Weight scales explained

Seri commented on my post about Wowhead and weight scales that she’d like to know more about how the weight scales work and I guess how they’re calculated. What I”m going to try and do here is give a high level explanation to give you an idea of how they work and how you can tweak them. What I’m not going to do is go into discussions about how to decide which stat needs to have which weight - because I’m not that good of a theorycrafter.

What is a weight scale?

Each class has key stats or attributes. For priests, that’s spirit, mp5, intellect and spellpower. Stamina is also a stat that a priest can consider paying attention to - but it’s generally less important than spirit or spellpower.

Have you ever faced a big decision and created a list of pros and cons? Then, once you had the list of pros and cons, you realized that it wasn’t simply a question of which list was longer but that some reasons were more important than others? So what you probably did was assigned a priority to each thing in your list, for example 1 being least important, 10 being most important. Once you had those numbers, you could add them up and then get a better idea of if the pros or cons are more likely to win. This is a way of quantifying things, making it easier for you to get a grip on what they actually mean for you.

A weight scale works similarly to your weighted pros and cons list. Instead of assigning priority to a pro or a con, you assign a priority to each attribute. Once you’ve applied a priority to your attribute, you can do calculations off of it.

How does it work?

As an example, I’ll be using Dwarf Priest’s holy priest weight scale from the beginning of December 2008. This means that at this point, it may already be outdated - but the principles still hold true.

0.74 Intellect
0.54 Spirit
0.35 Haste
0.15 Crit
1.00 MP5
0.60 Spellpower

In a weight scale, you can pretty much always assume that the higher the number, the higher the priority. So in this example, Dwarf Priest has said that she finds MP5 the most important attribute for a priest. Next in importance is intellect, followed by spellpower, then spirit, then haste and finally crit. You can see this because crit is worth the least at 0.15.

OK, now you’ve got your weight scale. Instead of calculating the number of points in the pro and con column, we can calculate how much each attribute is worth. Say you have Mace A that has 12 crit on it, and Mace B that has 15 haste on it. How do you know which one is better? Simple - you do the math.

Mace A
12 (crit) x 0.15 = 1.8

Mace B
10 (haste) x 0.35 = 3.5

All I did was multiply the attribute (haste or crit) by the corresponding weight in the weight scale. In this case, we can conclude that Mace B is betteraccording to this weight scale - because we value haste more, even though there is less haste on the item, it still gets a higher score.

Of course, real item comparisons are more complicated, as there are many more attributes to be calculated - but I didn’t want to do my own head in.

Using this method, you can decide how important an attribute is for you and calculate which item is going to be better.

How do I choose a weight scale?

At the end of the day, a weight scale is only a way of giving an attribute a certain priority. What I’ve explained here isn’t only applicable to priests, though I’ve only been using priest attributes. There are lots of ways of getting weight scales.

I personally tend to look at the one on Wowhead for the type of priest I’m working with and tweak it accordingly. Just because Wowhead put it together, doesn’t mean I have to agree with it, after all. And the Wowhead weightscales happen to be based on 100, not 1 - but the principle is the same.

Wowhead’s holy priest weight scale
Spellpower - 100
Mana regeneration - 93
Intellect - 88
Spirit - 85
Critical strike rating - 63
Haste rating - 51

However, like I said, I might not agree with all of this stuff. But I can decide to change it if I want. I could decide to put in Dwarf Priest’s values, instead. Or I could just decide that I think haste rating is the bee’s knees and give it a weight of 90.

In conclusion, you can find weight scales all over the place, like on PlusHeal, Elitist Jerks - or you can make it up yourself. I tend to steal someone else’s and just tweak it as I please.

How do I put this into practice?

Right, calculators at the ready!

I’m joking. Honestly. I’d drive myself nuts if I tried to calculate this stuff. As it is, I already very much appreciate those very nice people who do the calculations for the best in slot loot lists. There are plenty of ways to automate these calculations.

1. Wowhead’s loot ranking system (I wrote a post about it)
2. Lootrank.com (pure win for generating whole lists, link to Dwarf Priest’s weight scale)
3. Pawn (addon for adding weight scale info to tooltips in game to easily compare)

These are great ways to compare items using a weight scale, both in and out of game.

Don’t forget the salt!

Weight scales are very cool. However, they are not the ultimate decision.

Your weight scale needs to reflect what your character needs - these needs may differ from other characters of the same class/spec.

Sometimes weight scales can be very unuseful, too - if the stats are incredibly imbalanced (e.g. 500 haste and 10 spellpower on a weapon), these would give a very high number as a result. That still doesn’t mean it’s good for you!

Do use your head when choosing your gear. Weight scales are simply a way to help you decide what’s going to be best for you.