1. Do I need custom stat weights?


Mr. Robot already customized them for you, specific to each and every character.

“Stat weights” from guides are built for 1 character, not your character, which is why people tell you to sim your own. Instead of making you sim your own, we simmed it all for you. That’s right – we sim all of the talent and gear combos you might need to evaluate, before you even own the items or change your talents.

So when you get that gear, or change that talent, we already have the new set of stat weights waiting for you. They are automatically applied as your character changes… that’s why we call them “Adaptive Strategies.”

Also keep in mind that static stat weights can’t rank anything with a proc, which is half of your gear these days. That’s why our “adaptive strategies” use simulation data and machine learning to pick your stats and gear.


2. Should I use Ask Mr. Robot (AMR) or SimC?

It depends on what you want to do. If you’re simming just to find your DPS, both programs tend to be accurate, and both have very smart people working on them. Most classes collaborate across the platforms to make sure both are accurate as well since it’s in everyone’s interest to make sure both work. Anyway, pick your favorite.

However, when it comes to stat weights, SimC does a subset of what AMR does. One of the things we really focused on when we built our simulator was improving the accuracy of stat weight generation by using a statistically accepted practices. We also built the stat weight functions to integrate with gear ranking. Let me explain:

  • AMR looks at 1000s of data points over real gear stat budgets. We then are able to apply statistical models to this to find a ‘slope’ (how much your DPS increase with each stat). That is your stat weight.
  • SimC looks at 2 data points, one above your gear and one below your gear.  Then a line is drawn between those 2 points to find the slope. Because of this, the slope changes depending on the 2 data points that were chosen.
  • AMR looks at how stats interact. SimC looks at each stat in isolation with the stat scaling function, missing the interactions. However, for those of you familiar with SimC reforge plots, those do take a look at stat interactions, and then you can manually adjust stat weights based on your interpretation.
  • AMR sims all trinket, legendaries, and things with procs and bundles that with the stat weight report so that we can rank those items from sim data. SimC’s stat weights don’t do this.

This is not an AMR vs SimC battle, like I said, it is a great program. One feature not being as robust doesn’t make it less worthwhile to use as a simulation tool.

3. Why do Mr. Robot’s trinket rankings look different than from a guide?

Trinket lists you find in a guide are for casual players just looking for a quick estimate to eyeball what might be best. Min-maxxers will want to get a list custom tailored to them, as legendaries, talents, and your specific stats will affect how trinkets perform.

You can use any simulator to generate a custom trinket list based off your current gear. If you are using Mr. Robot’s ranked gear lists, those are already customized to you.

To repeat: Mr. Robot ranks all trinkets, and any item with a proc, directly from simulation data.

4. Why do gear suggestions sometimes sim less DPS? Is Mr. Robot broken?

The goal is that all gear recommendations are within a small % of error of their actual simulated DPS. There is a tradeoff of speed for accuracy. Mr. Robot ranks an entire list of gear for you in < 1 second, and gets you within 2% of the actual DPS. For example, for Best in Bags, Mr. Robot sifts through several millions of combinations of gear that you own, and does this in about 1 second. If you simulated every one of those combinations, it would take about 12-24 hours to run.

The reason we put that green ‘simulate’ button next to all of your ranked gear lists, is to let you play with it. Want to swap in one other item and sim it at a 0.05% margin of error? Do it. It’s fun. Have fun.

That being said, if you find something WAY off, definitely let us know so we can look into it.

5. Can you simulate tanks and healers?

Yes! Although this is currently very controversial as there are 2 camps who feel strongly in either direction. We like simulation, but that’s probably obvious. Other people don’t and aren’t afraid to tell you that. It’s your call!

Tanking: we improved on the model that SimC’s had over the years past, with super smart people pushing the way, like Theck (TMI). He took a break from wow and we picked up the torch to continue pressing forward on tank simulations.

  • We let tanks die! (SimC gives you infinite health).
  • We built our NPS metric to track death chance. So the lower your chance to die, the higher your NPS is. That’s our ultimate measure of a tank’s tankiness. We don’t factor in DPS right now.
  • We give you a team of healers that act like ‘real’ healers. If your health is high, healers hot you and use small heals. As your health gets lower, they use bigger heals. If your health is really low, they start using instant-heals.
  • We built in boss events that you can anticipate. If the boss is going to do a giant strike-of-face-smashing, we let you save your big cooldowns for that event. Just like you would in a real raid.

We think the tanking is really robust. Our developer plays a tank (if that makes you feel any stronger about it?). If you think there are other areas to improve it, hit us up.

Healing: SimC doesn’t sim healers, so we’re pushing into new territory here.

  • Our current model lets you define how much your other healers are healing.
  • It takes into account over healing.
  • It accounts for running out of mana and adjusts.
  • Rotations are set up like priority lists of who to heal first, or what type of event a big cooldown should be saved for, or rules on when to use hots, AoE healing, or big expensive direct heals.

6. What is this “Machine Learning” I keep hearing about?

It’s a better way to rank gear.  Read the full explanation on Machine Learning, written in a fun, cheeky way, that us non-math PhDs can understand, promise!

The short story is this: stat weights are basically a priority order. If Crit has a weight of 9 and mastery has a weight of 8, crit will always be favored. In a perfect world, these stat weights would find gear with only crit (and your main stat, like Int or Str). So you’d have a ton of crit and nothing else. But usually, you want some balance, or some ‘ratio’ of stats. This is one of the main reasons you see people recommending ‘caps’ – the point at which the interaction between 2 stats changes.

Machine learning knows all of this. It knows how stats interact. It knows if you can’t reach some threshhold, that maybe an entirely different setup is better.

And the biggest thing you’ll probably like: machine learning adapts as you get gear. That’s right, you no longer need to re-run stat weights every time you get a new piece of gear. Machine learning has all of the data, and changes with you. Except… you’ll want to run a new gearing strategy if something major changes: talents, legendaries, or relics.