ShadowCraft: Rogue spreadsheet for 4.0 - Page 2

Shadefoot · 10/29/10, 5:46 PM

Just had a bit of a play with it. Looks-wise it's fab. Liking the dark background, it makes everything stand out really well and, as far as the item changes go, they're laid out clearly and in a logical order.

I would, however, suggest a slight layout change of the other boxes on the main tab:
- Stat Totals and Tools up where Notices currently is.
- Stat Weights below that.
- Notices and Log underneath Stat Weights.

For me, that would feel a more logical layout, plus it means things are laid out in a narrower format to start with so they don't shift around as much depending on the size of your screen (I tried looking at it on a 24" widescreen and 17" 4:3 screen). Also, a suggested addition to the main tab - a box telling you which spec you're currently configuring for depending on what is selected in the Talents tab. I'm guessing that Glyphs is coming later as they aren't currently showing?

The other tabs are laid out well but it may be an idea to add in some of the other professions as, for example, out of the professions I have only Leatherworking is selectable, however during the import it obviously picked up the fact that I have Skinning too as it's mentioned in the "Export" panel on the final tab, which could be confusing.

Going back to the reforging function, it seems to hit the right targets reasonably well, but it seems to do it in a slightly peculiar (from my view) manner. For example, it's telling me to do the following:

Chest
-36 Expertise +36 Haste

Hands
-32 Crit +32 Expertise

Obviously the numbers being changed aren't exactly the same, but to me it seems very inefficient to be reforging Expertise into something, only to have to reforge something else into Expertise because you then don't have enough. Is this intended or is it just the system getting a bit over-zealous in trying to hit exact numbers?

Overall though, great job so far. Definitely user friendly, simple to use while still giving you plenty of infomation if you want it and nice and fast.

♦ Viper · 10/29/10, 6:39 PM

Originally Posted by Shadefoot

Going back to the reforging function, it seems to hit the right targets reasonably well, but it seems to do it in a slightly peculiar (from my view) manner. For example, it's telling me to do the following:

Chest
-36 Expertise +36 Haste

Hands
-32 Crit +32 Expertise

Obviously the numbers being changed aren't exactly the same, but to me it seems very inefficient to be reforging Expertise into something, only to have to reforge something else into Expertise because you then don't have enough. Is this intended or is it just the system getting a bit over-zealous in trying to hit exact numbers?

Ignoring the rest of the gear for a moment since fully analyzing the optimal reforging would be too time-consuming, look at it this way. Chest doesn't have haste on it, so clearly you're going to reforge into haste. So the options are hit->haste or exp->haste. Gloves have crit on them, so clearly you're going to get rid of that. There the options are crit->exp or crit->hit since they already have haste.

Chest: hit->haste or exp->haste
Gloves: crit->exp or crit->hit

I'm assuming the tool puts you slightly over the exp cap without these 2 reforges. So if you went with exp->haste on the chest, then you'd be below the exp cap and exp would be worth more than hit, so the glove choice would have to be crit->exp. If you went with hit->haste on the chest then crit->exp on the gloves would be worthless as you're over cap, so crit->hit is the logical choice.

Compare:
exp->haste & crit->exp = -32 crit, -4 exp, +36 haste
hit->haste & crit->hit = -32 crit, -4 hit, +36 haste

If you're over the exp cap, losing the 4 exp doesn't cost you anything so it's the better choice. Of course it's more complicated when you're solving for every piece of gear at once, but at first glance it doesn't really look like an extremely unlikely result.

Shadefoot · 10/29/10, 7:20 PM

*lightbulb*
Ohhh I get it now, thanks! I was forgetting you couldn't add a stat you already had on an item, because I had been wondering why the Chest couldn't just be left as it was and the gloves changed to Haste. And also now understand reasoning behind why the Exp and not the Crit is picked for reforge in that instance.

cjo20 · 10/29/10, 8:11 PM

I've started to add import functionality to my ingame addon. At the moment it will only tell you
a) If you are wearing the wrong piece of gear (and which one you should be wearing)
b) If the reforge differs from the imported value

The tool cannot automatically fix these for you at the moment, nor does it do anything with talents, enchants or gems.

The beta version can be found here: Shadowcraft Tools - Files - WoW AddOns - CurseForge.com and I would be interested to know if anyone can spot any bugs in it.

To use the data from the "Export" section of the website, you will have to strip out the [CharName-Realm.Region] section from the start before you paste it in to the addon. Use '/sc import' to bring up the import window.

Falowin · 10/29/10, 9:56 PM

Amazing, Amazing tool thus far. I hope you guys can get it fully operational as I would love for this to replace the spreadsheets I have come to adore.

One bug/design note: Sometimes when I click to view upgrades it works fine, other times the upgrade window is see-through and you can see all the stats behind it, making it very difficult to read. It doesn't matter what slot I click on, the window appears at the top in front of the stats and it is all jumbled together.

Thanks for all the hard work.

amafi · 10/29/10, 10:00 PM

Originally Posted by cjo20

I've started to add import functionality to my ingame addon. At the moment it will only tell you
a) If you are wearing the wrong piece of gear (and which one you should be wearing)
b) If the reforge differs from the imported value

The tool cannot automatically fix these for you at the moment, nor does it do anything with talents, enchants or gems.

The beta version can be found here: Shadowcraft Tools - Files - WoW AddOns - CurseForge.com and I would be interested to know if anyone can spot any bugs in it.

To use the data from the "Export" section of the website, you will have to strip out the [CharName-Realm.Region] section from the start before you paste it in to the addon. Use '/sc import' to bring up the import window.

I exported my character from roguething and imported in the addon, works fine as far as I can tell.
Very handy.

Going to go find an enchanting trainer, do some reforging and see if I can break it for you

If not every slot has gear in it when you export the addon throws a couple errors, I'll get signed up to curse and put up a ticket.

Theone · 10/29/10, 11:09 PM

While working with Shadowcraft I did the auto-reforge after I enteerd my Ep values for Assassination. While looking it over it is telling me to reforge items up to 232 expertise. Have a feeling the Value s set wrong or I did something wrong ( Most likely that last one)

EDIT: Ended up lowering the Boss Dodge % from 6.1 to the 5.6, and I went -7 ep.

nextormento · 10/30/10, 2:29 AM

I still don't get the whole git control system (I only write little projects for me and my friends) and I don't want to mess with it untill I understand it better. To get started easy, I'm going to comment on couple lines in Andriana's engine that I think need a second thought; under the backstab damage formula there we can find:

    def backstab_damage(self, ap):
        weapon_damage = self.stats.mh.normalized_damage(ap)

        opportunity_multiplier = 1 + .1 * (self.talents.subtlety.opportunity)
        aggression_multiplier = 1 + .05 * (self.talents.combat.aggression)
        damage = 2 * (weapon_damage + 345) * opportunity_multiplier * aggression_multiplier

        if self.assassins_resolve():
            damage *= 1.15

        return damage

This has not been tested yet as far as I know, but as Vulajin explained here at the start of wotlk, talents that affect one single ability tend to stack additively (opportunity and aggresion in this case); it is not important yet if they do stack additively or multiplicatively, but since they are two modifiers, the flow of the code should account for this posibility. So, I believe this thing could look like this:

    def backstab_damage(self, ap):
        weapon_damage = self.stats.mh.normalized_damage(ap)

        opportunity_modifier = .1 * (self.talents.subtlety.opportunity)
        aggression_modifier = .05 * (self.talents.combat.aggression)
        backstab_multiplier = 1 + opportunity_modifier + aggression_modifier
        damage = 2 * (weapon_damage + 345) * backstab_multiplier

        if self.assassins_resolve():
            damage *= 1.15

        return damage

Now my question would be: should I fork the project and add my code? should I fork and add a coment? should I open an issue (as it was suggested for bug reporting)?

For the same reason, I think it'd be sensible to store buffs/debuffs in the shape of percentages. Let me clarify: Leader of the pack is now stored as 1.05 and shadow and flame as 1.05 too. In the future, when we need to compute our spell crit chance we (well, Aldriana actually) will have to write something like UnbuffedCritChance*(LotP+SnF-1) just like it was done before in the spreadsheets, whereas having those constants stored as percentages would make the formula a little more understandable without the odd "-1"
While this is certainly not a big issue, if I find a better way to handle it, how should I comunicate that to the project manager?

When you write something like this you are bound to make many little changes and I don't know if they are worth a forking or just a mere PM to Aldriana. If all this sounds idiotic please disregard; it's just my humble attempt at being usefull for the project.

• Aldriana · 10/30/10, 3:23 AM

Backstab damage: if someone would like to test + confirm, that'd be great. As may be evident from the littering of comments, I've been running sort of quick and dirty while setting up framework.

Buffs: Not sure where you're seeing it stored as 1.05; both the crit chance buff/debuffs are stored as 5 in the master revision at the moment. That said, following the change I made earlier this evening, it does need to be changed to .05 to be consistent (to avoid having a bunch of stray /100 terms around, for much the same reason). I'll be checking in a bunch more stuff in a few minutes, so I'll fix that then.

Git: I don't really understand it either, but its what people wanted to use (and it's been recommended to me by my brother), so I figured I'd give it a whirl. So far I'm sort of reminded of what my friend/former boss said about it: "I'm sure Git is amazing, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough to use it." Anyway, general approach, as I understand it, is that you fork, make your changes, and then send me (or Antiarc, depending on which piece you're working on) a pull request; at that point he (or I) will decide whether we like it (or not) and either pull your changes into the main branch or send a response explaining why we don't want to.

For those of you with coding backgrounds, I'd encourage you to just make the change and send it off if you seem something clearly wrong. If you're not comfortable with coding, it's fine to contact me (us) via this thread, via PM, via email or via GitHub issues tracking and someone else will do it. If you want to help but aren't sure what needs doing, again, contact us with what sorts of things you're interested in working on, and we'll find something for you to do.

Saan · 10/30/10, 2:08 PM

It's looking like Blizz might be adding items to the loot tables in raids with intelligently driven some random stats. That is to say, it's not going to be something like int and agi on a pair of pants, but more likely something usable. If this is going to be the case, it might be needed for some way to manually make an item. Now if the "Random" stats turn out to be a grab-bag of known quantities (that is to say, you will always get agi and stam, and then 2 sets of green stats), then this might just entail making a "Raid-tier-1 pants-of-the-<random-stat-moniker>" item for each possibility.

StoicRoivaS · 10/30/10, 3:42 PM

Originally Posted by Saan

It's looking like Blizz might be adding items to the loot tables in raids with intelligently driven some random stats. That is to say, it's not going to be something like int and agi on a pair of pants, but more likely something usable. If this is going to be the case, it might be needed for some way to manually make an item. Now if the "Random" stats turn out to be a grab-bag of known quantities (that is to say, you will always get agi and stam, and then 2 sets of green stats), then this might just entail making a "Raid-tier-1 pants-of-the-<random-stat-moniker>" item for each possibility.

I would assume there's an exceptionally high chance of those <random encahnt> raid drops you're referring to behaving exactly like the outland <random enchant> items from the dungeon bags. Consider something like this item only bumped up to ilvl 359 and of epic quality. Now take out all suffixes that reference spell power, and all ones that have straight attack power on them, and add in maybe 1 or 2 other combinations (mastery, expertise, etc) and you have a fairly small list of what we're likely to see from these items. Enumerating them within the possible pieces of gear will probably end up being less work than a whole new functionality to create a new item, unless of course that functionality would otherwise be needed for some other reason.

• Aldriana · 10/30/10, 3:59 PM

It seems to me that random leather items are going to be extremely likely to be either agi/sta/x/x or int/sta/x/x, where the last two stats are chosen randomly from crit, hit, expertise, haste, and mastery. So there's probably 10 stat combinations per slot that we're in any way interested in. For a spreadsheet that would be annoying, but I don't see it being a major hurdle for this approach - just pop up a "suffixes" dialog whenever someone equips an random stat item.

Carridin · 10/30/10, 5:28 PM

Originally Posted by minimen456
I'd like to see where I can get those items. You know like craft, Badge of Justice, heroic dungeons etc

This would be valuable, but it's low-priority, since associating that data is somewhat tricky. There will be an ilevel filter in the interim, though.

Cant this be solved by putting in a link to the item on wowhead or something like that? Having location-info for where to obtain the item dont need to be inside the ShadowCraft itself. Especially if it adds unessecary complexity to the tool.

• Aldriana · 10/30/10, 5:34 PM

I think zone/boss filters are source information are good features to add at some point - I think they add a *lot* of value - but it's also not the immediate priority. We need the ability to do reasonable gear recommendations even in theory before we start worrying too much about filtering the results.

Ikutaba · 10/30/10, 7:33 PM

Originally Posted by Carridin

Cant this be solved by putting in a link to the item on wowhead or something like that? Having location-info for where to obtain the item dont need to be inside the ShadowCraft itself. Especially if it adds unessecary complexity to the tool.

It would be very simple to implement, and could just be a small 8pt text at the bottom of the item's info.

In broad terms, all you need is a table of "ZoneID"s and in the item info you simply assign an ID, trivial to implement, and a great help to newcomers.