Where is DPS? Simulations?

Ask Mr. Robot WoW Classic
1

I’ve just purchased the Classic upgrade for my account and I’m struggling to see where the DPS is shown or the simulations are?

I can see a % increase in sheet DPS with no actual number next to it, also suggested gear (Which has been available for years from a plethora of classic excel spreadsheets) but no simulations or raw DPS number?

I wanted to compared different talent options to see the real world DPS impact of each - or compare specs in raw DPS numbers. How can i do this? It doesn’t appear to operate the same way as the live website.

2

The classic version of the site is an optimizer only, it is not a simulator. If you search the forums you will see a few threads about this. We use a mathematical model to estimate DPS, healing, toughness and then use that to rank the relative value of the gear. We are able to tailor the gear suggestions to what you have in your bags and also to the specific fight length, raid buffs, and consumables you want to use.

We have no plans to create a simulator for wow classic - it is not necessary, in our opinion. As you can see, we have been able to calculate the optimal gear without using a simulator.

I know that some people would like to compare talents as well, but that is outside the scope of what our tool does for classic.

3

The information available on the site is already freely available around the internet. When I paid extra for the ‘Classic’ AMR I was expecting the same tools, or at least a road-map to arrive at the same set of tools as is available on the retail site. Nothing during the purchasing process indicated this was a reduced level of functionality.

How do I go about requesting a refund?

4

For the record, our simulator for the retail version of the game has always been a free feature. The premium feature is the optimizer, which offers several tools for quickly and conveniently ranking and managing your gear. For most people, it is the convenience of the optimizer and its ability to give you a custom solution for your particular inventory of gear in a matter of seconds that is worth the price.

(In fact, we made the first version of this website specifically so that we wouldn’t have to use spreadsheets anymore, which tend to be a bit clunky to use and difficult to customize to a particular player/inventory. The information in them is fine, it’s just the user experience that we found lacking.)

That said, if you are unhappy with the product you can use our contact form to request a refund – we don’t want you to pay for something that you don’t intend to use. (This is also why we always give a no strings attached 1 week free trial of any premium product.)

5

Thanks for the help - I’ve put in a message about it now.

I’ve been subscribed for about 3 years now and the service offered is generally excellent. I Don’t feel the classic option represents that same standard however - which was disappointing.

6

We would be interested to hear more feedback – the classic version of the site offers every single optimizer and premium feature of the retail/BfA site: Best in Bags, Upgrade Finder, Worst in Bags, and Best in Slot. It also offers all of the same convenient in-game addon integration to manage your sets of gear.

The classic site actually offers more customization settings than retail due to the model we were able to use for ranking gear, e.g. you can change fight length and consumable/raid buffs and get dynamically adjusted gear rankings based on those settings. (Those sort of things would require a prohibitive amount of time to calculate for retail because the mechanics are quite a bit more complex.)

The main difference is how we calculated the rankings: a mathematical model vs. a simulation model. For most people this is an implementation detail of little interest – as long as it gets good results, it doesn’t really matter. Personally, I prefer the mathematical approach, even more than simulation. It is fast, accurate, and very easy to customize.

The reason that we rely more on simulation data for BfA is because a purely mathematical approach is very difficult to calculate and maintain for that version of the game – simulation is just easier. Note that even for BfA, we don’t rely only on simulation data. There is still a heavy statistical and mathematical component layered on top of the data. We find this approach to be a lot better than relying only on raw simulation data.

7

Perhaps I’m being dense, but the simulation aspect of AMR (Which has been educational for me in terms of more complex rotations in the first instance) was what sold me on the product. It allowed me to adjust my rotation and see the impact it has on DPS, then change individual traits/talents and then adjust my rotation to include different spells to see the impact of those. This might seem minor but there are situations where the real world fights can differ massively from a mathematical model that doesn’t consider all the possible options.

It’s also useful in situations where i don’t have best in slot options but the items I do have are significantly higher in iLVL but have bad stats/traits than other recommended ones. It’s possible to simulate this, then adjust to a different rotation and optimize my DPS for that particular set of gear until I reach the point of having BiS slot.

The best real world scenario i can provide is from WOTLK playing Assassination rogue (ICC era). The mathematically highest DPS option was to have your highest DPS dagger in your main hand, regardless of weapon speed and a fast weapon (1.2 swing for example) in your offhand even if it was lower DPS than a slower off-hand. It also meant certain talents (Such as those that buffed mutilate damage) were not optimal and not considered when looking at stat priority and gearing options.

I spent many hours and hundreds of gold using different talent specs and item combinations (Such as the “mutilator” off-hand from PVP which was considered trash due it being a slow off hand) testing on a target dummy. I discovered that by dumping all expertise off my gear in favor of ‘aggressive’ stats, using a slow main-hand+off-hand, speccing into increased mutilate damage and adjusting my rotation, I had better DPS than with the prescribed set of gear/rotation. Nothing in any of the online guides i found mentioned that being parried was good - but in reality it was excellent because that perfect storm of events lead to increased envenom uptime, more mutilate damage, more mutilate poison procs and less contention for gear between rogues (suddenly we had more options of daggers instead of only 1 that we all had to compete for).

Classic has no Target dummies. Changing specs is prohibitively expensive and honestly, getting gear is harder and has a LOT more contention. Plus I have a full time job now, i can’t spend 4 hours on a target dummy to experiment with these things. Paying people who make amazing tools like AMR is the only way I get to experiment with this sort of thing these days.

There are a lot of random factors in Classic, so basing assumptions on a single parse is ridiculous. Running 100 sets of the same rotation in an instant provides a way more reasonable baseline. Also swapping a talent here or there - changing rotation based on length of fight - changing rotation based on different consumables. Classic is based more around total damage done than peak DPS and there is a gold cost to that because of the prevalence of consumables. Simulation would also allow the gold cost to be taken into account - e.g. perhaps you lose 5% damage done for down-ranking a spell but save 20g on consumable potions? Or what if a mage weaves in a more efficient damage-per-cast spell on clearcast procs instead of using evocation and stopping damage for those 8 seconds? What if on short fights you use instant cast spells to dump mana on cooldown? Is this a DPS increase? For how long? At what point should you not be weaving in that expensive shaman shock spell? At what point should you downrank? Is it actually worth changing 1/2/3 points in one talent to another? I can’t think of a way of testing these things in classic without using an adjustable simulation.

I hope this rant makes sense.

8

While you have some good points about the benefits of simulation vs a mathematical model, I think you missing the point with regards to the practicalities that the AMR team have to face when determining what features they develop.

The AMR team is only a small team of 3, and from what I understand, only one of them is the developer who implements the back-end optimisation algorithms. Also, I’m not even sure if the income from the subscriptions would allow them to work on AMR as their full-time job, I would imagine this is more of a side-hustle and they have actual day jobs, and most of the money from subscriptions would go towards paying for the server-time needed to host the website and run the optimisations and simulations for both current and classic wow.

Given there is a new expansion coming out later this year, I would presume most of their development time at the moment is focused on getting AMR prepared for Shadowlands, and they have mentioned as such in other posts on the forum.

So they don’t exactly have an unlimited amount of development time. They wrote a blog post a while back when the optimiser for Classic wow was introduced, explaining the reasoning behind the single one-off payment for classic. Ask Mr. Robot Classic + WotLK process & pricing – Ask Mr. Robot.

I don’t know the proportion of AMR users who use the classic vs current optimisers, but I would think it is probably much more weighted towards current wow. So they only would have a relatively small budget to go towards the classic wow optimiser development.

The theorycrafting behind classic wow is a lot simpler than current wow, and has been well worked out for a long time now. On the other hand, there are many more complexities with current WoW, with a lot of subtle interactions between the various stats, talents, spells and gear, that developing a mathematical model that covers everything would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, so a simulation engine is required to be able to solve the optimisation problems.

Implementing a mathematical model is a lot easier than developing a whole new simulation engine, which they would have needed to do since a lot has changed between classic wow and current wow. And as Swol and yellowfive have mentioned, the mathematical model is actually quite a bit more flexible than a simulation model, and faster to compute, so given the amount of development time they had to create the optimiser, I think they made the right choice.

If they had unlimited funds and time to develop the classic wow optimiser, I’m sure they would love to add a whole lot of new features to it, including the ones you have mentioned, but unfortunately that is not practical. Being a mathematician and software developer myself, I can sympathise with the difficulty they have with trying to balance adding new features to the optimisers vs the practicalities of the amount of time and money they have available to develop AMR.

9

Interestingly, the reason that wow classic lends itself so well to the mathematical model approach is because there is no haste outside of a few effects like flurry. Once you add in haste… everything gets way more difficult to deal with.

And yeah, there is a definite short ceiling to the number of people willing to pay a few bucks for classic optimization. We felt like there was enough interest to make it, and thankfully we gambled correctly on that, but we’re still talking about tight margins as far as development time is concerned. We are in full-on production mode for Shadowlands. I really wish there were less than 36 specs in the game now…

10

Hey thanks for all the hard work you guys did to develop this for classic, like I’ve said in a previous post. I’ve been sending people over here for the last couple months and know at least a few who subscribed after my recommendation. I don’t think a lot of people knew this tool existed and once they tried it out they really liked it. The “simulation” community is smaller in classic for sure, so I’m glad you guys were able to come up with a profitable/time efficient middle-ground for Classic. I can understand why a simulation model is just too much back-end work to develop rather than just the port-over you guys did, and the math usually seems to add up except for rare circumstances.

Anyway, I noticed for retail you guys have formulas and calculations available to view, but for classic we aren’t able to see the back-end. I’m sure there is very little interest in it, but I think people would trust the mathematical model more if they could see some of the calculation/reasonings themselves, almost like they can with spreadsheets (which are really popular in classic). This might also help you all with fine-tuning of the classic model, as people can spot discrepancies and let you know about them, potentially saving yourselves more time. Obviously, classic only has about a year left so you probably don’t want to sink too many resources into it at this point, but TBC is set to be just as, if not more popular than vanilla and will be another great opportunity for you all!

All the best!

11

The issue with this I’d presume is that given its done as a mathematical model if they release the back end it would be relatively trivial for someone to pirate/plagiarize/steal the whole thing

12

Yeah, to save time in this case, I just programmed the mathematical model right into the optimizer more or less. If there is anything in particular you have questions about I can let you know the formulas and assumptions I am using for my work.

I also had the benefit in classic of there being, more or less, a “known” solution to things like BiS. So when I tested the model I could see if I got the results that were expected, and then that was a good indicator that the model was correct. So I feel confident then about the cases where we find BiB for people who don’t have all the BiS gear yet, or who do BiS with different settings than static BiS lists generally assume.

Really, our model isn’t going to differ much from a speadsheet model. I referenced some of the popular spreadsheets to verify formulas as well. I think doing the calculations in code ends up being easier than making a spreadsheet.

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