The Blender: Dynamic Tank Gear Ranking

Thanks! I had been thinking about the NPS rules all wrong and originally assumed the function would be step, rather than linear, which had made it really hard to understand. But now I can make reproducible results.

So, my favorite rule set so far is

  • At 100% death chance, DPS is reduced somewhere between 10 and 20%

I do find it super interesting that this rule not only raises my simmed DPS (by about 17% over a normal tank strat), this does not appreciably reduce my simmed NPS (it drops 1% at most over the range).

Stupid questionā€¦am I able to use the Blender option for my DH which is main spec Havoc and offspec Vengeance? So I run a gearing strategy for Havoc and when it completes it gives me a Best in Bags for both Havoc (first priority) and Vengeance (second). If I run a gearing for Vengeance wouldnā€™t it overwrite my original Havoc main spec BiB with the Havoc offspec BiB from the Vengeance gearing? Sorry if that sounds a bit confusing.

The gearing strategy you choose is saved per-spec. You cannot use a Havoc gearing strategy for Vengeance or vice versa. So it will use your chosen Havoc strategy to optimize Havoc first, then it will use your chosen Vengeance strategy (with your blender options) to optimize Vengeance second.

So if I understand correctly - I first run a Havoc strategy and save it as Havoc1 and select it as my Havoc strategy, then I separately run a Veng strategy and save it as Veng 1 and also select it as my Vengeance strategy. Then when I use the AMR addon to paste in the details of my (currently set as Havoc) character from game into the BiB tool online, assuming I have my priority set as Havoc then Vengeance in the BiB tool it would use the Havoc1 gearing strategy to recommend choices for Havoc and then use the Veng1 strategy for my 2nd priority of Veng?

If I have understood this correctly then this is awesome. I thought you could only run a gearing strategy for the spec that you currently selected, and that the offspecs would default to some generic strategy. So I can run separate strategies for my offspecs (eg Assassination rogue is my main spec and I have a strategy for that, but I should also run a strategy for my Sub and Outlaw specs and when I use BiB for my main spec (Assassination) it will use the other gearing strategies for the other offspecs?

Exactly. AMR will remember the strategy you have selected for each spec and use those to optimize your gear across all, based on the priority you select.

Thatā€™s awesome! Iā€™ve gone six months without realizing that was possible.

Minor Display Bug regarding Blender:
When selecting Best In Bag, itā€™s giving me: +18.35% NPS.

I know thatā€™s not true - but I might be getting that improvement of a combination of NPS and DPS?
(I was geared entirely for NPS previous)

Yeah ā€“ I still need to update graphs and score to reflect the ā€œblendedā€ score. Will do that soon.

PS. Running Blended Gear is amazing.
From a full NPS strategy Iā€™ve lost 0.5% NPS, but gained about 18% DPS. Well worth the trade.

My DPS is up a noticeable chunk - Iā€™m nipping at the heels of our lower DPS, and the other tanks are asking me to watch my threat because Iā€™ve accidentally pulled from them without taunting more than once.
And the healers have confirmed they havenā€™t noticed a difference at all in my survivability.

Awesome!

Yeah I have a few UI improvements in the works for it as well, hopefully next week will finish those up.

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I am still trying to understand what is the best setup for the blender. For best setup, I mean the one that healers wonā€™t have a problem with the tank.

For example, at 80% Death chance reduce the DPS by 10% ?

@truthnz What kind of sims are you using (Boss / M+ level etct)? Also what blender options are you using?

Iā€™m simming against Spellblade - because I think itā€™s nice mix of single target and AoE (And Iā€™m too lazy to change gear/specs per boss while raiding).

I used the default suggestions in the Blender guide - canā€™t recall what they were offhand sorry.

Sometime in the next few days, we are making some changes to how The Blender works. This will be a one-time ā€œbreakingā€ change that will require you to reconfigure any blender rules you have created.

The new setup will store rules separate from gearing strategies, so that you can create and reuse rule sets across different characters. It will also be configurable directly from the gear optimizer, and we will offer several presets for you to choose from.

Please make note of any rules that you currently have and want to keep so that you can recreate them after the update (you wonā€™t be able to miss it when it goes live). Sorry for the inconvenience!

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What is NPS? What is Death Chance? Apparently a bunch of people understand, so it must be common knowledgeā€¦ What does NPS even stand for? I canā€™t find a reference for it

Death Chance is a metric we track in our tank simulator, and is pretty straightforward: on any given run of the boss fight being scripted, what is the chance that you will die?

NPS is a metric we created that tracks very closely with death chance, but includes some other stuff to help improve its suitability for ranking gear. You can read more on our blog: NPS ā€“ A more robust tanking metric ā€“ Ask Mr. Robot

Hello There! I am enjoying The Blender very much so far, I just have a question that I have been meaning to ask. Why do you give leech such a high value? It would seem to me that Versatility would be much more beneficial, as you need a bunch of leech to make it noticeable. You arenā€™t the only ones to do this, Pawn does the same thing. Itā€™s really been bugging me, so I thought Iā€™d reach out to the experts for some help. Thanks again for your wonderful Simulator, and The Blender! It helped make the difference in taking down KJ in our latest raid!

Leech can end up with a high value because it is relatively ā€œcheapā€ point-for-point compared to other stats.

We generally let our tank simulator figure out whether a stat is worthwhile or not. Itā€™s easy to think that leech is kind of uselessā€¦ you get all these tiny heals that seem meaningless. Butā€¦ getting a small amount of stamina also feels kind of meaningless too. Am I really going to notice if I have 6.1m health vs. 6.2m health? But stamina is clearly one of the best stats for staying alive.

Leech can be thought of as effectively increasing your health: you get hit, then leech heals a little bit of it up for you before you get hit again. All self-healing can be thought of in a similar perspective: it increases your health at the time you take a hit by healing you back up after the previous hit. Stamina makes your total health pool bigger, so you donā€™t go as low when you get hit, and you can just take bigger hits in the first place.

If leech was largely useless and just causing more overheal, the tank simulator should ignore it and think it is bad. But that never seems to be the caseā€¦ getting some leech definitely makes a difference, and just like with other stats, you donā€™t need a lot of it all at once for ā€œanyā€ of it to be good ā€“ every little bit has value.

I appreciate the feedback, thank you!

Hi there. I have a question for you. As you can see on the screenshot I got for you, your site is telling me that I need to adjust my gear for ā€œBest in Bagsā€ that manages to somehow make every single stat either stay the same, or be lower than before. Can you please explain how this is an upgrade, if every single stat is lower than before? Please help me out here, Iā€™m very confused.

Thanks

Iā€™m guessing it is putting in a lower item level relic with a better trait, which would lower your stats.