World of Warcraft Midnight Pre-Patch

Ask Mr. Robot Announcements
1

The Midnight pre-patch is coming on January 20th!

Getting Started with Ask Mr. Robot and 12.0.0 Midnight

With an expansion pre-patch, a lot of information in your setups will no longer be compatible. Do the following to get updated once the Midnight pre-patch is live sometime on Jan. 20th:

  1. Make sure WoW is closed, and get the latest version of our addon. It will be v168 or higher, which we’ll make available sometime on the 19th or 20th.

  2. Log into WoW and then follow the standard steps to reset all of your cached addon data in-game:
    A. Activate each of your specs once and choose some talents
    B. Open your bank once
    C. Export from the addon to the website

That should get your information updated on our website.

Note!

Some of your settings will be reset as they could potentially conflict with the new expansion. In particular, locked items/gems/enchants will be unlocked, a few filters will be reset (e.g. boss filters for Best in Slot), and gear and talents will be blank until you export from the addon as described above.

Best in Bags

You will be able to optimize using Best in Bags throughout the pre-patch. We have set it to use current (The War Within) gems and enchants.

The rankings could be a little wacky though… this is a pretty early pre-patch in a pretty incomplete state. Don’t worry about it – everything is going to change a lot over the next few weeks as Blizzard finishes implementing stuff. Content and abilities are not really tuned for level 80 characters anymore, Blizzard has tons of bugs to fix, etc.

We have tried to preserve the base functionality for the pre-patch, e.g. The War Within trinkets should at least rank somewhat reasonably, but don’t be worried if we’re saying GET TONS OF CRITICAL STRIKE and then in two weeks we say NO NO NO, GET TONS OF HASTE. Who can say right now?

We plan to make a big post with more detailed updates on each individual spec as we get closer to the actual Midnight release, and we’ll let you know when we are pretty confident that things are settling down to where we can make good predictions.

Upgrade Finder

As with previous pre-patches, we will disable the Upgrade Finder during the pre-patch. It’s not that helpful anyway with a new expansion right around the corner and the game balance all wacky.

Worst in Bags

This should work just fine during pre-patch and help you clean stuff out leading into Midnight.

Best in Slot

You will need a level 90 character to use Best in Slot. You can either use one of our generic characters, or manually edit your character’s level to 90 with the “hamburger” menu just to the left of your character icon/name at the top-left of the page.

This is just a preview of some of the gear on beta. It is very incomplete – Blizzard hasn’t even named a bunch of the items. The trinket lists will be mostly empty because we haven’t modeled all of the new trinkets yet. Only some of the Midnight Season 1 set bonuses have been implemented.

As mentioned above, we will make a page with more detailed progress notes as we get closer to the Midnight release.

Note!

Our generic characters are just placeholders right now. They have more or less random gear equipped and blank talents. We will update them closer to the expansion launch.

3 Likes
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Would you please stop ignoring us EU users by updating the site before we even have the patch?

You keep pulling crap like this where you render the website unusable in the most crucial time i need it to work, and that’s before patch so i can spend my last currencies before they dissappear

NOT COOL

Had you waited 4 hours the servers would have been down for EU as well, is there crucial optimizing people need in the start of a pre patch or should you consider there’s more value to the EU players to trust the site works for the entirety of a given patch making last minute optimizations?

I am leaning to just abandoning this tool as you clearly don’t give a s… about EU players

3

If we wait too long, the site will completely break once the 12.0.0 servers come up in the US with the old version of the site running – either way, one set of users will have a non-functional site while the game is live.

We are a small business… we don’t run separate web servers in separate parts of the world due to cost, so we can’t really release different versions of the site to different parts of the world at different times. Sorry about that :frowning:

1 Like
4

You could most like just make a toggle on user account page EU or US and use whatever optimization engine is appropiate, it’s a matter of will.

Also i fail to see why the start of a patch is more important than the end where everybody wants to use whatever currencies they have left, you really should re-consider who gains the most value from having the site “live” i doubt people are optimizing gear in the first 20 hours of a new patch, i know i don’t, so i find you resoning odd

And this time we are talking 4 hours? in 4 hours EU servers goes down for the maintenance patch

5

For just a couple of hours around big patches like this it would be a lot of effort to simultaneously run two versions of the website. We just don’t have the resources to do that in terms of time or money. (It would require running a second set of servers, which is expensive. Our website is a very memory and cpu-intensive piece of software – we would run out of memory if we tried to run two versions of retail on the same machines. We make extensive use of in-memory caching to get the speeds that we need.)

It is very important to get the new version of the site up before these big expansion patches to prevent a ton of errors. The old site won’t work at all with the new version of the game.

4 hours would be too late – there would be several hours of potential errors and issues for people in other time zones. Sorry about that – we are a small, U.S.-based company of two people, so we operate on U.S. time zones. It’s not that we don’t care about our EU users, it’s just a matter of time and money… it was already a stretch to get something working for this very early pre-patch, and there’s also a TBC anniversary launch piling on top of it, so the two of us are stretched pretty thin this week.

6

Update

The 12.0.0 site is live!

You will notice that your gear is blank if you load the site right now – as mentioned in the original post, you’ll need to import from the addon again to update your gear and talents with 12.0.0 stuff.

As with all pre-patches, I’m sure that what went live is slightly different than what was on PTR up until the last couple days. Once we can log in, we’ll pull new data and check for any errors and inconsistencies and do updates as necessary.

Please let us know if you run into any issues either by replying to this thread or starting your own topic for your issue.

Sometime in the next week or two we’ll provide more details about the progress on each spec’s optimization model, and provide some details on our updated optimization approach for Midnight and beyond! There are already significant differences between 12.0.0 and what is on 12.0.1 on the beta servers, so expect many changes in the coming weeks.

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You are correct, of course, anything is possible with enough time and money! As yellowfive stated, we are two people, so our amount of time is the main limiting factor.

I highly value every user of the site. Europeans make up a large portion of our user base, and we take their feedback and concerns just as seriously as US-based users.

We have to make some compromises when it comes to updates that are this large. There is no perfect solution. Both of us have worked 12+ hour days for the last 21 days straight. I am not exaggerating when I say we literally cannot have done more than we did.

Within a few hours, everyone should be up and running, and everyone will have their neighborhood robot to help them out!

8

Thank you for taking the time to answer me, and i am sorry if i sound like a bitter old gnome (i am one though), i only react because i absolutely love using this tool in my army of alt’s it saves me alot of time having a “checklist” of which items to go for.

i get that time is limiting and you are only 2 people but hope you will consider my question about who stands to gain most from a working site when new patches drop

anyway keep up the good work, up your price and hire more people so you can cater to US and Europeans alike :wink:

9

There is an error with the gear as the Cinch of Unity legendary is showing as ilvl 265 and being recommended, when it is only ilvl 56 after the squish. This is causing BIB to get messed up. I am currently excluding this from recommendations.

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image

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10

My devastation evoker is tripping errors when importing and checking BIB.
a169fe2c50d841e7878b04f16a115135

Error in optimization

For my Preservation spec where I dont have permission to access a file when trying to send to addon (1e8f0c6843544103848d415b97c2e66c)

Access to the path ‘C:\TeamRobot\sandbox4\devastationreport.txt’ is denied.

11

My devastation evoker is having the same issue.

Snapshot ID: 27ed33fe105a4aa59a3a92009413cb96

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My Devastation Evoker is having same ie issuessue

Snapshot ID: 59aa623f80ce435e90a4cd45ebff9eb6

13

I wasn’t expecting the EU region ‘release’ to go live much before 16:00 GMT, based on something I saw about ‘8-hour maintenance’… Looks like it already has - or WAS timed for NA players - but it is always wise to factor in that NA ‘always’ gets content first & their player-base is significantly bigger that the EU.

Please, also, be mindful of the way messages are worded, as the tendency to sound ‘aggressive’ is a fine line away from ‘assertively enquiring’.

14

Im having issue trying to do best in bag sims with my evoker

Snapshot ID: f249ff579be7424aa6412b1c38c326bb

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Sorry about the evoker errors, it got posted with debug mode turned on, I will post an update as soon as yellowfive wakes up

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I posted a quick update that should resolve the issue with evokers. I’m looking into the other issues that people have posted and hope to have fixes soon.

17

We just posted an update that should resolve this issue – we had a really old exception for this item and it wasn’t applying the new item level squish. You will need to re-import your character from the addon for the item to update.

As background: in previous expansions when they did a squish, they actually changed the item levels of all the items in the game. This time around… they haven’t changed anything and are implicitly reducing the item level depending on whether some bonus IDs are present or not… it’s kind of a mess.

I think they have 8 different ways to modify the item level of an item now… and we have to guess at the priority of those because they sometimes provide multiple conflicting adjustments to the same item.

You’ll notice on our website in small text at the bottom of item tooltips there is small text with the bonus IDs that are modifying those items. Those are not the actual Blizzard bonus IDs, but rather our own bonus IDs. We decided that there should be only one way to make each kind of modification to an item. Thus, we have just one way to increase or decrease an item’s item level, and on import from the addon, we detangle the Blizzard bonus IDs and turn it into a simple +/- X item levels.

18

@yellowfive/@Swol:
Might already be on the to-do list - even already mentioned - but Reshii Wraps & D.I S C. are still showing iL730 & 710, resp., in the add-on, in game…

Apologies if you’re already aware…

19

Some people just need to get a life and not complain about everything

20

I was not – is this just in the addon and not on the website?

edit: they look fine on the website, so I’m assuming it is just the addon that is not displaying the item properly… which is weird. Is the addon having a hard time equipping the wraps or DISC belt, or just displaying them improperly?