- wowrank@thoth.purplefrog.com
Apologies Patch 3.0.2 changed a lot of stuff. I assume a lot of the formulas underlying my scoring functions no longer match the new rules in the game. Also, when Wrath of the Lich King debuts in mid-November, these gear rankings will cease to be relevant, and I'll have to redo a lot of the logic.
I have created a perl script which ranks an entire World of Warcraft character with his equipment. I was introduced to the concept by the Rawr tool for feral druids.
My vision is to apply the Rawr methodology of ranking an entire gear set to more than just feral druids. I also have the idea of a "pinnacle set" which is the set of gear which maximizes the score function for a certain tier of gear. My suspicion is that as gear from other tiers becomes avaialble, it changes the value of older gear. This is because many (if not all) classes will be ranked by functions with non-linear components (uncrittability, spell hit cap, armor-based mitigation).
experimental spreadsheet skeleton (far from complete)
I am also toying with the idea of just harvesting the scoring functions from existing spreadsheets. Finding the boundary between the scoring function and the basic stat computation would be a non-trivial job. I'm sure the theorycrafters would consider copying their spreadsheet formulas into my skeleton a similarly non-trivial job.
21 - I have some new druid gear rankings for level 80. Some of the gear is probably in the wrong rank/tier. I'm sorting this out as I notice it. There are also inevitably mistakes in the math, and talents I have overlooked.
1 - The 3.0.2 patch changed a lot of gear, and some of the rules. I have downloaded all the new item XML (which is now lacking the arena rating information, bugger) and am calculating new gear rankings. They will be approximate until I find all of the rules that changed. I probably will not get around to changing everything before Wrath of the Lich King arrives and makes it all useless (again).
3 - I added a gear ranking function for balance druids based on spamming wrath. I discovered a mistake in my mana recovery math and this will affect the resto gear ranking too.
28 - I rehacked the damage calculations to take into account block value. My placeholder value of 50% damage block was far out of line with a boss fight. It was seriously screwing up the warrior gear rankings. I am recalculating all the tiers.
20 - I have added support for socket bonuses. I need to do a recalculation. I am slowly creeping toward on-demand gear rankings.
6 - I have separated Tier 6 from Sunwell. Sunwell is now "6.5". I realized that Sunwell drops include a lot of items that don't involve Yrma. Luckily Wowhead has a list of "zone drops" I can harvest.
17 - I took a first stab at a holy light spam paladin gear ranking.
10 - added the Brutal Gladiator (season 4) gear.
11 - I did some tier 6 rankings last night. The bear recommendations have an 0.2% crit vunlerability at Tier 6, weak. I have harvested some data about sunwell items, but the majority of their stats are unavailable from the armory.
10 - the reranking completed last night. There are some clear T5 upgrades for bear tanks. The resto druid gem insanity indicates that the T5 gear is capable of dancing across the OOM line in a 9-minute fight (as evidenced by all the (540/2) appearances in the explanation lines).
9 - Blizzard's armory is now divulging stats of the new Shattered Sun badge loot. It should appear in the next rerank. I am also scraping the loot/vendor table of a few NPCs to provide more meaningful "source" information.
8 - I'm now caching the computations of the pinnacle sets so that rerankings won't be upgrading as many (if any) pieces of gear, and reranks should run a lot faster.
27 - I cobbled together a function for scoring rogues. It is based on white damage, which is rather absurd, but better than nothing. I added a section to the ranking page for melee attack table. I added a section to the bottom of the ranking page for per-stat point value.
24 - I reworked the gem readout to score each gem, including gems that are clearly inferior to other gems (clearly inferior gems have been excluded from pinnacle set calculations).
17 - Meta gems are now placed in head sockets, but their activation conditions are not accurately modelled.
5 - I threw together a "holy paladin" scoring function based on spamming Flash of Light for 9 minutes (a semi-average berserk timer). I noticed that on-use trinkets were having their bonuses scored as on-equip. I'll have to fix that.
31 - I'm much more confident in the tier assignments for items now that I've correlated them against the Atlas Loot categories.
28 - I have a big list of item ids from AtlasLoot and will be incorporating them into my database slowly.
27 - I spent half an hour putting on one piece of gear at a time onto my druid and encoding the character pane into unit tests. My computations now accurately predict the 5 core stats and do an OK job with armor, defense, and resilience, but are still quite flaky (off by +-0.03%) for dodge. I also don't handle meta gems, gem socket bonus, or set bonus. I need to work on other classes too.
23 - shadow priest, done poorly. Hunter, kind of like white damage, but probably wrong. woo
22 - I currently have done a sloppy job of assigning items to the following tiers: solo, group, raid, heroic, T4, T5, T6. The distinction between group and heroic is unlikely to be correct.
12 - The underlying math is bad, but the annealing function mostly works. I have an approximation of the Rawr bear scoring function.