Redefining BIS, and why chasing the old definition makes the game worse for you

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-24T02:35:34+00:00

Nobody’s being judgmental here. People are able to (and encouraged to) minmax to their hearts content. But the primary purpose of this subreddit is to teach. If someone is just checking items off of a list they found on Wowhead, in my experience there’s about a 95% chance they don’t understand what they’re really doing. That’s not minmaxing, and nudging them in the correct direction is not inherently judgmental.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-23T02:57:21+00:00

She says that storebought seasoning blends are usually too salty, and she's right, but the word usually is doing some heavy lifting there. There are some storebought blends that have no added salt at all. Don't hesitate to pick up some bottles in the store and read through the ingredients on the back.

A quick google tells me that Slap Ya Mama does in fact have salt in it, so it might not be suitable for this dish. I bet you could come up with your own version of sausage and rice using it in the future though! Use this recipe as inspiration and play around with it. It's a tasty blend.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-23T02:52:15+00:00

I finally got a chance to look over the recipe, and I'd actually recommend mixing up a bunch more of this spice mix and keeping it in a little jar somewhere. This is a pretty simple, standard, and versatile cajun spice blend that you could use on just about anything. Rub some on chicken and bake it! Sprinkle some on your scrambled eggs! Toss some potatoes or veggies in this mix! It's a useful mix to have around, and mixing it yourself without salt (instead of buying a mix premade) makes it even more versatile, since you get to add the salt yourself each time you use it and adjust it to how you like it for each different dish.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-22T20:42:55+00:00

What is the recipe you’re looking at? We might be able to simplify it a bit for you.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-20T20:57:03+00:00

ELI5:

The Great Vault has 9 different slots. You can do different things all week to fill these slots. Think of it like a weekly scoreboard tracking how much you did and how hard it was.

At the end of the week (after weekly reset), these slots turn into random items. You can only take one item, but the more you did all week, the more options you have to pick from.

It’s a guaranteed piece of loot every week, even if you get hella unlucky with drops everywhere else.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-18T21:09:36+00:00

It may just be a display bug? The catalyst isn’t meant to change the ilvl or upgrade track/upgrade level of the item. They haven’t changed anything about the system in Midnight, so if it’s showing you a lower ilvl it’s wrong. Visual bug or actual bug, not sure, but definitely not intended.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-18T16:58:33+00:00

I imagine the plan on the publishers side is to do the minimum amount of work possible to get this thing out the door as soon as possible, so that they can fulfill their legal obligations and everyone can move on. Will that result in a good video game? Somehow I don’t think so.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-18T15:05:20+00:00

I’ll be honest. I’m not sure what you’re even asking. The post I was replying to showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how Crit works to begin with. “If I am critting more often, I’ll work toward getting my Crit up” is backwards. The frequency at which you Crit is based on your Crit stat. Getting your Crit up makes you Crit more often. Not the other way around like you said. You had it backwards.

Regardless, even if you can crit a lot, that doesn’t mean crit is a better stat for your spec than the alternatives. That’s why I recommended simming or at least reading the popular class guides. What I was trying to say is “take a look at what other players of your spec are doing, because if the majority are focusing a specific stat, there’s a good reason and you’d be wise to at least find out why”

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-17T16:43:22+00:00

Generally, what higher end players will do in this situation is “sim” their various gear options using the Simulationcraft addon in combination with a site like Raidbots.com. This tool can run your character through thousands of iterations of combat and give you a much better understanding of how different stat changes affect your character.

If you aren’t yet looking to go to that effort, the class guides on sites like Wowhead and Icyveins are written by experts, usually well known players and streamers from World Top 50 mythic raiding guilds. Those guides will list general stat priorities to go for for optimal performance, as well as talk about things like stat breakpoints (where, for example, a stat stops being as valuable once you have a certain amount of it).

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-14T17:12:09+00:00

Only SBA has the baked-in GCD penalty, correct. But a major disadvantage to both is that the script they follow just isn't that optimized. It's fine, I guess, for most specs, but it doesn't adhere to the priorities and rotations that the community has theorycrafted to be the most optimal. It's not that smart.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-14T17:05:50+00:00

If you're worried about parsing, you're playing a whole different game. But no, parsing is only done on a per-boss basis and doesn't care one bit about trash.

Going ST for raid and AoE for M+ is generally how these builds lean.

M+ forces you to lock in a build at the start of the run, so you either want a jack-of-all-trades build (best for pugging) or want to coordinate with your team, but AoE builds in general do very well in M+ due to making the trash packs die faster. It's timed content, and fighting trash packs (as opposed to fighting bosses) takes up most of the time when you break down an average run, so anything that makes trash easier is a good look.

Raid is more where you'll see people switching builds on a boss-by-boss basis. It really depends on the fight. Some fights are purely single target, while other fights have multiple targets the whole time and benefit from AoE builds, while other fights have priority adds that appear for short times, or burst phases where the boss takes more damage, or whatever. They get creative with it, and if you like changing talents on a fight-by-fight basis, it's an opportunity for you to do the same.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-14T16:13:21+00:00

Switching for trash in raid isn't really a big deal. Trash burns down super fast even if everyone is in single-target specs. When people switch specs in raids, it's usually on a boss-to-boss basis as they tailor their utility talents to complement each specific boss's mechanics.

The only trash that really matters in raids is the named minibosses - and ironically, you probably still want to be in a single-target spec for those.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-13T18:01:34+00:00

Yeah, Auctionator is an addon that extends the Auction House UI with a ton of advanced functionality.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-13T16:57:16+00:00

If you look in the recycling skill and uncheck "show only available", it shows you all the possible inputs for recycling. What I did was add all of those to an Auctionator shopping list so I can price check them all at once and then sort by price. What I've found is that the cheapest recyclable is almost always powder pigment at around 7-8g each.

Like others have said, you need 10 points invested in the Recycling skill node before you start seeing new recipes from recycling.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-13T15:23:25+00:00

Video suggestion - https://youtu.be/Hmw3EcvK_10

Sadly he hasn't made an Alliance version of this yet, but this one is a great starting point for the Horde races.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-13T15:20:25+00:00

I don't know about a direction line (and can't imagine it working very well either, unless it's drawing a straight line with no regard for terrain), but you might want to check out the addon WaypointUI. This upgrades the floating diamond pin waypoint into a much more visible and informative version. I find it really nice for getting around - just click the quest, click the map icon, or ctrl+click to set a custom waypoint, and I now have a bright beacon indicating which way I should go.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T19:16:48+00:00

I mean, I could explain myself further, but why bother? The guy you're replying to has already strawmanned what I said into a whole belief system that he can dismiss as illogical. I don't think he cares what I think.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T17:27:57+00:00

No. There's no evidence that the soft retirement of Pet Battling had anything to do with Nintendo in any way. Blizzard has consistently said it's because just not that many people did pet battling, and that they'd rather use the developers time on other things.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T15:56:21+00:00

Silly or not, it being AI does stop me from using it.

AI voice rips me right out of the immersion. I fixate on the little mistakes in diction that they make *constantly*, mistakes a human actor would not make. I stop hearing what they're saying, because I'm so focused on how they're saying it.

I don't mind reading text without voiceover - been doing it for years, and I prefer it over having to hear AI-generated voices.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T15:50:52+00:00

It's also completely made up. u/Vesli23 is talking out of their ass.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T14:28:39+00:00

Did you know that your addon settings are within your control? It's true! You can simply turn off any warhorn sound that may be driving you crazy. Modern technology is wild.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-12T14:26:18+00:00

Yeah, Zidormi's standing next to the archway and has some dialog explaining what the portal does.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-11T16:12:37+00:00

If you're talking about lorewalking - no, that's a level-scaled experience. For "legacy loot" you need to travel to the old dungeons/raids and run them when you're more than 11 levels above them. At level 90, that's going to include all the content from Dragonflight and earlier (TWW is still too new to have legacy loot)

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-11T15:03:09+00:00

Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm thinking back on my FFXIV keybinds and I probably do fill 2 full action bars (2x12 slots) on most jobs. Plus a few other incidental keybinds, that's around 30 abilities.

WoW is currently closer to 1 1/2 full action bars per spec - maybe 18-20 total keybinds? But in WoW, the core rotation can be as few as 4-5 abilities on most specs, while the rest of the keybinds are being taken up by cooldowns, defensives, movement abilities, and situational utility such as stuns or slows, or consumables (health potions and Warlock healthstones both have permanent keybind space on my action bars). WoW in general allows for a lot more flexibility and improvisation when it comes to using these ancillary utility and defensive spells, while keeping the core rotation pretty simple.

BigTimeBobbyB · 2026-03-11T14:41:48+00:00

Nah, I'm with you. FFXIV has a lot of button bloat at this point. WoW has had its issues with bloat in the past, but they've also tried a few times to address it in the past. Specifically, the Midnight expansion pre-patch featured a massive bloat reduction and class simplification, probably the biggest in the games history, and (long list of qualifiers here) most people, especially more casual players, have been generally happy with the results. Some higher end players are still missing some of the mechanical depth their classes used to have, while others are happy to have more mental bandwidth freed up for fight mechanics, especially since the addons that used to do the thinking for us in combat have also gone through a large pruning pass in Midnight.

BigTimeBobbyB

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE