I put “stat weights” in quotes, because there’s a lot more to stats than just a simple set of weights. Stats seem simple, but they are actually quite complex if you want to “min-max.”
Stats are complicated because…
- The best stats change as you get more gear
- You don’t want to just stack your best stat (which is what stat weights do). It’s usually best to have a specific balance of stats – a ratio, if you will (which typical stat weights don’t account for).
- On top of all of all of this, the best stat distribution is dependent on your specific items, trinkets, Azerite Powers, and talents.
This last point is why people often advise you to “sim your stat weights.” But I have exciting news: there is no need to sim your own stat weights anymore, because we sim them for you ahead of time.
I mean, why not, right? If it’s so important, why shouldn’t this be automated? It’s not hard – beating Mythic Argus is hard, running a bunch of sims isn’t. It just takes a ton of computing power. And that, my friend, we have a lot of!
So that’s that. We give you instant gear advice by simming stat weights for you ahead of time. In fact, we don’t just sim “stat weights,” we also find the best ratios, we sim procs from trinkets, we sim Azerite powers and their interactions with other stats, and the list goes on.
We sim all of the necessary combinations of talents, gear, and Azerite Powers for every character and save it to our database. Storing this massive amount of data, and applying some machine learning, lets us quickly access it for you every time you visit the site. If you get a new item, or change a talent, all we have to do is look up the simulation data relevant to those changes to your character. No need to re-sim it, we’ve already done it.
Knowing your best stats lets you answer a few big questions:
- What gems and enchants should I use?
- What gear should I equip now, from what I own?
- What stats do I want on new gear?
The first question is answered with the free Gear Check tool (as well as Best in Bags) – click one button and get an instant gem, enchant, and Azerite Power optimization. The second question is answered with Best in Bags: click 1 button and get an answer in a few seconds (no simming required, because… wait for it… we already simmed it for you).
The third question is answered with our new Stat Analysis section on all of the tools.
Stat Analysis – how it works
Mr. Robot looks at your current gear and compares it to setups that do more damage (or healing or tanking) at your current iLevel. He then analyzes all of those better setups to look for stat trends.
Let’s say that 85% of the better setups have more Haste and less Mastery. The Stat Analysis section will then tell you to focus on getting gear with more Haste and less Mastery on your next few items, like this:
While 85% of setups have more Haste, that doesn’t mean only high-Haste builds are going to be better for you. In this example, 15% of the better-than-your-current gear sets don’t have more Haste than you do now.
It’s possible that you get a new chest piece with a strong Azerite Power that scales really well with Crit. That might make a high-Crit build perform better (which Mr. Robot will tell you when you import that into Best in Bags). Or if you equip it and run a free Gear Check, Mr. Robot will suggest Crit gems and enchants.
You can also see a graph of the stat-data that Mr. Robot analyzed for you. This lets you confirm that, yep, a whole bunch of these are stacking Haste, but a few have relatively low Haste. Click the “View optimal stat graph” link to see the top performing stat distributions for your item level (or any item level).
Let’s talk a little more about this graph. First – this is a graph of data that Mr. Robot already summarized for you in the Stat Analysis section. If you don’t like reading graphs, you don’t have to and you won’t miss out on anything.
The general idea behind this graph: read this ‘vertically’ – meaning one column at a time. So if you look at the first (left-most) column, you see the stat combination has low Versatility, really high Mastery, almost no Haste and Crit. The best setups are on the right.
You see how Crit is pretty jagged? Up and down and up and down. That means there are a lot of stat combinations that perform similarly with both high and low Crit.
More solid (or smoother) areas means you can draw some pretty good conclusions. For example, the best builds (the right side of the graph), really favor high Haste. And the worst builds (left side of the graph) have high Mastery. So you can conclude that you want builds with high Haste and low Mastery.
PAWN:
You can also turn these into stat weights for use in PAWN, which ranks gear in-game. This comes with a disclaimer: PAWN will evaluate drops based on the stat weights only. It doesn’t factor in Azerite Powers, trinket procs or stat ratios. It also doesn’t adjust as you get more gear. But, it still have a fun use – it gives a quick estimate when an item drops in-game. (Who doesn’t want that?!)
If you are using PAWN and want to min-max, return to our site after you get a new item and import your new gear into Best in Bags. See if the item is an upgrade right now, and then you can get an updated (instant!) set of stat weights for PAWN.
Stat Analysis – it adapts to you
I already mentioned that the stat analysis (and suggested stats) updates as you get new gear. It also updates if you change talents, Azerite Powers, or anything about your character.
You also can get a stat analysis for different fight-types, including different raid boss scenarios and mythic+. Since this replaces the need to sim your own stat weights because we sim it for you (I feel like a broken record!), you don’t have to worry about managing different ‘stat weights’ yourself. The site automatically adapts to whatever setup you are looking at.
Is this already live?
The stat analysis is going live with our BfA site update. We’ve run a lot of simulations already to give you good recommendations and stat-weight exports for PAWN. However, those simulations are based on some generic characters and not totally custom to you… yet!
In order to fully customize the data to you, your gear, and your talents, we have a lot more simulations to finish running. To simulate the necessary combinations, it takes a ton of computing power, which I mentioned earlier. But don’t worry – we have a group of volunteers who donate their computing power when they aren’t using it. This lets us finish the simulations in about 2 weeks, across thousands of computers (if you are interested in contributing, learn more about joining the GloNet).
These will be completed and ready for use before Uldir.
As Blizzard balances classes with patches and hotfixes, we’ll update too. The system only has to rerun any data affected by those changes, saving us a lot of computing power (and time!). Any changes Blizzard makes should only take a couple of days, or even only a few hours, to update. As the changes get smaller, the updates will be really fast.