Destiny Is It Worth Upgrading Via Xur Guide

Destiny Is It Worth Upgrading Via Xur Guide by destiny_guru

Like many of you, I like to ensure maximum efficiency while playing Destiny. My Ruin Wings today have 84 STR, while the ones Xur happens to be selling today have 98 STR – a 14 point improvement. Now, Old Me would have dropped the coins immediately to get the better roll. But this morning I decided to see how much benefit upgrading would actually provide. Here’s what I realized:

Several other Reddit and Bungie.net posts have provided the following information in regards to how each 3 stats affect the cooldown timers:

0 stat –
INT: 5:30
DIS: 1:00
STR: 1:09

271 stat (max) –
INT: 3:55 (assuming you aren’t killing anything or stacking any buffs from your gear)
DIS: 0:27
STR: 0:31

^{^} If you do some simple division above, you will find how many points it takes to reduce cooldown of each ability by 1 second (I’ve rounded these values):

INT: 3 points per second
DIS: 8 points per second
STR: 7 points per second

Using the table immediately above, I can see that upgrading my 84 Ruin Wings to the 98 rolled version Xur is selling today works as follows:

14 point improvement -> 14 / 7 = 2 seconds

If I upgraded today then my melee cooldown is only 2 seconds faster – not that great to me when you consider what it would cost to upgrade, but YMMV. Intellect is where you get the best bang for your buck when upgrading.

Do math. Use logic. Upgrade responsibly.

TL;DR –
Every 3 points of INT reduces your super cooldown by 1 second.
Every 8 points of DIS reduces your grenade cooldown by 1 second.
Every 7 points of STR reduces your melee cooldown by 1 second.
Once you hit max stat of 271, there’s really no improvement. Do the math and decide if it’s worth it when choosing to upgrade your exotics from Xur.