I am still summarizing my thoughts as requested by the opening post, but in the mean time there is something I'd like to ask directly.

Aldriana, you already touched that topic a bit in your last post, but are you generally happy with the direction that ShadowCraft is heading? What I have in mind that unlike previous spreadsheets, the tool is so easy to use that it's popularity is rising massively and based on my observations of MMO-Champion forums, it became a de facto standard tool for all rogues out there.

I have to admit that I have a bit mixed feelings about that. Sure, it's great to contribute to the community and have such a great success. But at the same time, I am a bit worried that "just ShadowCraft it, OP" reply to any question became a bit too common and some people just blindly follow any results ShadowCraft shows them. This creates a whole new generation of rogues that take ShadowCraft for granted - in terms of both accuracy and availability. The latter is another concern that crossed my mind. We all currently rely on Antiarc's server and as far as I am aware, he is not getting anything back for hosting the service. So with increasing ShadowCraft popularity, what if he simply stops providing all this bandwidth at some point?

I don't think popularity is a bad thing, either in general or in this specific case. If ShadowCraft (or another theorycrafting tool) could get to the point that its easy-to-use and reliable enough for every rogue to use it for answers, that would be nothing but good. I don't think we're particularly close to that, but I think its a good goal to aspire to.

In terms of hosting: my original idea was actually to run it on Google App Engine, which provides free hosting up to some pretty reasonable limit; I'd have to talk to Antiarc to see how we compare to that limit. However, Antiarc indicated that he had free hosting he was willing to use, hence why we're running on his server. Given that he seems less willing/able to pay attention to it these days, we probably do want to find another hosting solution for Mists. This may or may not require changing the architecture; I don't know if GAE could run the current frontend, for instance.

All in all I think ShadowCraft was a positive step relative to the spreadsheets of old, but there are definitely still issues to be solved. The gear recommendation issue is one of them, but there are certainly other areas where we could improve.

That said: our ability to improve is ultimately a function of how much time and energy people are willing to put into it. If there are lots of people interested in helping, there are many useful features that we could build. But if interested is more where it was for Cata, where the bulk of the initial work was done by half a dozen people and only about 2 of them have paid attention to continued maintenance... we may need to be less ambitious.

I'm one of those users who could happily work through the spreadsheet logic, but for whom Python is a step to far. I really enjoyed working through the spreadsheet logic, and customising it to my needs.

Despite this I have really loved having Shadowcraft to call on, and think it is a major step forwards over the spreadsheets. I love the UI, the simplicity of maintenance, and the ability to work through the what-ifs of each combination of gear. The graph to quickly flip back to previous gear configs is a great plus.

On terms of added features, it would be great if:
- as a build on to a BiS list, we could see the upgrade potential of items across multiple slots. Similar to the 'Direct Upgrades' feature of Rawr.
- the ability to work through combinations of gear; so you can mark various sets of 'owned gear' and the tool would help you work out the best combinations.
- the ability to look at position, so you could say turn 'boss is parrying you' on or off.

The only downside of Shadowcraft is linked to my point about simplicity and accessibility. I've come to rely on it to the point that I've stopped researching my own theorycrafting, or trying to glean meaning from the spreadsheets. It has in essence encouraged me to be a 'lazy' rogue. However, I think that that is my problem to sort, not that of the excellent work that you've all done on Shadowcraft...

Would love to see where I go for patch notes however, so I can still read up on what the latest tricks for squeezing that last bit of dps out is...!

I'm not sure yet how much time I'll have to spare for our tools this xpack: I'm sure I'll keep an eye on it and try to help out as much as possible but my contributions may come in slowly. Most of what I could input in this thread has already been discussed so I'll only elaborate on short term decisions that need to be made sooner rather than later.

As a personal preference I'd like to have a tool completely written in Java. But I don't necesarily see that as any improvement from what we have. Especifically the need for an IDE might throw some developers back and, at this point, we may need some hands if we want to keep the standard of current ShadowCraft. Somewhere in Github I have the engine ported to Java (updated to 4.1 or 4.2, I can't remember), so we have something to build up from in any of the two languajes.

In any case, be it in Java or Python, I think we need to find those people that are able and willing to disect a spreadhseet and teach them how to run something (at least the scripts), and how the architecture of the project works. See, when I started helping the ShadowCraft crew, I barely knew anything about OOP programing, but I understood the spreadsheets and that was enough to get started: first simply following the syntax to emulate some formulas, then learning how to run the thing and get some feedback, and eventually reading some basic stuff about the languaje. Point in case: if you were able to read the old spreadsheets, you'll really have an even easier time reading through ShadowCraft.

As for the platform, I still think the web-app is the best approach. But in reality, if the only person that is able to set up the front-end is Antiarc, then we might need to look elsewhere. Currently ShadowCraft comes with an offline UI (very primitive, mind you) that only needs some Python libraries to be installed; it might be interesting to persue that option as an alternative for times -like today- when the web app doesn't work. I personaly have next to zero knowledge about writing frontends though, so I'll leave that to more experienced people.

The biggest thing I would like to see in a theory crafting tool is a CD planner. We've generally had some basic rules about CD usage to work with a tool to actually experiment with would be incredibly useful.

Additionally, since I think this is the right place, I'm throwing my hat in the ring so to speak on helping with Shadowcraft or a similar community developed tool in MOP.

I carried this discussion over the official US forums, to try and get a few more opinions on the matter.

Overall everything seemed rather predictable. The biggest concerns seemed to be about stability, keeping up with changes/known bugs (without having to go to this forum), and customizing the way the reforger works (custom EPs and custom caps). A couple people were excited about the idea of a mobile version, which may be my fault, but I can't see it ever being a serious goal and I'm just mentioning it again for the sake of being complete.

I still think we can accomplish more end user control without being overbearing, or confusing those less interested. Things like parryable, bonus haste effects (Sinestra), and setting the target's level (& armor, potentially) shouldn't be terribly difficult to add to a gui.

Another thought of mine. What about a set series of files, hosted publicly and away from the engine that has a list of the current known bugs, and the currently accepted BiS for each spec. Apps could then pull that info and use it however they want without having to hardcode this info into the engine or client/server somewhere. The issue is that it probably has to be a static URI, and there would probably have to be some sort of shared access. The alternative would be parsing the first post for each thread, but that seems messy.

I totally second that, seeing how several EP values might change considering that a few fights in Cataclysm had either a haste buff (Sinestra, Madness, Alysrazor) or increased/decreased the value of soft-capping expertise, which then might lead to a complete reforge. Unfortunately, for haste buffs being evaluated properly, one would have to somehow take energy capping into consideration in such a tool, which as far as I can guess is still pretty much impossible?

I honestly don't think this is as relevant as one would assume from face value. We have the means to generate a BiS list, albeit reliant on a bit of trial and error; it is a one time process. From there, regardless of how transitory gearing may appear to be, we are all working with a predefined shopping list. I feel like knowing when X may be better than Y in my current set even though Y is BiS for a full BiS set is a fringe scenario that isn't as practically helpful as knowing the full BiS set to begin with.

While, in the sense of having a feature rich tool, this is something to consider, I would maybe take the design approach of "these are the ULTIMATE upgrade recommendations" - rather than worry about how to construct an interface showing every single sidegrade along the way.

One thing I've learned while working on spreadsheets over the years is that to a surprisingly large extent, knowing what's best isn't actually enough. For a variety of reasons, people want to know the viability of alternatives. When you're progressing through Dragon Soul, knowing that the Legendaries are BIS doesn't help you much, as you can't necessarily get them until you've already done a fair portion of the instance. And knowing that Heroic No'kaled is the best alternative doesn't really help either, as if you're still in progression mode you're clearly not killing Heroic Madness. So there's value in knowing how good each of the various alternatives is.

Moreover, some rogues don't ever clear Heroics at all. Some don't even clear normal mode. Some guilds use DKP so its important to know how large an upgrade things are and not just what's ultimately best - the journey is as important as the destination.

And this applies to other aspects of such tools as well. In my TBC and Wrath spreadsheets, I did a lot of work to allow the spreadsheet to figure out the optimal cycle for people, so all you had to do was enter gear to get recommendations. And there's value in that. But the ability to say "how big a DPS loss is it to drop rupture from my rotation" or "how large is the gap between high-rupture and low-rupture" is also valuable.

Hence, while ShadowCraft in its current form is certainly adequate for some use cases, I think think their would be value in having something similar to what spreadsheets had - a column where you can see exactly what your available upgrades are, and how much benefit they provide, and have the ability to filter that list by what content is available to you. Is it as important as having good underlying modeling? Maybe not. But it is a feature that I miss in ShadowCraft.

I can definitely see the merits in all of what you're saying. In hindsight, I guess I was actually pretty reliant on the spreadsheet that sp00n had been maintaining with all of the gear options clearly laid out, then manually pulling EP's from ShadowCraft to plug back into the spreadsheet. An integrated list like that would have been quite convenient.

At this point into (or even post) progression, the spreadsheet doesn't really matter anymore, since now we're just fishing for specific drops to fill in BiS gaps. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its use in the big picture. I'll concede, I was being a bit shortsighted. Gear recommendations and filtering options would be a pretty neat addition.

That being said, one thing I'd personally like to see more of is flexibility with cycles (like your example of high-rupture vs low-rupture). I realize that this has been discussed, that most users likely lack the technical aptitude to mess around with the back end (and that it's not likely going to prove useful anyway). What if a scripting language was developed within the engine to do the modeling, give us the basic options (rupture? when to use rvs? etc) hard coded through the main interface, but then give us a sandbox to enter our own behaviors into? Not sure how useful it would be, but it would certainly be fun to play with.

Its interesting to note that some of these things are actually supported in the ShadowCraft backend (and to some extent in the frontend as well). For instance, there are some cycle options - a limited number of them to be sure, but they do exist. And its sort of in the nature of a calculator that supporting arbitrary cycles is hard - while Anticipation might make it a little bit easier, I seriously doubt we're going to get to a point where you can specify your own cycle rules and expect ShadowCraft to sort out the implications.

Similarly, damage breakdowns are already done by the backend; all that's really missing on that front is UI to display it.

Ultimately, though, I think the next big step forward for calculators like ShadowCraft will be to weaken the restrictions on the sort of fight they model. As noted, ShadowCraft, like most tools that have ever been written, focuses on the Patchwerk case; but how many Patchwerk type fights do we really have these days? Ultraxion is the only fight in Dragon Soul that even comes particularly close, and even there the interruptions do have an effect on your cycle. Real fights have adds to Blade Flurry or FoK and interruptions and target switches, and while modeling such things is significantly harder than the Patchwerk case, I think its becoming increasingly important and would like to see some work done on supporting such fights. And it probably is more feasible than arbitrary cycle modeling.