Thread:ClariS/@comment-98.201.177.181-20130104231418/@comment-75.143.77.86-20130114144536

So these gold values are put to multiple uses:

1) Helping decide when to replace lower tier items by a higher tier item.

2) Helping decide when to replace a higher tier item by lower tier items.

3) Helping decide which higher tier item to buy.

The "gold value" trick is a shortcut. We don't expect the shortcut to always give us a perfect answer; we throw out silly results. However, we can try to determine situations where it tends to give us good answers and where it tends to give us bad answers. If we learn to tell these apart, we'll only use the shortcut in places where it gives us good answers. This is critically important to the usefulness of the shortcut - if we know the shortcut sometimes goes bad, and it's hard to tell when that happens, we have a problem.

1) and 2) are pretty easy to settle. Gold value is a decent guide if we have enough item slots free. If we don't have enough item slots free, then we stop caring about gold values and favor the build that uses the number of slots we can spare.

3) is the part I suspect we disagree on. I won't go into detail on this yet. Is there anything I've said here you want to correct or expand on?