How accurate is Pawn?

Community General Discussion
1

I’ve used the addon for a while now but sometimes I look at the percentage value it gives me for a piece and go “whaaaa?”

How exactly does it work? Is it smart? Does it know that the piece you just got is genuinely going to be an improvement? What if I’m capped in a desirable secondary and do not need that stat no more, will it continue to tell me stuff is an upgrade?

I don’t want to trust it completely because I do on my other characters and I see average - good results, not optimal stat percentages.

Anyone with experience with this mod for determining if a piece is an upgrade, please let me know!

2

Are you using the default or importing your specific stat weights? It’s probably accurate (at least accurate enough) on its own, but you’d still be better customizing it.

2 Likes
3

this right here. I’m not into cutting edge gameplay so I run default with pawn.

But if I were trying to maximize, I would be customizing it.

4

I haven’t ever known about customising it, I just thought it was a mini knowledge bank in the background.

Would you help me find where I can get the spec specific information to input into the addon? Can I load multiple ones for my characters?

5

It’s accurate if you’re using simcraft/raidbot weights properly, and considering breakpoints and such carefully.

6

I just run a simulation once a week to update my status weights so my pawn is accurate. But honestly if you use the default stat weights, Its better than nothing

7

If you’re using pawn but not feeding it stat weights from a recent simulationcraft (or hsw for healers), you’re doing it wrong. The built-in weights aren’t really amazing.

8

Here is a decent guide:

1 Like
9

Now can someone help me do this? Frost mage to begin with? I’ve not delved into simming and stuff like that so I have no idea. It’s clear I’m missing certain aspects here.

10

It uses default stat weights for your class and spec. If you keep it updated these are generally FAIRLY accurate, but will not be specific for your toon or your gear level.

You can sim your stats on raidbots and import those stat weights into Pawn for a more precise estimate, but if you’re going to sim anyways, might as well just sim upgrades.

12
  1. Plug in your character and hit the Generate Stat Weights button.
  2. Go make a sandwich or something, because the Sim can sometimes take a while.
  3. Once the Sim is finished, it should give you a box with your new stat weights in it. Beneath that is another box (“Pawn String”) filled with what looks like a bunch of gibberish. Press the Copy to Clipboard button right below it.
  4. In Pawn, go to the Scale tab and change it from Automatic to Manual.
  5. Select Import under Share Your Scales. A little window pops up.
  6. Paste the Sim string into the Pawn window and hit Okay.
  7. Annnnd you’re done. You can fine-tune it under the Weights tab later by clicking each individual stat, you don’t need to import another string every single time (well I guess it might be faster to just do another import and simply delete the old weights as you go–prevents typos too).

Important: While it’s a good idea to keep your Pawn weights up-to-date for a general eyeball reference (I’d recommend updating them at least once a week if you’ve been replacing gear), it would be far easier and more accurate to do an Equipment Sim whenever you want to swap out a piece of gear. Stats (and thus weights) are so synergistic and volatile that they’ll be changing whenever you change gear, possibly by a lot. This means doing a lot of Weight Sims and also doing a lot of head scratching as Pawn sometimes tells you to equip one item and then your new weights tell you to reequip what you just took off (rinse and repeat in an infinite loop). On the other hand, Equipment Sims should not only automatically calculate what your weights are and use those to determine how much of an increase or decrease your new item is (and you can do more than one piece at a time), but most of them also do a pretty good job with calculating Azerite traits and trinkets, which a simple Weight Sim won’t take into consideration at all.

13

You need to import custom stat weights from a site like Ask Mr. Robot or RaidBots.