Now that we have the new Adaptive Gearing Strategies available for all specs (or they will be within a day or two of this post), we want to give people a roadmap for how we plan to keep them up to date for Antorus.
The Adaptive Gearing Strategies represent a massive amount of data – hundreds of millions of simulations performed on the Global Network. So as you can imagine… updating all of them when a new raid tier comes out is not the easiest task!
This roadmap will keep you informed of our plans and progress. And if you want things to go faster, please join the global network! The more people we have, the faster we can crank out updates. Please note: the global network is not always busy – if you join and your client sits idle or doesn’t do any work for a couple days, that doesn’t mean it is broken! Please leave it on, it will get used!
And here’s the roadmap – when each phase is started or completed, an announcement will be made via the popup on the gear optimizer that you may have seen in recent months:
##Phase 1: Rough T21 Estimates
The first thing we will roll out are rough T21 set bonus and trinket estimates. These will be sort of “tacked on” to the existing adaptive gearing strategies to give you a ballpark idea while we work on fully re-calibrating the data.
##Phase 2: Updated Adaptive Strategies
We will re-calibrate adaptive strategies for Antorus gear levels (the new loot will be significantly higher ilvl, 30 ilvls higher than Tomb of Sargeras loot, so we need to adjust our data around that). We will also modify them to dynamically adapt to T21 set bonus combinations.
These will be rolled out spec-by-spec as they become available, not all at once. We will try to pump these out as quickly as possible, augmenting the global network with our own servers as necessary to ensure a timely release around Antorus unlocking.
The timing on this is a little uncertain, though we definitely want it ready for Antorus. The uncertainty comes from the fact that Blizzard may change something at the last minute just before a patch goes live, or hotfix a set bonus or re-balance a spec slightly… all of these things require updating our data and can slow things down. We’ll keep you informed!
##Phase 3: Antorus Boss Scripts
Once Antorus is actually available and we can get more first-hand data, we will gradually replace our existing strategies with strategies based on Antorus bosses. It is unfortunately not viable to do this before the raid becomes available because it is too uncertain – something about the boss might change when it actually goes live.
That said, our existing boss scripts should generalize quite well to any kind of raid or Mythic+ fight. But we still want to put in the extra effort to tune it specifically for the raid encounters you are doing.
You can expect us to roll this out spec-by-spec probably a week or two after Antorus becomes available for play in-game. How long it takes to finish all specs depends heavily on how many people join the global network.