I cannot seem to find any solid information on this:
When does ilvl and agility become more important than vers for pvp? Im sitting around 200 ilvl with full pve gear and only 5% vers.
should I, instead, be using the lower ilvl pvp gear (171, etc) solely to gain more vers?
Ilvl comes first, but yes vers is almost as important.
Start working on your honor gear I guess.
If it’s like 20 ilvl difference, always go for ilvl upgrade.
No way. Vers reigns supreme in PvP. Vers>Ilvl by a huge margin. People without vers are turned into confetti paper.
A 210 in PvE gear will get obliterated by a 197 in PvP gear.
So you’d replace 200 ilvl gear with 170 one with 10% extra vers, which is 5% reduced dmg taken? And losing 7-8k hp and lot of primary stat and offstats?
Your funeral.
Note: Trinket only increases damage done part of vers, so it’s a bonus. It’s a great thing to get when you’re already geared, to push your 25% vers into +10% extra dmg, but for people gearing, ilvl is king to start with.
Think about it in terms of effective health and then also take into account the various offensive stats you will lose.
If you are taking 5% less damage than essentially your health is 5% more valuable so for example if you had 30k health it would be worth 31.5k health.
If you had 20k health but had 20% damage reduction then your health would essentially be worth 24k instead.
See what your values are for health in both your current gear, and that going for a higher versatility build.
If your ilvl drops substantially you will probably lose a lot of health.
Take those values and multiply them by the defensive bonus of your versatility (not the higher damage/healing one, the smaller one that is half your actual versatility) in each set and see what it comes up with.
That will give you a good idea of whether you should bother swapping or not.
If the lower ilvl does seem better then you just have to take into account how much offensive potential you are losing swapping against the effective health gained to see if it is worth it.
I highly doubt that the lower ilvl will be worth it, especially if it ~29 ilvls lower. But if you can steadily build up individual pieces to 197 it may be worth it swapping out a piece at a time.
He said he already has 5% vers so it would only be a 5% increase or 2.5% damage reduction. It would be a terrible trade off most likely lol.
Did I say that? No. I gave my own example. I was responding to the guy that says ilvl comes first. It doesn’t. It’s a factor, yes, but vers is huge, not just for the gearing, but getting in actual groups as well.
If you want to find out how valuable verse is specifically to you compared to agi you will need to sim yourself.
I’m not sure if the raidbots sim takes into account the pvp set bonus effect on verse, and this is also only from an offensive standpoint, so keep that in mind. You’d have to compare effective health you’d gain from the additional DR from more verse vs. the additional stam of the higher ilvl piece.
Well true, but mostly because people are actually just robots and parrot what they hear from other people instead of actually understanding how the game works lol.
This isn’t quite accurate.
The equation for effective health for a given damage reduction is not [Health] * (1+DR), its:
[Health] / (1-DR)
If you’re taking 5% less damage with 30k health, you effectively have 30000 / 1-.05 → 30000 / .95 = 31,578 EHP.
If you’re taking 20% less damage with 20k health, you effectively have 20000 / 1-.2 → 20000 / .8 = 25k EHP.
While vers is definitely king in PvP thanks to the PvP trinket set bonus (40% more healing/damage effect of Vers in PvP and war mode), you probably shouldn’t pass up non-vers gear that’s two tiers above a versatility piece you’re wearing (i.e. 200 vers piece vs 226 non-vers piece).
depends, are you trying to FC? because then no, Absolutely not.
you should AT THE VERY LEAST have both PvP Trinkets
no FC on my hunter, and I guess the vers would come into question in 2s and 3s where I might get focused by burst. But judging from the other comments it seems like the 20-30 ilvl decrease overall, at this point, with the 2 sets I have would lean in favor of the stam and damage coming from the pve gear rather the 5% extra verse. ill sim it and see though.
you should aim to have at least 10% damage reduction through vers. after that it’s main stat (agil in your case) and main dps stat following vers.
You can upgrade PvP gear to 197 with just honor, and it all comes with versatility. Gear doesn’t matter that much for unrated BGs. Just farm honor and upgrade gear to 197. Wear whatever you want in random BGs. Buy 200 rings/neck with the conquest you get from wins/dailies. Once you have around 200 ilvl and 20%, do rated arenas.
You’ll get smacked in pvp if you don’t have Vers, if you’re going to pvp you need Vers on all pieces of gear.
I’ve done both. I leveled two mages and and a warlock, and can say that in theory people will tell you to go for higher ilvl over vers, but…
IMO, it’s a balance, but vers is way more valuable than it looks on paper. In any random BG, if I find out (usually by 2 shotting them) that someone has no vers, I am going to murder them every time I see them.
So what I do now is level an alt, get all the covenant armor + renown to get high ilvl world quests. Look for anything with X-stat (whichever is your best pvp secondary besides vers) + vers from world quests while getting some of the biggest vers upgrades you can from the honor/conquest vendor.
Essentially, replace your PVE gear piece by piece with high vers gear. Any piece of gear that is crit/mastery/haste with no vers, replace those pieces with honor stuff first. You will quickly be up to 15%+ vers.