Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-1990160-20140521040036/@comment-1330314-20140522133556

@NeonSpotlight: Using the most gold efficient item, rather than the least gold efficient item, as the benchmark for stats actually doesn't make that much of a difference, since literally every item with that stat will just scale down in efficiency, so any comparisons you could make previously would still apply. You're just arbitrarily setting the baseline value of stats to some other item. The advantage to choosing the least gold efficient base component, however, is that it more accurately reflects the fact that items become more gold efficient the more expensive they become, so you're almost always getting more than your money's worth than if you had infinite inventory slots and decided to fill them out with the same stats' worth of base components. The other advantage is that, while items like and  and  build into a whole ton of different items, their advanced components build into far, far less items, usually specialized for only one role, so you're basing your values on a more commonly used item (or at least an item that's easier to include into a build).