Missing Items Quel'Serrar and "Rune of the Guard Captain"

Ask Mr. Robot WoW Classic
1

Was using AMR yesterday to help in crafting our guilds loot priority list for AQ40 and noticed there are a few missing items still which are a fairly big deal. Based on our guild which I suspect is not a-typical of a fairly social guild still managing to clear all content for the majority of a phase people are still wearing items AMR either doesn’t have at all or won’t suggest.
Example I’ve noticed for Warriors and feral.
Feral can’t even choose Rune of the Guard Captain

I can force Quel’Serrar but it never suggests it.

These could be symptoms of using the fake characters to try to create BiS lists. I alter the talents and then run BiS sometimes eliminating the items the profile think it has in bags.

PS is there any chance we’ll get a better AMR with threat and sims considered if Blizzard confirm TBC servers?

2

I would need more information about the situations in which Quel’Serrar are not selected - it is available in the item lists… if our calculations do not find it to be BiS, I’m not sure that is necessarily a problem.

We have found our calculations generally agree with most BiS lists we’ve seen out there. In some situations they deviate a little bit, but that is usually because our calculations adjust dynamically to the buffs, consumables, and fight length settings - which are all assumptions being made in static BiS lists.

I’ll have to look at TBC more closely when the time comes. I prefer the way the classic website works - using a mathematical model. It allows us to provide more options for optimization. Making a simulator is both more time consuming and more limiting.

As far as threat goes… we do take into account threat generation for the tank calculations, implicitly. We assume tanks are trying to generate maximum threat, and alter the ability use accordingly such that they will use abilities in a threat-maximizing manner. So, the more you push the “slider” towards DPS, you are also pushing it more towards threat generation.

I’ll take a look at that lower level trinket… we filter out a lot of lower level stuff. If you actually have it, BiB will include it in the calculation, but the BiS lists won’t show it unless we specifically hard code it as an item of interest, like we do with things like the crowd pummeler.

3

That trinket is in the list, but it looks like there is a small issue where if you manually change your race, it’s not updating the faction, so the filters are removing it because it is a horde-only item. I can fix that in the next update.

If you were to start with a horde character, you could get around the issue until we make that update.

4

I should really have taken more notes when we were doing this. To give specific examples.

A Little background might help. And if you are interested in supporting this I can keep examples in future.
My guild were totally against DKP and Loot council as people had bad experiences of them. So they were running a totally roll based system when I joined. Item drops, roll for it, if you win something you can’t win again that reset unless everyone else rolling has also won.

It works way better than I imagined it could in distributing gear but as raid leaders we we realized a need for some kind of improvement as people were rolling for stuff that was bad for them and it took time to explain why and occasionally caused offence. We also wanted to feed some stuff to tanks because our raid DPS limitation was becoming tank threat.

An item priority list happened and we spent Saturday afternoon making the AQ40 sheet for it.
Our goal with each item is not to allocate it to simply who it’s BiS for (sometimes it’s that easy) but to take into account who has other viable alternatives from 20mans, dungeons, quests or other bosses. They might not be as good but the loot drop rate is so low on many of the near universal BiS pieces that nobody is realistically getting a full BiS set.

What we want as raid leader is a full 40man raid that can clear content. Not 4 people with BiS sets.

In using AMR to help in making the sheet I force combinations that are non BiS but realistic. Nobody should expect to get Band of Accuria & Drake fang talisman, or in healer land Angelista’s charm is obviously what BiS lists say everyone should get but there are 4 other good necks which are close. We aim to split them out based on class difference so that everyone has a real upgrade path.

AQ40 had the whole new adventure of all the quest items like regalia, Armanents and multiple Onyxia head style quests from bosses.

The example of guard Captains came up if a feral tank hasn’t won a Drake Fang talisman but wants to wear other extremely stat heavy BiS pieces that are realtively easy to obtain. BWL trash drops, 20man drops etc.

My own personal disappointment with AMR classic has been with war tank specs. Anything other than “Mostly DPS” generates gear sets which can’t hold threat and are just far too mitigation heavy. I’ve tanked as deep prot, Fury Prot and a surprisingly viably Arms/Prot tank spec due to the drops I got not supporting fury prot or needing more versatility. Deep prot and arms/prot OTs struggle to chase threat on taunt immune bosses like Broodlord and Hakkar because they get rage starved but that second tank’s threat not your MT becomes the cap for DPS.

The reality of non deep prot play is that you macro switch to 2hander for WW or MS, swap in shield and 1hander after you take a crit or crush so you can’t be crushed again. It really feels from the success we have with how we’re playing that AMR isn’t considering rotations with weapon swaps. In retail I would edit the rotation and run the sim, AMR feels much less for classic because I can’t.

That’s why I hope a more retail like AMR is viable for you in the future.

5

I stopped and start the wall of text and missed. This. That would totally explain the feral issues we had if one of those templates is Alliance. I didn’t think to check that.

6

Supporting weapon-swapping would require a lot of work. One of the reasons we were able to make the wow classic site at all is because we re-used a lot of the code from the retail site. Introducing the idea of a player using more than one set of gear at once would require structural change to a lot of back-end code. I don’t think it is feasible to support that, unfortunately.

We’ve been trying to be very up-front about the classic site and what it is/will be. From the start, we’ve said that we won’t be making a simulator for classic. I don’t see that changing, based on the number of people using the classic version of the site. I appreciate that there are a few people who would love to have a full-featured simulator for classic - but there is no way we’re going to have time to make that happen.

You said the suggestions you get when the optimizer is pushed towards “mostly DPS” seem to be good. Why not just use that setting?

7

I didn’t say good.But i don’t swap out much at that point and it has shown some interesting upgrade options. I’ve always been a big advocate of AMR and still use it in retail. Use of it in classic is really just for my own interest now. Anyone I recommended it to stopped using it because it just wasn’t good enough. Old style resources like spreadsheets in class discords give results which relate better to the reality of the game.

I appreciate the position that you are a small team with limited time and can only do so much development and testing. Doesn’t stop me wanting it to be better :smiley:

8

I guess I’ll have to look at these spreadsheets. I really went into a lot of detail on the calculations for warriors in particular given how popular they are. I’d be interested to see if the differences in suggestions between what people get using the spreadsheets and what they get using our calculations really matter.

I would understand the idea of weapon-swapping for tanks not being supported as being a downside for people wanting to do that… but otherwise I really think the calculations we are doing line up with most of the expectations people have in classic. I’d also argue that maybe some of the “conventional” wisdom out there wasn’t quite right, especially since it evolved so heavily over time based on private servers which weren’t quite right in their implementation of the game.

9

I definitely don’t favor the spreadsheets. My personal aim is to find the best TPS build for the gear I’ve got and then what gear to target. Weapon swapping aside I find myself doing comparison of x set of talents with BiB to Y set of talents with a BiB. Does AMR have absolute values in the background it’s not showing us for Survivability and TPS in preference for the +/- score? And if it does would they be viable for that kind of comparison?

10

There is a value calculated that could theoretically be used to compare different talent builds… but I think it would only work well for comparing slight variations of talents that don’t change the “rotation”. I think that there are some edge cases where the comparison wouldn’t quite work. We never designed the site to compare talents - we have always treated them as an input to the optimizer.

I think in a lot of cases the calculations we are doing could inform your talent decisions, but the few cases where it wouldn’t quite work kind of prevent us from making that available.