Picking BIS Gear and Skills

Best in Slot, or BIS for short, is a listing of items and skills that we consider to be the “Best” option for the slots they occupy. The tables in the FAQ are as simple as I could make them, for easy reference and citing, however they don’t leave much room for answering WHY these suggestions are best in slot.

Well pull up a seat and let me get you caught up!

For the first iteration of the BIS tables, I was still quite the hero noob, and enlisted the full help of a fellow Shop Titans player by the name of Phoenix. If you don’t know, Phoenix has an incredible roster of heroes, and has done countless hours of testing and optimizations with them. Seemed the obvious choice to consult for a best in slot list endeavor. After a bit of back and forth the table was created, and I learned an absolute mountain of information regarding heroes, stats, and the way it all interacts.

Using this new found knowledge, I began building a tool to help with all the number crunching. I wanted to be able to select gear/skills/etc, and be displayed a potential stat sheet for comparison.

Fast forward a couple months and here is what I use now –

Dropdown gear and skill selectors that pulls stats from a separate sheet
Full stat sheet report using all gear and and skills selected

I have sheets like these designed for the big 6 classes (Geo used in this example), to cover all the recommendations in the FAQ.

The key section to pay attention to is the bottom “Results” portion:

  • Quest dropdown allows me to select a quest to run the simulation on, all quest data lives on a separate sheet
  • Damage Taken shows how much damage per normal hit this setup will take on the selected quest
  • HTK is ‘hits to kill’, or how many hits this hero needs to kill the enemy in the selected quest
  • RBD is ’rounds before death’, or how many rounds this hero will get before the enemy lands the killing blow
  • Possible Crits is an estimate of HTK based on the heroes crit rate
  • RBD w/EVA is an estimate of RBD based on the heroes evasion percentage

    • Best in slot results, and the ones that ultimately end up in the FAQ, are the ones that result in the greatest balance of lowest HTK, with the highest RBD on Castle Hard

    I use Castle Hard as the breakpoint because on most days, that is the “endgame”, and if you can run that well, you will tear up LCOG without issue.

    Thats it! In current form I am able to mathematically whip up a new best in slot on patch days very quickly, then toss it over to Phoenix for a second set of eyes and verification, the beauty of (almost) automation.

    Next Steps

    I have a super alpha version of a full party simulation in the works that reports the same sort of stats and outcomes, which would help incorporate teams into BIS selection. Initial testing is simply proving that standalone BIS matches the potential team BIS, but I am still coding around all the possibilities that could result from the many different team compositions.