Pawn Scales for WOW

Since a lot of folks have been searching this blog for information about Pawn scales to use in World of Warcraft, I thought I'd do a summary with all the current information available.  The Pawn software is downloaded from Curse.  This link is for the download and tells you where to follow Vger on Facebook for news, etc.  Don't rush to download, though.  Read on, McDuff.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/pawn

Pawn scales are used to compare two pieces of gear to tell you which will give you the most boost in your character's stats.  Apparently by Pawn version 2.3.11 (November 3, 2019) Pawn works for WOW Classic in all languages that it works in for WOW Retail.

You will still need to import your own stats for Classic as they are not built in for this version of the game.  How do you do that?  If you are really really into theory crafting, you'll want to read this WOWHead article about Pawn and SimulationCraft.  Be warned, though, WOWHead has inaccuracies now that it is a for-profit company, not the obsession of bloggers and extremely knowledgable gamers.  The Solo MMO Player has found at least three instances of incorrect information over the last month.
https://www.wowhead.com/how-to-use-simulationcraft-and-pawn

There is some question as to the accuracy of the built-in Pawn scales in Retail.  The best way to make Pawn scales as correct as possible is to build your own.  The second link below is to a Google Doc that explains how to do this with SimulationCraft.  I don't know how up-to-date this is since the G-Doc isn't dated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/57vlvo/how_accurate_is_pawn/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pW5mWY9nkfWoRCOHfoXqeeGb8s-jMoSVy-g8uveUv4c/edit

Icy Veins' forum has a nice summary of how all this works using a Warlock as an example (dated 2014).  The author reminds folks that Pawn or SimulationCraft stats are about current gear.  They don't give you any information about what sort of gear you should seek down the road as you play.
https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/7275-scale-factors-and-you-an-explanation-of-stat-weights/

By the way, Weebly has stats for you to import.  This is old information derived from The Elitist Jerks and MaxDPS, so don't use it unless you are playing The Burning Crusade.  I am only including this for the sake of completeness because it sounds likely Blizzard will have a Burning Crusade server opened in 2020-21.
http://tbcwowaddons.weebly.com/pawn.html

UPDATE:  This article has proved very popular among those who want to data mine WOW, so I've added it here so similar things are together in one place.
https://solommo.blogspot.com/2010/07/learning-data-mining-in-your-spare-time.html


***************************
Copyright Solo MMO Player at http://solommo.blogspot.com