Stat Goals and Graphs

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.

For me the Full Stat Details page is not very useful right now, as I can’t see the location of my current stats, or easily find out what kind of stat change would be an upgrade for me. Perhaps you could highlight for each stat the bars which correspond to my current value, or only the combination which is closest to my current stats? And then provide eg a slider for each stat, set to the current value, and with the possibility to change them individually,.Then you could see what changing one or more stats does in the graph (move to better or worse? That could make it easier to compare gear, by actually entering the stat changes.

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I have to reply to say how much more helpful this suggestion would be than the current UI.

At the moment, from what I understand as a blood death knight my master should be between 8k and 16k, but all i see is the mastery % i have …

TLDR: Mouse over your stat numbers and check the tooltips that pop up for conversion from % to Numerical values

The line graph says we should strive to get somewhere in that ball park…

Down the right margin of your character page in game AND in the amr character site you can Run your Cursor over that will give % and number from gear. not sure why so many are asking you to point this out ALSO on the graph, i’m old n slow and i caught onto it. there are numbers and ranges that are good. Not sure what would be concidered better or best, but at a difference of the “1%” it doesn’t make a hill of beans as far as i can tell.

there are other places on the same character page that tell me essentially “If i change this enchant back to Crit from the Haste that i changed from Mastery last week,i’ll get +.02% more DPS” i can decide not to and not lose much. I think you’ve done a really fine job. thanks especially for the “find upgrades” section

My comment was about the Full Stat Details pop up, not the main character page. On that popup you cannot see your own stat numbers and percentages. Bringing in a little bit of interactivity could make the popup much more useful, I think.

Is anyone still looking at this a month later and ashamed to admit they have no idea what value this provides?

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@darpa3171 the original post describes in the best way that I know how, what these graphs are trying to show. The “value” is that you can see generally how different stat combos stack up to each other.

Is there something else that you are wanting it to do for you perhaps? Maybe your expectations are different than what we intended when making the display?

Think the existing replies cover it. Both Y5 and kansie explain how they’re useful.

I think your comment implies you find them too much work and want one simple answer to a very complicated question.

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Running the above as an example for import to running BiB, is the TL; DR of this new feature that as long as you have at least the amount (of stat the bar relates to) in the darker bars, the rest, within the lighter bars is all good…?

Yeah it is essentially saying, “the best stat combinations are where all of your stats fall within the colored ranges.”

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That helps a lot, good looking out. I am a casual raider, trying to make my way to ‘know it all bad ass’ like yourself. The fact a lot of this stuff still makes limited sense hardly implies I am lazy. It simply means I am not yet a bad ass. I think I kind of got it though.

I couldn’t find where this may have been stated - but where is the data coming from? Is it from sims, logs posted to askmrrobot, or logs posted to warcraftlogs?

This is all based on simulations done with the Ask Mr. Robot simulator.

what is this bullshit weight that no one can understand, seriously, you guys have gone to shit
this is the last time I purchased a payed subscription to the website
I WANT TO SEE MY PROPER WEIGHT NOT SOME BULLSHIT LINES

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kungur… this idea that stat weights are the “proper” way to rank gear is not true, it is just one way to rank gear, and not that great a way at that. We wrote an article about why we stopped using them back in december: Stat Weights vs Machine Learning – Ask Mr. Robot

Also, we’ll be adding a button in the near future for you to export stat weights to e.g. Pawn, if you really like stat weights. It can be useful for a quick and rough estimate in-game right when an item drops, which you can then double check using the complete optimizer on our site.

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