Gear Ranking: Version 3

Ask Mr. Robot Announcements
1

With 7.3, we are converting all of the AMR-provided gearing strategies to what we call Adaptive Gearing Strategies. Short version: they rank stuff better! Read on for the details.

#7.3 Progress
We are in the process of updating all specs for 7.3. Check this post often for progress updates. We will start with the specs that changed most significantly, and move down the list to update all specs over the next few weeks.

The following specs have been specifically updated for 7.3 (but not Antorus yet, tier 21 and Antorus trinkets, etc. will be added in a future update, closer to the raid opening):

  • Death Knight, Frost
  • Death Knight, Unholy
  • Demon Hunter, Havoc
  • Druid, Balance
  • Druid, Feral
  • Mage, Arcane
  • Mage, Fire
  • Mage, Frost
  • Monk, Windwalker
  • Paladin, Retribution
  • Rogue, Assassination
  • Rogue, Outlaw
  • Rogue, Subtlety
  • Shaman, Elemental
  • Warlock, Affliction
  • Warlock, Demonology
  • Warlock, Destruction
  • Warrior, Fury
  • Warrior, Arms

Mythic+ Healing strategies:

  • Druid, Restoration
  • Monk, Mistweaver
  • Paladin, Holy
  • Shaman, Restoration

Available Specs

We will keep this list updated with the gearing strategies that have been upgraded to the new “version 3” method, aka Adaptive Gearing Strategies.

##DPS Specs
###Single Target

  • All Specs!

###Multi-Target

  • All Specs!

##Healer Specs
###Mythic+

  • Monk, Mistweaver

##Tank Specs

  • Coming Soon!

Details

In the new Gearing Strategy picker (next to your character name), you will see strategies for the above specs labeled as “Adaptive” now. If it is still labeled “Default”, they are definitely still good and will work great for most players, but they won’t have some of the benefits of the new approach yet.

Adaptive Strategies are created using a lot more data than our defaults or your own custom strategies (thus why we started the Global Network project). As a ballpark, it uses around three orders of magnitude (1000 times) more data. What does this do for you?

###1. Adapts to Talents
Our old defaults (and your own custom strategies if you have made one) assume a single set of talents that are popular for that style of fight. This works well enough… but if you have a different talent setup than we assumed, accuracy goes down a little. We will now tailor your gear ranking to your currently chosen talents.

This is why we now show your talents right at the top of the gear table in the optimizer: you must make sure that you have the talents chosen that you plan to use in-game! Just click on them if you need to change a talent and re-rank.

###2. Ranks Legendaries Better
Ranking legendary item combinations is very difficult and requires a lot more data to do well. This is because certain legendaries can interact strongly with certain talents, or one legendary might work better with a higher crit set of gear whereas another is better with haste. The adaptive strategies will consider all of these interactions when ranking gear.

###3. Handles the “Soul” Rings
Those legendary rings that give a talent? Super hard to rank well. With an adaptive strategy, when doing Best in Bags, we will now check the other talent options and suggest a talent swap if doing so would make using the ring better. If a talent swap is suggested, you will see a talent above your Best in Bags gear recommendation with a green border around it.

#Accuracy
The adaptive gearing strategies will suggest a set of gear for Best in Bags or Best in Slot that is near-guaranteed to be within 2% of the best possible set. Often it will be the best set. But due to statistics, it is impossible to guarantee that without some margin of error.

Given that the gear optimizer is sorting through trillions of combinations of gear in your bags in just a couple of seconds, that is pretty amazing accuracy, and more than sufficient for even a world-first raider.

For the people out there who just like playing the accuracy mini-game, you can use our powerful simulator to squeeze out a tad more assurance that you have the best possible set of gear. We have some new features planned for simulation junkies in the near future that we think you will really enjoy.

2 Likes
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Sounds great, if only I played a Frost mage!

Could you add a way of changing talents to optimise for from the web page? If it’s there it isn’t very obvious, I know I can if I want to do a sim.
I can see people doing an export and then heading to work and then can’t do the optimisation they want as they had their solo/pvp talents selected when they exported.

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If you click the edit character menu button to the left of your character name, you can change your talents and artifact traits right on the gear page. We’ll also be adding a more obvious display of your current talents as well.

4

Very Nice !
Can we have a list with which spec are “done” with this new gearing ? And the one to come ?

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Yeah – we’ll be making a bunch of announcements and post up a list.

6

Quite excited about this!

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Hi,

I’ve been trying the new adaptive gearing strategy for awhile but the weights for versatility seems to be quite low compared to what we get in Simc and so on.

Also, is it possible for one the adaptive gearing strategies to be like the Sassz’ine when we have adds spawning every 30-60s since a lot of the fights in ToS are like this boss.

Thanks

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We spent some time refining the techniques for the adaptive strategies – they’re getting pretty good, have one or two small tweaks left to make. But we have made a few more specs available for you to try out! See the original post for the current/official list, as of this post: arcane/frost mages, and all rogue specs – single-target only.

Also with this update, all adaptive single-target DPS strategies are based on Goroth now, not the older Krosus script.

Another feature that we added with this update is special handling for the “soul” legendary rings that give you a talent. A really common question people have with those rings is this: “If I were to change talents and put on the ring, would it be an upgrade compared to using the talent it gives me but with a different legendary?”

Best-in-Bags will answer this question for you now! It will show a recommended talent change in the results pane above your gear. This feature is only available on adaptive gearing strategies. It can also be disabled via the filters/options window at the bottom of the left column of options, if you would prefer it to never try changing to another talent.

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Today’s update added a bunch more specs! We’re keeping the global network running almost constantly now, we hope to have the DPS specs done this week, and maybe a few healers.

1 Like
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Cant wait to see the update and thank you for all that you do! I love the idea of rankings that adapt with Talents and wanted to know if there was still talks about changing the addon/webpage to support talent builds rather than just specs? With this new ranking system and the need to swap for different fights this seems like a prefect setup.

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Yes, we definitely plan to do that. Probably sometimes during 7.3.

1 Like
12

I always said that Blizzard should rename Warlock to Awarlock :slight_smile:

When can we expect to have Warlock Demonology and Destruction specializations updated?

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Working on finishing the other DPS specs this week, though have to spend a bunch of time on preparing for 7.3 as well.

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All’s I need is Frost Death Knight ^_^; but… sounds awesome!

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This is great news. So can I assume that with the Adaptive Strategies now becoming available, there will be no more need to run a 3 hour custom gearing strategy for your toon? Or will running an up to date custom gearing strategy still be more effective?

Also, Swol had suggested prior to the rollout of the Adaptive Strategies to lock in the legendaries we were planning to use before running a Best in Bags. Will this still be necessary with Adaptive Strategies?

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You should not need to run custom strategies in most (if not all) cases. There could still be a few edge cases where you can squeeze out a small bit of extra accuracy, but they should be rare. The nice thing is that the custom strategy option still exists if such a case does ever pop up.

You do not need to lock in legendaries with adaptive strategies – they are able to sort through and pick the best legendary combos. With custom strategies created recently (since an update about a week ago), they should automatically favor the legendaries used to create them, so in theory you don’t need to lock legendaries for custom strategies anymore either – it will just always pick them.

It seems that a handful of the adaptive strategies updated yesterday are a bit further off than desired… (nothing huge, but a percent or two further off in a few cases than we would like) so we’re checking those and working on another update soon (while also still running more specs).

17

That’s great news. Thank you.

18

Is this going to be useful for healing specs as well? Holy Priest wants to keep with my 860 level gear when I have the 4piece tier 20 for set bonus.

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Yes, we will be doing this update for all specs. Tanks and healers are a bit trickier, which is why they are coming after DPS.

20

So if I run a new Simulation on my BM hunter will it be more accurate than the new Adaptive Gearing Strategies?