New user, first post… Quick question: After reviewing the guide on AMR for Prot Warriors, the only thing I can conclude is that the maths done by AMR to determine which gear/stats/talents/etc do not coincide with other highly regarded resources (WoW Head, etc).
I state this not to be antagonistic, but to give reference to my mindset: I am confused. Is it possible to get insight into the logic used by AMR for its recommendations?
Apologies if this has been asked before in recent history, I found older posts, but nothing relevant to the state of the game today.
Hello there; Vengence DH player here. When I started using AMR I had the same question and did some searching around.
From what I can tell Wowhead and other sites get their information from Simulation Craft (Wowhead) or Raidbots (Icyveins). While these tools are fine for DPS characters they only sim DPS for tanks, not survivability. AMR also takes into account how tough you want to be (you can read their blog post about it here, and so comes up with different answers.
I found a lot of discussion on places like Reddit about the differences between sites about ‘which was best to use’ and such, but ultimately the end results aren’t much different ingame from my experience. I chose AMR in the end because they are (currently) the only ones that sim survivability for tanks, and I think that’s important.
I’m a user of AMR since Legion probably, so i dont know every bit and pieces like AMR’s Team does.
I can provide you some information if you want.
AMR it’s like a huge dictionnaire with all spells and data from any item in the game (pretty mutch like SimCraft). it is retro engineering, so data is added manually and doesn’t not come from Blizzard.
Becaues AMR have all of this data, it is able to do “simulation”. Test any item, for example an azerith trait, with another and write down the result.
AMR do that for each and every item in the game and that a LOT of test to do.
So here we have the “special” sauce from AMR to reduce the number of possibilites and still managing to get the “optimal” result or close to.
Their margin of error is somewhere around 3%.
This was the “general” optic. Yellow and Swol Zoopercar or even the comunity can add more information about that.
What i suggest you to get more by yourself is to go on the “blog”.
As a prot warrior you could read this :
The difference about Wowhead / Icyveins and AMR are more around “feelcrafting”.
People making the guides are testing them on PTR and give you the information “this is good” or “this is bad” to equip.
Simcraft and AMR have the same goal and i find AMR easier to use to a non-developper.
I like to understand what going on and Simcraft isn’t that firendly-open (you can access code but can’t declare thing without beeing push away in their discord or forum because you aren’t a dev)
Also having two different simulation offering a good way to compare and validate some of the data. That doesn’t mean both need to be perfect.
Another thing to note: we are still in the process of ranking all the new gear and essences added in 8.2, and will be updating our guides as well. We aim to have everything ranked and updated before the Eternal Palace opens up, and Season 3 Mythic+ starts. So expect a few things to change this week and into next.
That said – what the other people said in this thread is true – you will tend to see slightly different recommendations from our site for tanks and healers in particular because we use a different methodology. I have been playing a tank since vanilla, and even as a player, it’s really tough to tell if item A or item B really makes me tougher or not. There are a lot of variables at play when tanking.
There is also a bit more personal preference that comes into tank gearing than DPS – for damagers, in the end it’s all about how much DPS you pump out. That can be easily measured. For tanks, measuring how “tough” you are is a difficult problem to which nobody has a perfect solution.
Our approach tends to favor things that lower your chance of dying or getting burst down in a fight. Often times these things aren’t that popular in the community. A great example would be “cheat death” effects like the Bwonsamdi’s Bargain trinket. These are hands-down some of the best things in the game for doing content that is tough for you, but they are very unpopular with most people. No idea why… it’s not hard to prove their worth. It just boils down to personal preference again I suppose – we prefer them, others don’t.
We also try to give people the customization tools they need to change things up from our recommendations – don’t like a trinket? Exclude it. Want different stats? Set a preference. And we plan to expand on these customization options as well (once the 8.2 stuff settles down).