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.
Getting started
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, 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.
Language support
Pawn now works with all languages on both live/retail and Classic. It's possible that you might run into stats that Pawn doesn't recognize from time to time when playing on non-English clients—if you think that Pawn's not calculating something right, put an item into the Compare tab and see if it lists all of the stats there. If something's missing, let me know which item and which language, and I should be able to get it fixed!
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. If you're a huge nerd you can also find Pawn on GitHub.
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 use Pawn and WoW in, (2) whether it's live/retail or 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 as well.
Incompatible with...
Pawn will not work with Titan Panel Artifact Power or Combat Numbers Separator. Those addons change item tooltips and will cause Pawn to give bad advice. It's also been reported that using Pawn with TradeSkillMaster can cause the game to crash or hang.
After latest update, the addon is no longer showing me if a loot drop is an upgrade or not.
Did the update change a setting I need to reset?
In reply to jwilliam87:
Hi! Hmm, no, the latest update just made Pawn start recommending better gems on Shadowlands gear. Where are you seeing missing upgrade advice: on tooltips? in your bags? somewhere else?
I haven't been able to download the latest version of Pawn (I currently have Pawn-2.4.11.zip). It keeps saying there is a connection problem... but I'm able to download all of the other addons. This is for the Retail version of WoW. Thanks for your time!
In reply to redeemed78:
Hi! Sorry, I don't have any involvement with the CurseForge site (besides hosting stuff here obviously) or app—you'd need to contact their support team for help with that. But in the meantime, you can get 2.4.15 here if you want to install it manually!
In reply to TravisSpomer:
Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it. Have a great day!
In reply to redeemed78:
You too! ♥
The base value on some items (with socket specifically) seem to not work like it used to. My mastery weight is 1.22, yet it showed only a 5 point difference between the base and the gemmed neck. My ring as well does not account for the socket and it used to work so this seems to be a new issue.
In reply to Rificz:
Hi! Sorry for the misunderstanding, but it looks like the base value is working as it always has. If you turn on both current and base values, what you should see is a lower current value than base before you put the gem in, and then a current value that's the exact same as the base or very close after you put the gem in. The base value includes the points for Pawn's recommended gem for that item, so it looks like you put a slightly better gem than Pawn was expecting in that particular necklace.
That behavior can be a little unexpected, but it makes finding upgrades a lot easier: if you get a new item that has a socket and you want to see if it's an upgrade over your existing item without a socket, you want that upgrade calculation to be based on the item's stats with a gem, or otherwise you might vendor a potential upgrade.
Hope that helps!
In reply to TravisSpomer:
As you can see in these stat weights I don't see how a difference in gem selection can make up that amount, which would be about 1.7 difference between any two stats at max and this states ~5. I have no screenshots to be sure, but I am quite confident that it used to show a lot larger difference in stats between base and current (pretty much the gem value amount). I totally understand what your saying for the values, the base value just does not seem to add up to me no matter which gem its selecting.
In reply to Rificz:
I figured out it was looking at a +12 haste gem value for the gem slot after using the compare tool, which makes it add up correctly Is there a way to force it to always use +16 gem? Due to it doing this it considers items upgrades when they are really not. My other ilvl 207 ring shows the correct info to match up with a +16 gem. I really love your mod and appreciate the response.
In reply to Rificz:
Hi! Right now there isn't a way to customize the threshold at which Pawn starts suggesting higher-level gems, though it's been requested quite a bit. BUT, you've reminded me that the 16-stat cluster gems ended up being way cheaper than I was expecting them to be when I picked that threshold, so there's really no good reason to go for a cheaper gem in gear that you're keeping, so I'll drop that threshold in the next version, which should help you out in the short term!
Changelog is illegible with whatever you've done to it in most recent update - had no problems before that.
In reply to ZaneBusby:
Ha, weird. I can probably work around that by pasting that text in a different way. Thanks for the heads-up.
I think the Hunter values are wrong for MM, it values Mastery > Agi > Haste > Crit > Vers when every guide (wowhead, icyveins, etc..) says that Crit is the main stat, after Agility of course, the fact that it values Mastery over Agi is itself weird.
In reply to Mahashivatri:
Hi! Sorry, I can't speak to the specifics of the Ask Mr. Robot stat weights that come with Pawn. They do extensive simulations to produce stat weights that will work well to suggest gear for an average character. If you have questions about their math, you could contact them, or you could also simulate your character yourself to get customized weights that you can put into Pawn so it'll give you custom advice specific to your character. But I don't play a hunter so I'm afraid I don't think I can give you any better advice than that.
So, Pawn is only showing comparison tooltips in vendor windows. Meaning, it's not showing the currently equipped item next to items in my bag when i hover over them, with a comparison. Only vendor equipment. I'm not seeing anything in the options window that explains this behavior.
In reply to ball5deep23:
Hi! Pawn doesn't add comparison tooltips. Maybe you're thinking of a different addon? What you're describing sounds like the normal behavior—normally you have to hold down the shift key to see comparison tooltips. (Maybe you had an addon in the past that changed that behavior?)
In reply to TravisSpomer:
Ah okay, it's been about 9 years since i last played WoW and used Pawn, so my memory must be foggy.
Speaking of, wouldn't it be nice to add the comparison tooltips to Pawn (without holding shift)?
In reply to ball5deep23:
I could see that, but also there are a bunch of addons that already do that, and I wouldn't want to introduce more conflicts. I'll keep it in mind though!
The addon has Guardian Druid's base haste priority as 0.01 (compared to a high of 30.52 for Vers).
There's literally zero way this is correct. Haste is above crit for both dps and survivability, based on wowhead/icy veins, and even Ask Mr Robot? (Even without that knowledge, a stat that reduces the cooldown on one of your major mitigation skills would never be weighted 0.01)