I don’t see stat goals anywhere in the gear optimizer page? I must be blind - EDIT found it, you have to run best in bags FIRST to see that…kinda dumb but whatever
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Once we do our next update soon, it won’t be so “dumb” – we’ll be using sometimes up to hundreds of different gearing strategies to optimize your gear. We won’t be able to show the stat goals until you optimize because… we won’t know which strategy it ended up using until the optimization is complete!
This would be a perfect way to show it and would make it much easier to see where you stood
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I honestly still don’t understand what the darker shade is. I read where you say that you are well optimized if your stats are within the lighter shade, but what does the darker shade represent? Is the whole bar representing the top 1% of sim results or just the lighter color? What % does the darker shade represent, if not the top 1%? Also, what is NPS?
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We’re gathering feedback and may tweak things when we get some time, but for now just roll with it:
At its simplest, think of it as a horizontal bar chart: the longest bar is generally your best stat, the shortest is your worst.
Then, at the “tip” of each bar, is a colored-in range that shows you how “wide” the range on that stat is for combinations in the top 1% – or in other words, you could have a set of gear with stats anywhere in that range and still be within 1% of optimal.
And @rulem search the forum or our blog for NPS, we have some articles describing it. It is a tanking metric that we developed for Legion.
I agree with ddcorkum, please do this.
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Another helpful improvement could be adding an arrow or a similar mark in the “full stat details” graph, just to show where in that 10% range you are currently placed, if you are. And also another way to show if you are not there.
Is all this process taking legendaries and set bonuses into consideration?
While i don’t realy understand this whole thing yet i do want to point is that as a collorblind person its realy hard to see the difference between the orange, yellow and green so maybe a option to make that more clear would be nice.
kaminsod – if you mouse over any point in the graph, it shows you the percent of max at that point. That should help out until I have time to investigate what colors work better for different kinds of color-blindness.
The red dots are a great idea.
For my characters the bright bars cover quite a large range. I’m not sure how useful a range of 1.5% would be. Is it possible to have the bright bar show like top 0.5 or 0.7%, and the darker one 1%?
Also I’m missing my primary stat in the list.
Here’s the cause of my confusion. I have four bars on a scale of 0-18,000 but in the char sheet column, those four stats are expressed as percentages. The tooltips say " from gear" which I think implies that some comes from somewhere else.
I see two solutions to this. One, put red dots on the horizontal graphs representing my current stats or two, put both the values and the percentages in the char sheet column. I think I’d prefer the red dots.
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honestly I don’t understand the chart. I prefer how it was before. new system is way to complicated to follow it. as I read my chart I don’t know where I stand and what I need to do. you are are recommending to increase versatility but other forums don’t. Please revise your work on the chart and make it so when we look at it know what to do in a glance - that’s one of the reasons I subscribe to enjoy more the game and read less. thanks
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Does the explanation at the top of this post help you understand it? In other words, even though you didn’t understand it at first glance, do you understand it well enough to make use of it now?
I agree with what some of the others have said, I was a little confused until I read the post.
While I understand it now, at first glance the new stat representation wasn’t obvious. I still don’t feel like it provides me any actionable information, yeah the range is nice, but I don’t know where I am in that range.
I think maybe eliminating the darker portion altogether and adding a marker for the characters current stats would be a big help in making the presentation more clear.
One other minor thing I’ve noticed… In some cases the ranges are so big it feels like any piece of armor will do, or that I could swap 3-4 armor pieces and not notice a change. While it may be true that each of those pieces still fall within 1%, it doesn’t feel like progress or optimization, so maybe some way of listing or marking what the 100% stat goal is could help as well.
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Yeah we’ll revisit it when we have some time, gather up feedback and tweak as necessary.
If the ranges are really wide, it probably does mean that you could swap 3-4 pieces of gear and not notice a change (as long as they are of similar overall quality). There are a lot of stat combinations that can work for some specs… it has probably always been like this, but the way that theory has been presented to users in the past has been very “absolutist”. We’re trying to show people that they actually have a lot more options than they previously thought.
The ranges are certainly not perfect… not every combination of stats within those ranges will be within 1% of optimal, for example. We had the opposite problem with the previous version that showed a single stat goal: not only that combination is good.
I’m going to think more about this idea of marking where your current stats are at… I am hesitant to do it though, because I have a deeper understanding of how optimal gear combinations work. For example, I know that in a not-insignificant number of cases, when you run best-in-bags it will intentionally make your stats “worse” according to this chart – why? To pick up a good set bonus or trinket or legendary, or to get stats that synergize with a special item better, or to get a higher item level item with more primary stat but perhaps worse secondaries, or any number of reasons…
The optimizer is extremely good at valuing these trade-offs. But a lot of people have been “trained” to not think like that… we hear things like “you made my crit go down for [insert spec that likes crit], so the optimization must be wrong,.” When we look at the optimization though, it is actually improving DPS because it found a “non-obvious” trade-off. But it has become very difficult to convince people to try even minor variations from “accepted” builds…
I realize that people want a simple goal for gearing… something to make progress towards. We’re going to think about that some more, see if we can give people that simple goal while still providing “correct” optimizations. It may not be possible though… there really isn’t a “defined”, single goal for gearing now.
I think people can understand going for a set bonus, legendary, or trinket.
But should the primary stat also be on this chart? Would that help better show some of the other balance/trade offs?
I also realise for tanks even more stats matter (e.g. armor) - but I think getting it right for DPS is the starting point.
Primary stat, stamina, and armor wouldn’t be very interesting… they are pretty much locked to your item level, with a small amount of variation around the average for your item level (e.g. if you have a higher ilvl chest and a lower ilvl wrist, you might have a tad more than average strength/stamina/armor).
We would have to come up with some other way to show how much secondary stats you would need to gain to offset an amount of primary stat…
Another reason we have excluded it for now, is that a lot of people end up getting mislead by stat priorities with primary stats. For example, there might be cases where e.g. crit or haste is worth more per point than strength or intellect. So people think wow crit is so amazing I should sacrifice almost anything to get more of it. What they don’t realize is the “budget cost” of crit ends up making strength or intellect a more “cost effective” stat on gear, so it’s rare that the optimizer would suggest dropping a lot of primary stat to get crit in this case – the gear combinations just don’t work out like that.
It’s a tough UI/presentation problem that we want to get back to and work on a bit… the desire for easy answers (here’s your stat priority, amen!), and the desire to give easy answers (here’s my 1-page guide, just do what it says and don’t ask me questions and yay I never have to update it again!), have really messed things up… I’d say just kind of roll with it as we try and improve on this, but keep the suggestions coming!
I would like some kind of “simple” vs. “advanced” view options for different kinds of users, it’s just hard to figure out how to do the really “simple” views… since that is where people tend to get angrier. When the optimizer does something that is counter to the simple advice, they think it is broken rather than being really smart.
We’re going to try and see if we can get to something everyone can understand that is also really accurate first. If we just can’t do it – if people are just too confused by what an accurate gear optimizer is doing, we’ll then explore simply offering a different optimizer that gives slightly worse advice, but is easier to understand.
I am really having a hard time understanding why you don’t want to tell us how this graph applies to our current gear situation. If my stat levels are represented by the thin red line mentioned above i can tell that my haste is currently to high for mastery and crit levels. so the next piece of gear that drops i am hoping for somethign that will add crit and mastery and maybe get rid of some haste. right now the graph tells me general information about my class and how to properly gear the class but no personal refernce for where I am at and what needs to go up and what needs to go down. This makes me less likely to use the new method even though it i s better way of doing things.
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The problem is… that it isn’t really that simple. How your gear interacts with all the special effects that you have (legendaries, set bonuses, trinkets, relics, chosen talents) could make a worse stat allocation end up being better, because it allows you to pick up a better combo of special things.
After we finish up some of these new gearing strategies and features, we’re going to think a bit more on the next iteration of visualizing what the gearing strategies are doing. It is challenging because you can’t really “understand” what it is doing with a simple stat priority or even a stat graph… it doesn’t boil down to something that simple. We’re moving to something that is truly adaptable to all these special item effects.