gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

Among the many features of Wowhead is their gear compare feature. It is a nice way to compare the stats between two or more pieces of gear and is a principle way I go over my gear wish list. A less used aspect of the compare page is the stat weight score.

Stat weighting allows you to assign a fixed numeric score to a piece of gear, based on its stats. Each stat is giving a fixed amount of points, usually ranging from 1 to 100 on Wowhead but any fixed range works, and Wowhead then calculates a final score based on how much each stat is worth and how many of that stat the item has. For example strength is usually worth 100 (being our best DPS stat) so 10 strength on an item gives the item a score of 1,000. If the item also has 5 crit rating, which is worth 47 in the stat weight presets I’ll go over, then the item is worth 1,235 (1,000 from the strength, 235 from the crit).

The system isn’t perfect, but it is a great tool to use for quick comparison of gear. Wowhead has built-in presets for Blood, Frost, and Unholy DPS specs and Frost tank specs. The presets are pretty good, but they can be improved upon and Wowhead allows one to create custom stat weight values. It is important to keep in mind that death knight theorycrafting, which is how we come by the numbers used, is still in its infancy compared to the other classes. Values can change as the class is balanced and new talent builds are found. For now, however, I like to think the stat weights I use for my own gear are pretty accurate for what we know today.

Below are the stat weight setups I use on Wowhead. You should note there is no way to save these as presets, even if you have a Wowhead account, however you can reuse the links to set the values and Wowhead will remember your compare page changes if you come back on the same computer and browser. You can use the Wowhead default presets if you like, but a big gap with them is that they don’t value gem slots or agility and they don’t take hit cap into account. There are also little things people may want to change, such as giving armor value in a DPS stat weight because of Bladed Armor talent.

The two DPS stat weights are generic. I took the values usually assigned for blood, frost, and unholy builds and averaged them out. You can tweak the generic DPS stat weights for your build if you wish, but I only consider that if I have two items I just can’t decide between otherwise, and even then I can usually do the final decision on my own. The tank stat weight is good for frost and unholy tank builds. All death knight tanks want the same defensive stats and both rely on both melee and spells for threat.

Finally, here is the combined stat weights in one link. DPS hit capped is top, DPS + hit is middle, and tank is bottom. Enter this into your usual Wowhead browser, click the Save button on the page, and any new items you add to compare will come up with all three scores.