I actually enjoyed and currently miss the spreadsheets. Although Shadowcraft is wonderful tool and big props to those that put it together, I personally would go back to speadsheets in an AR heartbeat. I think its because I get to see all of the numbers and make changes if desired.

Did we/anyone ever decide how to move forwards with the Mists iteration of the engine? Seems like sooner rather than later would be best, I'm at a point where I will need to know the interface.

Additionally, I have a followup to earlier thoughts. I really think there is a middle ground between exposing all the settings of the engine, and keeping it simple for those who don't need to know it. A single textfield can store commands and settings, and the engine can parse and handle them. This solution actual solves other issues like trouble we had with Hemorrhage weaving with the current Shadowcraft, since the command "hemo_interval: 25;" could be passed to the engine, and the engine could deal with it as needed. This means the UI doesn't have to be fixed or changed to handle the option, and it would just need to pull a new engine.

I've been meaning to update you guys on this, but haven't found the time to do so. I fully intend to work on the update and shape out the new models; but really, work has kept me busy so it's very possible that I won't be able to do so before release. If no other develpment has been made elsewhere, I guess we can simply update the python library and start producing some stat weights.

As for the inteface, I crossed a couple emails with Antiarc and he's interested in hosting and updating the site, so we can count on that. Note, however, that he isn't playing wow now, so any feedback needs to be directed to him either to his email or through the issues in the ShadowCraft-ui project in github.

About the hemorrhage thing: it could have defaulted to something else; I chose to default use_hemorrhage='never' in the settings module because, iirc, at the time it was written (namely before DS actual release) it wasn't a clear winner. In any case, I would rather have everything exposed, yes.

Thought I'd go ahead and post even though wheels look like they've already been set in motion. I'm all for the Shadowcraft approach and think that the only key flaw was not enough support from the people that could help. What Antiarc and everyone that worked on the code did was amazing and for the amount I can guess the site was used even more so.

Not only was Shadowcraft a great quick and easy tool for me to use but it allowed anyone that came to myself/other guildies chance to help them use a site that answered pretty much any of their questions.

I'm at a point myself where I can only offer so much help on the coding front but if it ever comes to a point where Antiarc can't host or doesn’t have the tools to be able to make the hosting easy, I'm sure I'll be able to work something out with Curse/MMOC/Myself to give you guys and gals that can code and spend the time to the stuff you need.

Hey folks -- nextormento pointed me at this thread, and I wanted to address a few points.

1) Hosting. I'm happy to host it indefinitely; the 300x250 ad in the corner actually makes the site slightly profitable, so money isn't a concern (specifically, it's making ~$60/month right now, and the VM costs me $40/month, so after taxes it shakes out about right), and systems maintenance is still very much within the scope of my day job, so I'm happy to keep at it. As noted, I'm not playing WoW these days and so it's not really on my radar, but I do want to continue to support it, and may end up playing MoP so I'd need it anyhow

Hosting failures lately have primarily been due to logfiles filling up the disk (it's on a tiny little Linode VM), which makes everything puke all over itself. Fixing it is trivial, and last time it happened I set up logrotate to fix it for me.

2) I'd like to improve how changes could be pushed to the engine. This could be as easy as a github hook that deploys the engine when the master repo is updated, and then giving a trusted few commit access to that repo. In that vein, I'm happy to give sysadmin access on that box to folks like nextormento or Aldriana, if so desired. My eventual goal would be for it to mostly "run itself", and where it doesn't, for there to be multiple people that can fix issues, so that there's no single point of failure (like yours truly).

3) Languages; the Shadowcraft UI is about 90% Javascript and 10% Ruby. Mongo was chosen because the document database structure effectively lets me work directly with remote JSON endpoints, except it's all cached and indexed (which is awesome), but it wouldn't be hard to replace it with something else. Ruby was chosen because I'm Really Dang Fast at writing Rails apps, and it's utterly amazing at parsing some of the markup we have to parse. But, the app isn't married to it, and we could replace the Ruby and Mongo parts with Python and SQLite without too much fuss. At the end of the day, there just needs to be:

a) A way to get a character from the armory
b) A way to get item, gem, and enchant info from the armory and WoWHead
c) A way to generate the JSON datafiles like http://shadowcraft.mmo-mumble.com/items-rogue.js

If all that's in place, literally the entire rest of the app is Javascript, and as such, should run anywhere. A "user-installable" version shouldn't be too hard, with two caveats:

First, the engine has to be spun up. Maybe this is something that we could do with a batch file (spin up engine, spin up a lightweight HTTP server like whatever the Python equivalent of Webrick is, open browser).

Second, the reforge service is off-site. Tini runs and hosts that on AppEngine, and there are quota and pricing concerns there. His reforger is written in Java, which, while portable, requires the user to have a JVM handy, and there are some special considerations in Shadowcraft about how it talks to the reforger. This would need to be solved, and probably isn't trivial.

It's important to note that Shadowcraft as a whole was designed as a set of interoperable parts, with the intent that the parts could be replaced. The engine doesn't care what the UI looks like, and the UI doesn't care what the backend server looks like, as long as all the interfaces are consistent.

If I get some time, I'd like to see what I can do about moving the app off of Rails and maybe into Sinatra (which is a *ton* easier to self-deploy) or even Flask (which I'd have to learn, but I'm not worried about that), and off of Mongo and into SQLite (again, for self-deployment purposes). This should hopefully address the "I can't run my own fork" issues. As an alternative, a VM image would be trivial to create, though I don't know of people are thrilled at the idea of running a whole virtualized Linux distro just to be able to tweak their gear.

Just from a point of professional pride, I kind of want to rewrite the Javascript parts of the app now that I actually have a better idea of what the hell I'm doing, which should mean better organization and more maintainable code. Hopefully, adding things like gear upgrade planning or weight tweaking wouldn't be that hard.

Are these changes we are talking about specific to the spreadsheet, or to change in the website as well?

I haven't read most of the comments, but these are things mainly for the website:

-Ability to manually alter stat and stat weights
-Rotation "guide" which will tell you if an ability is worth using with your current gear (i.e. rupture for combat -->a lot of rogues dropped as it became nominal)
-Ability to pick which foodbuff
-Test to see if using a foodbuff for hit/exp/haste/mast/crit would be better than using agility because of the reforging it would allow
-More rotation customization (I use this ability this many times, then do this, then this, etc) or at least an output of what rotation it is suggesting would result in the dps.
-The ability to change how often cooldowns are used. It seems there may be fights in MoP that we may want to hold our CD's for a short period to wait for a better time (this happens all the time actually). I would like to have a "Check here if you want to check cd's when not on normal CD schedule" that lets you enter the time in seconds between uses.
-Incorporate some kinda of Feint/other gcd abilites uptime check. "I use feint ever xxxx seconds" so we could see the effect on dps while using feint/other on cd.
-An expected energy capping meter. "We expect you to be energy capped for 5% of the fight (or 50 seconds of the 1000 second fight.



I think the gear/gem/enchant selection is where it needs to be.

I'm one of those "doesn't raid" rogues. Actually, the first "progression" raiding I ever did was Raid Finder DS. Most of the time, I tried a raid when it was a couple of patches - or more likely an expansion - behind. Having said that, BiS gear, for me, used to be whatever I could get through Heroic drops as well as token gear. (Now, I've just moved up a step to RF.) So, having the ability to block out gear by source would be an awesome feature for me. Otherwise, I really liked ShadowCraft and would like to continue having it available.

In order to do that, I'm willing to chip in any way I can to help with the development and maintenance of it. While I'm not familiar particularly with MongoDB, Python, or Ruby, I am an intermediate-to-advanced .NET programmer and have a significant amount of experience with databases, especially MSSQL. So, while I may not be able to write the code in the languages chosen, I am fairly good at picking up on and following the logic in a piece of code and believe I may be able to help during debugging and/or feature design and spec. Also, for the most part, relational databases are relational databases, so I'm willing to help in any way I can with the database maintenance and management.

Let me know if I can be of any help to keep this awesome tool alive in Mists. I just pre-ordered my Collector's Edition, so I'm definitely all-in for this expansion.

Hi there,

IMHO, Shadowcraft is a magnificent tool as is, and helped me a lot.

It could have been better by:
- Setting a haste cap (I was totally energy capped and it kept stacking haste ^^)
- Suggesting items regarding your current gear, your actual EP values, and various filter (quest only, dungeons only, etc.). Or... having a lootrank link with EP filled in
- Having a way to evaluate the DPS loss of maintaining recuperate and/or feint.

So nothing important/critical ^^

Not sure a haste cap is all that necessary; even with energy capping, increased attack speed still means more white damage, poison procs, mastery procs, etc--energy regen is only one facet of haste, albeit a decently important one.

Being able to manually adjust values for stats would be helpful. Wowreforger is a good tool, but not nearly as efficient as ShadowCraft for swapping gear in and out. Spine comes to mind as a fight that I spent some time using wowreforger instead of ShadowCraft, because the fight required different values for stats than a standard Patchwerk style fight.

As far as ShadowCraft vs a spreadsheet, I prefer a ShadowCraft approach because it's more intuitive. (and cooler looking!)

Thanks for the hard work you all put into this, I'll be happy with whatever you decide to do.

PvP analysis would be a feature I would love to have. Meaning PvP Power and resilience included, players as targets, selectecable buffs/debuffs for players. Analyzing burst sequences for example.