Pawn Addon Guide

Ask Mr. Robot Tutorials
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Pawn is a popular addon that can show you item rankings directly in-game. This post will describe how Ask Mr. Robot can help you use it, and how to use it properly.

What does Pawn do?

Pawn will show you right on an item tooltip in-game whether it is an upgrade over your current item. You will see an up-arrow and a percent upgrade. There are some other nifty features, but that’s the core functionality of the addon: is item X, by itself, better than item Y?

What doesn’t Pawn do?

  1. Pawn does not rank set bonuses, trinket procs, or any other special effect.
  2. Pawn does not look at your entire set of gear – it only compares two single items in a vacuum. Whether you are completely naked or in BiS gear, it will show the same score difference between two items.

How does it score stuff?

Pawn does single-item comparisons. For example, if you are looking at a pair of gloves, it will compare them to your currently equipped gloves. It does this using stat weights or “scales”. The concept here is super simple: each stat is given a numeric value. It then multiplies all the stats on the item by the value to get a total score. Then it shows you the difference in total score for the two items. That’s it! Very straightforward and easy to follow.

How do I get these “weights”?

Pawn has some defaults based on popular builds, but it is best to get weights tailored to your character*. The easiest way to do this is via the Export to Addon button on our website, which appears underneath the Best-in-Bags gear table.

See the reply below for detailed instructions on how to export.

How should I use it in combination with Ask Mr. Robot?

As mentioned above, Pawn is not a full gear optimizer. It is meant to be a quick and convenient tool for getting an idea about whether an item is potentially worth using.

Because it does not examine your entire set of gear, try combining that item with different combinations of the gear that you own, or rank any special effects like sets, trinkets, etc., you should use it to get a rough idea of whether an item might be an upgrade, and that’s it.

Once you have decided the item is maybe good, then you should export your character to our site and use Best in Bags to determine if it is an immediate upgrade when combined with the gear that you already own.

(*) Note that the weights will be very specific to your current setup. If you change your talents or get different set bonuses or trinkets, the weights could change. You should update often.

If you don’t want to keep updating your weights all the time because that seems like a drag, you should stick with the AMR defaults provided with Pawn. Pawn ships with defaults that we generate for each spec based on a common talent build and that is not specific to any particular sets or trinkets.

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To get the pawn export, click the green “Export to Addon” button found on any of the gear results (although we suggest Best in Bags as Yellowfive stated above).

PawnExport.jpg603×637 164 KB

This window pops up. Copy the export string, then paste it into pawn.

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Hey guys! Thanks a ton for this integration! I love using PAWN for easy real-time decision making, but I depend on AMR for any long term gear decisions.

Only problem I’m having with this–when I export my data from the add-on and generate a new string for BIB, I have the little box that says it contains a Pawn string, but there’s no content there. I tried running through the whole process a couple times and reloading the site, but to no avail. Is there a bug that you know of? Maybe something really easy that I’ve overlooked?

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Where do you import the “pawn string” to in the addon?

Thanks ahead of time for the help!

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What gearing strategy are you using? If it is an older custom gearing strategy, it might not create a pawn string.

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You import it into the Pawn addon, not the AMR addon.

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I’m really liking having the Pawn strings to help me find potential upgrades right from the tooltips. I don’t know how feasible it is to do this but I’d love to see a way to automatically import the strings to Pawn when I import to the Ask Mr. Robot addon. I imagine that’d probably require some work from the Pawn people to accept strings from another addon though. Maybe that’s something both addon’s devs can collaborate on? Even if that’s not possible I’m very happy to have the current functionality in general.

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I realize it goes into the Pawn Addon but where? That’s what I am asking.

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Scale - > Import. The box is small, but just paste it in there. You have to export the specs you want and disable the default ones. It only gives you one at a time unlike Mr. Robot.

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The blender setting (Aggressive/Conservative etc) does not get integrated into the generated pawn string. Is this a known limitation or a bug?

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I believe it is a known limitation right now. We can ask yellowfive when he gets back from vacation if there is a way to make the stat weights change based on blender settings.

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Ah ok. Would be a welcome addition! :slight_smile:

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Hey, sorry for the late reply! I was expecting to get an email if there was a reply, but I see I should have just checked the forum.

I’m using Ursoc (H), set at machine learning. Is that considered old at this point?

Thanks for your help!

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@willowmaid, yeah you might need to make a new strategy… could be that older strategies don’t have the required information for Pawn export, but I can double check.

Also @shaarla, it is on my short list to add blender support to the Pawn export.

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Thanks guys, that was definitely the problem! I changed it to Physical, and the string popped up no problem. Thanks again for your good work on this! I’m excited to have the integration!

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I rolled a mage character and have been using the Pawn string to upgrade gear as I leveled. I finally made it to 101 and equipped my first legendary. I used Mr. Robot to obtain an updated Pawn string. However, I noticed that none of the stat weights were changing.

For example: stat weight for Intellect is 15.03. That is the same value it had at 40, 60, 100 and now 101

I use the export form Best in Bags.

Any idea why the stat weights are not changing?

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The weights are only designed for max level characters. The weights won’t change based on your level - they only change if you have significant changes in talents, set bonuses, etc.

If you are not max level, just equipping the highest item level gear possible, or the heirloom items, is what you should do.

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Since the “Export to Add-on” text includes gear suggestions for all specs, then there should be a Pawn string for all specs too. Really, Ask MrRobot could use a lot of tweaks to eliminate the number of clicks required to do a task (especially when managing three different specs). Why not make the Import button in the Ask MrRobot add-on automatically import all three or four Pawn strings as well? This could be an optional feature. Pawn has the ability to hide scales the user doesn’t want to see, so there’s no reason not to import Pawn strings automatically.

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Exporting multiple pawn strings at once is an enhancement we could make when we get around to updating that feature for BfA. We had a few general improvements in mind, so we will probably design it out and do them all at once.

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I like the changes in BfA for Best In Bag. Switching between specs is much quicker now for that. I’m not sure about Upgrade Finder - it should behave more like Best in Bag, where the specs are outside the Setup options so you can quickly see the upgrades for a spec by clicking a spec button. I don’t know why Gear Check and Best in Slot don’t have spec buttons. There are spec buttons at the top of the web page but using them requires scrolling up to the top. It’s weird that all the sections don’t behave the same. It seems that the user might find it easier to open a browser tab for each spec. I think making that unnecessary would be a good design goal.

I would still like to see the pawn strings be included in the “SEND TO ADDON” text (only one text box for all the gear and pawn strings for all specs). You would just need to find a hook into the Pawn import code to do all the pawn strings at once. Import of pawn strings can be an option in the Gear import frame of the add-on or in preferences.