I wanted to share some tips for the Classic optimizer that will help you get the most use out of it. This isn’t a starter tutorial (you can find that here), it’s more about the nuances you’ll come across for different roles and specs.

Specs

Classic does not have explicit “specs” like retail WoW — you can pick whatever talents you want and play however you want with those talents. But we found that it is really convenient to keep the idea of a “spec” on the classic optimizer. Here’s how it works for Classic:

Detecting Spec

When you import a character from the addon, we inspect your talents to take a guess at which spec you are probably using. Most of the time this will work just fine, but maybe you are using an unusual build — no problem! Use the spec picker up by your character name and the “Import from Addon” button to change to the spec you want to optimize, and you’re good to go.

Talents

The first time you import your character, we’ll automatically populate your talents for you with that spec. After that, you’ll have to manually adjust your talents to be what you want them to be. This works exactly the same as the optimizer for retail WoW. We do it like this for a couple of reasons:

1. You have the flexibility to pick any talents you want for whatever spec you want, e.g. you could pick Fury talents for your Protection warrior spec.
2. The optimizer allows you to create multiple setups per spec. It is very common that you will want to save different talents with each setup. If we were to automatically overwrite your talents whenever you import… it would get very annoying very quickly.

So bottom line: keep your talents up to date on each of your setups! The optimizer adjusts for every talent in the game.

Spec Is Important

The spec you have chosen determines how the optimizer behaves. For example if you are a paladin, choosing Holy will optimize you as a healer, Protection as a tank, and Retribution as a damage dealer. It doesn’t matter what talents you pick — you could choose Holy spec and then select all Retribution talents… we’re still going to assume you are a healer. This approach gives you maximum flexibility to use any build that you want for any role.

Warriors are Snowflakes

Warriors in Classic are super special. For example, a lot of people like to tank while dual-wielding with a mostly Fury build. We can handle all of these builds through the use of spec and the toughness slider on the strategy picker (more about the toughness slider below).

1. Arms spec: we will assume that you are using a 2-handed weapon exclusively.
2. Fury spec: we will assume that you are either dual-wielding or using a 2-handed weapon, but not using a shield.
3. Protection spec: we will assume that you are using a 1-hander and a shield.

Now that we know what kind of weapons you want to use, the toughness slider tells us how you want to play:

1. Arms and Fury spec: if the toughness slider is all the way to the left (DPS), we assume you are a pure DPS; any other value we assume you are tanking
2. Protection spec: we assume you are always tanking

Whether you are tanking or not has an impact on things like your chance to be parried and rage generation. The toughness slider controls how much emphasis you want on defensive vs. offensive gear. You can do really offensive or really defensive builds with any warrior spec.

Outlaw Rogues

In WoW Classic they were called Combat rogues. But we left the labeling as Outlaw… because it sounds cooler.

Arcane Mages

Yeah so… not really a thing, but you can use the spec as you see fit. If you have the Improved Fireball talent, the optimizer will score/play like a fire mage. If you don’t, it will score/play like a frost mage.

Gearing Strategy Picker

The gearing strategy picker is the first option in the Best in Bags and Best in Slot feature, above your talents. This controls how the optimizer will behave for your character. At launch, there is only one strategy per spec. It is likely that this won’t change — we are going to focus more on customization options than creating multiple strategies. We think that makes more sense for how Classic plays.

There is one important option in the strategy picker though:

Toughness Slider

For tank specs and all Warrior specs, you will see a toughness slider under the strategy when you open the picker. You can use this to control how much you care about offense vs. defense.

This slider is completely relative — there is no “correct” place to put it. Move it up or down until you get a blend that you like. We default it to the toughest setting for tank specs, but that is not meant to be a suggestion. Please change it to what you prefer!

Healer Customization

Ranking gear for healers has always been tricky. For Classic we’re using an old but popular and effective approach: you tell us roughly what your spell usage breakdown looks like, then we choose gear for you that works well with that play style.

We have some reasonable defaults for each spec, but you should customize as you see fit! Your raid team may require that you play differently, or you may just prefer a different approach. To change your spell usage:

1. Click on the “Customize” tab next to the Set Up tab for Best in Bags or Best in Slot, or click the Customize Strategy button below the Find Best in Bags or Find Best in Slot button in the Set Up step.
   
2. Check Customize your healing spell breakdown (shown below)
3. You will see a default set of rules. Remove them and add new ones as you see fit. Note that you can re-order the rules, but it has no impact on the optimization — it is purely for your own organizational purposes.

Easy as that! Then optimize and see your gear suggestions change to match your spell breakdown.

Note that we have also included decurse spells in the list. If you tend to spend a lot of mana on decursing, add it to the list and that will be factored into the calculation.

Unusual Best in Slot

You will notice that our algorithms pick about 95% of the same gear as you’ll see on pretty much any Classic Best in Slot guide out there. But every now and again you’ll see a particular item that the optimizer seems to like more than what you are used to seeing.

Most people’s first reaction is that it must be a bug. Feel free to tell us about such cases and we’ll look into it! But let’s say that we look at it and there is no bug — the stats look correct, estimates of any special effects look correct, and so on. Now that begs the question:

If this mathematical formula picks 95% of the same gear as everyone else, but then picks this one item that is different… maybe that different item is better than everyone thinks? I know… blasphemy! There is no room for new thinking in Classic! But it would be kind of weird for a purely mathematical system to be selectively incorrect… you’d expect it to be systematically incorrect.

Anyway — just some food for thought. Let us know if any anomalies that you find on our forums, but also keep an open mind!

For nearly a decade, we’ve offered premium features to help you gear up in Warcraft. Best in Bags was first launched with Cataclysm to help reforge your gear.  Even though we’d been personally playing the game since Vanilla, our site wasn’t around then, so we didn’t have anything to revive for Classic’s relaunch.

We also didn’t think there would be a need for a gear optimizer with Classic – everyone already played it, gear was simpler (or so we thought), and we figured there would be enough information for people to make decisions.

We were wrong.

Shortly after Classic launched, it became clear that gear wasn’t as simple as it seemed and Best in Bags would actually be pretty darn handy. So we decided to make it for Classic.

Creating Classic AMR – the process

Our entire company is just 3 people: a developer (Yellowfive), a designer and theorycrafter (Swol), and me (Zoopercat), a researcher and data guru. We already work full-time on retail Warcraft, so supporting Classic was going to be a massive undertaking.

It seems easy to support Classic – just add in a few stats like Spirit and Hit, remove Azerite, change the talents, etc. It’s never that simple though, is it? Of course we already knew it wouldn’t be easy, but the devil is in the details.

For example, when you load your character, we need to know your ‘spec’ in order to apply the right optimization. Retail WoW has specs built right into the game, Classic does not. Instead, we have to infer your build for Classic by identifying key talent choices. Incorporating those assumptions into the optimizer wasn’t enough – what if someone builds differently than the standard builds? To accommodate everyone, we had to add a way to customize your ‘spec’ in the Classic optimizer.

Situations like this were so common that half way through creating Classic AMR, we ripped so much code apart that only the most basic building blocks from our Retail code were useful. It was like our remodel project required taking the house down to the studs.

But taking something down to the bare bones is often a good thing. Sure it took us way more time than we wanted, we cursed a little along the way (ok, a lot), but the end result is worth it.

Classic AMR pricing

As a consumer, I often wonder how companies come up with their pricing on products. Is the more expensive product worth it or just marketing hype? Is a product more expensive because it costs more to be climate-friendly? How much of the cost of this product goes into marketing and advertising?

At Ask Mr. Robot, we aren’t selling grass-fed beef or Gucci belts, our website is way more serious than that 😉 I thought it would be interesting to share how we price our premium features.

Our current subscription price

We launched premium in 2011 for $12 a year. That price has never changed and we’re proud of that. It has taken a lot of work over the years to keep the price low.

As a recent example, when Corruption was introduced in Patch 8.3, the number of combinations of gear in your bags exploded. It wouldn’t have been a problem if we could have just equipped all of the best items, but then you’d be at 150 Corruption. More combinations = more computing power = increased server costs.

In order to not pass that extra cost onto you, we had to get clever with our optimization algorithm and make it even faster. A faster algorithm means we could keep the computing power at a stable level and not increase costs.

This type of thing happens every expansion. That’s part of our job and your $12 subscription pays for our ongoing work.

Pricing for Classic AMR

Classic will have ongoing work as each phase is released, so our first instinct was to create a second subscription for Classic.

However, in a survey of over 2,000 Classic players, we found most of them were also playing Retail. With this information, separating the site into two subscriptions seemed less than ideal. Doubling the price didn’t seem right either – we don’t have double the ongoing work.

What we did have is a lot of up-front work from creating Classic AMR. That’s a one-time thing, so a one-time payment mades a lot of sense: a one-time Classic Upgrade payment.

We set the price at $10 because it’s our best guess at covering the cost of our work to create Classic AMR. It’s possible we go in-the-hole, but I hope not. It’s also possible we end up with extra money which will allow us to add more Classic features.

Meanwhile, the subscription price stays at $12 which covers both Retail and Classic.

Questions about how the payments work?

First, I’d like to point out that everyone gets a 1-week free trial for Classic (no credit card required). Once you decide to upgrade, here are some answers to questions that might come up:

• Using Classic requires an active premium subscription and the $10 one-time Classic Upgrade payment. The active subscription can be annual, monthly, a guild sub, or a gift code that you redeemed.
• The premium subscription can be purchased at the annual price of $12 a year, or you can pay monthly at $2 each month.
• If you currently have a premium subscription, you just need to pay for the one-time Classic Upgrade of $10.
• If you have no subscription, you will need to buy one (for either $12 a year, or $2 a month) and the $10 one-time Classic Upgrade.
  • If you buy the annual subscription, you will be charged $22 now ($12 + $10), and then only $12 next year for the annual subscription.
  • If you buy the monthly subscription, you will be charged $12 now ($2 + $10), and then only $2 next month for the monthly subscription.
• Once you pay for the $10 Classic Upgrade, you get it forever. So even if you cancel and stop playing, when you come back and subscribe again, you will still have Classic access. You will NOT need to pay for the Classic Upgrade again.

Here’s a screenshot of what your account billing page would look like if you had a monthly subscription and paid for the Classic Upgrade.

The Upgrade finder for WoW Classic works just like the one for Retail.

This tool  gives  gear suggestions for any content you want to do. For example, Mr. Robot will give you advice on what bosses drop the best loot for you.

I have a super short video from Retail, but it still does a good job of showing you the different searches and filtering. The video has no sound (no, your speakers aren’t broken). If you don’t want to view the video, I have screenshots below, so keep reading.

How to setup the Upgrade search

First, you’ll need to pick the Best in Bags setup that you want to do the search for. This is required because Mr. Robot needs to know what setup you want to consider when evaluating gear.

The screenshot above shows that Frost is selected. If I want to search for items for my Fire spec, I select one of those that I’ve set up. I also selected to find upgrades from Rep Vendors.

Search through the list with advanced filtering

You can also search through this list to narrow it down.

• Search by stat or stats by typing the stat into the search box (ex: Spirit)
• By slot (type Trinket or Legs into the search box.
• Source (name of boss, for example)
• Set: type set into the search box to find items from a set

Dailies, assaults, visions, emissaries, islands, missions, dungeons, raids… dang dude, that’s a lot of stuff. So what do you really have to be doing to keep your character caught up and raid ready?

This little guide is not targeted at people who have time to play WoW for 4+ hours every day. This is targeted at the WoW player who wants to raid or do Mythic+ two or three times a week with their team, and that’s it! (Or maybe you want to play more, but life gets in the way.) We will also target this at players who aren’t interested in putting in a lot of time to get cosmetic rewards such as mounts. We’ll order it by activity, and do an analysis of the time vs. reward for each.

(There’s also an infographic summarizing everything at the end of the post).

Assaults

Each week there is a “major” assault that you can do which gives you a cache that has a Vessel key in it for a Horrific vision.

You can also do two “minor” assaults. The minor assault resets on Tuesday and then again on Friday night, rewarding 5,500 Coalescing Visions each. The location will rotate between Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and will show up on your map.

These are worth doing. They don’t take very long, you don’t need to do them every day, and they essentially reward 2 keys (a key from the Major and a total of 11k Coalescing Visions from the minor).

Minor Visions

Each day, there is a “minor” horrific vision that you can do. The first week it was in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. It shows up on your map, and looks like a pillar with a quest-giver near it with a blue/daily quest to go inside and do a simple objective like kill enemies, rescue people, or close portals. You can do this once a day and it rewards 1000  1500 Coalescing Visions, 3000 for the first one each week.

These are worth doing. It usually takes less than 5 minutes.

Daily Quests

Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms have new daily quests tied to two new factions. These daily quests also reward 50 250 Coalescing Visions each and a good chunk of War Resources. If you do every daily quest for both zones every day, you’ll get around 14,000 Coalescing Visions per week, enough for an extra key.

You will also average around 3500 reputation with each faction per week if you do every assault and every daily quest. This means that it will take you roughly 5 weeks to reach revered with each faction. (Note that some people could certainly do it faster in calendar time, but it will require many hours of extra farming of the zones — out of the scope for the type of player we’re talking about in this guide.)

The only interesting rewards (in terms of raiding) for reaching revered are rank 3 of the essences Breath of the Dying, Spirit of Preservation, and Touch of the Everlasting.

A person who is pretty efficient about doing daily quests can finish them in around 20-30 minutes for each zone, depending on the quests that day. So plan around 40-60 minutes per day, or 4.5-7 hours per week. To put this in terms of rewards:

1. 12-18 hours of total play to go from Rank 2 to Rank 3 of Breath of the Dying
2. Another 12-18 hours of total play to go from Rank 2 to Rank 3 of Spirit of Preservation and Touch of the Everlasting
3. 3-5 hours of total play to earn enough Coalescing Vision to do an extra Horrific Vision

Without doing these dailies, you can earn enough Coalescing Visions to do 3.3 Horrific Visions each week for a total of about 2.5 hours of play… so roughly 45 minutes of play to earn enough to do a vision via assaults and the very short “minor” vision quest… having to spend 3-5 hours to get another vision is not a great use of your time.

12-18 hours of total play time to upgrade an essence from Rank 2 to Rank 3 is also not a great use of your time. At best, you are looking at a 1-2% increase in DPS or tanking/healing performance, given that you will have other good Rank 3 essence alternatives.

Dailies are not worth doing. It’s that simple — just skip them entirely if you don’t feel like doing them! You will be able to keep up just fine without them.

Other Stuff

Some other activities are still worth your time:

1. Emissary quests that reward artifact power
2. Emissary quests that reward gear that is an upgrade, or a higher item level than something you already have
3. The weekly island quest for artifact power and the extra table mission
4. Heroic Darkshore warfront — do it once for the quest each time it is available
5. Table missions
6. New world bosses (available as of Jan 21st)

Any other emissary or world quests are not a good use of time. Doing islands other than for the weekly reward is also a bad use of your time.

This is a lot of stuff… so if you want to save more of your time, skip islands entirely, and skip any emissary quest that is not artifact power.

Horrific Visions

These are important and you should do them!

This is a new activity in 8.3, can’t miss them if you do the main story quests. There has been quite a bit of “stress” about these after the first week because the number of times you can attempt them is limited by how many Coalescing Visions you get. If you fail, you don’t get any reward, and you just wasted 10,000 of your Coalescing Visions. But as of January 22nd, Blizzard increased the amount of CV you earn from various activities so failing isn’t nearly as punishing.

If you do the activities above without dailies, you will end up with essentially 33,000 Coalescing Visions per week (23k from activities and 1 key from the major assault). That’s 3 keys a week and that feels much more flexible. If you fail a key, you can now farm dailies for the week to earn a key back.

Horrific Visions have the following rewards:

Legendary Cloak Upgrades

Wrathion gives you quests to upgrade your legendary cloak. This is important! It is the only way to increase your corruption resistance, which is very important for increasing your power this patch. Each quest will tell you what to do in the Horrific Vision.

• Rank 1-5 only require that you kill the main boss in the center area (Thrall or Alleria).
• Rank 6-11 require that you clear objectives in the “corrupted” areas around the center (the tooltip on the map labels them as such).
• Rank 12-15 require that you clear objectives in the “lost” areas around the center (the tooltip on the map labels them as such).

You can only reach Rank 6 up until Jan 21st (when the raid starts). After that, you will be able to increase your cloak one rank each week, up to Rank 15. This is why you don’t need to worry too much if you failed once or twice: you’ll be able to do more Horrific Visions than are required to rank up your cloak.

Gear

Gear drops from the chests at the end of a Horrific Vision. You get better gear for completing more objectives, and eventually doing the Horrific Vision with “masks” activated. For the target audience of this guide (someone who wants to raid), the gear is not worth worrying about until you can clear all 5 objectives. That will drop ilvl445 gear. After that, each Faceless Mask activated will increase gear rewards by 5 item levels.

Blizzard posted all of the gear levels on their forum in this post: Horrific Visions Rewards.

Essence Upgrades

You get items to upgrade Spark of Inspiration, Unwavering Ward, and Strength of the Warden in Horrific Visions. You’ll get rank 2 pretty quickly without worrying about it, but rank 3 will take a bit longer. If you can full-clear all 5 objectives, you can get to rank 3 faster.

Optimal Use of Coalescing Visions

The number of Horrific Visions you can run each week is extremely limited, so you want to make the best use of them to upgrade your cloak.

Rule 1: never* run a Horrific Vision unless you have a quest to upgrade your cloak, or you would waste Coalescing Visions. Bank your Coalescing Visions for the following week instead. (To bank more than the Coalescing Visions currency cap, purchase the item to open a Horrific Vision, you can hold up to 5 of them in your inventory.

Rule 2: never use a mask unless you are 100% confident that you can complete the objectives needed for your cloak quests.

Next, you want to ensure maximum progress when you do run a Horrific Vision:

• Rank 2-5 you should not leave the center area, just kill the boss (Thrall or Alleria) and be done
• Rank 6-11 you should clear both Corrupted Areas, you still make progress even if you don’t kill the main boss!
• Rank 12+ doesn’t have as much data out there, but likely you should go for the 2 Lost Areas first to ensure maximum progress

Projected progress for Cloak upgrades

If you are doing only the time-efficient activities suggested above, you would earn 23k Coalescing Visions each week plus 1 key from the Major Assault. Here is what “perfect” progress would look like in terms of the runs required to max your Cloak’s rank for the week, the rank of your cloak, and the remaining resources.

(see infographic below for a nice chart of this data)

• Week 1:  5 runs to get to Rank 6 with 0 resources leftover (in reality, you would likely have a bit extra from looting rares, chests, etc).
• Week 2:  1 run to get to Rank 7 with 13k CV  leftover + 1 key
• Week 3: 1 run, Rank 8 with 16k CV + 3 keys (after converting 10k CV to a key to avoid capping CV)
• Week 4: 2 runs, Rank 9 with 19k CV + 4 keys
• Week 5: 3 runs, Rank 10, 12k CV + 5 keys
• Week 6: 4 runs, Rank 11, 5k CV + 5 keys
• Week 7: 1 run, Rank 12, 18k CV + 6 keys (use a spare key this week)
• Week 8: 3 runs, Rank 13, 21k CV + 5 keys (speculating you can only get 2 of the quest item per run for this rank and higher… but not sure)
• Week 9: 6 runs, Rank 14, 4k CV + 4 keys
• Week 10: 7 runs, Rank 14, 7k + 0 keys (not enough to complete it this week, but if you did dailies just this week, you would have enough for 2 more runs)
• Week 11: 2 runs, Rank 15, 10k CV + 1 key

Horrific Visions infographic

This is a lot of data and to make it a bit more fun to read, we put together an infographic (click for full size).

The Warcraft developer Q&A on Thursday spent the first 15 minutes talking about the off-GCD change. It’s probably the most controversial change so far.

Let’s take a look at what this change is, why Blizzard made it, the possible downsides, and how it might impact gameplay.

What is the Off-GCD ability change?

If you haven’t had the chance to keep track of all the changes in the BfA alpha, the Global Cooldown (GCD) has been one of the biggest. In the alpha, some abilities that were not on the GCD were put back on the GCD. You might see this referred to as off-GCD or OGCD.

If you didn’t have a chance to watch the video yet, here are some resources that might interest you:

• Full Dev Q&A video on Twitch
• Text-summary on MMO-Champion
• Link to the Video, queued up to the GCD discussion at 15:48.
• Update on May 10: Blizzard announced they are taking some racials and on-use trinkets back off the GCD.

That seems like a simple change, but it definitely affects a lot of different aspects of the game. The latest developer Q&A addressed the reasoning behind this decision.

Why did Blizzard make this change?

This is the big question everyone has been asking. In the dev Q&A, Blizzard explained that one of the main reasons for this change was to bring back some more meaningful decision-making in-game. When things are off the GCD, then there is no choice between A or B, you simply use them both. Continue reading