Understanding EP

Sometimes the World of Mathcraft makes me a little nuts. Thankfully, people who are even more obsessive-compulsive than I have already done the work for me - so it's just a matter of understanding the words that are coming out of their mouths.

Lolwut? L2math.

Backtracking a bit... tonight was a breakthrough in our little guild that could: the first time Chivalry ran two simultaneous Karazhan raids. Pretty exciting stuff, as the potential for 25-man content is there, even though it's definitely not one of our stated goals. Sometimes it's enough to know you *could* do something if you wanted to. Lol.

Gear-wise it was a pretty decent night. We had two random-drop epics off trash, and a blue jewelcrafting recipe that got defaulted to me. Woots. One of the purples was Zierhut's Lost Treads, which caught my attention with all it's raw stats and mail-like armor. Since the kind Rogue in our raid passed (already had PvP boots), and there were no Druids, I was lucky enough to collect them. Rating Buster reported it as a pretty decent upgrade over my current Outland Striders, but I wanted a 2nd opinion.

Getting back to the part about people doing the work for me already, the Elitist Jerks have developed a formula for Enhancement Points (EP). No, this has nothing to do with those commercials you see on TV. :P It's a way to weigh the stats of a particular item, based on the tier of content you're in and whether or not you typically get Blessing of Kings (which we usually do - three Pallys tonight!).

Here's the EP breakdown for our current raiding level, Tier 4 (with Kings):
AP = 1
Strength = 2.2
Agility = 1.91
Crit = 1.97
Haste = 1.28
Hit = 1.34
Armor Pen = 0.22
Expertise = 3 (zomg wtb expertise gear)

Stats like Intellect, Armor or Stamina are not considered, as they're often included for "free" in sufficient amounts.

So using EP, below are three items: what I previously had, what I received tonight, and what I considered getting with badges before tonight's drop. You can mouseover each to see their stats, and next to each their respective EPs - spreadsheets FTW.

Outland Striders 91.37 EP
Zierhut's Lost Treads 128.28 EP
Nyn’jah’s Tabi Boots 180.07 EP (two +8 strength gems)

So using EP seems like another great way to obsess over compare Enhancement Shaman gear, and it's pretty obvious that going from Striders to Boots woulda been like, zomgdoublebetter. But now that the Treads are on my hooves, the Boots are less of an upgrade, especially considering the other bits of gear I could spend badges on first.

Like Mardi Gras decorations. -_-

p.s.: there's some hooves for ya, Fel!