In World of Warcraft, WoW, theorycrafting sometimes takes on absurd forms. How can one determine who benefits the most from the increase in items from the Blackrock Foundry? Who deals the most damage? And what is the wipe probability of under-equipped raiders against Gruul … on a Tuesday when the sun is again in the sign of the turtle?
“Theorycrafting” is the rocket science for WoW players. Players theoretically calculate what their pixel avatars need to accomplish in the raid.
Theorycrafting in WoW: A long time ago, just a little while ago, and today
Back then, the calculations in WoW (Warning, cliché) were taken over by Korean math students from US elite units in their abundant free time. They tackled the secrets of Blizzard with a calculator. They then posted their findings in elite forums like “Elitist Jerks.” As a mere mortal, one simply had to believe their lengthy explanations about minimal DPS increases – because if you asked, you could get banned.
Later, there were spreadsheets to fill out yourself with the charm of a tasty tax return. During this time, “Third Party Websites” emerged, which chewed through how to optimize your character to reach the best outcomes.
Today, WoW has shed some of its theoretical quirks. Theorycrafting has long entered the mainstream, even though no one calculates by themselves anymore. It’s similar to mobile phones. People use them much more than before, and much less than they used to but at least roughly know how they work. The offerings are commercialized and tailored to the player. There are easy-to-use websites. Theorycrafting now has an interface that players can actually work with. Everywhere there are little graphics and bars. One almost feels like one is in Azeroth.
Who benefits the most from the increase in Blackrock items?
The challenges theorycrafters face, however, haven’t changed. To name a current issue that theorycrafters in World of Warcraft must deal with: how do you calculate who benefits the most when Blizzard suddenly decides: We are raising the gear from the Blackrock Foundry by 5 item levels?
At the currently trendiest site “Ask Mr. Robot,” they turned it into a spreadsheet and set some assumptions as given. Now you can see who benefits the most from an item increase from 470 to 472 percentage-wise.
The answer: For DPS, the BM Hunter, for tanks, the monk with two one-handers, and for healers, the Disc Priest. The spreadsheet can be found here.
Who deals the most DPS in 6.1? Depends on whom you ask
Of course, there’s a catch that fans passionately discuss: The underlying mechanics in WoW are not solely mathematics, but often also a matter of faith. And the mathematical formulas that are supposed to represent performance in raids differ among the various purveyors of truth in World of Warcraft as much as the respective secret recipes of Coke and Pepsi.
Depending on whether you value the Crit rating for a class with factor X or Y, completely different results arise. And is what happens on paper really the same under real conditions? Should one not consider latency, personal performance, class complexity, different encounters, synergy effects? Yes, of course. But how? How can all the variables be taken into account?
This eternal question has been disputed by fans in World of Warcraft since theorycrafting began. Who is the strongest DPS now? If you go to this site, it says this, on another site it’s a different class. Sneaky!
Ask Mr. Robot is currently the most user-friendly site for theorycrafting in WoW
On the website of Ask Mr. Robot, you can now find the most user-friendly interface available and also the widest range of offerings. There are precise tables here where you just have to set your gear level and it then graphically shows who is ahead in damage at that level.
You can have the logs of your own character analyzed. And of course, you can also spy on your teammates. This has been the custom in WoW since a few years ago when the “He still needs to pop a flask!” whistleblower add-ons came out. This way, one can observe how your own raid functions, who is struggling in which boss fight, and who is excelling. Even the wipe probability of the entire group at a certain item level can now be calculated and displayed.
And do the numbers behind it all add up correctly? Who knows? Somehow the numbers are always buggy when they don’t reflect your own raid. And if that damn rogue, who shouldn’t hit at all, ends up ahead of you again, even though you did everything as the nice gentlemen and ladies with calculators said, then … well then – the site is simply bad!
In this article, we deal with another important element in WoW: The race for the World Firsts in World of Warcraft.
