Saturday, June 28, 2008

Rawr: Dr00d gear optimization utility


While googling around to find a list of WoW enchants in XML, I stumbled over Rawr, an application that is designed to help optimize your gear. Here's the description from the site.

Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for Bears, Cats, Moonkin, Warlocks, Mages, Retadins, ProtWarriors, and Healadins, in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It is currently in public beta testing, and is being developed by by Astrylian, of US-Eonar. Rawr has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to find.


It's a Windows app, written in C# for .NET, and at least marginally works in OS X using the Mono project (and, therefore, I assume, Linux). I've played around with it a bit, but have yet to be particularly impressed with its "Moonkin model". The upgrades seem to be all about upping damage without any real consideration for anything else. They should call the model "Clothkin," because that's what you end up with for upgrades. Oh well.

Still, it remains in development, is open source, and I suppose I could get in there and write a Panzerkin model... Might be worth your checking it out, so I thought I'd pass it along!

2 comments:

Orishas said...

People Rawr to optimizing their gear are doing just that - min-maxing their gear for a specific role. Its a PVE-based utility, simply because its impossible to model the mix between survivability and damage that a pvper needs to look at. A moonkin's role in raid PVE is that of ranged DPS, that is what rawr models, and currently, apart from tier gear, most spell damage gear comes from cloth.

How exactly would you do a 'panzerkin' model? How would it know what the perfect balance of defense and offense is, that is for indivuduals to decide based on their situation, not something program can decide.

ruffin said...

Orishas --

I think it should be relatively easy to create a real Panzerkin model -- or even just a regular moonkin one. I believe someone had already started working on one when I viewed Rawr the first time, actually, but didn't bump into the model until later. I've not yet tried it.

To oversimplify a bit, if you were going against a boss that required fire resist and prot, it'd be possible to write a formula that maximized mitigation against those attacks while maximizing damage, right? Now you're min/maxing, but maxing a combination of two goals, DPS and fire mitigation. For Moonkin, I think all you've got to do is to make some sort of formula to balance all-around damage mitigation with DPS (and some degree of manap5, etc). That moonkin armor bonus is there for some reason, isn't it? I've seen youtubes of 'kin tanking near endgame, but still dealing some dmg. I wouldn't say that ranged DPS is a 'kin's only role in 5 mans or raids.

I guess at its lowest level, the gripe is that there's not even a checkbox to say, "Give me the best DPS with leather armor." Allowing me to dodge becoming a clothkin would be a good start. If all you're going to give me is maxed out DPS, well, I'm not yet impressed. And if the tool's only for [end-game] raids, it's wasting a lot of time on lower level gear. (But it is open source, so if I don't like it...)

Is it as one-dimensional for bears? That is, does Rawr suggest gear based only on damage mitigation?

Thanks for commenting. Hope I understood your critique properly.