Over the past few days, since hitting 80, I’ve been gearing up for tanking heroics. The first goal was to hit 535 defense to avoid crits. The next goal was to get around 20k health. No, it’s not a universal goal, but I’m aiming for it.
It was a lot easier to hit the defense mark than I had assumed that it would be. I had been collecting quest rewards and boss drops with defense as I leveled through Northrend. I grabbed some of the crafted Tempered Saronite and Daunting pieces from the auction house and was well into the 540s.
The problem is that those crafted pieces are relatively low level. They have a modest itemization budget and they spend it on defense instead of stamina. While I was comfortably past the defense mark, I was nowhere near the amount of health that people like to see. At one point I remember having 535 defense, 19k armor, and 17k health. Oof.
It was time to find items which had perhaps just a touch less defense but a lot more stamina. I wanted to start with the upgrades that were easiest to achieve and which gave the highest gain in health. How do we figure out which slots have the best potential upgrades?
I started by finding a WoWHead search which gave a decent summary of the pieces that I was interested in for each slot. It took some fiddling, but I ended up being happy with simply searching for plate items added in wrath that have both stamina and defense. I sorted the search results by item level. This is simplistic, yes, but it does a pretty good job in this case.
Then I’d jot down summaries of the search results for each slot. Looking at summaries of all the slots all at once seemed to be a great way to get a feel for which slots were ready to go and which slots needed more work.
Here, straight from the sticky note on my desktop, is an excerpt of the notes that I was taking:
chest: 187B: UP q+d 200B: DTK(H), HoS(H), Wrym .... belt: 174G: Icecrown 184B: Oc 200B: DTK(H), UP(H) .... boots: ebon, 200B: DTK(H), wyrm, TOK(H) .... shield: 187B: CoS 200B: Nax(H) ....
Yikes! But there’s some decent data in there.
We see that there’s an easy boot upgrade from Ebon Blade rep and after that it’s heroic drops and Wyrmrest rep. We’ll probably get the Wrymrest rep from championing in heroics. So once we get that boot upgrade from Ebon Blade we can probably move on to to other slots.
The belt slot is a disaster. There’s still a green upgrade waiting in a quest reward in Icecrown! Then a drop in The Oculus before we get into heroics.
And so on. But man is that ugly. It’s not a whole lot of fun to write down the results of all those searches so that we can see them all side-by-side. Wouldn’t it be great if some software could do that for us? I sure thought so. I sat down and did a manual HTML mock up of the sort of thing that I’d like to see. Here’s a screenshot that’s a link to the static HTML..
Each row has the items which are returned by a WoWHead search for a given slot. We could order the items by whatever colum in the search we wanted. In this case it’s item level, as indicated by the header. Under each item is its source. The source label gets a red background when that item is currently equipped.
Look at how much clearer this display is. It still takes context to interpret but once you have that context then you can make some fast and powerful observations.
For example, we can see from the source labels that blue ilevel 200 items mark heroic drops. The closer equipped items get to that point, the more ready that slot is for entering heroics. The cloak slot, a Wyrmrest accord piece in this case, is good to go. Equipped items which are far to the left of the heroic drops, like those stinky Boots of Not Awesome that dropped from The Nexus a million years ago, are slots to work on. They have quite a few upgrades available before entering heroics. In this case, the bracers are somewhere in between those two extremes.
That’s immediately obvious just from looking at the positions of the items. In fact, we’ve sorted the rows by the position of the equipped items. The slots at the top of the table have the most to gain by getting upgrades. If this existed on some web site somewhere I could have just done this search and immediately seen which slots were lagging most behind. Instead of having to dork about with manual searches and note taking.
If we can geek out for a minute, what we’re doing here is trying to get all of the important data viewable at the same time. Imagine asking two people to sort 10 numbers. You give the first person a single page with 10 numbers printed on it. You give the second person a small book with each of the 10 numbers printed on its own page. The first person will stare at it for a bit and have it. The second person will be flipping around in the book trying to first remember what the set of numbers are before they can begin to sort them. To throw a wild generalization out there: we’re built for analyzing what we see, not what we remember.
So the idea is to have some software get the gear progression data for all the slots in front of our eyes in a way that lets us quickly estimate which slots are furthest from our given goals.
Yes, I know, some sites come close to doing this. Almost all of them are horrible to use. Gear wishlist comes very close but has two giant flaws. Its multi-page list fails to get all the data in front of us at once. It could pretty easily offer a more compact layout. Unfortunately, its fatal flaw is posted right there on the front page:
Gear wishlist is meant to be simple and is NOT configurable! It uses each source’s default rankings, power users should use the ranking sites directly.
Fiddlesticks.
If I had my way, WoWHead would implement this directly! Please? I know I missed Christmas this year, but it’d make a great.. Easter gift? Are you guys listening?
If not, I’ll see if I can con Mrs. Zabery into taking a swing at it. She writes web apps in python and JS for a living. /swoon.
Tags: gearing, visualzation