How big is my e-peen?
Recently I succumbed to the vanity of checking myself out on Beimba. I blame Seri over at Snarkcraft for an interesting post about WoW web tools for this. The result was a “that’s nice dear” type thought and I moved on with my life.
Then last night (Tuesday) a guildie commented in guild chat congratulating two of our healers for being the best geared healers in the guild, on Beimba, with scores around 360. I figured with my score of 340 I wasn’t doing too badly and that they probably just had some better epics. I seem to have a regular slot in one of our 10-man raid teams, so I wasn’t too concerned.
Being Tuesday we then had the compulsory night off with server maintenance so I wondered over to Beimba to check out one of the priests mentioned before shutting down for the night. I also re-read Seri’s post and checked out some of the other tools. WoW-Heroes is a similar tool to Beimba (I prefer it actually) and while exploring I noticed it had a compare tool. So I loaded myself and the priest in question up to compare us. It’s quite a handy tool listing not just gear but each toons stats. The other priest had mostly epics as expected, some I recognised as upgrades (including one T7 item) and a few I didn’t. Generally the other guys gear was slightly better, which is about what I would expect with Beimba scores of 340 vs 360.
Then I noticed the base stats down the bottom. OMG! His gear might have better iLvls than mine but my stats are superior in almost every single category!!
Turkelife (Disc spec) vs priest X (Holy spec)
Wow-Heroes scores 1621 vs 1741 (similar to Beimba)
Health 13k vs 14.4k
Mana 20k vs 15.5k
Spell crit 14% vs 12% (base crit is almost the same (9%) so i suspect he only has 3 points in Holy Spec)
Spell power 1598 vs 1553 (I have slightly more. I’m very surprised as surely he has Spiritual Guidance which adds 25% of spirit as spell power?)
MP5 249 vs 217
Haste 160 vs 278 (note Enlightenment adds a further 164 haste for me, i.e. 324 total)
I was very surprised by this to say the least! I have more MP5, slightly more spell power, bigger mana pool, etc, etc. The only area I consider myself weak compared to priest X is total health. I assume the explanation is that even though priest X’s gear has higher iLvls, which raises his Wow-Heroes/Beimba scores, he is less well itemised that I am. Sound reasonable?
Moral of the story? Web tools like Beimba and Wow-heroes are decent general guides to a toons gearing levels, but be very careful about using them for ranking players once their scores get close. Higher scores do not always mean better geared.
BobTurkey's blog 
I’ve always found these sorts of tools to be great for ‘at a glance’ sort of information but in the end it’s up to you to make judgments about what stats you value most. Your stats are higher because the other priest has significantly more haste gear, which is common on the higher ilvl stuff.
The WoW-Heroes tool is superior imho, if only for presentation. I take and agree with your point about using your brain rather than the ranking.
@Seri – Yeah i figured that would be part of it. I’m a bit of a novice priest, but i’m not sold on the stacking haste = good idea, but i’ve got a jumble post in my head about that one. Thanks for the comment.
@Typhoon Andrew – Yeah the presentation is what sold me on it first. I also like the compare function because I can then use my own toon (and its associated feel) to guage how significant the stats/gear of other priests are. I use Turkelife as a base-line of sorts.
One issue I do have with WoW-Heroes is that its not clear when talents are included and when they are not. For example the holy crit includes both our Holy Specialisation talents, but Haste excludes my Enlightenment. Spell power, well, i’m hoping for priest X’s sake it excludes Spiritual Guidance as otherwise his SP is a bit low for his gear level. Sometimes talents are included and sometimes they are not.
Gobble gobble.
[…] that conversation about Beimba scores has started me on a gearing challenge between Turkelife and the other priests in the guild (who […]
The spec support, or a good understanding of what is valuable in a spec used to be really suss on Be.Imba. A while back now (so it is probably fixed) the Pally and Warlock spec support was rubbish.
I’ll take another look at BeImba now.
Spec stuff was still broken last time i looked.