Classic: Any way to compare different talent choices?

Hi,

From my understanding the best in bags feature or the best in slot features is based around the talent build you input. As it shows you a percentage increase from your talent setup and your current(?) gear there is no clear way to tell which build would output the most damage.

In theory, you might achieve a better damage output build altogether with another talents and changing gear accordingly. This is typically so for enhancement shamans, where you can choose to go into restoration for Nature’s Guidance 3% hit / spellhit but offers no other direct damage bonuses, or if you don’t need the hit you can go deeper elemental which grants you damage bonus to both your melee and spell attacks.

This has come up in a few threads.

We use the talents as an input to the optimizer, so it does not compare across talent builds. There are some examples like you pointed out where it would work fine - since the talents are just some passive stat increases. But, there are other choices you could make that might potentially affect the rotation/spells being used - those become more difficult to compare.

If a lot of people subscribe to the classic optimizer and/or really want to see some way to compare talent builds - I’ll see what I can do about adding it in. It would take a significant amount of extra work, though, because there will be lots of edge cases where certain talent builds cause problems - and the I’d also have to add some UI to show the suggested talents compared to current talents.

For the time being we are keeping the tool at its original scope: strictly gear optimization based on the input settings (talents are an input right now).

The other thing that will inevitably happen if I created “talent optimization” is that the optimizer will find builds that are theoretically better - but aren’t what people expect to see. For the most part, folks consider talent builds a “solved” problem for classic and would only want to see the optimizer look at a few talent choices.

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Thanks for your reply! I agree full heartedly.
I for one would definitely like to see it as a feature, even if somehow limited to strict talent builds.