I had quite the stroke of luck today. I decided to give Pawn a try now that I’m up in Outland and have added some dungeon runs into the leveling mix. I’m starting to see decent blues and wanted to start building up healing and tanking sets which wouldn’t be too awfully embarrassing in Northrend.
I’d used Pawn on a previous Hunter but I hadn’t given it a try with the new Paladin itemization that hit in 3.0. I asked Google if anyone else had and, lo and behold, found that there’s been a fantastic thread about Pawn scales for Paladins on Elitist Jerks over just the last few days. Oh interwebs, is there anything you don’t know?!
What’s Pawn, I hear you asking? I’m glad you asked!
It’s an addon which adds a line to the item tooltip which tries to quantify an item’s stats. You give it weights for all the various stats and it presents you with the sum. Say you have an item with 2 strength and 3 stamina, and you give strength 10 points and stamina 1 point, it’ll assign the value of 23 to the item.
Adding different scales for stats for tanking or for healing lets us eyeball whether or not a new incoming item might be worth adding into either of our sets. I chose two of the example scales from the EJ thread and took some screen shots to use as an example:
The first two pieces, a quest reward and regular ramps drop, aren’t hugely different. You can see small differences in the RatingBuster stat breakdown in the bottom of the frame. The third item is a kara drop linked from atlasloot. It’s a much better tanking piece than either of the other two.
What pawn is good for us summarizing that really noisy RatingBuster data. You can see the ‘wowhead PvE prot’ scale doing a decent job of summarizing the differences in the stats which are interesting for tanking. The kara drop’s pawn value is twice the others. That’s not a subtle difference.
And look at what is happening with the ‘frmorrison Holy’ scale. It’s barely different between the items! This comes from the lack of Intellect in the tanking kara piece. Let’s see a healing plate drop from Kara:
Now we’re talkin’! The increase in Int, spell power, and mp5 add up to give it a much better holy pawn value.
It is very important to keep in mind that these values are inherently limited. A single holy scale doesn’t know if you want to prefer spell power or mp5 depending on if you’re in short or long fights. To start to delve into that level of detail you start to add more and more scales with different multipliers. DPS classes may want different scales for being hit capped, juggling haste and armor penetration, all that stuff. At some point it gets so complicated that you might as well just use the RatingBuster breakdowns and your noggin’.
A Pawn scale is no substitute for knowing your class mechanics and the particulars of a fight but it is still a useful tool for summarizing the character of items. I’m a fan.