite amount of arena points to spend, and thus it makes sense for you to pick up the best gear choices first.

(math follows later, if you care.)

If you are in full season 3 the best way to spend points is as follows:

1) Glove slot - 79.6 itempoint gain per arena point
2) Chest slot - 74.2 itempoint gain per arena point
3) Head slot - 71.2 itempoint gain per arena point
4) Shoulder slot - 66.3 itempoint gain per arena point
5) Leg slot - 64.5 itempoint gain per arena point
6) Offhand - 61.7 itempoint gain per arena point
7) Mainhand - 50.3 itempoint gain per arena point

(itempoint gain is from season 3 to season 4)

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If you are in full season 2 the best way to spend points is as follows:

1) Glove slot - 128 itempoint gain per arena point
2) Chest slot - 126.3 itempoint gain per arena point
3-4) Leg slot - 116.7 itempoint gain per arena point
3-4) Head slot - 116.7 itempoint gain per arena point
5) Mainhand - 115.6 itempoint gain per arena point
6) Shoulder slot - 106.6 itempoint gain per arena point
7) Offhand - 94.1 itempoint gain per arena point

(itempoint gain is from season 2 to season 4 - note that "itempoint" is not actually like 100 sta, of course, but some arbitrary normalized number representing gear progress)

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If you are in a combination of season 2 (or lower) and season 3, it is ALWAYS worth upgrading your season 2 (or lower) to season 4 pieces before touching your season 3. Simply follow the full s2 chart first, skipping the pieces of s3 you have.

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The math:

This uses the official blizzard itemization point spend, adds up the total points allocated to each item, and divides the final item value by its arenapoint cost in order to weight it correctly. This weighting is important as obviously  s3-s4 helm is better than s3-s4 gloves, but not enough better to justify buying it over gloves for the extra arena point cost.

If you weight stamina at 1 rather than 0.66, the results are still the same, but slightly closer. If you want to change the weighting more than that, you're going to have to go through my spreadsheet yourself and screw with stuff.

Sockets are not considered - all seasons of gear have equal sockets. If you are in season 3 gear / rare gems and upgrading to season 4 / epic gems, it doesn't make a difference as to what piece you upgrade first, cause none of the differences are big enough. But it *could* theoretically do so for other classes etc.

This also does not consider armor. I have no idea how blizzard weights it, and assuming you're in s3 gear anyway each piece is 25 to 35 armor (bar the chest, which is 40). It's not going to change any of the calculations.

The spreadsheet, for those of you who care. Note that it's not pretty. I imagine it'd be pretty simple to adapt it to other classes if you cared: http://db.wtfdie.com/wowdru.xls