Optimizer Feature Updates for The War Within

[yellowfive]

We have made a few changes and improvements to some existing features for The War Within (TWW). These will go live with the early-access sometime on August 22nd.

There are more changes in the works for The War Within, but these small things are worth pointing out to existing users.

To track the overall progress of our TWW updates, please follow The War Within Roadmap post.

General

Talent Summary

When you pick talents, we show a small summary right on Best in Bags and Best in Slot when the talent editor is closed/hidden. Prior to TWW, we just listed all chosen active abilities (square nodes). This has been changed to show a subset of nodes that we consider not necessarily the strongest nodes, but the ones most descriptive of the different possible builds.

Gem Lists

The list of gems shown by clicking a socket on your solution for Best in Bags or Best in Slot has new filters to make it easier to find specific gems.

Also, you will notice that the gem list is no longer ranked. We did this for a couple of reasons: the first is that the difference in value between most gems is extremely small, so it’s not that meaningful a ranking.

Secondly, there are some new secondary effects on the unique gems (Blasphemite) that don’t rank well in a list like this. They need to be ranked in conjunction with all of your other chosen gems. It is also relatively obvious which unique gem is the best for each spec.

Enchant Lists

The list of enchants shown by clicking an enchant slot on your solution for Best in Bags or Best in Slot has a quality filter to make it easier to find specific enchants.

Best in Bags

We have removed settings that were Dragonflight-specific, and made one change to the behavior of an existing option:

Gem+Enchant Threshold

This setting has been around since the beginning of Best in Bags and is meant as a way to save some gold by not making low-value gem/enchant changes. A handy feature… but it never quite worked as well as we would have liked, so we improved it.

The way it used to work: we optimize your gear and pick some gems and enchants. Then, we replace all gems+enchants in the solution with your existing gems+enchants where possible. Does this new solution score at least within your chosen threshold of the optimal score? If so, keep your original gems and enchants.

The problem with this: it is an “all-or-nothing” proposition. We might suggest 2 gem changes and a weapon enchant change – the gem changes are tiny and the weapon enchant change is big. It would be nice to ignore the gems but do the weapon enchant.

The new way: we optimize your gear and pick some gems and enchants. Then, one by one, we try to replace a chosen gem or enchant with your original gem or enchant. If we can do so without lowering your score by more than your chosen threshold, we keep your original. Then, we repeat this as many times as we can while staying above your threshold.

This gives a much nicer result – it will ignore e.g. low value wrist enchant changes while keeping high-value weapon enchant changes.

Best in Slot

There are a few new filters:

Tier Set & Catalyst Level

Towards the end of Dragonflight we added an option to filter tier set items separately from any specific drop source (like raids), because you can create them via the catalyst and obtain them even if you never touch a raid.

That behavior is the same as before: you choose a difficulty and it will add tier set items of the same item level that would drop in the respective raid difficulty. But now this will also include the non-set catalyst-created items so that you can see if they would be good alternatives. The item level for those non-set items in the minimum item level for gear seen in that tier of raid.

Delve Tier

Similar to the Mythic+ Level setting, you can choose what tier of Delve rewards to include in Best in Slot results. And also similar to the Mythic+ Level, we have added a Delve Tier filter on the per-slot item list that appears when clicking on a slot in the Best in Slot results.

Upgrade Finder

No big changes here, but we have added a Delve search. We plan to make some larger improvements to the Upgrade Finder as a whole in The War Within, but those will take a little longer. In the meantime it is fully updated and working the same way that it always has.

[yellowfive]

Sometime today we will release our first update to the Upgrade Finder.

Quick Rank

A new type of search called “Quick Rank” has been added. It replaces and consolidates many of the previous searches such as Raid, Mythic+, Regular Dungeons, Delves, and Crafted.

This new search allows you to rank all of the same items as those other searches but all at once, making it easier to compare loot across different sources.

Why is it called “Quick Rank”?

This ranking (and all of the previous ones it replaced) uses a faster ranking method than the other searches (such as Great Vault, Catalyst, Valorstones/Crests). This allows us to rank hundreds or even thousands of items for you very quickly. The cost for speed is a little bit of accuracy… but how much accuracy are we talking about?

• In most cases, the score you see will be identical to if you obtained the item, added it to your bags, and ran Best in Bags with it.
• In some cases, the score might be a little lower than that.
• For a few special cases (most notably set items), the score could be a little higher or lower, depending.

This is in contrast to the ranking method used by the Great Vault, Catalyst, Valorstones/Crests, and Add to my Bag searches. Those rankings will try many combinations of your existing gear, gems, and enchants with each item in the list to try and improve the score.

This slower ranking method is more thorough but much slower, to the point where we ran into issues with the Valorstones/Crests search last expansion, once people collected 50 or even 100+ items that could be upgraded. Our next improvement to the Upgrade Finder that we are working on will seek to improve on these slower searches – both the speed and the functionality.

Set Bonus Prediction

We still have the “set bonus prediction” option to help with ranking set items. It does a decent approximation of what your score might be were you to obtain other set items. That said… we can’t know exactly what your gear will be like when you complete the set or which exact versions of the set items you might obtain.

We have not changed how the “set bonus prediction” works with this update, but our next update will improve on this methodology to get even closer predictions. The current method is pretty good, but we think we can do a little better.

Search Results Filtering

We have always had a search box at the top of the Upgrade Finder search results that allows you to instantly filter the results. Now that you can combine a lot of different items into the results via the Quick Rank search, this filter becomes more important. We have added a link right under the search box to a cheat sheet of how it works and the different search terms you can use. It’s a pretty handy feature, you should try it out!

[yellowfive]

Sometime today we will be releasing another Upgrade Finder feature improvement:

Valorstone/Crests Cost Efficiency Ranking

At the bottom of the Valorstone/Crests search you will see a box with some optional settings. This is a bit of an experiment right now: it is a way to rank upgrades based on how efficiently they use your currencies.

First, you tell us how many of each currency you are typically willing to obtain in a week, and also up to which type of crest you are willing to downgrade and use for lower upgrades. (For example, often people won’t want to downgrade Guilded crests to do upgrades that require Runed crests, so you can set this at Runed and it will only downgrade Runed or lower crests if necessary for an upgrade.)

Then, you tell us about how many hours you estimate that takes you to obtain in-game. This can be a pretty rough estimate – it only changes the magnitude of the scores shown in the result, not the relative ranking of efficiency.

Press ‘Find Upgrades’ as usual, you’ll see your results. By default it will probably show it like it did before, with the ranking method set to “Biggest Upgrade”. Change that to “Most Efficient” to see the new ranking.

How is the score calculated?

We already know how much of an upgrade each item would be from the standard “Biggest Upgrade” result.

Then, we determine how much of each currency it costs to do your upgrade. You can hover your mouse over the score for each item to see the cost that we determined. We take into account any valorstone or crest discounts you may have (requires that you have exported with v145 or later of the AMR addon).

Finally, using your settings described above, we calculate how many hours it would take you to obtain the currencies for this upgrade.

The score shown is your estimated percent score increase per hour spent obtaining upgrade currencies.

Why did we do it like this?

As we started writing this feature… it became frustrating to assign a relative cost to each upgrade. Some upgrades take only valorstones, some take crests and valorstones, some require different kinds of crests, etc…

But even more problematic is the fact that each currency is of a different value to each individual player. If you do a lot of casual content and not much high M+ or raid content, you might be swimming in valorstones but really hurting for crests. Crests are “expensive” for you.

Conversely, if you log on only to raid most weeks, you might have a lot of crests but nowhere near enough valorstones. Valorstones are “expensive” for you.

The constant quantity here is your time or effort. By telling us about how many of each currency you get and about how long that takes, we can directly compare the value of each currency for you.

Even then it’s a little complicated… as different activities award currencies at different rates… but we wanted to strike a balance between relatively simple user interface options and a realistic estimate. Behind the scenes we do some weighting of each currency type based on the relative rate at which you can obtain them via various activities in-game.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

[grimrazor]

Does this have any way to account for the “warband discounts”?

[yellowfive]

It does account for the account-wide valorstone discounts. It looks like maybe there are some crest discounts tied to some achievements… I can look into checking for those.

[yellowfive]

We just posted an update that will read the achievements that give crest discounts after reaching ilvl thresholds on one of your characters (and they also unlock trading lower crests up for the next higher crest, which we also factor in).

You will need v148 of the addon for reading the achievements to work. It’s on the website, and will be available on curseforge soon.

[yellowfive]

Sometime today we will release a small feature improvement to some of the Upgrade Finder and Best in Slot options:

Max Upgrade Threshold

Previously we had an option for both Best in Slot and most of the Upgrade Finder searches to set a “Max Upgrade Level”.

For example with Best in Slot, if you set it to item level 610, we would upgrade all items to item level 610, or the highest allowed item level for that item that is at 610 or lower (e.g. a Veteran item can only be upgraded to 606, so we would upgrade any Veteran track item to 606 if you set this option any value 606 or higher).

We have replaced this with a new option, “Max Upgrade Threshold”. With this new option, you pick the highest level of currency that you wish to use to do upgrades: Valorstones, Weathered Crests, Carved Crests, etc. (If you set it to Gilded Crests, then all upgrades are possible.)

This setting will take into account any discounts that your character may have (both personal and account-wide discounts), the most notable being the removal of crest costs for items in a slot up to a given item level once you upgrade any item in that slot to that item level.

For example, my lower-level character received a 616 chest item, but most of my other gear is down at 580 or so. If I set this threshold to Valorstones (only consider upgrades that cost only Valorstones and not crests), I can only upgrade most items to 580, but I can upgrade any chest item to 616 without requiring crests.

We think that this is more in line with how most people approach upgrades. Let us know how you feel about this new setting!

Mythic+ Level

In several places on the UI there is a Mythic+ Level filter, for example the Best in Slot options. Previously this was a list of all unique difficulties: Mythic 2-10, and then also the related Vault rewards for each difficulty, for a total of 18 options.

While simple… that ends up being a bit awkward because item levels overlap quite a bit. There are actually only 9 unique item levels at which you can obtain Mythic+ gear. We have changed this option to reflect that, and the picker will indicate which Mythic+ difficulties drop that particular item level.

Item Level Variants

This is a less-used feature that we have had for a long time: when looking at a per-slot item list, for example clicking on a slot in a Best in Slot solution, or when using the “Add to my bag” Upgrade Finder search, there is a down-carat to the left of the rank number on most items in the list. When clicked, it shows some fields to let you choose any known variant of that item.

Due to a technical limitation, the list of item level variants often had more than was technically possible for a lot of items. For example, most raid loot drops at four base levels, one for each raid difficulty. Each of these base drops is on a different upgrade track (Veteran, Champion, Hero, Myth). This UI would show all possible item levels from Veteran to Myth for all four raid difficulty versions in the list.

We have updated this to more correctly limit e.g. the Heroic raid drop to only show Hero track item level variants, the Normal raid drop to only show Champion track variants, and so on.

[yellowfive]

Today we released a few more improvements to Best in Slot, and we have also made Best in Slot a premium feature (it was our last free feature before this update). First we will describe the feature updates, then we will explain why we made it premium.

Inventory Items

Best in Slot generally works by finding the best combination of gear from all of the sources that you allow in your settings. But we also always include your currently equipped gear – I mean… it’s on your character already, so why not use it?

We have expanded this to include any item in your inventory, not just the items that we see currently equipped on your character. The same logic applies – when finding a Best in Slot set of gear, you probably want to include… everything that you already have!

Per-Slot Item Lists

After finding a Best in Slot solution, you can click on any slot in the solution to see a per-slot list of available items, and a quick rough ranking of those items. These lists are pre-determined by us: we locate all relevant end-game items and figure out which base variants of those items drop in-game.

Prior to this update, that list was very simple and static: it always shows the same list of variants for each item, and the filters default to the highest values so that you are seeing the highest quality versions available.

After this update, we have made this list more responsive to your Best in Slot settings. Firstly, the filters will be set to match what you chose when running Best in Slot. For example if you said to limit Mythic+ gear to a specific level, that setting will be copied to the per-slot item list when you open it. These filters are synchronized after each time you run an optimization.

Secondly, we modify items in the list to the variants that the Best in Slot optimizer would have used with your specified settings. For example if you said to add 2 sockets to jewelry, you will see all Neck items with the added sockets in the list now. Same idea with the Max Upgrade Threshold – we’ll upgrade all items in the list to the level allowed by your setting.

Why is Best in Slot now premium?

After making these improvements and the other improvements last week, Best in Slot is now a premium feature.

The main reason for this change is that we wanted to give Best in Slot a little more polish and make it feel like a premium feature. There were some minor technical reasons as well – we needed to integrate it with all the other premium features to open up some functionality around player inventories, for example.

We started out as an ad-supported, free website way back in the day, and Best in Slot being a free feature was a hold-over from those days. But… ads are gross, and we really don’t like advertising as a revenue model. When you are supported by ads you find yourself motivated mainly by “how can I serve more ads to more people” rather than “how can I make a good product that people actually want to buy”.

[ragowit]

A day of joy! I’ve been longing for this update, thanks a ton for your hard work!

A feature from the old days that I miss is the Guild Section to distribute loot within your guild. But then again, these days so am I just a casual parent raider and not a guild master. But I remember loving that feature and enforcing it on my guild.