All the new Rawr models are great. It has gone from a tool our ferals loved to one of the most used theorycraft tools in our guild. Thanks to everyone involved in the deveopment!

As always, the better something is, the more we can think of ways to make it better. Some things I'd like to see:

- User assigned weighting for evaluating gear on multiple criteria. One of our experienced protection warriors feels the model is overweighting Survival vs Mitigation relative to his experience. It would be nice to be able to just adjust the rating slightly. For example, Rawr Bear now includes Survival, Mitigation, and Threat and the Overal calculation uses all three with fixed weightings. I'd like to be able to find the best gear based on .9*Survival + .75* Mitigation + .5* Threat. For a more Threat based fight I might use Threat + .75*Survival + .5*Mitigation rather than just looking at Threat numbers. For a given fight, a Mage might want to value gear based on DPS + .25*Survival. While we can always max DPS then look at ways to get more Stamina without decreasing it too much, it can be easy to overlook items, especially when Optimizer is used.

- The ultimate tanking model would be to take the gear, model data on healers, a defined model for the boss, and calculate Mean Time Between Failures. MTBF seems to be a much better way to measure tanking gear than Effective Health, but it's also much more difficult to calculate (General The power of avoidance (preliminary results) - TankSpot)

Thanks for the kind comments!

These are already supported in b14.1. See the Options tab of those models.


Indeed, that sort of simulation would be powerful, but we're a long way off from that right now. Eventually, perhaps.

I'm very excited and impressed with what I've seen so far with the Healadin plugin and rawr in general. Being a software developer, I imagine an awful lot of time and thought must have been put into this utility.

What I'm confused about is why Rawr loves +int gems and +int enchants so much for my healadin.

My human paladin is on the US Server gorefiend, by the name of Tokov. I just now re-loaded the char from the armory with my pvp gear on, and set the fight length to 2.5 mins and *no* mana potions to try and better represent an arena match. For the buffs tab, I checked improved wisdom, mana spring totem and wrath of air totem.

Ran the optimizer at maximum thoroughness, and it put INT gems and Int enchants on everything. If I increase the fight time to 6+ minutes, it changes all my gems to +int/MP5 gems.

I'm not saying that these calcs are incorrect, but it does make me wonder because I never, ever, see other healadins, for pve or pvp, 2v2 or 5v5, gem and enchant their gear in this manner.

Any thoughts?

Most Rawr models are designed for PvE only. I expect the Healdin model follows this pattern, and that there's other things involved in arena matches that aren't in PvE, which skews things. (ie, it expects you to just stand still and spam heals, which probably is a wonderful way to get interrupted and locked out of everything until your teammate is dead, in arenas).

Basically, CTProfiles, but based on Rawr files? Hmm... Gneh, I dunno, the Armory seems to solve most demand for that, I think... What do others think?

Well not exactly, cause I'd want it to display something looking more like the Rawr page, with DPS information and everything. Though, I guess people could already accomplish the basics of this by just taking screenshots, eh? *shrugs*

When a mage in my guild complains that Rawr is recommending he gem for Int, but EJ spreadsheets say he should gem for +spell, the armory tells me what his gear is, but doesn't tell me what options and raid buffs he selected.

I really need that other information to figure out if the issue is:

1) He made goofy option choices.
2) Rawr Mage did something poorly.
3) He really should gem Int.

and since I don't know enough mage TC to give an intelligent answer, being able to forward a link to an expert would be good.

I suspect the real benefit would turn out to be something I haven't even thought of. When you make it easy for people to share information, they use it in new and exciting ways. I wonder if any at Blizz thought that Armory would lead to something like Rawr? Maybe they did, but maybe not.

Of course you don't need a dedicated web site to move character.xml files around, but it might provide a nice, general solution.

It might also be interesting to have benchmark comparisons:

• What is the best (highest damage for single-target, 8-minute boss fight, reasonable raid-buf choices and options) mage, pre-kara, pre-heroic, rare gems?
• What is the best mage, through t4, all heroics, rare gems?
• What is the best mage, through t5 content, epic gems?
• What is the best mage possible with currently available gear?

with similar entries for other DPS classes/builds.

If we tweak the character file (or maybe as a separate export) so that it includes the gear info and the calcs it lets you show someone who doesn't have rawr the info. Having separate exports for different gear set sould be nice as well, especially for us feral druids. I have 6 (overlapping of course) outfits hotkeyed and that isn't even counting healing and resist sets.

I wish I had a bit more experience with stylesheets to be able to build something like a mix between the rawr interface and the armory from an xml file exported from rawr.

As a Mac user, I know I would appreciate a "Rawr.com" module instead of having to reboot under Boot Camp Running it under Mono is just too buggy at the moment, which I'm sure is much more Mono's fault than yours.

It would be amazing to have access to Rawr as a web app, but as you say, just emailing your XML file solves this user's particular problem.

Rawr as a silverlight app, perhaps? /drool

I've never played with Silverlight, an online applet is a REALLY good idea. And really I originally had this idea for fun, wasn't sure if anyone would really use it so I'll probably try to do it either way. The problem is, would an online applet have the kind of features I had in mind? So you'd be able to share with multiple people in an easy way.