Seems to find offhand upgrades even if 2h is equipped, but it doesn’t take into account the weapons in bags. This can be shown by equipping a weapon in MH and locking it in. After doing so, running Upgrade Finder changes significantly.
Current Gear (2h equipped):
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Upgrade Finder for Current Gear:
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Current Gear (1h locked and equipped):
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Upgrade Finder (1h equipped):
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It seems that 2h weapons need a different classification so that the model doesn’t include OH as an upgrade option. The harder thing is to select the best simming 1h MH in bags and determine if that, in combination with an available off-hand, nets a DPS increase over use of the 2h. Don’t have all the answers, but I believe the relative difference seen in comparing upgrade finder depending on MH equipped shows that the model isn’t correctly comparing 1h MH + 1h OH vs 2h MH. The net effect is that Upgrade Finder is polluted with a bunch of off-hands that can’t be equipped, and don’t actually net a DPS increase when paired with an available 1h MH.
Yeah I probably need to add some more handling for different weapon combos in the upgrade finder for hunters. This has been one of the most difficult things to handle in WoW since the beginning of our site.
We have a bunch of code in place to deal with 2H vs. 1H+OH combos for casters (which is still an issue in retail). We can probably extend that to deal with hunters in TBC. It is a quite ambiguous ranking scenario, and what we have settled on over the years is this:
When ranking a list of weapons or off-hand items:
Ranking a 1-handed weapon in the main-hand
If the player has an off-hand equipped, rank the weapon with that off-hand
If the player has no off-hand equipped:
for Best in Bags per-slot item lists, find their best off-hand and use that
for Best in Slot item lists or Upgrade Finder, find the best off-hand available of equal or lower ilvl
Ranking an off-hand (shield, off-hand)
If the player has a 1-hander equipped in the main hand, rank the off-hand with that weapon
If the player has a 2-hander or no weapon equipped in the main-hand:
for Best in Bags per-slot item lists, find their best main-hand 1-hander and use that
for Best in Slot item lists or Upgrade Finder, find the best mh 1-hander of equal or lower ilvl
I think we could use this same logic for hunters.
We settled on this as kind of a compromise… because there really is no “right” way to do it. Taking the case of a caster as an example:
If you have a 2-hander equipped and are trying to see how 1-handers in the Upgrade Finder will rank, you want a “fair” ranking against your 2-hander. If you only have really bad off-hands in your bag, 1-handers will never rank high enough to be suggested as upgrades, so only using your owned off-hands doesn’t really tell you what you want to know. But if we’re e.g. ranking an ilvl115 1-hander and we always pair it with the best ilvl164 off-hand… that’s unfairly boosting the value of those 1-handers. Thus we settled at finding a good off-hand of ilvl115 or lower to pair with it for a fair ranking.
On the flip side, if you already have a 1-hander equipped and you’re looking at the rank of off-hand items, we decided to rank those with your current 1-hander. Same for the other way around, when looking at 1-handers and you already have an off-hand equipped. The rankings work out pretty well in this case and tend to show people what they want to see.
I think that is a reasonable compromise and don’t immediately see any way to improve. Running the Upgrade Finder this morning, I already see what I perceive to be a much more useful list.
Yes forgot to reply – I did an update yesterday with some tweaks. I may have a couple more minor improvements to make on a few cases, but I don’t think it will change the rankings significantly.