Antorus Gear Ranking Roadmap

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.

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Phase 1 has been completed! All existing strategies now have rough estimates for Antorus trinkets and tier 21 set bonuses. Let us know if anything looks wacky!

We’ll start on adding re-calibrated Antorus strategies now. You will see them show up alongside the existing strategies, which we’ll probably relabel. It will probably be a week or so before these start to show up on the site.

Sometime today we will do an update with part of Phase 2 complete: new re-calibrated strategies for most DPS specs.

Single-Target DPS strategies are now based on Garothi Worldbreaker! So we kind of combined Phase 2 and Phase 3 for DPS specs.

Phase 2 for the remaining DPS specs, tanks, and healers are cranking away on the Global Network, with the goal of finishing before the first raid reset. It’s possible we’ll run a bit over… but we’re going to try! The more power we can get on the Global Network, the more likely it is that we will finish!

Posted an update today with many updated gearing strategies:

  • All tanks except Blood and Vengeance have new strategies tuned around Antorus. The rest coming this week. It is very important that you choose the correct strategy for a tank! If you have around ilvl930, stick with the Pre-T21 strategies. If you have around 940+ gear, use the Heroic raid boss strategy, or Mythic+ (16-20) strategy. If you have 960+ gear, use the Mythic raid boss strategy or Mythic+ 20+ strategy (unless you don’t ever plan to do something that hard, then stick to the heroic strategies).

  • Updated DPS strategies with many small tweaks. Some specs still need more tweaks, we’ll make an announcement when they are all done.

  • Healer updates coming soon!

Phase 2 is complete! All specs now have Antorus-tuned strategies available.

During/after the holidays, we will work on phase 3: adding some extra adaptive strategies based on different boss scripts.

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