The Dreaded Mr. Robot

[Generalfrisk]

There are no "correct" stat weights. They are calculated individually for each character. The ones they have up are calculated from BiS gear I believe. While they are not perfect for your individual character's stats they are more than adequate for general use.

I'm calling false on this one. If it's calculated on BiS gear, that makes AMR even worse

it tells resto shamans to stack pure spirit and mastery and essentially forsake anything else. This is about as wrong as it gets. Even at max levels you stack crit, get about 12.5k Spirit (For 25s) and get the haste cap you're comfortable with. Mastery is next to useless since we have so much base.

[Schizoide]

Gotta get dem alts ready for leveling. Just imagine the difference in leveling speed between 589 ilevel and 580 ilevel!

I'm sure people are just bored playing their mains and want to try something new. Happens at the end of every expansion, and even some long patches.

[Zoopercat]

Vegas, If you're getting an optimized score that is worse, it's because of your settings! Mr. Robot has to follow the rules you give him. For example, if you set a haste soft cap, he has to get to it (since haste is an 'at least' condition). There are a few settings like this. If you return to our site and save what you're looking at (click the green save button to the left of your character name) - and post that URL I can see what option is being enforced, and you can choose to keep it or remove it.

As for how we calculate our default stat weights: it is not based on BiS. We wrote a program that interfaces with SimC. It equips real gear at various levels and runs it through SimC. The program them puts those stat weights into our site, gets new optimizations and runs it through SimC again. We do this over and over until the stat weights 'stabalize.' By that I mean you get similar gems/reforges across various gear levels. And if the stats don't stabalize because you have to gear differently for higher level gear than lower level, we make multiple sets of stat weights for users to choose from.

[SlippyCheeze]

Get ReforgeLite, put in your stat priority, click calculate and let it reforge for you. No idea why people visit a website to check reforges.

I suspect it is rhetorical, but: because AMR also handles sidegrade gear, gems, and enchants alongside the reforges to get the right result. That means that I might, eg, flip between those two WF boots when I get an upgrade, because the upgrade and one pair of boots had hit -- so I get more use out of the other boots secondary stats.

Also, because AMR has good SimC integration, which lets me more easily manage generation of custom weights, and testing with my simulated rotation, to build the feedback loop as ilvls change to get optimal results.

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Except for when you put in stat weights and it mysteriously ignores them in favor of other things. Then I go into reforgeLite with the same stat weights in game, auto reforge, and strangely it gives me a better result than AMR can get. That means it reforges differently than AMR and then I load the reforged gear into AMR and ask it to optimize and it spits out an answer than ITS OWN SOFTWARE says is worse... Yeah, AMR isn't perfect. And neither is SimC. Fire mages don't get good results from either program for one reason or another.

If AMR ever, ever ignores the stat weights you gave it, one of two things has happened:

Option one, the most likely, is that you are at fault. They now have a big banner linking to their blog post for "why is AMR putting expertise gems into my caster" when they do that -- because this was pretty common, despite the fact that those were actually the optimal choice for hitting the stat weights that people wanted.

Option two, you have found a genuine bug in AMR. You should report it on the forum, as they specify, and the developers will fix it so that it never happens again.

Actually, there is also option three: you did something stupid like turn on "YOU MUST HIT 15 PERCENT HIT NO MATTER WHAT!!!" and so it puts you over the hit cap to ensure that 1 in 10,000 attacks land, at the cost of a substantial amount of valuable secondaries. That one is probably the least likely, but some people like to do it, so...

The case where you describe their reforging as producing worse results than the baseline is interesting, and sounds more like an actual bug -- did you report it? What did the developers say?

As to the SimC complaints, can you spell it out a little more? Was it trouble managing the rotation? Was the DPS too high, or too low, compared to real world measures? Was the difference, eg, downtime or movement in the fights that you had trouble managing? T90 talent pain?

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I'm calling false on this one. If it's calculated on BiS gear, that makes AMR even worse

it tells resto shamans to stack pure spirit and mastery and essentially forsake anything else. This is about as wrong as it gets. Even at max levels you stack crit, get about 12.5k Spirit (For 25s) and get the haste cap you're comfortable with. Mastery is next to useless since we have so much base.

You ... know that there is an option to set the spirit cap, which by default is not set, quite deliberately, right? Because, as the AMR devs say, spirit levels are a personal choice. Actually, so do the vast majority of guides, and so forth. "Spirit until you are comfortable with regen, then X, Y, or Z".

Every healer is the same: spirit has a very high weight, and works perfectly if you set the soft or hard spirit caps in the options. By default it will stack that to the roof, just as you asked, and ... well, 12.5k spirit might be right for you, but it isn't necessarily right for me.

For example, many of the disc priests would stack to ~ 11k spirit, I went to 8k before throughput. I am not sure if it was better mana management, cutting closer to oom on my part, a better raid team, or what, but I was fine on 99 percent of fights with 8k. So, I set my cap there.

They also have an option for which haste cap to aim for, defaulting to "pick one for me", and so forth. eg: what you describe there is exactly "using the tool wrong" -- for people who don't just want to stack spirit until they can spam flash heal all day.

[Barnabas]

Gotta get dem alts ready for leveling. Just imagine the difference in leveling speed between 589 ilevel and 580 ilevel!

9 item levels doesn't make a difference if you suck at leveling.

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Its computational capabilities will still likely be useful for comparing upgrades.

That is exactly what I want to use that website for in WoD.

[Darkfriend]

9 item levels doesn't make a difference if you suck at leveling.

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That is exactly what I want to use that website for in WoD.

Won't need it for that. 1.) BiS list to know what gear to aim for and 2.) stat weights to find out what each piece is worth at your current gear level.

[Octa]

Same, especially when ReforgeLite typically works better than AMR for me. Gemming shouldn't be hard to figure out either considering there are default choices for all classes and specs(hint: Blizzard links to a site that tells you what they are).

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There aren't millions of variables you can set in AMR... that's what thousands upon thousands means. There aren't all that many things you can set aside from stat weights, a few caps and then basic filters. There aren't thousands of variables to set in SimCraft either.

I didn't mean to say that the sites themselves have millions of variables, that was worded poorly. There are tons of variables that change your dps, from how your raid members perform, to how your gear is itemized, to how fast you kill things, to how the item upgrade plays into it, your guild's strat, you getting tricks, etc. Maybe not millions, but FAR more than you could EVER factor into a general set of default weights, which was the point. You can't complain about a set of default weights and say "these are not correct in every situation, AMR is shit"....that's completely insane. If you don't know how to use a knife then that's cool, but don't say knives are bad tools for cutting things. Don't say your knife is broken because you can't put the sharp blade on what you need to cut. That's dumb.

[DarthMetatron]

Hey this pencil sucks, my lines aren't straight!

PS. Zoopercat > *

[Zoopercat]

Darth, it took me a minute, but I finally understood "Zoopercat > *" Haha, <3

[SlippyCheeze]

Darth, it took me a minute, but I finally understood "Zoopercat > *" Haha, <3

Where is my like button? I wanna punch it so hard that it breaks. Also, I am sorry you get so much grief for AMR. It must make it hard, and I know I hardly ever read the *positive* comments compared to the negative ones. So thank you, and thanks to the rest of your team.

[Darkfriend]

Where is my like button? I wanna punch it so hard that it breaks. Also, I am sorry you get so much grief for AMR. It must make it hard, and I know I hardly ever read the *positive* comments compared to the negative ones. So thank you, and thanks to the rest of your team.

They get credit when they get things write. Hell, I wrote a guide on how to use AMR correctly. The issue is they tend to ignore blindingly obvious problems from multiple sources for months on end, which means it generally has errors.

It's great, when it works. It just tends to have errors for a longgggg time.

[Kreps]

I like AMR.

[Grimdeeds]

We actually wrote a program that interfaces with SimC that iterates over various gear options, optimizes, recheck results, repeat. We do this until the stat weights 'stabilize.'

I've tried the above method but I am not getting 'stabilized' results. I sim, get stat weights, put those into AMR, then export the AMR's optimized results back to simc, sim again, replug new results back into AMR, etc etc (rinse/repeating). But what seems to happen is not a stabilization, as in stat weights coming closer together, it's just a pendulum that keeps swinging from one extreme to another and back again. You need more haste! (put in more haste) You need to dump haste!

Also, another frustration I'm having: A common stat weight I get from simc is (scale factors) crit = 6.62; mastery= 6.19; haste = 5.55, and when I plug this into AMR, it optimizes me as full mastery gemmed (I'm an unholy DK). I'm not sure if this is because the scale factors have an error range and for some reason AMR thinks mastery's true value is actually above crit with this particular set of scale factors, or because with my particular itemization, the two stats are close enough as to be equal and so my gear can juice more out of mastery than crit (I don't have as much crit itemization as I should). But anyway bottomline is I don't understand why AMR goes full mastery with these particular scale factors.

Another issue that I don't understand. I have in my bags a Hwf'd wep, but it's not upgraded at all versus my current-equipped H wep which is fully upgraded, and even when I input the simc result that wep dps scale factor is 4.17, AMR still values spending a full 1000 valor as the second most efficient upgrade for my gear (I still have a LOT of other pieces needing upgraded)

I'm not knocking simc or AMR at all, I'm just having frustration with understanding the integration of the two, in particular the part mentioned above about how the stat weights are supposed to 'stabilize.'

edit: shoot, forgot one other issue I have with the AMR-SIMc integration. Again, as an unholy DK simc -usually- gives me a scale factor for strength above 10 (one sim I did get a 9.94 for strength) but AMR custom weights won't let me put in a weight above 10. I usually just list strength as 9.99 on the AMR custom weights, then. NO idea if this is the correct way to handle the issue.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...deeds/advanced

[SSHA778]

I've tried the above method but I am not getting 'stabilized' results. I sim, get stat weights, put those into AMR, then export the AMR's optimized results back to simc, sim again, replug new results back into AMR, etc etc (rinse/repeating). But what seems to happen is not a stabilization, as in stat weights coming closer together, it's just a pendulum that keeps swinging from one extreme to another and back again. You need more haste! (put in more haste) You need to dump haste!

This behavior is because of how stat weights are generated. They are generated by increasing a single stat while holding all others constant. That is, they're generated based upon the amount of every stat you have. When you make massive changes to your gear, the previous stat weights are useless because your stats aren't even close to what they used to be when the weights were generated. It's similar to this: if I make $60/day selling ice cream in the summer, then I can reasonably assume that in a summer week, I will make $420. However, if it's a winter week (different conditions), expecting $420 is unreasonable because the situation has changed, which caused the original rate of $60/day to be useless (and likely harmful).

Generate stat weights and change only a few pieces of gear. Then, generate them again and change a few more pieces. What you're seeing is that there is a haste breakpoint between your haste-heavy build and the other build. When you switched all of your gear from the stat weights, the value for haste tanked but you assumed it was constant.

[Shiira]

To expand on what SSHA778 said, haste is very good until you have enough of it, then it's very bad.

What you're seeing is one set of reforges with low haste causing the stat value of haste to sim high.

The problem comes when you reforge all of your gear with that stat weight and put yourself past the point of having enough haste, which causes your next sim to give a low weight and suggest that you should go back to the first set of reforges.

There are a couple of ways you can deal with this, SSHA778's suggestion is perfectly viable, and you could also use the reforge tool in simcraft to find the level of haste that sims highest. Just be sure to sim with an appropriate amount of ams soaking if you take the latter route, failing to sim ams properly will guarantee that your results are not useful.


As for your problem with amr not appearing to provide optimal results, this could be due to how it handles the thok trinket. I'm not actually sure how to handle that though.


Your issue with your strength weight being too high can be solved by simply dividing all of your weights by two. The actual numbers aren't what's important, it's the relative values.

[Grimdeeds]

Thank you SSHA778 and Shiira for the help, much appreciated.

Your issue with your strength weight being too high can be solved by simply dividing all of your weights by two. The actual numbers aren't what's important, it's the relative values.

very clever, makes sense. Thank you.

[Darkfriend]

Thank you SSHA778 and Shiira for the help, much appreciated.



very clever, makes sense. Thank you.

Or just used the normalized results.

[SlippyCheeze]

Thank you SSHA778 and Shiira for the help, much appreciated. very clever, makes sense. Thank you.

Note: when you see that sort of flipping, you probably found a soft or hard cap to a stat value, as they noted. This is where the reforge graphs can be super-useful. By showing what the change looks like at each level visually, you will often be able to pick the inflection point -- what amount of haste, etc, is enough that DPS changes flatten out. You can then use the cap facilities in AMR to limit haste or whatever to that point, and redo the sim to figure out weights past that point.

[Monoliith]

My 2 Cents.

1 - I have a yearly sub to AMR, and I use it for me ENTIRE guild, and I use simulationcraft to get the best stat weights for everyone. (Oddly enough, my resto shaman is now haste/mastery and is TEARING SHIT UP)
2 - It's also very useful for little things like what to upgrade, what to use bonus rolls on, and where to get gear.
3 - Do not use the default stat weights, take some time on wowprogress or worldoflogs, find what stat weights are the best, (Just a basic priority order, you dont need super precision) and put them in.

That it

[Deleted]

My 2 Cents.

1 - I have a yearly sub to AMR, and I use it for me ENTIRE guild, and I use simulationcraft to get the best stat weights for everyone. (Oddly enough, my resto shaman is now haste/mastery and is TEARING SHIT UP)
2 - It's also very useful for little things like what to upgrade, what to use bonus rolls on, and where to get gear.
3 - Do not use the default stat weights, take some time on wowprogress or worldoflogs, find what stat weights are the best, (Just a basic priority order, you dont need super precision) and put them in.

That it

Hope you and your guild clear normal soon, your ambition seems good yet misplaced.