There is a lot of power in this application. More than most people realize. Many people don’t even know it exists. It is basically a gear calculator that can help you make choices about your items. As you get more of one stat the value of other change. To truly compare gear, you need to take into account the other items you have. This is more important for some stats than others. Some classes feel the effects of this more than others. Rebalancing hit and spot checking side grade items is what I use it for the most. Like any good tool, you need to know when to use it and when not to use it.
Here is a video guide they had on the Rawr website. This is a great overview on how to use it. So take a moment to watch it.
So you can see how easy it is to tell if an item is an upgrade or not. When you select a gear slot on the right side, it lists all items of that slot and highlights your equipped item. Items higher in the list are better upgrades. You can also see how close to best in slot your item is. This is very valuable when looking to spend badges or dkp on items of the same item level. Most of the time you can just tell if its an upgrade, but when its not as clear is when rawr helps you the most.
Rebalancing hit is one think I like to use it for. I mark all the items that I have. When I get new item and there is a large difference in hit in the same slot I will turn to rawr for help. I mark the new item and run the optimize option. Rawr will let me know if i need to put on one of those old pieces of gear because of the hit difference or if its better to regem. It takes into account all stats, but hit is the clearest example.
Now that I am a raider, this is about all that I use it for. But I also found a lot of value in it when I was about to finish leveling my characters. When I get about 3 levels away from max level, I plug my character into rawr to plot out my gear path. It has filters so you can include or exclude raids, pvp, craftables, and things like that. So I set the filter to show me all the quest, rep, and craftable items. This highlights all the best items you can pick up with minimal work as you hit 80. If your questing, you may as well be questing for the easy gear. If its a rep item, you can be doing quests that give you that rep. This has little value now in WotLK with so many options available to get gear. Remember this one when your char hits 83-84 and your thinking about getting raid ready.
Another thing rawr is amazing for- dps set bonuses. What’s better, your (insert dps move) getting 3% more crit, or 2-3 higher ilvl piece’s stats? That’s impossible to figure out on your own. rawr let’s you find the optimal setting,if you’re willing to fiddle with it- and it can take into account only the buffs you DO have in a raid, not ones you ‘should’. There are a ton of other things, and i love this program. Good to see someone getting it out there more.
-Ty
Comment by tyra — December 4, 2009 @ 3:46 pm
Hey kev,
I’d like to talk to you about some improvements/tweaks I have made to your excellent KTQ addon. I’m posting this on your latest Wow related post because you don’t have a “contact me” option on your blog… (I apologize for it being totally unrelated, but I figured you would be checking the comments on the latest post more closely), I am a developer by day, so I took the solution you came up with and ran with it to add in some additional functionality I found useful for my own glyph factory.
I figured out a way to get my sales count out of auctioneer, and made some tweaks to your Addon to include an option for the Quantity to be “AUTO”. This allows me to set the amount to craft based on the amount I have actually sold of that particular glyph.. thus I can craft 20 of popular glyphs and only craft 3 of the less popular (by personal sales volume) glyphs.
I also added a (somewhat unrelated) option to auto set the Auctioneer Batch post quantities (I don’t use QA2) based on the amount I’ve sold… thus I batch post 3 of glyphs I’ve only sold 23 of, but 10 of glyphs I’ve sold 275+ of…
obviously these changes only work as intended if you have a decent sized history of glyph (or other item) posting.. you wont’ have the sales history data to use for this if you only just started) but if you have been doing it a while, this, at least for me, is a huge time saver in terms of crafting and posting
I was tempted to keep these changes to myself, but I figured since you were nice enough to make the base addon available, it would be bad karma if I added value to it and didn’t try to give back
If you are interested, I’d like to talk to you about including these changes in your main KTQ release as I think it would be very useful for others. email me at max at maxschilling doot coom. (if others know LUA I would be happy to send these changes to you, but they currently aren’t in a state to be used by non-developers)
Comment by Max Schilling — December 6, 2009 @ 4:16 pm