Thought I'd respond to the comment from Martha's husband here, since others might be interested.
I play in order to understand what's under the hood. When I played Dungeons and Dragons (aeons ago), it was slow, because you had to do all the lookups of the results of the dice rolls, but you knew what each decision meant. You knew how increasing or decreasing one stat would affect all the others. That's what I'm looking for here.
I play to watch the system in action ... what graphics are repeated, how combat is run, ... again, what's going on under the hood.
Since he asked, here are my characters
My main is a lvl 84 (soon to be 85) Draenei Ret Palladin
I also have a lvl 16 Human Demonology Warlock and a baby (lvl 2) Night Elf Priestess
I am currently focusing on getting that Pally up to lvl 85 to see what that opens up to me ... I actually might have to start playing in groups (Oh no!)
I belong to the Old Geezers Brigade guild and play on the Scryers server. It's a role-playing server (yes, I'm a care-bear) because like I keep saying ... I'm in it to understand.
Let me know what you think
A lot of the analysis tools--referred to as "theorycrafting"--are aimed at raiders primarily, but they can help more casual players.
ReplyDeleteThe comparison to mapping out D&D skills is helpful because it allows me to law out a principal difference between theorycrafting in D&D and other older games and WoW. Spreadsheets work well for static analysis--situations where every action is tested against a given stat. For instance if you have a save roll it relies on a base stat and maybe some conditional modifiers. Modeling that in a spreadsheet is easy. You can write a simple formula and plug in your specific values in order to get some expected outcome. WoW doesn't really work that way. As you are probably discovering on your paladin, many actions are conditional on past and current states. I don't play a paladin so I can't give specific examples but you can notice that certain actions only become available (or become more potent) after using one skill or another. Now in order to model that we need a program which is cognizant of past states in a meaningful way. Excel *can* do that but it is neither efficient nor easy (in fact, it is quite complicated).
In order to get around these limitations people developed tools which simulate encounters thousands of times and test changes in your stats (mastery, haste, etc.) and talents. The difference in damage output (usually measured in damage per second or DPS) for a given stat change is recorded for each simulation and averaged across all of the thousands of runs. What you have left is a decent guess for what a marginal increase n a stat might be. That's the basic idea. Some tools are advanced enough to allow plug and play with your armory profile. You can simply run a simulation and the program will output suggestions specific to your characters for each stat or talent.
In your case these tools are only helpful for a top level character. Lower level characters face much less challenging encounters in the main and don't actually have a wide variety of equivalent gear to choose from. As you level you usually want to pick up gear which is appropriate for your character (plate with strength on it for the paladin, cloth with intellect for the priest and warlock). Most of the time you can eyeball raw stat differences between a piece you currently wear and a new piece from a quest or monster without worry that you may be sacrificing haste for crit or something. There are other much more complex reasons why lower level item selection is mooted by game mechanics and I will explain those if you need me to. But for now just know that optimally choosing items at levels below 85 is basically a waste of your time.
Talents are another thing entirely. Talent choices have been simplified in the current expansion and will be further simplified in the next expansion (scheduled for next year sometime), but you still are given enough rope to hang yourself. Funny enough, the paladin is the easiest. You have three trees: ret, holy and prot. Only one of those trees is focused on damage dealing. the priest has shadow, holy and discipline; two of the three choices perform the same role: healing. The warlock is even worse. All three warlock trees deal damage! Choosing between them is a matter of preference.
Up till now I have been giving you the fish. I want to see your reaction to what I have said above before I try and find specific tools for you. That said, the best possible tool you can arm yourself with is general knowledge of the mechanics for the game and your class. If you basically understand what haste and mastery do for your class (ditto crit, hit and the base stats) you will be in a much better position to interpret the output of these tools. Likewise if you learn about individual spells and abilities you will understand the motivation behind talent point calculators. Otherwise the choices a tool like simulationcraft or RAWR will offer you for talents will be inscrutable.
ReplyDeleteI apologize if any of this is remedial. Just trying to establish the baseline.