Find upgrades, do more damage, win.
Pawn helps you find upgrades for your gear and tell which of two items is better for your spec. Start with built-in advice from Ask Mr. Robot, or customize Pawn's stat weights to have it suggest items based on your favorite class guide or simulator. Pawn can help you decide whether it's better to use the cloak with 100 mastery or the one with 80 crit—whether you're just starting out, or you're an advanced player who plans out gear upgrades and regularly simulates and evaluates performance.
If you're new to Pawn, don't worry—Pawn will automatically set itself up to give you advice based on math done by the experts at Ask Mr. Robot (or, on Classic versions, HawsJon). Just watch for Pawn's green arrows. If you decide you want to go further, there are a lot of ways that you can customize Pawn, by tracking multiple specs at once, importing custom stat weights, and more.
Staying in touch
Become a fan of Vger on Facebook and get updates of new versions and stuff like that. You can also leave questions or comments there if you don't have an account on this site.
Found a bug?
If you think you might have found a bug, just leave a comment here. In addition to a description of the problem, please make sure to include: (1) the language that you play WoW in, (2) whether it's live/retail or Classic Era or Burning Crusade Classic, (3) the specific items that don't work as expected, and (4) your class and spec if you're using the built-in (not custom) stat weights. Screenshots are usually very helpful, and typically the most helpful thing you can provide is a full item ID (12345:67:89:0, etc.). You can find the full ID for an item by turning on Pawn's "show item IDs" feature or by putting it into Pawn's Compare tab and Alt+LeftClicking it and then copying it from the box that appears. (You can also get the first number from the item ID from any Wowhead item link, and that's usually enough, but not for items with enchantments or upgrades or random stats.)
Hi, love this addon. I'm randomly hitting the hot key in arena matches and don't know what the hotkey is or how to disable it, I think alt-something? Mainly need ot know how to disable or change it. Thanks.
Hello. Love this addon very very much, but inability to compare two slots vs two hand is frustrating. For example staffs vs swords and left hand for warlocks. Why not just add values up and compare?
In reply to vrnvorona:
Hi! As a shaman I agree. 🙂 Definitely something I want to improve for the future! Right now, manually adding up the numbers is the right way to do it.
I was wondering if there is a way to only get info for 1 spec? On my Druid I get all 4 specs for every single item I mouse over. TBCC
I read through many posts and stared at the options in game and see no way to narrow it down to 1 spec.
Thank you.
In reply to Fondleburg42:
Hi! You can open up Pawn and shift-click the specs you don't care about, just like if you were untracking quests. (Or, if your shift key is broken, you can choose a spec/scale, and then uncheck "show this scale in tooltips" on the Scales tab.) I hope that helps!
Hi!
Is there a reason Pawn does not work with enchants the same way it does for gems?
Not only accounting for enchants in the item "value" but more specifically offering a list of "best enchants" available for a specific item/class-spec combo.
In reply to thengus:
Hi! It's mostly just a matter of priorities. Since if you replace item A with item B, for a given spec you'd use the same enchantments on B that you did on A, so the enchantment on an item doesn't really matter all that much for purposes of finding upgrades. Gems are different, because item B might have sockets while A didn't, or the other way around, so sockets are pretty important for finding upgrades. Also, the best enchantments for a slot and spec sometimes are based on things that aren't stats, like "chance on hit" effects, which Pawn can't understand.
So, gems are included because they were important—enchantments weren't included because I don't think they're that important for comparing items, and there were always other things that I could do instead that seemed more useful to build.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure how outlandish this suggestion might be, but in gearing my tank/healer; Since stat weight simming can be a complicated issue, but it can be rather easy to find stat values of various top performers. Murlok.io and Subcreation being some examples. And it got me thinking about being able to input a preferred end result for my stats and then get Pawn's display on whether or not something brings me closer to that goal. Sure it neglects growth once I've achieved my goals, but since I won't quite have the top possible ilvl, I'm not as concerned with that.
In reply to skeletalSir:
Hi! Sorry for the late reply; I was on vacation. Thanks for the suggestion—let me see if I understand correctly. Instead of directly setting individual weights for stats, what you'd like to see is a way to just say "I want to end up with 1400 intellect and 900 crit and 1100 haste" and then Pawn would tell you for each item if it gets you closer to those numbers than what you currently have? I could see how I could build something like that, but you'd still need stat weights to know if it's better to get +30 crit or +30 haste. So then I guess at that point the main difference between that and how Pawn works today is that you'd have caps at which Pawn would no longer care about a certain stat, which does make sense for things like hit rating in Classic, but not for str/int/agi. So then I'm not sure what the benefit would be. Maybe I misunderstood?
In reply to TravisSpomer:
Hello there, and thank you for the reply at all!
I think you understood most of what I was saying. You do have a point on likely still needing stat weights to truly know if the +30crit is > or < to +30 haste. But that is why Simc + Pawn make for such a strong combination for many dps classes. Since DPS is an easy scenario to test on an even playing field. The root of why this thought came to be was on the basis that there isn't always a tool that can fill for Simc's place for tanking and healing. Particularly when its a balancing act somewhere between healing/survivability throughput and pure dps.
An example is that last time I did a brewmaster simulation on Raidbots, the pure damage stats actually felt very fragile to play in content slightly harder than what I was kitted for, even if it did actually help to get some form of world content jump start while leveling. What it lead to was difficulty pushing forward on a stable footing. AskMrRobot has a bit of a feature that tries to simulate that middle ground and provides a slider, but is other wise a vacuum on the functionality with hit or miss results. I mostly blame that because it is aiming at theoretical standards and for me personally becomes an abstract path to gearing. But with Murlok.io being a website that aggregates some "Top 50" players of a spec to average out their stats. Which can become something to aim for. Which lead to this idea. Since I can have the assumption that secondary stats near that have lead to a practical use in their performance.
In the current moment, my best practice has been to do minor guess-work tweaks to a stat weight; attempting to sidegrade my way into a better/ideal place. If I have too much haste that isn't serving me well, I tweak it down a bit. If I think I need more vers, I bump it up. But my end goal is to try and get close to someone else's stat balance since that is the more concrete target to aim at instead of a moving target without a proper scale.
Regardless of if this idea/suggestion is feasible, I thank you for your time and efforts on this addon :D
I maybe late, but pawn used to show me enchants, gems n stuff on the paper doll character info page.. did something change?? hope someone can guide me.
In reply to kaseyd24:
Hi! Sorry for the late reply; I was on vacation. Unfortunately you must be thinking of a different addon. I'm not sure what addon would do that.
Feature request: for me as a mage it's hard to calculate oin the fly the advantage of two-hand-wappons over one-hand plus shield. Couls you implement such a compare?
In reply to strolcharygos:
Hi! Sorry for the late reply; I was on vacation. That's definitely something I'd like to add someday; as a shaman I understand your pain. 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion.
For BCC is it intended that there is no way to weight non-meta / simple sockets?
v2.5.28 BCC, tried creating an empty scale to see all the attributes that can be weighted, under sockets only Meta is available.
Thanks.
Edit: Actually even the metasocket attribute does not weigh the presence of a meta socket on an item, but only then non-basic attribute portion of the meta.
Is socket valuation not supported for BCC atm?
In reply to MrFIXlT:
Hi! That's correct; you can't manually assign a value to colored sockets or the stat portion of a meta socket. Pawn will automatically give those a value based on the stats of the appropriate gems, and the socket bonus if it's worth going for. (It's smart enough to figure out whether it would be better to just use all red gems and ignore the socket bonus, or whether the socket bonus is good enough that using a slightly-worse orange gem in the yellow socket is okay.)
In reply to TravisSpomer:
That's fair enough.
Does it use some built-in weights for those sockets or just built-in choices of gem stats which it then uses the scale weights (for say stamina/agility/strength/crit or whatever) to add up socket value?
What I'm trying to say if that was confusing. If a scale assigns STR the highest weight will Pawn opt to fill red sockets with STR gems and use that value to compute their worth? Or if a scale assigns INT the highest weight will it suggest INT gems and use that scale value to compute socket worth?
In reply to MrFIXlT:
The second one—it will use the same weights as if the item had those stats directly instead of on a gem. So if you're a fury warrior, red sockets will be valued as if you put in strength gems. You can see which gems Pawn will use in its calculations on the Gems tab—for many specs, the best "yellow" gem might, for example, actually be an orange gem.
And keep in mind what I mentioned about the socket bonus: if it's better to use 3 blue gems and ignore the socket bonus, Pawn will assume that you did that when calculating the item's value, and it'll also tell you that when you shift-right-click the item. In addition to the hints on the socketing window, you can also figure out what Pawn would do on the Compare tab, but it's a bit technical there and not super clear.
Hi,
This addon gives me significant slowdown with its latest version (2.5.27) whenever comparing items or switching item. This is especially noticeable if I switch gear sets in ItemRack, which will lock the game up for 1-3 seconds. My computer isn't exactly bad, either (I usually manage a consistent 60FPS on high graphical settings). Is there a way to throttle calculation when changing equipped items, perchance?
In reply to Lethay:
Hi! A few questions: Which version of the game are you playing? Does it happen if Pawn is the only addon enabled? And, has it always been this way, or did it just start happening recently?