On the off chance that you haven't noticed, the Interwebs are
ablaze at the moment, with the release of several new features to Wowhead.
OK, so maybe "ablaze" isn't the right word. Perhaps
"smouldering." Possibly even "smoking a bit, but not an
actual
fire
hazard per-se."
Anyway.
The feature that most people are yammering on about are item
scales. If you don't know what they are, these are basically
a scoring system for gear. You assign relative scores to
various attributes and bonus effects, and Wowhead will then compute
relative scores for different bits of gear. For example,
let's say I'm a very narrow-minded fire mage who earnestly believes
that every point of +spell damage is worth 10 +intellect, and that's
all there is to gearing.
Here's what the
Wowhead scale would look like:
And here's a snippet of how it would score some items:
As you can see, this is pretty useful for getting a rough idea
of how valuable a piece of gear is. You'll also notice that
since I did this search on "Armor" in general, it's not limited to
stuff Mages can actually wear. The scales can be used in
conjunction with the existing filters, so you could easily search on
gear usable by Mages that drops in heroic-mode instances and
is epic, or whatever you want.
However, item scales aren't new; they've been around for ages.
The first (at least, that I know of) was AEP or Agility
Equivalence Points. It was designed for rogues to
give them a
simple way to rate gear. There have been a few other point
systems dreamed up over the years (TankPoints
is one notable exception
in that, as far as I know, it actually does some theorycrafting on the
fly for you as opposed to simply summing attributes.)
But what's really got me excited is how well the new Wowhead
scales work with an old addon I've been using for ages: Pawn.
This addon basically does exactly the same thing that Wowhead
now does: you tell it the relative worth of different attributes and
bonus effects, and it will compute a score for each piece of gear you
look at. The great thing is that instead of having to fire up
a browser to check an item's score, Pawn will insert the score into the
item's tooltip.
The big problem with scales is coming up with them in the
first place. Take mages as an example. How much is
crit worth relative to spell damage? Relative to intellect?
Relative to strength? [1]
However, the fine, fine human beings at Wowhead have done most
of the work for us by coming up with default scales for every class and
spec. That's not to say they're perfect; but they do give us a
starting point. What's more, now that this exists in the main
stream, it's likely we'll see people posting "optimised" item scales
that we can use.
Let's say you've found an item scale that you like.
Like, say, our fire mage scale above. You'd rather
like to be able to use
that in-game. Well, OK; maybe not you personally, but
work with me here. This is long enough without trying to do
something actually useful.
First of all, grab Pawn
and install it.
Once you've done that, you can bring up the Pawn configuration
by typing /pawn.
There's also a button on your character sheet if you'd rather
use that. You'll get an initial "go read the documentation,"
message, but we can ignore that for now. Click on the
"Options" tab down the bottom.
A few notes on these options.
-
Show item
levels will show an item's level in its tooltip.
This isn't the "required level;" an item's level determines
how much of each stat it gets. For example, weapons that drop
off heroic end-bosses are ilvl 105, whilst gear from those same bosses
are ilvl 110; Tier 4 is ilvl 120, except for stuff that drops off
Prince Malchezaar which is ilvl 125. That said, the item
level is not
the be-all and end-all.
-
Show item IDs
will tell you an item's unique identifier. For instance, my [Surestrike
Goggles v2.0] have an itemid of 32474. Fun fact:
look at the URL for Wowhead's page on that item; the last part of the
URL is the itemid itself. This means you can always get an
itemid from an item's tooltip in-game, and then directly enter the
Wowhead URL for that item!
-
Show
inventory icons displays the icon for an item above its
tooltip in some cases. Personally, I prefer it off, but turn
it on and see if you like it.
-
Add a blank
line before values does exactly what it says: it adds some
padding into the tooltip.
-
Align values
to the right edge of tooltip also does what it says; with
this turned off, the scores are right next to the scale's name; this
makes them a little harder to find when you're scanning a tooltip, so I
prefer to have this checked.
-
Show (*) on
unrecognized stats relates to things that Pawn doesn't
know how to score (for example: the minor run speed increase on some
meta gems.) If it finds something it doesn't understand, it
puts "(*)" next to the score. I turn the warning text off
because I'm well aware of what it means by now.
-
Digits of
precision is useful if you have a lot of really close
scores. Personally, I leave this at 1 and try to engineer my
scales so that scores aren't so close together that I need to increase
the precision.
-
Calculate
unenchanted values will display an item's score as if it
wasn't enchanted. This is important because when you get a
new drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it? This levels
the playing field a bit.
-
Calculate
enchanted values will display an item's score including
its enchant. This is important because when you get a new
drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it? This lets you
know if the new drop is already better than what you have even before
enchanting.
-
Normalize
values can be useful if your scores are all 6+ digits;
your scores will generally drop to very small numbers with this.
It doesn't change how they're computed, however; it's just
visual.
The rest you can leave or fiddle with, but they're the
important ones. So, with that done, let's look at porting a
scale from Wowhead to Pawn, shall we? Click on the "Scales"
tab. You should see the default Pawn scale; uncheck the "Show
this scale in tooltips" box down the bottom to hide it. Now,
click on the "New empty" button, set "Fire Mage" as the name and hit
enter.
Now, let's get to work. The big list on the left
contains all the things Pawn knows about. When you click on
one, a description shows up on the right, along with a box for entering
its value. First of all, we'll click on Intellect, and set it
to "1."
Next, scroll down the list to the "Spell stats"
section, and select "Spell damage." Set that to "10."
That's it; we're done! Because we're a Fire Mage
(not really,) change the colour to a nice firey orange and click
"Close." Now, let's see if it's working...
Cool, huh? Note that it's not the same score as
Wowhead gives us, however. This is because Wowhead and Pawn
use different normalisation techniques for the scores. If you
go back to the options screen and check "Normalize values," this will
get the two close, but they still won't match.
So if they don't match, why is this useful? Well,
imagine you're in an instance and some inconsiderate bastard
starts looting corpses while you're still busy DPSing your little heart
out. The item pops up and... ooh, that might be useful.
But is it better than what you've got? Hmm, not as
much spell damage, but it does have a bit more crit...
In situations like these, you can look at the scores in the
tooltip to give you a quick indication of whether a piece of gear is
worth further investigation or not. Combined with an addon
that shows comparison tooltips, it can save you a lot of time better
spent causing things to violently explode.
Now, there are a few more caveats: Wowhead's system will
automatically fill gem slots with whatever gems give it the best result
(maybe; it's not documented anywhere, but that's what it looks like it
does.) Pawn doesn't do that; instead, it allows you to assign
a score to different coloured sockets. So what to do?
The trick here is to look up the gems you're likely to put in
those slots. Count up its stats, and work out what the gem's
score would be. It's important that you don't just look at
Wowhead's score for the gem, since this won't be directly compatible
with your Pawn scales. It's not that hard, though.
Take [Runed Living Ruby]
as an example. We said that each point of spell damage was
worth "10" in our scale, so the gem itself is worth "90."
Assuming you intend to put those into your red gem slots,
plug in "90" as the value for red gem slots.
Meta gems are a complete pain in the rear end, but since
you're not likely to ever upgrade to a piece of stylish scalp-protector
without one (at least, not until WotLK,) once you're in gear that has
them, you can probably just ignore the meta gem value
(or give them some silly high value like 1000.)
There's another trick that might be of interest to the hunters
out there. You all know how weapon speed is basically the deciding factor
in ranged weapons, right? Well, Pawn supports a nifty little
trick that Wowhead doesn't.
First of all, you need to decide which direction you want to
go with weapon speed. Head down to the "Special weapon stats"
section, and select "Ranged: speed". If you're BM, enter a
big negative number (which will give higher scores to faster weapons;)
otherwise enter a positive number (which will favour slower weapons.)
This part will also sort of work with Wowhead. [2]
What you do then is scroll right down to the bottom and select
"Speed baseline" and enter your ideal weapon speed. In my
case, I set "Ranged: speed" to -500, and "Speed baseline" to 2.5.
This means that weapons faster than 2.5 will gain points, and
weapons slower than 2.5 will lose points. Nifty, eh?
One last final tip before I go: you might not be happy with
the scores. Specifically, if you don't normalise, you can end
up with big scores like 3890, and if you do normalise you end up with
tiny scores like 1.57. If you want something in the middle,
you can divide all the attribute values by a power of 10. So
instead of using "68" as a score, use "6.8" or ".68". Just
remember to do this to all
of your values.
And that's really all there is to using Pawn. I would recommend
that you use as many scales as you have roles. For instance,
Druids should have a "Tank" scale, a "Kitteh DPS" scale, a "HPS" scale
and a "HPM" scale. This will let you quickly decide if any
particular piece of gear is an upgrade for one of your gear sets or not.
Does this mean you can rely entirely on Wowhead and Pawn for
gear choices? Don't talk crazy like that. Things
like this aren't a substitute for experience (or at least, really
complex theorycrafting,) but they do help you make quick "ballpark"
guesstimates.
P.S. If you didn't get the joke in the comic, that's
because you're pronouncing "pawn" and "porn" wrong. No, the
British pronunciation was in use first, ergo it wins.
[1] Yeah, OK, that last one was a trick question.
:D
[2] "Sort of" because Wowhead seems to have hiccups
with negative scores.
Image of tasty
looking tempura prawns © Swamibu,
the
not-real-at-all girl who is actually really wearing a
bikini under those black bars © myvirtuallady,
and the
pawn that I spent like 10 minutes cutting out is © Jud McCranie.
