Ok, this is getting really ridiculous. I'd ask you to go back and check your math Kaz, but i'm sure you've run into the same thing i'm running into here, and have rechecked it at least 20 times by now :P

Just look at this list, it's very glaring...

Warbringer Breastplate
Chest Plate
1329 Armor
+43 Strength
+31 Stamina
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Crit Rating
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 21

Listed ilvl 105, calculated ilvl 87.5?!? Grats on killing Magtheridon, you just earned yourself some C'thun lvl loot.

It could be 51str, 38sta and 28crit for example, to get to the 105 limit, or some other blend of stats.

Warbringer Battle-Helm
Head Plate
1080 Armor
+40 Strength
+39 Stamina
Meta Socket
Yellow Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Resilience Rating
Equip: Improves hit rating by 10.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 20.

Listed ilvl 105. Calculated ilvl 91.2. Sigh.
Could go to 49str, 39sta, 22crit, 15hit and not be overbudget.

Warbringer Shoulderplates
Shoulder Plate
997 Armor
+28 Strength
+18 Agility
+28 Stamina
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +3 Strength
Equip: Improves hit rating by 10.

Listed ilvl 105. Calculated ilvl 89.7. Sockets seem to be a real problem for blizzard to figure out. You could ditch the agi, then go 28sta, 34str, 25crit, 10hit and not be overbudget and have a far superior item to boot.

Warbringer Gauntlets
Hands Plate
831 Armor
+31 Strength
+20 Agility
+27 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 15

Listed ilvl 105. Calculated ilvl 91.89. OK, so even lack of sockets is hard on blizz! Maybe someone needs to replace the decaf with regular in the item guy's break room.

Warbringer Greaves
1163 Armor
+46 Strength
(-32 Agility)
+46 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 32 (new)

These are the new stats for warrior legs according to the item changes thread, and they come out a lot closer, but still only 100.2 calculated lvl. Some things from wow1.0 were that underbudget, but why does ANYTHING need to be underbudget? Just add a couple stats until it's right on, it's not that tough.

Just looking over this one set, for one relatively minor role (i'm honestly afraid to look at the tanking stuff, which is far more important to raiding), one can immediately understand why no one is excited about raiding and there's no gear progression.

It's impossible to tell whether the current gear progression paradigm- that is ilvl 105 -> ilvl 120 -> ilvl 140- is even workable, because they're not even close to putting out gear that is actually following that progression in reality.

Every piece of epic gear in this game needs to be gone over and fixed, by the look of things.

I'm becoming more and more suspicious that Blizzard is 100% aware of this problem and has been for a long time, but don't want to suddenly correct item levels because of the work involved in rebalancing Raid encounters to deal with better geared characters.

If I had to hazard a guess, they did Epics first, like has been said, so that they could get people drooling about them ahead of time, then did epic encounters, then tried to do blues. I think they were only intending to make the Blue --> Purple more smooth than the curve in 1.0, but probably due to the gap in time between designing the Purples, Raid Design for Kara or w/e, then Blues, they only realized later that the Blues were amazingly overbudget, but by then had lost a lot of time and couldn't afford to go back and redo everything.

I think, if I had to again, hazard a guess, Blizz will address this by just writing off the Raid loot available at the moment as a bad job and a) fix gear piece by piece until they've solved all the major complaints, and b) try to get it right in future instances.

Ok, first thing I'm going to do is go back and go over all the math. Second thing I'm going to do is post a chart of base armor values, because it's becoming clear that a lot of things have some armor tacked on where one might not expect. Research inc in a little while...

TBH I'm more willing to bet they designed the raid bosses around characters wearing gear with the stats they should have with proper ivalue calculations. That would certaintly explain A LOT of the issues currently present to us =]

Brief update: I have updated the calculator page with a list of caveats for the discerning user. The armor formula has been changed significantly enough that I'm having trouble finding accurate values for what the base armor amount *should* be on most items, especially epics.

Gruul will not be significantly easier with upgraded half-T4 and Kara gear that you would have at the point of attempting him unless they are completely over-budget.

This is reminicent to me of the early days molten core itemization. Arcanist legs with agility anyone?!
Click here for a trip to the past !
http://web.archive.org/web/200502050...b/itemset.html

Aside from the fact that items in older instances remained superior for raiding jobs untill far in, it is always easy to compare same slot armor and weapon dps to gain insight into blizzard's planned tiers of advancement.

So, all heroics are lower tiered when compared to karazhan, and prince = gruul's lair*
a sad comparison : http://thottbot.com/?f=w&name=&loc=T...=&c3=gt&v3=&e=

Clearly this does not look right, prince is a fallover and die boss while gruul is a cthun style dps without adds with tricky positioning encounter.

So clearly blizzard has had a plan on how advanced some rewards should be.

However, as someone mentioned before, they dare not change every item when many of us have de'd scores of epics in the past month because blues were so much better. Similarly, they clearly had something in mind when designing sets such as http://thottbot.com/?i=56794 (270 spelldamage / 78 crit rating / 42 int on three items)

Who knows, maybe 2.1 or even 2.0.10 will include a complete blue/epic item revamp.

People DE'ing epics that are 'ok' but not as strong as overpowered blues have nothing to whine at aside from their own stupidity, it reminds me of Fang of the Mystic & ToEP.

Its 2-3 bank slots at most and if your not sure it will drop frequently then get a clue and pick it up incase.

Im happy I kept my Forest Wind Shoulderpads in the event that Mantle of Autumn would be nerfed and not like the exalted enchant is irreplaceable or expensive.

Another item to toss on the mountain of evidence:

Justicar Shoulderguards (Paladin T4 tank)
Shoulder Plate
997 Armor
+18 Stamina
+22 Intellect
Blue Socket
Yellow Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Stamina
Equip: Increases defense rating by 12.
Equip: Increases your shield block rating by 15.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 22.
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 23.

Listed item level: 105

Actual item level (per Kazanir's calculator): 96.6

Item level with stamina change "undone" (i.e., plugging in 27 stam instead of 18): 101.77

These shoulders were always a personal pet peeve of mine.

Retainer's Leggings appear to be another with pre-TBC stamina pricing. Kazanir's calculator gives them an ilvl of 106.07, whilst pricing them at 1.5x the stamina cost comes out as 114.88, almost perfectly matching the listed 115.

Just checked out mage T4 (aldor) and like others, it is coming up underbudget.

Shoulders
expected: 105
actual: 89

Chest
expected:105
actual:94

Pants
expected:105
actual:102

Gloves
expected:105
actual:99

Hat
expected:105
actual:94

Even when plugging in old stamina values many of these are still underbudget. It almost seems like all Blizzard would have to do is bring items up to where they should be and switch everything to the new stamina value to solve a majority of current raiding concerns.

I have more faith in your code than in Blizz, its not really crazy, and other calculators are pretty much the same... underbudget underbudget underbudget...

How ironic is it that the pants, the quote unquote closest valued to their actual ilevel are literally a sidegrade to polarity legs, the gloves on the other hand are superior to trisfal but fail in comparison to mana etched with two piece bonus.

The helm completely fails to compete with http://thottbot.com/?i=59103. *because of a blue socket the socket bonus is hard to attain and minmax for pve dps (By the way, is it not funny that the druid and shaman versions of the ss helm are better then the cloth ones?!)

In fact, overall the set fails to compete with Mana Etched, except for the robe

Items such as Boots of the incorrupt and Chestguard of exile come really close to the expected ilevel using Kazanir's calculator, but using it on the tier4 priest healing set, I get that the non-socketed items are a few levels below budget, but the socketed ones are 10-15 levels below budget. So there might something strange going withh your socket calculation.

It is my belief (based on no inside information or anything other than a 'gut feeling') that the raid class sets, most of the high end socket stuff, and the vast majority of other raid items were designed before the stamina change, and before most, if not all, of the level 70 5 man items. It seems that Blizzard may have gone back and added a few last minute items to raid loot tables they felt might have been under itemized (perhaps they had a list of what needed another item or two and had the item guy fill those in just before release). This explains why there are some items that really do look like fair risk/reward comparisons.

When so many raid items fail to come even close to known formula expectations untill you increase their Stamina by 50% any other explanation just doesn't really explain what is going on. I'd really like for Blizzard to come out and either explain how socket pricing is done, and/or just admit they made a mistake with raid loot again. I can take the truth even if it isn't what I want to hear. Being treated like a fool who is only kept around for their monthly check is something that deeply upsets me, however.

I don't really care that they fucked up -hey mistakes happen- it's that it doesn't appear to me that they even realize how fucked up these items are. The test realm changes to the warrior t5 are an example, they don't even come close to fixing the huge deficiency in the quality of those items. T5 seriously needs to increase in quality by about 30% for it to be fixed, and t4 needs about 15% more stats.

Hopefully someone with some clout is seeing this thread, and hopefully someone cleans house in their itemization team, because I guarantee you this problem is costing them subscribers, and will continue to cost them if it isn't fixed pronto.

Try plugging in the old Bracers of the Green Fortress stats [57 stam, 14 defense rating] vs. the new ones [39 stam, 10 str, 17 defense rating]. That should inspire some confidence!

As I have noted on the calculator page, no one has any real data on what a socket should be worth. The best estimation would be that it adds 8 of a stat, but on epics (at least) that clearly undershoots a lot of item levels. It seems to undershoot about 1.2-1.3 ilvl per socket on epics but still be quite close on blues.

And yeah, tons of Stam missing. What the crap is going on here? I feel like I've created a monster.

This is possible, but since the old formula works perfectly for many, many blues and greens, it doesn't appear that they could really have changed anything. The only possibility is this:

The last step in calculating Item Level is to take the ItemSlotValue (which is ItemValue * SlotMod) and adjust it for item quality. Since we know that the old formula works for greens and blues, the only place where it could have changed is in "how much better" an epic is, which is given in this step of the calculation. The known formulas are:

Is it possible that the modifiers in the Epic category have changed to make epics in TBC be categorically less powerful (relative to greens and blues of the same item level) than they once were?

I could believe something like that if the results we were seeing were consistent, and items were all showing up at around the same amount under-budget, but they're not. Some items seem to simply be using the old stam weighting, some almost perfectly match the stated ilvls using the new stam weighting (with some slight variance due to the fact that we don't know exact values for sockets), and some are just plain odd and broken.

Take some crafted items for example: the first tier armoursmithing BP is ~2 ilvls under-budget, which should be explainable by the socket budgeting issues. Look at the leatherworking BoP breastplates, though, and they're all over the place - the Nethershrike Breastplate, for instance, works out at ~ilvl 95 (meant to be 105), and comes back up close to what it's meant to be if you change the stam to reflect the TBC weighting (42sta rather than 28sta puts it at ~ilvl102). The Ebon Netherscale Breastplate works out to ~ilvl97.5, and adjusting the stam puts it at ~ilvl100 (still seems a bit low, even considering that the sockets may be overvalued). The Windhawk Hauberk comes in at ~ilvl97, and adjusting the stam bumps it up to ~ilvl 102 (probably just the socket issue).

So far, these all seem to be issues with the stamina values - they all seem to have it at the old, pre-TBC weighting. The Primalstrike Vest, on the other hand, also comes in at around ilvl97, and adjusting the stamina value (up to a quite frankly faintly ridiculous 59) puts it at nearly ilvl108, with no possibility that it can be sockets screwing things up, as it doesn't have any (on the other hand, adding three sockets to it puts it at just over ilvl103, which would match the stated ilvl reasonably well given the issues with socket values).

The BoE crafted items, even the ones that were recently adjusted in 2.0.7, are also screwed up - Cobrascale Hood is ~ilvl102 (meant to be 105), Gloves of the Living Touch are ~ilvl95 (also meant to be 105), etc. Someone already mentioned how out of whack the Bracers of the Green Fortress are earlier. They're all over the place.

If there was an actual, intended change to the item budgets for epic items, it should fir some kind of consistent pattern. It doesn't. This stuff is just plain broken.

I'm willing to bet that the sockets cost the point value of the gem you socket in if it has the same color. i.e. a socket on a green is 6pt, on a blue 8, on an epic 10.

They have announced they're going to revamp cost so that it costs a fixed amount (the lowest). I expect thus sockets to drop to 6pt.

Yeah, you're right. And I also noticed that there really isn't a lot of *space* to change epic items around -- they are pretty close to blues as is, there is not a lot of play, as it were, since it's pretty clear that the formula for rare items hasn't changed.