All Things Mr. Robot!

I'm a MT of a small 10-man guild on Malorne that just recently got our first Nef kill. I've been tanking for a long time in this game and my guild depends on me for strats and figuring out solutions to problems. So a guildie of mine, to help me out, gave me a link to this website about gear optimization.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow

I checked it out, loaded my toon up to see that some "improvements" could be made. Interested as to why this service considered me subpar, I took a gander at it's stat weights for Protection Paladins:

Dodge 112.70
Parry 112.70
Mastery 100.00
Agility 68.83
Stamina 66.00
Strength 29.58
Armor 15.70
Expertise 10.00
Hit 5.00

Eh...? Dodge and Parry being higher than 100 is a bit odd, and also being higher than Mastery is surprising. And really? Agility over Stamina? I guess that's the main weakness of stat weights. I dunno, the suggestion to replace most of my gems with parry/mastery almost sounds like a good idea, I just really don't like it's choice of "BIS" trinkets. Both stamina and no Mirror? I love my Mirror! Just wanted to know what you guys think of it. Are these good suggestions?

In case anyone was curious:

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/usa/malorne/soltron#v1-z1-w0,3,1E8,1E81P43Ou8v40iE7d236S000,K9E021IFG-s1E8,9-h1,1G,y,CK-c11,K-vEdz,0,2

Mr. Robot accounts for diminishing returns, which is why the dodge/parry stat weights are so high. Those are the "base" stat weights before any DR is applied. Similarly with agility.

By the way, I helped them tune the stat weights. If you prefer a stam-heavy gemming strategy, bump stam up by 1 point to 67.

You did?! *groan* That means I probably should take the re-gemming suggestions seriously. Still, their trinket selection sucks. Thanks, Theck.

I don't think that Mr. Robot can quantify the on use cd of the Mirror. Obviously any fight with heavy predictable magic damage the mirror is going to be invaluable. Just because Mr. Robot cannot give a weight to magic resistance doesn't mean the stamina trinkets are necessarily better then the mirror.

Solare wrote:You did?! *groan* That means I probably should take the re-gemming suggestions seriously. Still, their trinket selection sucks. Thanks, Theck.

Well, at least their dodge/parry/mastery suggestions should be valid. The default stat weights will generally favor a mastery-heavy gearing strategy, which seems appropriate for the majority of the population (heroic 5-mans and normal mode raids).

For example, it's basically impossible to get it to suggest mastery/stam in both blue and yellow sockets. Why? Well, it has to break ties somehow, so if your mastery weight is higher than your stam weight (according to equal itemiation, so mastery=100, stam=66), it will prefer pure mastery in yellow and mast/stam in blue. If Stam>mast (i.e. stam=67, mastery=100), it'll shift to the other extreme of pure stamina in blue and mast/stam in yellow.

If you want to check this yourself, try editing the the stamina weight. If you set it to 66.666, it'll give you the mastery-heavy strategy, and if you set it to 66.667 you'll get the stam-heavy strategy. There's no way to represent 2/3 of 100 exactly with three decimal places, which is what you'd need to give mastery and stamina exactly equal weighting. They'd have to change the mastery stat to 99 and adjust everything else appropriately (I guess you could do this yourself if you wanted to test it). And even if you could, I'm not sure how it would handle the tie.

As with anything, use your own judgement. If you want stam-heavy instead of mastery-heavy, bump stam up to 67 and the recommendations should be in line with what you expect. You can always choose to use mast/stam gems in blue slots if you want a more balanced strategy. I don't generally use it for gem choices as a result, but I find it really valuable for balancing dodge/parry through reforging.

You'll also have to use your judgement on trinkets. It's obviously not weighting magic resistance at all, which is an oversight. I'd put it right up at top with the two stamina trinkets from this tier.

<edit> Just fooling around, if you set mastery=99 and stamina=66, it will suggest mast/stam in both yellow and blue slots and parry/stam in red. You can fool around with it on my profile if you want. That's basically where my gear setup is heading, I've just been lazy about replacing the gems in my older pieces.

Been on the site, used the provided info for my hunter. Increased my dps but more than anything, it made me realize that once you get a piece of gear to upgrade something, you might want to revisit reforging on your entire set.

I am a bit confused with the BiS gear it shows though. It lists the T11 shoulder as BiS for example but when you look at the detailed list the Heaving pauldrons are #1. I do have the Exclude world BoE items unticked! Also it does not list/like Agility mastery necks/rings!

Also where does it list reforging reccomendations? As far as i see it just shows what i've done

It's works out a best in slot set as well as straight up slot comparisons.
So for the set it's telling you the T11 are best, but on a 1 on 1 comparison for the shoulder slot the heaving shoulders work out better.

When you hit the optimize button the stuff that shows up in green boxes (both reforging and gems) are the reccomendations

Yeah so according to that i shouldn't reforge anymore... Good to know i was reforging correctly

Really? The Bile-o-Tron Nut is BiS?

You may like the way I've been modeling Protection stats more, but it assumes you're using a W39 rotation and doesn't account from expertise / bonus healing from seal glyphs. It's a .NET executable written in C#.




These are the weights it currently provides for my gear, against a purely physical boss hitting for an average of 40k/swing.
This is a purely physical boss hitting for an average of 30k/swing, for comparison.
Here is my armory.

I'll attach my most recent build below, it will also tell you your CTC and how much dodge/parry to reforge to get the most avoidance. I plan on converting it to PHP someday so it can be run from a webpage rather than an executable, or maybe an add-on so you can see it in real-time.

so going on the above sheet its actually worth reforging out of dodge/parry into mastery?

This is my toon. I'm just starting T11, (late started waiting for RL buddies) we're only 3/11 in atm.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/c ... s/advanced

Should I really be doing exactly what mr robot says to survive best? Also why does it favor Parry over dodge?

milali wrote:so going on the above sheet its actually worth reforging out of dodge/parry into mastery?

Sure. If you are aiming for combat table coverage, and for example you have 15.2% dodge, then it takes more than +3 dodge rating to yield the same +ctc as +1 mastery rating. If you can reforge dodge into mastery 1-for-1, you can more than triple your increase in table coverage.

You can read these numbers straight from the table where I calculated them. No optimizer software required:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31627#p659872

Mastery is just flat better than parry and dodge for tankadins. Reforging all your gear to mastery gives you an enormous survivability boost that you'd have to be uninformed not to take. I'd say it's more important than enchanting.

The optimizer presumably favors parry over dodge for you because you have a whole lot of dodge on your gear. Dodge and parry have diminishing returns, meaning the more of each you have, the less you get per point of rating. However, they don't care how much the other one has. As an example, you you have no dodge and 30% parry, one point of parry rating is going to give you much less avoidance than one dodge rating. It's not an enormous difference for normal gear, however. Ignoring this altogether might cost you a fraction of a percent of avoidance.

theothersteve7 wrote:Mastery is just flat better than parry and dodge for tankadins. Reforging all your gear to mastery gives you an enormous survivability boost that you'd have to be uninformed not to take. I'd say it's more important than enchanting.

The optimizer presumably favors parry over dodge for you because you have a whole lot of dodge on your gear. Dodge and parry have diminishing returns, meaning the more of each you have, the less you get per point of rating. However, they don't care how much the other one has. As an example, you you have no dodge and 30% parry, one point of parry rating is going to give you much less avoidance than one dodge rating. It's not an enormous difference for normal gear, however. Ignoring this altogether might cost you a fraction of a percent of avoidance.

It favors parry because of DR yes, But its because it also knows you will be getting raid buffs. If you look at the "show stats" tab - there is "unbuffed" and "raid buffed". You will see that you get more buffs to your dodge than your parry so you want to be a bit more parry heavy in the reforging to compensate for the DR.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/usa/stormreaver/nyrin

So I've been using Ask Mr Robot for my reforging, and I noticed that it says the Heroic Porcelain Crab (from H ToT, 346 blue) is best in slot, even at heroic raid level. How does it come to that conclusion?

Quick guess being the massive mastery proc.

Flex wrote:Quick guess being the massive mastery proc.

you would be correct

Does the optimiser account for block capping at all?

While changing stamina to 67 as Theck suggested makes the geming / enchanting more stamina heavy, a third option would be to leave stamina at 66 and drop mastery to 99 (from 100). This ends up in proposing mastery/stam gems all around for blue and yellow sockets for those who prefer the middle of the road

KysenMurrin wrote:Does the optimiser account for block capping at all?

I can't imagine it does, since a lot of the mastery from the porcelain crab proc would be completely wasted if it's used by anyone that gears properly.

Can anyone explain to me how we should balance parry and dodge? After optimising my gear, Mr Robot's leaves me at have 13.47% parry and 12.6% dodge after raid buffs. I thought we were aiming for equal dodge and parry for diminishing returns?

Looking at my unoptimised gear, it seems from Mr Robot that raid buffs add 2% dodge and 1.14% parry. So I infer I should aim for unbuffed 10.6% dodge and 12.33% parry.

This is rather different from the rules of thumb I thought I had picked up from this forum - I thought it was go for about 1% higher parry unbuffed, rather than 1.73%.

I'm confused and would rather be able to work this out myself, rather than rely on Mr Robot (although it is a pretty amazing tool), if only to save on reforging costs.

econ21 wrote:Can anyone explain to me how we should balance parry and dodge? After optimising my gear, Mr Robot's leaves me at have 13.47% parry and 12.6% dodge after raid buffs. I thought we were aiming for equal dodge and parry for diminishing returns?

Looking at my unoptimised gear, it seems from Mr Robot that raid buffs add 2% dodge and 1.14% parry. So I infer I should aim for unbuffed 10.6% dodge and 12.33% parry.

This is rather different from the rules of thumb I thought I had picked up from this forum - I thought it was go for about 1% higher parry unbuffed, rather than 1.73%.

I'm confused and would rather be able to work this out myself, rather than rely on Mr Robot (although it is a pretty amazing tool), if only to save on reforging costs.

It's only equal dodge and parry after 4.2 when the baseline amount of both not subject to diminishing returns will be equal.

Until then, even raid buffed, you need different amounts of both to be at the same places on the diminishing returns curves.

Take a look at the Tabular Mastery / Avoidance Equivalence Tables I created a few weeks back. I did this to "unroll" the math so-to-speak, making it possible for anyone to see the data and figure out equivalent points themselves.

The key point is that only 3.9705% of your dodge is not subject to diminishing returns, while 5% of your parry is not. Thus when you are at equal points on the DR curves you will have more parry than dodge.

You can see this on my tables. On the dodge table, at 12.6% dodge it takes 2.811 additional dodge rating to gain the same amount of combat table coverage as one mastery rating. On the parry table, at 13.6% parry it takes about the same (2.808 additional parry rating) to gain the same amount of combat table coverage as one mastery rating. Even though you have a full percent more parry, you are at the same place on each DR curve.

If you were balanced to be even, though, at 12.6% parry it takes only 2.712 additional parry rating for the same CTC as 1 mastery rating. Clearly at this point someone on the parry DR curve isn't as far along, because they are gaining more value per point.

In short: raid buffed, ~1.03% more parry than dodge is optimal.

A friend showed the site askmrrobot.com to me a little while back and I noticed that for prot pallies the stat weightings are off, so its not very accurate. It shows dodge and parry being above mastery for reducing damage, so it tells me that a lot of my gear is sub optimal. It seems you can adjust the stat weights though, but I have no idea what to set them to. Does anyone know what they should be?

Also, does anyone know if the stat weightings it uses for ret are correct? It'd be awesome to be able to use it to optimize my dps spec as well.