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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsAsk Mr. Robot: What gear should you get?
by Matt Low 
Feb 9th 2011 at 9:00AM
I'm not the best person when it comes to really optimizing and min-maxing my characters. I read up on the theory, but much of it goes way over my head. I'm just not that great when it comes to numbers. But hey, there is a new site out there for players like me who have difficulty with this kind of stuff. If you're looking for a gear optimizer, go ahead and Ask Mr. Robot. If you're not sure which item is the best you can get for the content you're doing, you can use Ask Mr. Robot to show you what the optimal drops are. Not only that, it even tells you how you should gem, enchant and reforge.
Let's take a closer look.
Let's take a closer look.
I'll take the jump and throw my character up here as a guinea pig. The import process is a breeze. All you do is enter your server name and character name before it pulls up your character information. If you don't want to import your character from the armory, you can always create a gear list for different classes and specs.
On the left side, you can see a list of my current gear. If I wanted to, I can hit the switch for the best in slot tab and load up a list of items Ask Mr. Robot thinks is best for me. If you're not much of a raider, there are a few checkboxes that let you limit the pool of items (from heroic raids, raids or dungeons). If you want, you can exclude items from archaeology, the Darkmoon Fair, random world drops or anything too expensive.
On the right side, you can see the gems I'm using, my enchants and any reforging that I've done. A red border indicates the enhancement isn't the most optimal choice. If you're not sure where to find the item in question, hit the drop location tab, and it will tell you exactly where to go to get a certain item.
But here's the real beauty of this tool: If you press the optimize button, it will give you the recommended gems, enchants and stats to reforge based on stat weights. For you theorycrafters out there, you can adjust the stat weights however you like. There's a feedback button in the event you feel the stat weights or gear lists are wrong.
Matticus: After
This is what is recommended for my character after optimization. It turns out I've been doing it all wrong. It might be time for me to make a few adjustments to my gear!
If you need a hand with your character, give Ask Mr. Robot a shot and just try it. Oh, before I forget, you can always come back at a later time and load up your character again. Ask Mr. Robot remembers recent characters that you've loaded for a quick reference later.
This is what is recommended for my character after optimization. It turns out I've been doing it all wrong. It might be time for me to make a few adjustments to my gear!
If you need a hand with your character, give Ask Mr. Robot a shot and just try it. Oh, before I forget, you can always come back at a later time and load up your character again. Ask Mr. Robot remembers recent characters that you've loaded for a quick reference later.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 7)
Zoop Feb 9th 2011 3:03PM
A quick update: we got a tip that might get us out of the 'throttle' trouble with the Armory. It might take a few more hours to code, but we hope to have it fixed later today.
For up-to-date progress on this, check our forum thread on the issue: http://bit.ly/e0HsGW
Zoop Feb 9th 2011 6:31PM
Update: Mr. Robot can now load your characters again!
He spent the last couple of hours rewriting all of his code to talk to battle.net instead of the old armory. Mr. Robot wanted me to let everyone know he's very sorry, and he is going to stay up all night baking rainbow cupcakes to make up for it.
akiva Feb 9th 2011 9:50AM
Might I suggest Rawr as an alternative.
http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php
Mr Robot is currently timing out for me so I can't comment on it, but I know Rawr has lots of options. For tanks it will let you set how much you want to favor threat vs survival and also plug in numbers like how hard a boss hits. For healers you can compare throughput vs longevity.
Riley Feb 9th 2011 9:50AM
I cant load the character either. I think their server is getting hit hard right now.
revulva Feb 9th 2011 10:10AM
We will bring up an extra couple of servers to accommodate the heavier traffic. It does seem to be running a little slower than usual. They should be up in about 20 minutes or so!
Daveg Feb 9th 2011 9:52AM
You only need to be have the extra hit/exp if your running heroics. For raids, hit/exp right now for tanks is a lost cause. I don't know very many tanks that are even over 3% hit and above 10exp. For raids there is more adds and running around for the dps/heals so the tank doesn't have to be hit capped.
Neuropox Feb 9th 2011 9:56AM
I used Mr Robot back in Wrath for my DK, with good results. I havnt tried him in cataclysm, but if it is anything like it was back then, it will be well worth your time
malohkan Feb 9th 2011 9:59AM
Rawr for Elemental hasn't been updated to even give so much as a bad guess for many months now, and there's no telling if it'll be fixed even within the next 2 months. I'm hopeful that Mr Robot can help me out!
djdiapason Feb 9th 2011 10:06AM
I'd like to try it as well....if only I could get it to load my character...
Ben Smith Feb 9th 2011 10:11AM
The popularity (I'd assume) generated from this post seems to have killed the site.
Eranwolf Feb 9th 2011 10:16AM
Site is dead form traffic!!
revulva Feb 9th 2011 10:19AM
We are bringing up extra servers at this very moment - we were running it off of two servers, we're going to try doubling that to four and see how it goes. If there are still problems we will keep adding more until it handles it!
We have the site on the cloud, so we really just need to figure out the right number of servers to handle the traffic. Sorry about any delays in the site working for everyone.
djdiapason Feb 9th 2011 10:38AM
I keep getting this message now...
"The armory is currently not available. This either means that blizzard is doing maintenance, or blizzard hates Mr. Robot, or blizzard hates you."
The armory is loading my profile just fine.
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:38AM
I replied to another comment - we are temporarily locked out of the Armory. We apparently did not throttle our armory requests enough. The site works, but loading of characters will be temporarily unavailable.
I would expect the armory will let us back in tomorrow sometime. Sorry about that. Blizzard will not provide any information as to how many armory requests they allow in a short time frame, so we just have to guess and hope it works. We will be updating our code to throttle armory traffic even further to hopefully avoid this problem from happening again.
Monger Feb 9th 2011 10:27AM
When i bring it up with Firefox everything is all scrambled so I am wondering if it is compatible with Firefox? Or is it just unable to process atm?
revulva Feb 9th 2011 10:34AM
It works in all major browsers (I use firefox mainly) as well as on the iPad and decently on Android devices.
The "scrambled" problem you were having is because the servers got choked. It should be working now - we added more servers and they are live.
Colin Middleton Feb 9th 2011 10:38AM
Worked fine for me in Firefox
Res Feb 9th 2011 10:36AM
This is a great site and it's a good place to start when optimizing. I hesitate to rely on this, rawr, or addons like reforginator fully though just because it has to be impossible to keep every class and spec fully up to date. It's clear since if you use 3 different tools you'll often get 3 differing suggestions on how to be 100% optimized. Your best bet is still keeping up with the latest research and data yourself IMO. But that's not to take away from Mr Robot, I use it often, just don't go with what it says as gospel all the time.
Boobah Feb 9th 2011 2:39PM
If Rawr works for your spec, it's going to give you better answers than Reforgenator or Ask Mr. Robot, since it develops its 'stat weights' by comparing the numbers between your current setup vs. the proposed one.
Reforgenator, by default (or at least last time I looked) had an uncomfortable love affair with mastery, too. It also has serious issues with expertise, since that's the only stat in the game where rating-to-stat is a discontinuous function.
Ask Mr. Robot apparently assumes (from what I've gathered in-thread from the folks behind it) that your stat weights in best-in-slot are going to be the same as whatever crap gear you're currently wearing. The only real advantage to that is that a best-in-slot set can be defined, so you have fewer arguments about the default. Doesn't make it any less arbitrary, though.
Ideally, for Reforgenator and Ask Mr. Robot you should be using something else to generate your stat weights. And each time you upgrade, generate them again. And generally do enough research so that you can find out if there's non-obvious plateaus to keep an eye out for (haste is a frequent offender here, on top of actual caps (soft and hard) for hit and expertise.)
SliceMessiah Feb 9th 2011 10:38AM
Grr... now it keeps telling me the Armory is unavailable, though I can access it just fine. Something like this could be great for my casual guild just learning to do regular normal instance runs together. Rawr functionality without having to tweak would be great for them.