##Ask Mr. Robot says something different than a guide
Guides are very helpful at explaining how to play, or illustrating nuances when using specific talents, or how to change your play style if you have a 4pc set bonus, and so on.
However, stat weights, trinket lists, and legendary lists are just basic starting points, based on one setup. They are not custom to you.
Q: Why are your stat weights different than what a guide says?
Stat weights and gear suggestions from guides are a starting point for one specific setup. They are not custom to you. As explained by one of the guide writers,
DISCLAIMER: Any stat weights in this guide are purely for showing how different talents and legendaries affect your stat weights. The actual numbers are unlikely to match your personal stats. If you want your personal stat weights, you should always sim it.
At Ask Mr. Robot, we also highly suggest running a custom setup to make sure the gear, trinkets and legendaries are completely tailored to you.
Q: But some guides say that if stat weights are different, it’s because I’m doing it wrong.
If you are using SimC, that holds some truth as Binkenstein points out - the stat weight function in SimC doesn’t look at stat interactions, so Theorycrafters using SimC to generate the weights DO have to massage the data to get something useable (they often do this using reforge plots).
However, when you are using Ask Mr. Robot to generate weights, we do look at stat interactions. We actually built a very robust, statistically sound way to generate stat weights, and rank gear even better with a Machine Learning approach. Here is a [blog post]((6 Biggest stat weight questions, answered! – Ask Mr. Robot) that covers other questions and differences between AMR and SimC stat weights.
Q: How does Ask Mr. Robot’s machine learning work for ranking gear?
The TLDR: Machine Learning is a better way to predict your DPS with higher accuracy than stat weights or static trinket lists, etc. Read more about it here
Q: Why is Ask Mr. Robot showing different rankings than a list I saw posted?
Static lists are for one setup and are not custom to you. As another guide author points out:
Trinkets are as always hard to provide general advice for, and as such, I recommend simming the different combination of trinkets you have in your bag, just like before.
For a custom list, use the Ask Mr. Robot gear optimizer which ranks them all, tailored to you, in about 1 second. Anything with a proc is ranked directly from simulations.
The ranked lists do have a small margin of error, but some people want almost no margin of error (within 0.25% or 0.05% for example). To get rankings within those smaller margins of error, you can simulate them directly.
Q: Which item is better??
The answer is that it depends on your character. You can get the answer on our simulator, in less than 60 seconds, without downloading anything. It’s easy, I promise. Here’s a super short video to demonstrate it.