Nezralix

Is there a mod out there that draws out a visual representation of an item's budget, demonstrating what percentage is allocated to each individual stat? What with the large numbers being thrown around these days and the somewhat variable stat values, I find that it can be a little bit tricky to easily identify whether an item is optimal for my goals. I haven't seen anything like this.

 

• tsigo

Not exactly what you're looking for, but have you tried RatingBuster from WowAce?

 

Nezralix

Sure, I use RatingBuster, but to my knowledge it doesn't really have any facilities like that. The problem is the stats like mp5, stam, spell power, armor, etc. don't convert into the same units as other stats, so it's hard to really get an idea where the points are going unless you really look at it carefully.

For a rudimentary example, you might look at [Crimsonforge Breastplate] and might initially think that stamina is the dominant stat, when in fact, in terms of actual value, it has less stam than strength and only barely more stam than crit.

Perhaps more strikingly, you could look at an item like [Gauntlets of the Righteous] and realize how horrendously designed it is for tanking.

 

hypetech

Have you tried Pawn?

 

Spink

It seems like you're kind of asking for two things here. To start it sounds like you're seeking something which will give you a sort of reverse engineered version of what the devs would use in order to create an item. But later you mention that you want something that will "easily identify whether an item is optimal for [your] goals." which is more looking to weight stats based on which class/role you are playing like to give the tank points value of an item based on your current stats, or the Shaman AEP based on your current stats as an Enh shaman etc.

For the former I'm not sure if such a thing exists. For the latter Pawn can work in some cases, but I couldn't guarantee it will work for every class/spec.

 

Nezralix

Well, it's not so much that I need a mod telling me "yes" or "no" to whether an item is any good (as Pawn attempts to do), it's just that it's easier to determine whether an item is well-designed if you can see a visual breakdown of the stats. Frankly, even a sort of "normalized" stat number attached to each actual stat could be useful (i.e. convert some mp5 value into the equivalent value of str/int/spi/agi and show it next to the actual value). So this is partly the result of some stats being awkward to compare against other stats due to unequal StatMods.

The other issue is that stats are computed somewhat exponentially, as a result of the item formula [ilvl = ((stat)^(1.7) + (stat2)^1.7)^(1/1.7)]. So an item with, say, 10 strength and 5 agility, you might intuitively believe that twice as much of the budget was spent on strength as agility (66.7%), but that's not really how it works out (as far as I know). In fact, the sum of the stats would be 10^1.7 + 5^1.7 = 50.1 + 15.4 = 65.5, so 50.1/65.5 = 76% is spent on strength, and only 24% on agility. So it could be, if an item has a very large amount of a tricky stat like extra armor or mp5 on it, that the rest of the stats may be suffering an inordinate amount. A visual representation lets you realize this pretty quickly. In general, a more "balanced" item is probably more desirable. A mod like Pawn helps you in this regard, but it can't hurt to have more information.

If I'm misinterpreting this somehow, then let me know.

EDIT: As an addition, I believe the formula that I'm talking about is very easy to implement; you don't really even have to do any calculations related to the actual item level, if you're just considering the sum of the stats. If I had any kind of knowledge at all about the WoW Addon system I'd probably write this mod myself.

 

◊ Praetorian

It's an interesting idea. Basically just a pie chart showing the budget allocation of the item.

That's something that could just as easily be done on the web as in-game, really, since it's not like you necessarily need that info in real time.

 

Suesse

This is a pretty interesting idea. I agree that it would work very well as an offline tool.

Once the basic framework is in, I can see some interesting additions. For example, as a warrior a lot of our BT/MH gear has strength and block rating on it where offset pieces don't. Many warriors consider that not very worthwhile. This tool could tell me the itemlevel of the item without stats that I indicate as insignificant. The same thing could go for a mage who wants to see the itemlevel of a T6 item without spirit on it (many mage offset items will have zero spirit). Or a healer who wants to see the item level of an item without stamina or even spell haste.

I haven't seen an literature on the topic recently. Are the formulas well defined? Or would such a project require first some testing to determine the formula particularly in regards to sockets.

 

Nezralix

I put together this tool pretty quickly as a proof-of-concept: http://krom.x10hosting.com/misc/test.html

 

Fcukstar

I'm having a little trouble really seeing the usefulness of a framework like this. To be honest, in-game Addons such as Ratingbuster and Pawn give you most of the information you need to determine when an item is an upgrade or not. I'm assuming you want to know how much of the iLvl budget was used for each item on each individual stat that it has, but even then I don't really see how that is helpful or not. The reason I say this is because different classes, and different talent specs for each class have different EP values for certain stats due to class usage of certain stats.

For example, a rogue gets 1 AP from stength and 1 AP from agi, but they also get dodge and crit, while warriors get 2 AP from stength, and no AP from agi. Also, certain classes need different amounts of stats as well, for example rogues need gobs of hit, while enhancement shamans don't quite focus on that stat as much. Even if the mod told you that item X was well budgeted for your Shaman, if you didn't need anymore hit, then that information would be useless excess. Each class is affected by certain stats differently, as I'm sure you know, so knowing the budget that was used on each stat in an item really isn't going to help you understand if that item is useful or not; that information comes down to knowledge of said class and spec.

But that is just my personal opinion. I really believe that you should be able to make a judgment on the piece of gear you need and/or want to use by understanding of the class and stats that are required rather than having a mod do it for you.

 

Nezralix

Equivalence Points don't really mean a whole lot in the real world, given that stats multiply with one another in different magnitudes at different levels of gear. I don't think any kind of elaborate framework is necessary; I think that, as a simple utility, this offers information directly from the game that's useful to know in making decisions. It's not making judgments on what stats you do or don't want, only telling you how the item designer laid out the stats on the item, which is not always obvious.

 

Roywyn

The point isn't to have an addon like pawn/lootrank/etc. that caculates the Agility-Equivalence-Points (or whatever your class uses).


The point is to see how much of the item budge is eaten by which stat.
To see whether an item is well designed or not.

For example [Gauntlets of the Righteous] would display something like that:
22 stamina (15%)
20 intellect (23%)
19 defense (22%)
21 dmg (21%)
7 mp5 (19%)

Pawn/etc. show you the tanking-points or whatever.
But showing the stat spread is nice for telling whether an item is well designed or not.
It would tell you that this item is badly designed for pure tanking. That it's a random smattering of stats.

Another item would then look like:
45 stamina (35%)
11 intellect (13%)
28 defense (32%)
20 dmg (21%)

That shows that while being a vastly better designed item, it still spreads only 2/3 of its budget on pure health/avoidance tanking.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput
This assumes Torment and no Razorice.
Increase Frostfire by 5% and decrease Frost by 4%, Fire by 8% for practical purposes for now.

More detailed at http://elitistjerks.com/923110-post2775.html


And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.

 

Rieux

I guess I'm a bit confused, though - could you not tell the second item was significantly better just by simply looking at the stats? Why do you need to know that the mp5 is taking up 19% of the item budget to realize that it is a wasted stat and could be better allocated elsewhere?

I mean, I can see this being interesting out of game for showing to what degree certain items are misallocated, but I don't see how it would help determine what items you should be using.

As an example, looking at [Life-step Belt] and [Cord of Braided Troll Hair] from ZA, which have the same ilvl of 128. Does the fact that the cloth belt misallocates 11 int in lieu of 22 spirit, 2 healing, and 3 stamina on the leather belt really matter to me when making the determination on which item to use? Certainly not, from my perspective; the leather belt is simply better, and I can tell that by just looking at the stats.

Again, it could be interesting to see the percentage the 11 int uses up in item budget to determine how poorly designed the item is, but it shouldn't make any significant difference in whether or not you should use the item in the first place.

 

Spink

I'm similarly confused, how does this cross the barrier between interesting and useful?

When deciding whether X is an upgrade over Y when both bear the same ilvl will always come down to class needs rather than distribution item building points. I would be willing to guess that any item with mp5 at all has an easy to acquire superior alternative for tanking for example.

I guess one way I could see where you were coming from is that it would be a useful tool for giving feedback on items to the developers. I think every spec has several ideal stats and would prefer that every item that they had equipped had all of those stats divided evenly on it. But in the real world you have to deal with what is served up which while not optimal compared to what could potentially exist for that slot (I think intentionally in a lot of cases) it is the best choice available and can be easily confirmed by the ratingbuster/tankpoints/pawn/gear spreadsheets that ask you to input stats etc.

So yeah I can't see a use for this in real time as an addon past being something that is interesting to those inclined to know what the world is made up of even if it isn't useful. That being the case surely it would be a lot easier to have an offline version since I think the amount and kind of calculations can get pretty complex although I couldn't honestly say I understand it especially with the new heights that stats are reaching as well as their continually diminishing returns through ratings and crit:agi ratio etc.

 

Nezralix

The calculations are trivial, and I have to imagine a mod that shows a simple graph would be pretty simple for an experienced addon writer. I wouldn't picture this as a major project; it's just a handy utility for those with the interest in that sort of thing, with very little user-effort required (some mechanism for selecting an item -> see a pretty graph).

 

dinesh

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you as to its ease of development. By all means, find someone with free time to build it.

We're all just genuinely interested in exactly how it would be useful or handy or anything other than just eye pleasing. We don't see it as such, and would like to be enlightened as to how it would be useful, and who it is useful for.

 

Nezralix

It's more information, which in this case assists in giving some insight into whether or not an item is well-designed for your purposes. You can use something like RatingBuster, which can do direct comparisons on the stats an item provides to you. That's certainly a good tool. For those who are curious as to what proportion of an item's budget are going to stats that aren't valuable to them, as sort of a "what if" comparison, then something like this is informative. It's operating at a somewhat lower level, and it's something that Blizzard item designers could probably get more use out of than the average player, but that doesn't mean that it's not an informative tool for players.

If you don't think it's interesting information, fine. I do. Some other players in this thread do. What more do you want?

EDIT: For what it's worth, I modified the JavaScript utility I wrote to output a simple bar graph instead of just text, which is about as good as it's going to get with my knowledge of HTML.

 

Suesse

I haven't looked at the code, but it looks pretty cool.
What would be really neat is if you could plug it into an item database, grab xml data from the armory or wowhead OR maybe use that firefox plug-in that lets you modify webpages to actually show this info in-line on the armory or wowhead.

 

Hate Monkey

Just like RatingBuster is able to calculate the avoidance levels from defense, total avoidance and such, it doesn't seem to far fetched to think it could add in this feature easily.

Just need to add in the values for each iLvL/armor class/slot/rarity/sockets, then add the known values per stat, and just do the simple math performances from there.

Basically if you have an iLvL 141 pair of gloves, epic level, plate, you can do whatever function blizzard uses to find the allocation points of available. Let's just say iLvL*epic*gloves*sockets=points. You can then take the known stat values, and multiply them out for each stat, and divide by the allocated points value to get the percentage of allocation.

To me that seems really easy, but I don't know what the exact derived formula for determining how many points can be used per item.

And people are forgetting, we want this in game, no on a website, because there are ones around that already do that. Just need the author(s) of RatingBuster to say how easy or hard this would be, because making another addon to modify tooltips while almost all of us use RatingBuster now would be a bit to much work.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png

 

Nezralix

It's really not even that complicated, at least the way I looked at it. We don't really even need to consider the slot type, armor type, quality, or even the actual item level. All of that is basically just a multiplier on the part we care about.

As indicated on the WoW Wiki topic, the important formula is this:

ItemValue = [(StatValue[1]*StatMod[1])^1.7095 + (StatValue[2]*StatMod[2])^1.7095 + ...]^(1/1.7095)

In short, each stat is multiplied by its "StatMod" (some multiplier that determines the absolute "value" of that stat), and then each of the resultant values is raised to the power of 1.7095, and then they're all summed together. That sum is then raised to the power of (1/1.7095). The end result is that larger stats take up a more-than-linear relative portion of an item's value.

The budget proportions are retained through the calculations done to the specific slot, armor type, etc. They're also retained through the exponentiation to the power of (1/1.7095). Really, all we need to do is figure out the sum:

sum = [(StatValue[1]*StatMod[1])^1.7095 + (StatValue[2]*StatMod[2])^1.7095 + ...]

...which is easy. And then we exponentiate each stat component to the power of 1.7095 (i.e. (StatValue[1]*StatMod[1])^1.7095), and divide by that sum. It's only slightly more work than dividing each stat by the sum of all stats; we're just exponentiating each term first.

EDIT: Also note that I don't bother to consider socket costs. Players have control over what they put into those sockets. It does affect the results somewhat, but I'm not really sure how to calculate their innate value (for example, it "looks like" three sockets is approximately equivalent to 40 of some rating, but that's not always the case). Since you're basically interested in whether the stats have been budgeted intelligently, the empty socket configuration doesn't really factor into that anyway, even if it does have a small effect on the proportions.

I'm not sure if we need to modify tooltips. We'd need to read the item data from some item, which might or might not be done using the tooltip interface. Then we pipe that data to a routine that draws a window that includes a bar graph or pie chart. The drawing part is probably pretty easy; I'm not sure about getting item data.

And that's really the same issue with a Web-based interface. If you can tie into the WoWhead or Armory database, then it's probably pretty trivial to write a Java app that creates an image representing the breakdown. I'm just not sure how difficult it is to get that data, as I've never done anything like that.

 

dinesh

I'm not being condescending or patronizing. I am genuinely interested in what you think this data will allow you to do, because I am interested in improving my own ability to talk to friends and guildies about gear quality, and to assist in discussions when parceling out loot (my guild doesn't use DKP, we use common sense and random roll among people who have the same level of "need" for an item).

I didn't, and still don't, understand what value the item budget (graphical or otherwise) has to play in that thought process. It seems strictly inferior to me - I'd have to take that information, and transform it into something more like what RatingBuster or Pawn provide.

Or perhaps you have some other use in mind, not for gear comparison. If so, I am genuine in my desire to understand what that is. I can see some value for an actual item designer at Blizz, I suppose, but that wouldn't seem to have much real world impact for the vast majority of us.
Just one data point, but I use Pawn, not RatingBuster. It's probably not safe to assume that "almost everyone" does anything.

 

Nezralix

It's not an either/or proposition.

 

dinesh