Patch 5.3 interview with Ghostcrawler
Mystery of the Unborn Val'kyr
The latest patch 5.3 news
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 4 of 7)
djdiapason Feb 9th 2011 10:42AM
Same here! I am getting this...
"The armory is currently not available. This either means that blizzard is doing maintenance, or blizzard hates Mr. Robot, or blizzard hates you."
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:05AM
So... we got locked out of the Armory. We have all sorts of code that throttles our requests to the armory, but, apparently we still sent too many requests with the spike in traffic due to 4.0.6 and links from here :(
We're going to update the code to throttle the requests even further. It might increase load times for Armory imports some, but not too bad. Unfortunately blizzard does not provide any numbers as to how many requests they allow in any time span, so it's a guess and test process.
Last time this happened to us in WotLK we were locked out of the armory for 24 hours. I hope this is shorter or at least not longer. We will make a post when armory loading works again.
For now the site still works and anyone who already loaded a character still can, you just can't load your character from the armory. You could select all your items manually from the item lists, but, that's sort of a pain :(
Sorry about this problem - we really had no way to know for sure if it would happen or not.
SliceMessiah Feb 9th 2011 11:08AM
I understand completely. Still, the site works great just manually selecting "I'm a Draenei Resto Shaman pre-raid level, looking for any gear, with maxed alch and herb." Looking forward to actually loading myself up, but still definitely useful in the meantime. Thanks for the great tool :)
Zoop Feb 9th 2011 6:33PM
@SliceMessiah - The armory will now load your character again!!!
nordveien Feb 9th 2011 11:01AM
This tool, as any other tool with that little calculation time, does not provide the optimal result. It might provide a result that is better than your current setup, but, again, there's no guarantee.
In order to, say, calculate the optimal reforging strategy based on known stat weights (the so-called EP points), one needs to go over all possible reforging options (not piece wise, but set wise), compare the outcomes and pick the one with the highest total EP value.
There is a tool that does exactly that (currently, available for rogues, one may find it in the respective topic at Elitist Jerks). Suffice to say, it gives different results than Mr.Robot with all other input (gems, enchants) being equal.
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:17AM
You are referring to Korner's reforging script I assume.
You are correct that Mr. Robot uses an approximate algorithm to find "near-optimal" gear setups. It takes a long time to check every single combination - "long" being a relative term. We wanted it to run in less than a second - you can already see the stress on our servers with just that much processing time.
That being said, I posted up an example of Korner's reforging script failing to find the optimal solution. I ran the same character through Mr. Robot and found a comparable result - both tools were about 10 EP off of THE optimal solution.
In his optimizations of the script, it appears that Korner is now also inadvertently doing an approximate solution, although it is still very near-optimal.
Mr. Robot is going to be so close to the optimal solution that the random number generator in the game will make sure that you never notice the difference - I know that will not appease hardcore min-maxers, but it works for most of us!
Keep in mind that Mr. Robot also optimizes gems and enchants for you too, which will often result in an overall better setup.
nordveien Feb 9th 2011 11:52AM
Yes, I was referring to Korner's script (and, in later version, C-based tool).
I do agree with you that it's generally more convenient to get a near-optimal result in an acceptable time and using a pretty user-friendly GUI.
And it's, basically, what most want.
It's probably a matter of personal choice which kind of tool to use. But I think it's important to separate between the tools that use more precise math models (with their drawbacks like longer calculation times and a bigger set of manual config options) and the tools that use more approximate models, that work "in most cases", but, due to their approximate nature, may give random spikes on some input data, while being very close to optimal on most data.
That's why I find it misleading using words like "the most optimal choice" in the article.
In any case, best of luck to you and your project, it's great to see developers' comments in articles like this one.
Camo Feb 9th 2011 11:03AM
"makes it simple to see at a glance which raid boss I need to concentrate on next, which nights I can safely skip"
So true! Thanks Mr.Robot!
loot > progress!
Wait what..?
Nina Katarina Feb 9th 2011 12:12PM
With bosses who are on farm, we're bringing in alts and more casual guild members; our raid leader has asked us all to form lists of which bosses we're willing to skip. It's not loot > progress, it's guild progress > personal vanity.
drkbkr Feb 9th 2011 11:08AM
In the specs I examined it seemed to always suggest getting 4 piece bonus. Is there a way to turn that off and / or set a value for the bonus?
I've been using rawr for years (for my bear) but have a horrible time with their new web version so if I can get this one figured out I'd be pretty happy.
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:22AM
We have made estimates as to the value of each set bonus in terms of one or more stats, and then the stat weights make the decision as to whether it is worth getting or not.
If you have some input or insight into what the values for particular set bonuses should be, we would love to discuss it.
drkbkr Feb 9th 2011 11:45AM
Mostly I was wondering if it just automatically assumed 4 piece (or even 2 piece) was always worth it. It would be nice to be able set the weight for the bonus as you can for stats, but I guess as long as someone is thinking about it, I'm ok with it, especially since you can "trick" it by making it choose particular pieces. This is at least partly the case because it may be a while before I get my hands on the set tokens from nef or chogall (random loot and rolls are random).
Sidone Feb 9th 2011 11:11AM
doing it all wrong? reforging spirit/haste to mastery doesnt seems awfully right to me...
and i am pretty sure hearthsong beat power torrent any time of day ( well for holy priest at least)
i would stick with reforging crit to something useful ( usualy spirit/haste) but healers are not dpsers, u cant just forgot all stats to bumb one
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:26AM
There are some options at the bottom which could affect the results. By default we prefer "healing throughput" to "mana conservation". Change your "healing preference" with the dropdown in the options and it will pick heartsong over power torrent.
For holy priests, the default stat weights will get your haste up to 12.5%, and then stop getting more haste.
If you have an example where spirit is being reforged to mastery with the default stat weights, I would appreciate a link so that I can check it out.
JB Feb 9th 2011 11:21AM
I am going to assume this is only useful for level 85 characters, and not those folks that are still leveling....
As for RAWR, I can no longer use it. It locks up my PC. Silly idea to have gone the route they did *shrug*.
Is there any site that will give stats for leveling characters?
revulva Feb 9th 2011 11:28AM
Yes, this is for level 85 characters only. It will load any item from the armory, but, we only consider item level 346+ items for optimizations right now. Drop location information is also only available for 346+ items as well.
We will be adding PvP gear and PvP optimization support in an update in the near future.
tk4426 Feb 9th 2011 11:59AM
WowInsider destroys another useful website..
MrRobot is now blacklisted from battle.net it seems.
Donhorn Feb 9th 2011 12:10PM
It would appear so. :(
Man, and I was hoping to see what it had to say for me. I can't seem to change the items it shows to the ones I own.
revulva Feb 9th 2011 12:24PM
The ban from battle.net is only temporary! This happened to use once before during WotLK and we were able to get back in the next day. We will throttle the armory traffic further to hopefully avoid the problem from happening again.
It is really spammers and people who make computer viruses that caused the problem. Blizzard wouldn't have to automatically assume any site making lots of requests is malicious if... most of them weren't malicious.
Kerevin Feb 9th 2011 12:25PM
Mr Robot seems to ignore factions when suggesting gear; i was looking at human warlock gear and it was making recommendations for rep gear from Dragonmaw.