Which Gear Upgrade Is Actually Worth Buying?

Price alone tells you nothing

A 5,000 upgrade that adds 15% is a better buy than a 2,000 one that adds 2%. So "how much does it cost" is the wrong question, and so is "how much damage does it add".

The question that works is cost per 1% — divide the price by the percentage you gain, and every upgrade in the game lands on one scale. Lowest number wins.

At the defaults, a 5,000 upgrade taking you from 1,000 to 1,150 buys 15%, so each 1% costs 333. The alternative — 1,080 for 2,000 — buys 8% at 250 a percent. The cheaper item is the better buy despite adding half the damage.

The part worth trusting

Which of two upgrades wins never depends on how strong you are.

Both percentages are measured against the same character, so your current damage sits in both scores and divides straight out of the comparison. This upgrade's cost per 1%, over the alternative's is built from the two costs and the two absolute gains alone — your base doesn't appear in it.

You can watch it happen. Hold the two gains at +150 and +80 and move the base:

Your damage now	This upgrade	The alternative	Ratio
1,000	333	250	1.33
2,000	667	500	1.33
50,000	16,667	12,500	1.33

Fifty times worse in absolute terms, and the ratio doesn't move.

One caution on trying that yourself: the tool takes your damage with each upgrade, not the gain — so raising Your damage now on its own turns the alternative into a downgrade and the comparison correctly reads —. Raise all three together.

Two things follow, and both save real effort:

• A ranking never needs redoing because you levelled up in between.
• A ranking someone else worked out transfers to your character, provided the absolute gains are the same.

Why late upgrades feel worse — they are worse

The same +150 damage is 15% at a base of 1,000 and 7.5% at a base of 2,000.

Identical item, identical price, exactly twice the cost per 1%. Set Your damage now to 2,000 and Your damage with the upgrade to 2,150 and the score goes from 333 to 667.

Prices usually climb steeply over the same stretch, so the two effects compound. Late-game upgrades buying less isn't a perception problem or a difficulty curve — it's arithmetic, and it's worth knowing so you judge a late upgrade against what it actually buys rather than against how the early ones felt.

Price it in hours

Currency is a stand-in for the time you spent earning it, so the honest unit is hours.

Hours of earning per 1% gained does that conversion. At the defaults it's about 17 minutes per 1% — 4h 10m of grinding for the whole 15%.

That reframing settles a lot of arguments with yourself. Forty hours for 15% and four hours for 15% are the same purchase in resources and completely different purchases in life.

Same slot changes the question

This one catches people, and the tool can't see it.

If both upgrades go in the same slot, they're mutually exclusive. Buying the cheap one first means its whole price is spent and gone the moment the better one arrives — it's a stepping stone, not a saving.

If they're in different slots and you'll eventually own both, then order is the only question, and the cheaper-per-1% one should come first. You hold its benefit through every hour you spend saving for the other, and your total spend is identical either way.

Same numbers, opposite advice. Check the slot before you check the score.

What you have to work out yourself

The damage figure. Enter what you measure on a dummy, not what the tooltip implies. Tooltips report the stat, not what the stat does to your output, and that gap is where most upgrade regret lives — a soft cap, a conditional proc, a weapon speed change that interacts with everything else.

Stat interactions. Crit, armour scaling and set bonuses multiply with the rest of your build, so the same crit chance is worth far more to a high crit-damage character than a low one. Our crit chance versus crit damage calculator handles that specific split; a training dummy handles the rest more honestly than any formula.

Currency type. A token that buys nothing but raid gear has no alternative use, so spending it costs you nothing you'd otherwise have had. Compare upgrades within a currency rather than across them — which is what the head-to-head is for, and what the printable table is laid out to collect.