Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Theorycraft... lol...

Theorycraft, as defined by me:
"Crunching numbers in WoW til your eyes bleed and your head hurts from the math as you try and squeeze every single benefit from every single number in the game that effects game play in some fashion or another".

Theorycrafters will get on forums and argue for posts and posts over hours and hours about calculations which affect gameplay that the game does for you, behind the scenes using the numbers that you provide for those calculations in terms of gear, stats, buffs, and talents.

See, every single thing in WoW has a number associated with it, or a "score" (actually, pretty much all games do). These "scores" provide base numbers from which the game will calculate random outcomes for everything you do.

Do you hit or miss with a weapon or spell in a fight with a boar? How often does that produce critical damage? What are the chances it will be resisted? Will you parry an attack, dodge it, or will it hit you? How much healing will that Flash of Light spell do this time?

The gear and talents that you chose to equip your character with all setup a baseline from which these things are calculated from. Just because you have a weapon that does 365 max damage with a 3.80 attack speed doesn't mean that you will always deal 365 damage. You have to factor in your Hit Rating and Strength, which factors into your Attack Power, which factors into your Weapon Damage.

Many of these things are displayed on your character sheet, if you hover your mouse over a particular stat. But pretty much everything in every instance is calculated by a random math equation. All of this happens behind the scenes. Casual players don't care about what percentage of their INT contributed to the spell damage which contributed to the frost damage they just did on that last, single Frostbolt they just threw at skunk in Elwynn forest. They just want to see the big damage numbers from a crit flash up over that dead skunk's head. They also want to know what stats on their gear they need to get bigger crits, and more often, and higher damage too!

Then there are the players who bother with actually learning these calculations to get every last bit of benefit from everything they do so they can be ZOMGUBERLEETHAX!

I am certainly no theorycrafter. I've never been good at math. And honestly, I don't really know what the hell "Avoidance" is, nor do I particularly care. I think it has something to do with Dodge Rating, Armor, Defense, Block, and Parry combined. You will not find theorycrafting here, no sir/ma'am. I don't have the time to sit down and crunch numbers and do math concerning a video game.

My "theorycraft" for gear begins and ends with this:

In my Retribution gear - If I equip one piece of armor and my max overall Damage, Melee Crit, and or/Hit Rating goes up without severely gimping any of the other aforementioned stats, it's an upgrade! I keep it! I click my Outfitter Mod and add it to that outfit.

In my Protection gear - If I equip one piece of armor and my Defense, Shield Block, or Resilience goes up without severely gimping any of the other aforementioned stats, it's an upgrade! I keep it! I click my Outfitter Mod and add it to that outfit.

In my Holy gear - If I equip one piece of armor and my Bonus Healing, INT, or Spell Crit goes up without severely gimping any of the other aforementioned stats, it's an upgrade! I keep it! I click my Outfitter Mod and add it to that outfit.

Pretty complex theorycraft, huh?

Let's talk a bit about stats on items themselves and not so much about the changes that equipping said items will have on my character sheet.

If you're browsing items in the WoW armory or on sites like Thottbot and Allakhazam, you may notice that items listed will often have an "item level" listed. This is a different number than the level required to equip it. What is it?

Essentially, a brand noob WoW player will quickly learn that equippable items have colors associated with them.

Gray, White, Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange.

This translates to to the quality of the item:
Worthless (or Inferior, I never did learn the quality given to gray items), Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary.

How does an item get assigned a color?

This question goes back to the "item level". An item will be built and added into the game item database. Each item has points associated with it (this will all be transparent to the player). Points will be allocated to stats on that item like Armor, STR, Healing, and other stat bonuses. These points contribute to the "item level". So the "item level" is then bounced against the level required to equip said item. The result of this equation roughly determines its quality, and furthermore, the color or quality that said item will be given.

Now this is not to be confused with socket Gems. They have their own colors assigned to them for the purposes of being beneficial to items with those same color slots. A socket Gem's color is not reflected in its item quality. In fact when gems do drop, or can be purchased from NPCs, they too have quality colors associated with them; White (most often bought from faction NPC vendors, and the least powerful of socket gems), Green (pretty much every gem gathered from a mining node will be of Uncommon quality), Blue (also gathered from mining nodes, but more, well... rare), and finally your Purples (I've never mined a Purple Gem, my Atlasloot Mod says that they quite often drop off Heroic bosses).

So let's back up (the gem thing was a bit of a tangent) a bit.

Items are assigned points which are allocated to stats on that piece, this combination becomes its "item level". This is then checked against a required level to equip. The result of how good this item is when compared to what level a player has to be to equip it will be shown as its quality, or it's color.

Basically, Blue items have more points on them in relation to the level one has to be to equip it than a green one. Thus giving the player an idea of how good the item is. I've never met someone who preferred a green item over a blue item of same required level. I mean, that's why we run instances right; to get some blue drops? Because they're better, right? The same is true for raiding. People go to Karazhan to get Epic items to equip. They're just better.

And that's how these item qualities are determined! Hooray!

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