Later today we will do our first update with the full Midnight version of the website!
Optimizer fully updated
All optimizer features are fully updated for Midnight:
Upgrade Finder
The Upgrade Finder is back and updated with all known Midnight loot.
Gems and Enchants
Best in Bags and Best in Slot will now recommend Midnight gems and enchants. We will not look at The War Within gear modifications anymore, though if you have some on your current gear they will still have value, with the exception of The War Within weapon enchants, see…
Special item effects (trinkets, on-equip effects, etc.)
All Midnight special item effects now have estimates. Some of these are a bit rough and will need further testing, but everything should be in the right ballpark. Let us know if you see something really wacky!
The War Within special item effects will no longer be ranked. This includes trinkets, crafted embellishments, and weapon enchants. To keep things sane we always stick to ranking just stuff for the current expansion – the old stuff becomes irrelevant very quickly and just slows things down.
Also note that a few of the special things from The War Within like the fancy gems in Cyrce’s Circlet and D.I.S.C. belt effects will also no longer be ranked.
Feel free to lock in old trinkets or weapon enchants for the first few levels while leveling. It won’t take you long to replace most of them though.
Class and spec changes
There were a TON of changes with this expansion due to Blizzard’s major rework of the user interface. We have almost all of them done, though we are still working on several of the healer specs – we should have initial versions finished by the official launch on March 2nd.
Blizzard is already planning significant tuning patches, and we will be running extensive tests in the first 1-2 weeks of the expansion, so expect changes!
Roadmap
Early in this expansion we plan to release a couple of new features!
We will have more details once we get through the launch, but the short version: since Dragonflight released we were using a different optimization approach using mathematical models instead of simulation. There were a lot of reasons for this with the main one being speed – the huge number of possible talent combinations available in the new talent trees would make it take a very long time (or cost a huge amount of money) to do enough simulations to rank gear well.
Well… it turns out mathematical models while fast, are very difficult to write and maintain. Some of the mechanics in WoW are pretty complex interactions, thus why simulation became popular in the first place – you can “brute force” it instead of coming up with a complicated formula.
So… we have switched back to simulation! Kind of. You have actually been using the new simulator for all of the pre-patch to rank gear! This is a different kind of simulator that is very fast. We’ll explain it more in the coming weeks.
We are still planning the kinds of new features we can do with this new simulator, but for a start we’ll do some simple things like show a simulation report for your Best in Slot or Best in Bags solution with spell breakdowns, buff uptimes, and estimated DPS.
