Adventures in Azeroth

New equipment comparison/evalution tool

For those of you that just can’t get enough analysis of your equipment, the Druid Wiki has yet another option: RAWR.  Now who doesn’t want to download this thing with a name like that?  Before I start, here’s the overview right from the wiki:

“Rawr is the ultimate program to compare tanking stats on items. With inspiration from the gear lists by Emmerald and Hugehoss, this can take a look at your current tanking stats and then summarize what gear pieces are best used for tanking, what upgrades are the best for you, what enchants you should use and what gems that would be strongest in your current setup.

• Can pull your characters gear directly from the armory (US or EU)
• Compare gear pieces, socket, enchants, socket bonuses
• Splits the result of an items worth into two different categories, Mitigation (armor, dodge) and Surviveability (armor, health)
• Takes various things into account, including the damage reduction/armor cap, crit immune or not, buffs depending on your own choice, your characters race
• Can compare the same item more than once with different sockets
• Can search the armory for all gear piece upgrades that might interest you and updates itself with all new items that might have appeared after a content patch with a single click of your mouse
• Easy-to-use, User-friendly, Nicely designed graphical Interface

You can download and read more about Rawr on the Wikispaces page, as well as get a Tour of the program including screenshots. Click on the Rawr logo to proceed to the Rawr page. This program is coded, developed, created and owned by Astrylian, 70 Night Elf Druid on Kilrogg (US).”

I recently downloaded this program and gave it a run.  It’s limited (only applies to Bear tanking gear), a little quirky, but kind of fun.  It’s different than a lot of gear sites out there in that it’s not a website but an application that you download and run on your computer. 

Once you download and install, the very first time you start it up, be prepared to take a short bio break while it downloads all the artwork for the gear.  This appears to be the number one FAQ question as there isn’t a nice message telling you that a download is in progress, it just looks like the program is locked up.  Patience, my furry one.

Once the initial download is done, the next thing is to get your character loaded.  Just click File / Load From Armory…, fill in the appropriate info, and your character’s current gear will be loaded into Rawr.  (Be sure you logged out last time with your tanking gear).

Once you get your gear loaded, you can examine two basic ratings by slot and see what other gear and gems are out there to upgrade that slot.  The two basic ratings Rawr uses is Mitigation and Survival.  Mitigation is all about avoiding damage and Survival is all about being able to soak up damage.  That’s it for Rawr; threat generation is not covered.

The program lets you set what buffs you generally have in a raid, so you can evaluate gear under “real world” conditions.  (Did I just imply that a raid is real?).  You can also play around with gems that are slotted in different gear pieces for comparison.  This is useful if, for instance, you don’t anticipate getting gems out of The Black Temple anytime soon.  You can even create different instances of the same gear piece, just with different gems for comparison.

In the words of Rawr’s author, the program helps you evaluate gear by:

“Based on these extremely accurate calculations and well simply founded ratings, Rawr is able to provide accurate ratings for individual items, using the following method. The Overall Rating of an item can be calculated as the difference between the Overall Rating of the whole character with that item equipped, and the Overall Rating of the whole character with that slot empty. The same is done for the Mitigation and Survival Ratings. This provides the most accurate ratings possible, by factoring in all of the gear, enchants, buffs, and the item itself into the value of the item, and not including the item to be replaced.”

For you theorycrafters out there, check out this page for more details on Rawrs calculations.

From here it’s time to play.  I’ll admit I haven’t spent a ton of time experimenting with Rawr, so for any questions I would recommend hitting the links above.  The author has a ton of information on the Druid Wiki and the calculations page should answer any questions you have on how the ratings are derived.

All in all, not a bad little tool for some basic gear evaluations.  The fact that it is limited to Bear gear only at this point, and then just mitigation and survival ratings, limits it’s use somewhat.  However, if you are looking for a second opinion to supplement Emmerald’s gear list, this might fill the bill.

October 26, 2007 - Posted by Amanna | Druid Gear, Online resources, World of Warcraft