TLDR: Mr. Robot has a new super-powerful simulator. You just push a button on our website, no need to download anything. For how-to tips & videos, visit this page.

Have Legion Questions?

Did you know there are several quadrillion viable combinations of gear, talents and artifact traits for every level 110 Legion character? I bet you’ve had a lot of questions about what the best talents are, or how spell changes are shaping up! I know I have…   What if there was a button to get the answers yourself… would you push the magical button?!

Push it.

/Launch Simulator

We built a new Legion simulator.  “So a new simulator?! How is this going to change things?” you might be asking. Let me give you the TLDR version:

• Goal #1: End the “Black Box Theorycrafting” era and move into “Public Theorycrafting.” Instead of requiring your trust, we wanted to earn it, by making every little detail public on a wiki. What’s that phrase, “Trust, but verify” ?
• Goal #2: Increase confidence in simulation as a method to model the game. For example, Patchwerk fights don’t exist so it’s easy to dismiss results of a simulation based on that type of fight. So our simulator will model out every boss in Legion.
• Goal #3: Ignite collaboration and creativity to take theorycrafting to a whole new level. We don’t want you to rely on just our 1 or 2 spell rotations. Instead, everything is public and easily editable, so anyone can tweak rotations, making them better and better. We also don’t want you to rely on just one boss script… the system will let you choose from a list of scripts for each boss, like ranged, melee, a 9-minute strategy or a 3-minute strategy. This also opens up an opportunity to create very specific spell rotations for each boss in Legion.

We’ve been working for the past month with some of the top theorycrafters and top mythic guilds to make sure the system is in tip-top shape. So far so good, and now we’re ready to release it the Legion version to the public. Keep in mind, it is still a beta (so if something looks like a bug and sounds like a bug, it’s probably a bug. Please report it!)

Moving to “Public Theorycrafting”

An incredible amount of advice on the “right way” to play or gear is controlled by very few people who haven’t been required to prove our work… it’s in a Black Box. I say “our” because Ask Mr. Robot does fall into this category. We guarantee that we will get you the single best optimized set of gear, which we did verify and prove. However, it’s based on stat weights… which come from simulation results that we didn’t publish the details on.  Most advice based on simulations, whether on a tool like ours or in a guide, has had little-to-no independent verification. We’re changing that.

To ensure that the information driving the simulations is easily viewed and verified, it can’t be buried in code. So we pulled nearly everything out of the code and moved it to a wiki.

All of the information on the wiki is then turned into code to run your simulations, automatically and on-demand. Let that sink in… a wiki that powers an entire simulator.

How does this wiki make theorycrafting more public? 

The wiki lets you see how any spell works, how buffs interact, or the assumptions made in spell rotations. It’s critical to make this information accessible, so that it’s easily verifiable by class experts, theorycrafters, and you! This means thousands or hundreds of thousands of people can verify the accuracy of each spec, instead of just a handful of people.

In addition to verifying the mechanics of the Legion simulator, the community can verify assumptions and conclusions of class experts’ simulations. Every simulation is saved (forever), and easily shareable. This means you can see the results as well as all of the details that went into the simulation, like what spell rotation was chosen, what gear was equipped, which talents were selected, and so on.

Now let’s say you look at those assumptions and wonder if a different talent setup would be better, along with a slightly different rotation to make the best use of that talent. You can use their setup as a starting point, select that other talent and drag & drop spells in the rotation to adjust it. Then run your version of the simulation and compare results. Let’s say your setup gets more DPS, so you share it. Someone else might come along and tweak your setup, and the process continues to iterate. Instead of tapping into just 1 or 2 people’s knowledge, this model opens it up to tap into everyone.

Models for every Legion Boss

If we go through the effort to make sure every spell mechanic is properly implemented and to create min/maxxed spell rotations, it seems silly to throw that level of accuracy at exaggerated bosses that don’t exist. “Patchwerk” fights assume pure single target where you never move (when’s the last time that happened?). And AoE fights aren’t 100% AoE all the time… the packs of adds come and go. Modeling a boss really isn’t much different than modeling a spec’s spell mechanics and spell rotations. So we’re going the extra mile to add every single boss for Legion into the simulator.

It doesn’t stop there… what if your team uses a special strategy on a boss? Or what if the melee never have to move out of things, but ranged players do? What about multi-targeting? Those require different models, which is why we will be releasing a boss editor that’s as easy to use as the rotation editor.  Perhaps hunters need a special boss setup, now they can have it.

While we have the boss mechanisms ready, the actual bosses aren’t live yet.  As they are released for testing in the Legion beta, we’ll add them to the Legion simulator.

Ready for Legion!

Here’s a list of what’s ready:

• Every DPS spec’s spell mechanics are implemented (if something seems wrong, it’s a bug, and will usually be fixed in 24 hours or less of the report)
• Basic rotations for every spec (but not min-maxxed yet, feel free to play with the rotations though!)
• Reporting with filters and searching built in
• All regular Legion gear is available to equip (trinkets, special legendaries and set bonuses are not yet modeled)
• All pages are easily shared, just grab the URL and post it to a forum or send to a friend.
• Web-based simulations (use our servers, on the cloud, free)
• Full, fast support! Need help learning the system, have a specific question, or need to report a bug. We’re friendly and we’re dedicating time to help you!
  • Discussions: discord or forums
  • Specific questions: discord or forums
  • Bug reports: forums

Here’s what’s coming

Known issues can be found here.

• Client program so you can run more processor intensive simulations
• Trinkets, special legendaries and set bonus implementation
• Batch simulations (like trying 10 different talent setups all at once and compare the DPS between them. Or do a simulation for every combination of haste and mastery between 1,000 & 5,000 rating and graph the results)
• Distributed simulations (running one of those large batches across multiple computers… like 2 of your own and your mom’s)
• Legion bosses (and the boss editor), as they are released for testing on the Legion Beta
• Stat weight generation

Give it a try!

Head over to beta.askmrrobot.com. You can use the beta version of the addon to load a character or use one of the default templates. There’s more tips on our Simulator FAQ page.