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


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DK Tank Gear, UI, Mods, Macros and PAWN Scales

Today must be Death Knight Day as I have three new good articles for death knights.

First, Pwnwear's site has updated the DK tanking gear list there with the new Ruby Sanctum items that are known.
http://pwnwear.com/forum/tank-gear-list-t142.html#p394

Secondly, Skeleton Jack has changed his UI around and posted a long article about what he uses, why, and why he has discarded certain items.  If you need UI or mod ideas, it's worth a read.
http://www.skeletonjack.com/2010/06/27/skeleton-jacks-mods-and-death-knight-uis/

Thirdly, and most importantly, Skeleton Jack has listed specs and PAWN scale tags for the Frost and Unholy Death Knight flavors.
http://www.skeletonjack.com/2010/06/26/frost-and-unholy-specs-and-ape-weights-and-scales-for-3-3-5/

UPDATE:  Skeleton Jack has added an article about macros that DKs will find very useful.
http://www.skeletonjack.com/2010/06/29/you-need-death-knight-macros/

UPDATE #2 by Skeleton Jack-an article about Tell Me When.
http://www.skeletonjack.com/2010/07/01/tell-me-when-and-invaluable-mod-for-death-knights/

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PAWN Using WOWhead's Stat Weights (Addons)

WOWHead announces PAWN is using their stat weights now as the default.
http://www.wowhead.com/?blog=147110

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RAWR Screen Shot Introduction

If you are interested in learning more about RAWR, the Greedy Goblin  has a nice explanation of how it works with plenty of screen shots here.  Note that the Solo MMO Player finds the math that underlies RAWR unclear and is suspicious about how well simulations of normalized data relate to an individual's play style.  In other words, RAWR is a black box.  They can be good, they can be absolutely useless.  One solid fact about black box technology is that you never know.  If you feel the same way, use PAWN instead.    
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/12/your-christmas-present-is-rawr.html




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Priest Theorycrafting in Patch 3.3

BobTurkey has written a series of great articles about priests on his blog.  There are to be six articles full of important stats for all types of priests.  I'll update this with links to each entry as they are posted.

Introduction
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-introduction-part-1/

Mana Regeneration
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-mana-regeneration-part-2/

Mana Pool
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-mana-pool-part-3/

Haste Rating
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-haste-rating-part-4/

Critical Rating
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-critical-rating-part-5/

LootRank and PAWN Values
http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/priest-theorycrafting-for-3-3-summary-part-6/

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The Feral Druid Tank

Karthias looks at Nurturing Instinct as a talent to help heal his feral druid tank in cat form. Note that this is from 2008. Read the comments for more insight.
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2008/04/more-on-nurturing-instinct.html

A discussion from 2007 about how a bear tank can heal without shifting out of bear form.
http://vnboards.ign.com/wow_druid_class/b22777/105202468/p1/

More about bear tanking threat rotations from Karthias from May 2009.
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2009/05/bear-threat-rotations.html


A feral druid talks about how to improve as a tank.
http://feralconfessions.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/this-tank-sucks/

Loot scales for Patch 3.1 (we are currently operating under Patch 3.2).
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2009/04/loot-weighting-for-31.html

Feral druid PvP tactics against various classes (from 2006!).
http://thedruidsgrove.org/wow/forums/archive/index.php/t-10803.html

Karthias posts his feral druid gear worksheet here.  It's a Google document so anyone can see it no matter what computer flavor they use.  Note the Bear Only and Cat Only pages at the bottom.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pdnkV0444wHn_grOhx1RkNg

A Karthias macro to keep from accidentally switching out of bear form.
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2008/12/poison-pill-macros.html

Big Bear Butt's video guide to leveling your weapon skill as a feral druid.
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/02/20/leveling-your-weapon-skill-the-video/

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PAWN Explanation

An explanation of how PAWN works to compare gear.  Note that the folks in the comments like Rating Buster, although it doesn't seem to do exactly what PAWN does.  The Solo MMO Player says Rawr is replacing PAWN due to PAWN's complexity but he still thinks PAWN gives him exactly what he wants.
http://druidreliquary.blogspot.com/2009/09/gearing-with-purpose-pawn-and-true.html

By the way, I capture links to all the scale tags I can find.  If you use PAWN and want to see the scale tags I've found, search for "scale tags."

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PAWN Scale Tags for Many Classes

Go to "DPS Scale Factors" table.  Below the first table is one with PAWN inputs.
http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/wiki/SampleOutputT8

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The Great Gear Myth Explodes

We've been noticing a lot of gear misunderstanding on The Solo MMO Player's realm and elsewhere. Folks advertise for PUGs which want only players with absolutely the best gear. Folks sneer at the Solo MMO Player's gear, at Big Bear Butt's gear, at the gear of anyone who doesn't have absolutly top-of-the-line equipment. Is everyone who plays WOW turning into a twink? Do folks assume if you don't have the best gear you aren't committed to putting in enough hours in the game to get the gear? Is everyone looking for a character geared in such a way that any instance with them will be a piece of cake? Or is gear misunderstood on a fundamental level?

Gear's certainly important--don't get me wrong. The game revolves around getting better gear as you progress through the levels since better gear aids your gameplay. It does not replace your gameplay however, and "better" gear can be hard to determine. You can't just say that blue gear is better than green. It isn't always. As you already know, the perfect wand for a level 30 priest isn't the perfect wand for a level 30 warlock. Or even for a level 35 priest! Things change. Good gear becomes less good. What is good for my character isn't good for yours. How do you decide the best gear for your current situation? How do you even know what gear you can use?

First, know what gear your character can use and what, if anything, they can make. To do that, research your character class and profession. I like to start at WOW Wiki's descriptions of classes and professions. Taking the druids as an example of a class, you see that they can only use cloth and leather armor, and are able to use daggers, staffs, maces and pole arms . So if you come across a nice shield while playing as a druid, the only thing you can do is sell it or give it away to a friend or a guild bank. You can't use it yourself. That assumes that our hypothetical shield is not Bind on Pickup (BOP) which means once you touch it, it is yours whether you can use it or not. No one else can use it. When it comes to choosing a profession, figure out what you can make and who can use it. There's no sense in becoming an engineer if you can't sell or use the stuff you make and only a limited range of your alts (if any) can use it either.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Class
http://www.wowwiki.com/Professions

That is the first step: know yourself and what gear you can use or make.

The second step is cheating by using all the game resources available to you. Become familiar with the blogs and websites that talk about the characters you like to play. Often the writer will post about their gear choices and how well they worked out. Take advantage of their knowledge in choosing your own gear. The drawback to this approach is that your playing style may not be exactly the same and the writer may not know what they are talking about. Probably the best places to look at the websites focused on one class as many folks contribute information. This site, for example, has a feral dps druids gear methodology. To search for other class gear listings use the upper left hand corner search box and type "gear" and your class. Whatever I've found and saved on Blog will show up.
http://druid.wikispaces.com/ToskksDPSGearMethod

Here a hunter talks about item level and using iLevel to choose the best gear to play as a hunter. Note that this information is now visible in Blizzard's normal UI but that wasn't always the case. The followup article in the second link below which gives examples.
http://www.wow.com/2009/06/11/scattered-shots-what-you-see-is-not-always-what-you-get/

http://www.brigwyn.com/2009/06/15/so-lets-talk-more-about-upgrades/

Now how do you choose exactly what sword out of hundreds that you want given your class/profession/level? There are a lot of tools available to help you sort through gear. Knowing what they are and how to use them is the third step in managing gear. First and foremost of all the resources is the Armory which is Blizzard's database of all the stuff in the game. You can look up anything here.
http://www.wowarmory.com/

However, the Armory is limited to What and Where information. It does not tell you what gear is best for you. It just describes the gear and where it can be found or bought. There are many websites that take the Armory information and make it more useful for the player looking at gear.

The Popularity Contest for Gear
Interested in the most popular gear sets? Armory Data Mining is for you. Most high levels and classes are listed on the right hand side. Click and look. This is a popularity contest, though. Do you really want to use the gear that 3,000 teenagers on your realm choose because it looks sick? Or because they read about it on a website? Besides, Zardoz started pulling this together with the higher levels and if you have a fairly new character, your information's not here yet.
http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/

GEAR COMPARISON WEBSITES
There are many sites that compare gear. Let's start with Gear Wishlist. Plug in your character and realm information and it'll recommend what gear you should look for. The gear recommendations are based on gear rankings pulled together from many sources. It's useful, but doesn't take the nuiances of your character and playing style into consideration. The list you'll get is fairly comprehensive and is divided into chest, back, fingers, etc. The drawbacks of using this site is that you may be given ten blue items without any way to tell which might be the very best and sometimes there is no location information. If it is a quest item, you are not told which quest so you'll have to look that up elsewhere. However, move your mouse over an item and a little window with details about it pops into view.
http://gear-wishlist.appspot.com/

Lootzoor is one of the sources Gear Wishlist uses for its ranking. It gives you gear options for each slot. Whether you use Gear Wishlist or Lootzor is probably personal preference although Gear Wishlist may have a better ranking as it draws from multiple sources. Then again, maybe not.
http://www.lootzor.com/

Quick Armory works the same way as Gear Wishlist. Plug in a character's name and realm and you'll see the current gear for that character. This is useful when you want to check out the gear of that mage that is knocking off everything in sight. It's great for looking up someone's stats. Note the new bar chart ranking added to the results. The Solo MMO Player thinks this might be buggy so don't depend on it exclusively.
http://www.quickarmory.com/
Quick Armory differs from Gear Wishlist in that it has has Quick Armory Stats (next link below) to compare gear you are curious about. Again, this doesn't take one's playing style into consideration which is important if the gear you are comparing is very close statistically.
http://www.epgpweb.com/help/gearpoints

WOWhead's Item Comparison does the same thing as Quick Armory's quick armory stats page. It doesn't look quite as detailed as Quick Armory's Stats but it has a nice description of how to use the comparison tool that makes sense to the casual user.
http://www.wowhead.com/?compare

There are other databases which relate to gear but don't rate it for you. Want to see what loot is available for your class? Click on one of the icons at the top of the page to get started. The downside of using this database is that this is out of date as it is current as of patch 3.0 and we are on patch 3.2.2 now.
http://www.wow-loot.com/

There are addons that judge in-game players and their gear like the addon NVgearscore. Use them at your own risk. After all, you often haven't a clue if the person you are scanning actually knows how to play the game. They look great but their gear might be inappropriate for their character and playing style, or they may not know how to use it. Don't you remember the old "don't judge a book by its cover" saying? It didn't get to be a cliche by being untrue.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/nvgearscore.aspx


PAWN and RAWR
These two are addons for comparing gear specifically for your own character. They take information from your character and its tree and evaluate and compare gear that will work for you. The Solo MMO Player chooses his gear based on PAWN. Many folks don't want to clutter up their UI with addons that have to be maintained and reloaded after every big patch, but the Solo MMO Player finds PAWN worth all the trouble. It is based on statistics for the various classes, which means I am constantly scouring the World Wide Web for scale tags, which is what PAWN calls those stats. (All those I've found are posted somewhere on the Solo MMO Player blog. Search on scale tags in the upper left hand corner's search box to see what I have gathered.) Here's a bit about how PAWN works.
http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/05/compare-gear-easily-with-pawn/

You can download Pawn at Curse.com. Note the link to the unofficial Pawn forums where you can grab scale tags to plug into your calculations.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/pawn.aspx

The ReadMe information for PAWN is spelled out here.
http://worldofwarcraft.filefront.com/file/Pawn%3B83933

Here's a detail explanation of how to use it with screen shots. Click on the tiny thumbnails to get a better view.
http://flameshock.blogspot.com/2008/07/softcore-pawn-how-to-use-loot-ranking.html

Here is the Pawn forum.
http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewforum.php?f=1

Here's information about installing the addon and where the documentation lies.
http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewtopic.php?t=2

How do you install PAWN?
just like every other addon: exit your WoW, and copy the PAWN-folders into your Interface\Addon-Directory. (e.g. D:\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\)
be sure you got TWO new directories:
- VgerCore
- PAWN
now restart WoW again.

More about installing all addons and how to check for errors.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/pawn.aspx



Now for RAWR. Here is the RAWR site. The second link is to the Druid WIki with further RAWF information. RAWR started out being just for druids so it is a particularly good tool for the druids.
http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr

http://druid.wikispaces.com/Rawr

Here's a review by Big Bear Butt Blogger, who has used RAWR for a long time. Make sure you read through the comments as some folks believe it overstates usefulness of some items or is less useful for some classes.
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/06/12/as-long-as-im-repeating-myself/

Other addons--Tank Points is another gear comparison addon with the guide to using it in the link below. The drawback to this addon is it seems slanted towards tanks and death knights. It is not as popular as PAWN and RAWR.
http://deathknight.info/2009/06/gravitys-guide-to-using-tank-points/


GEAR TIP
WOW Insider documents a tip they apparently have mentioned in their podcasts--as of Patch 3.1, when you are in your character screen you can hold down Alt and see all the gear in your bag that sits in that slot. Details here.
http://www.wow.com/2009/05/26/tip-show-possible-slot-gear-on-character-screen/


CONCLUSION
I hope all this information helps you evaluate and assess your own gear and that you might be able to get in the game. Use these tools and you can decide for yourself just how valid The Great Gear Myth is.

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Shock and Awe, PAWN, and EnhSim (Addons)

You are probably gloomily trying to rebuild the UI Blizzard casually destroys with each big patch. You might want to consider replacing what you used with this integrated UI that will help you evaluate gear. Sadly, I cannot tell what role Diriom plays but I'm guessing an enhancement shaman.

http://bighitbox.com/index.php/2009/08/integrating-enhsim-shock-and-awe-and-pawn

UPDATE:  Here's an article by an enhancement shaman about using Shock and Awe that concentrates on options, timer bars and the priority frame.
http://www.wow.com/2010/02/20/totem-talk-shock-and-awe/#continued

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Arcane Mage Pawn Scale Tags

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=8246538204&sid=1

http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewtopic.php?t=651&highlight=arcane+mage+pawn+tags

http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewtopic.php?t=328

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Warlocks in WOW (with PAWN tag scales)

Besides the Warlocks Den* (listed on the right side of the page under Favorite Links) there are several guides to the warlock that look pretty thorough. Ten Ton Hammer updated their guide in January of 2009. Besides gear, talents and spells, it includes information about soloing with the warlock through various levels.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/guides/classes/warlock

apbit hosts a warlock guide that seems pretty thorough and which includes a leveling guide and a list of known bugs (always useful). This information doesn't seem to have been updated since the original game came out. There's no leveling information for Outlands, for information. Depend on it at your own risk.
http://apbit.com/classguides/warlock/thewarlockguide.html

I found a site devoted to warlock builds that is updated to Patch 3.1. Definitely post-Ulduar!
http://warlockbuilds.com/

There is a wiki just for warlocks. The link below is to their section on green fire, which is an addon that turns the warlock's flames green. I'm holding out for an addon that allows my warlock to shoot pink rhinestones, but this is pretty cool nevertheless. The wiki has a lot of other good information like guides to raiding or PvP play as a warlock, as well as a list of macros for warlocks. This is a good site to explore. Look at Game Mechanics for a DPS calculator and a list of spell coefficients. I've added this wiki to the list of Favorite Sites on the right side of this page.
http://warlock.wikispaces.com/Green+Fire

Finally, from WOW Head's Class Forums for Warlocks, I found PAWN tag scales for those using PAWN to evaluate gear.
http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=101768&p=1149215

*The Solo MMO Player says the Warlocks Den site doesn't seem to have been updated in a while. Use at your own risk.

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