Hi all - I plugged the VP/JP upgrades into a spreadsheet to see how they compared with item purchases.
Comparing against my heroic blues, buying a Valor point item is at least twice as good as buying a Valor point upgrade.
So the correct strategy is to upgrade all items to purple before you start spending VPs on upgrades.
There is a caveat, however.
Upgrading an weapon is as much as ten times better than upgrading an armor piece. In the caster case this is because the +spell power upgrades dwarf all the other stats -- but I suspect the raw DPS increase on weapons makes it true for you as well.
For JP upgrades the correct strategy is clearly to upgrade blue weapons first, then go back and upgrade the blues according to which you think you'll keep longest.
Specifically, for those who like the gory details: I used wowhead's default item weights and calculated (item score delta / points) for each. VP upgrades tended to be in the 0.08 range, while VP items were often in the 0.2 to 0.3 range. Epic weapon upgrades were more like 0.6 to 1.0, however.
Comparing against my heroic blues, buying a Valor point item is at least twice as good as buying a Valor point upgrade.
So the correct strategy is to upgrade all items to purple before you start spending VPs on upgrades.
There is a caveat, however.
Upgrading an weapon is as much as ten times better than upgrading an armor piece. In the caster case this is because the +spell power upgrades dwarf all the other stats -- but I suspect the raw DPS increase on weapons makes it true for you as well.
For JP upgrades the correct strategy is clearly to upgrade blue weapons first, then go back and upgrade the blues according to which you think you'll keep longest.
Specifically, for those who like the gory details: I used wowhead's default item weights and calculated (item score delta / points) for each. VP upgrades tended to be in the 0.08 range, while VP items were often in the 0.2 to 0.3 range. Epic weapon upgrades were more like 0.6 to 1.0, however.
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