To those people who ask, "Why does Mr. Robot do X and Y"

[Krazyito 521]

TL;DR: Mr robot is not telling you what to do. YOU are telling Mr. Robot what to do and Mr. Robot is doing his thing with what YOU give him. Don't ask "is Mr. Robot right?" because you have to decide that for yourself and the adjust the weights accordingly.

STOP ASKING IF THEY ARE RIGHT. You're basically asking if you told Mr. Robot the correct weights.

You can make him right/wrong.

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Hello. I am here to clear up some hate about Mr. Robot. I haven't necessarily seen anyone on these forums say they don't like it, but I've talked to some guildies and other people over the game and a few seem to not like it.

I am a HUGE min-maxer. I love to tinker with my toon and see how I can max out every little bit of stats I can to try to be more optimal. Sometimes it means completely regemming or new gear, but its just one aspect of the game that I love to do. In my quest to optimize I tried to find different add ons or resources to help me. As a Computer Scientist, I know that when coded correctly, computers can optimize much quicker and better than I ever will. I used addons like Reforgelite to do my reforges more accurately than I thought Mr. Robot did, but I still had problems with gems for haste breakpoints. I despise haste gems and felt that I could reach my breakpoints without them, but as you will see later, I had to compromise. For a long time I used Mr. Robot to suggest my gems and then I used reforgelite in game for reforging.

Now, on to explaining about Mr. Robot.

I can agree that some of the default stat weights are arguably no good for some specific people, but for beginners they are usually very good. Most classes are pretty decent, but what the people who dislike Mr.Robot don't understand is that most of these weights are pretty low end, all around, weights for people either learning the spec or what the community has found as "acceptable" or "the norm".

If you are playing a new class, most of the time you don't know what stats to go for at all. Using Mr. Robot and following his suggestions just to get started will probably give you the best start on the class until you decide to delve deeper into it and learn what you want out of the spec in terms of stats.

Then there's the argument that "It will teach new people the wrong way of gearing/haste caps etc" Well, new people in general will do stupid and wrong things. It's their way of learning the class and Mr. robot is a stepping stone, which provides all the TOOLS to get you where you need to be. Most players will find that they want something different out of their class but the problem is you just have to actually work for it, like most things in life.

The reason Mr. Robot is such a powerful tool is that it allows you to change your weights. By setting your own custom weights you are able personalize the optimizer to do exactly what you want for your gear. You just have to know what you want and adjust the weights to your preference.

An example: Here is Mr. robots default weights for a Mistweaver Monk


Which gives me a ton of spirit (14k~) the first haste cap and then some crit and mastery after theres enough spirit.

These work wonders for new MW monks who just start out. It would be the exact same way I would tell them to gem/reforge, but personally I want something completely different.

Since I have a pretty high ilvl and I am doing Heroic 25m ToT raids, I decided I want to maximize my total crit. I also wanted to prioritize crit over intellect in terms of gemming, but I did not want to completely ignore intellect socket bonuses. On top of that I wanted to get the 3rd haste breakpoint of 9158. Lastly I wanted to get rid of spirit. The legendary meta gem and my mana tea mechanics are enough for me to do any heroic ToT boss with very minimal spirit, but the biggest annoyance is excess haste over the cap. And any excess haste that could be easily transferred to cirt or spirit, should be.

This is what I ended up with.


Pretty different weights. To make the optimizer gem for more of a secondary stat than a primary (crit > Int in this case) You need to make sure that the secondary stat weight is MORE than half of your primary stat weight. (half of 2.5 is 1.25), but by having Intellect as a higher weight than Crit, it will still try to go for Int socket bonuses since it is the #1 stat. If i wanted to gem more intellect than crit, I would simply bring the weight of crit down to 1.2 or 1.

The bottom line is that most people who hate on Mr. Robot dislike it because of the default stat weights. What I would highly suggest and implore, is that you give it a second chance and mess with the custom stat weights. If you take the time to think about it from Mr. Robots point-of-view, they need to generalize their default stat weights to try to cover the very basic and most stats can change depending on gear and sometimes even encounters. It's pretty difficult to come up with a general set of weights that will work for everyone and every encounter.

By doing this you not only gain a deeper understanding of your class and how you want to maximize your stats, but you are also happier with the suggestions of Ask Mr. Robot and know that you are much more optimal than before.

Thank you for taking your time to read this and I hope that I at least helped change someones mind or helped someone find a new way of optimizing their character.

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More Information to help get you started:
http://blog.askmrrob...s-stat-weights/
http://www.mmo-champ...=1#post21398266
http://blog.askmrrob...t-stat-weights/
http://blog.askmrrob...-with-mr-robot/
http://blog.askmrrob...orial-overview/
http://forums.askmrrobot.com/index.php?topic=6389.msg37571#msg37571

[rjparker1 7]

Hello. I am here to clear up some hate about Mr. Robot. I haven't necessarily seen anyone on these forums say they don't like it, but I've talked to some guildies and other people over the game and a few seem to not like it.

I am a HUGE min-maxer. I love to tinker with my toon and see how I can max out every little bit of stats I can to try to be more optimal. Sometimes it means completely regemming or new gear, but its just one aspect of the game that I love to do. In my quest to optimize I tried to find different add ons or resources to help me. As a Computer Scientist, I know that when coded correctly, computers can optimize much quicker and better than I ever will.

Reasons why people do NOT like Mr. Robot.

Mr. Robot is WRONG! I have been using it for a while. It works pretty well.. MOST of the time, but you have to consider that there are MANY people that take tweaks to the nth degree, those are the people that find flaws with Mr. Robot, and it's FAR from perfect..

I don't hate mr. robot, I was a member.. until.. I tried to switch to Enhanced and found Mr. Robot led me astray.. so I cancelled my monthly membership.

I will say Mr. Robot is still the best, but I use both wowreforge and mr. robot I don't put my trust into either one. Mr. robot gives extras like haste tips and gem enchants.. which is nice, I also find that if I have a LOT of items to change at once Mr. Robot seems to get confused, like it will tell me to reforge a bunch of crit, then I do exactly everything it says.. I come back to Mr. Robot and it tells me to change other items .. so it contradicts itself...

That's happened more than once.. so you might be a computer scientist, but that just means you should know they are not perfect and there is more than one way to code...

I realize these sites are free, which means people do this on their own time, and things DO get missed.. you can't expect much for free.

Overall they do a brilliant job and Mr. Robot is my go to when I want to ensure my gear is correct, I just validate the changes in Wowreforge..

Right now Mr. Robot wants to reforge me OFF haste to mastery.. for 1 item, and then crit to haste.. . It will basically be a .02% change for me... the crit is LOWER than my normal haste so its not even worth doing to reforge.. I am simply ignoring that reforge since It will do ZERO DPS .. it will actually be lower DPS (according to simulcraft), by like 15 DPS..

I like Mr. Robot but you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket.

[Zoopercat 22]

I'm from Ask Mr. Robot. Krazyito - nice post, thanks :)

rjparker - regarding your post:

• Reforges that change: this is a by-product of the 'old' algorithm. You see, most people's gear has a few quadrillion combinations of gems, enchants and reforges. Since we can't look at all of them, we have to do a little estimating. The 'old' algorithm uses your current gear as a starting point to 'seed' the algorithm. So once it changes, the 'seed' changes and you might get a different suggestion. With the old algorithm, there's about a 0.5% margin of error for some of the cases. BUT DO NOT FEAR! WE have a new algorithm that went into beta last week, that will guaranteed the best solution, every single time :) Here's more info about that.
• Regarding the Off hand: here's the catch! Most people want to BEST solution, and if we are off by even a fraction of a %, we aren't perfect. But then when Mr. Robot swaps reforges to juggle 0.02% change, some people are like 'ugh, I'm not paying for all those reforges.' And that's ok - that's why we have the score function - people can decide if the change in score is worth it :)

About the new beta optimizer:

We have a new algorithm that will guarantee the best results. It's taken us a long time to make it work, since a quadrillion (and sometimes more) combinations of gems, enchants and reforges is a lot. The trick is to go through the options fast and rule out ones that aren't optimal as soon as possible. And we finally figured out how to do it AND keep it running in sub-second time!

Definitely give our beta optimizer a shot - once we verify enough results (and fix any bugs), nothing (and no one) will be able to beat his optimizations. (Given a set of stat weights and rules of course. Change the stat weights and Mr. Robot will also change his optimization suggestions).

[rjparker1 7]

I'm from Ask Mr. Robot. Krazyito - nice post, thanks

rjparker - regarding your post:

• Reforges that change: this is a by-product of the 'old' algorithm. You see, most people's gear has a few quadrillion combinations of gems, enchants and reforges. Since we can't look at all of them, we have to do a little estimating. The 'old' algorithm uses your current gear as a starting point to 'seed' the algorithm. So once it changes, the 'seed' changes and you might get a different suggestion. With the old algorithm, there's about a 0.5% margin of error for some of the cases. BUT DO NOT FEAR! WE have a new algorithm that went into beta last week, that will guaranteed the best solution, every single time Here's more info about that.
• Regarding the Off hand: here's the catch! Most people want to BEST solution, and if we are off by even a fraction of a %, we aren't perfect. But then when Mr. Robot swaps reforges to juggle 0.02% change, some people are like 'ugh, I'm not paying for all those reforges.' And that's ok - that's why we have the score function - people can decide if the change in score is worth it

About the new beta optimizer:

We have a new algorithm that will guarantee the best results. It's taken us a long time to make it work, since a quadrillion (and sometimes more) combinations of gems, enchants and reforges is a lot. The trick is to go through the options fast and rule out ones that aren't optimal as soon as possible. And we finally figured out how to do it AND keep it running in sub-second time!

Definitely give our beta optimizer a shot - once we verify enough results (and fix any bugs), nothing (and no one) will be able to beat his optimizations. (Given a set of stat weights and rules of course. Change the stat weights and Mr. Robot will also change his optimization suggestions).

OK just to be clear.. I didn't disparage Mr. Robot, I like Mr. Robot.. I just said it's not perfect, so please don't ban me from mr. Robot, I still use it.. :)

hehe

Also I renewed my subscription, seeing as how you "guarantee" my results..!

Edited June 24, 2013 by rjparker1

[Krazyito 521]

Rjparker; I'm pretty confused with your first post. You seem to be saying how bad it was, but then saying it was fine since there is nothing better.

and I have to wonder if you even read most of my post. The entire post was about asking people to go back and look at Mr. Robot and learn to research their class and use their own CUSTOM STAT WEIGHT which will give them the optimizations that they are happy with.

If you don't take the time to tinker with the weights, then Mr. Robot will ALWAYS be wrong in your eyes because they are not tailored to you.

Mr. Robot, for the most part, always does what he is supposed to. You just need to take the time to give him the guidelines he should adhere to.

Also I renewed my subscription, seeing as how you "guarantee" my results..!

And again, as I said, He guarantees results according to the weights that are defined. If you continue to use default weights and decide that its "wrong", then its not Mr. Robots fault.

[rjparker1 7]

Rjparker; I'm pretty confused with your first post. You seem to be saying how bad it was, but then saying it was fine since there is nothing better.

and I have to wonder if you even read most of my post. The entire post was about asking people to go back and look at Mr. Robot and learn to research their class and use their own CUSTOM STAT WEIGHT which will give them the optimizations that they are happy with.

And again, as I said, He guarantees results according to the weights that are defined. If you continue to use default weights and decide that its "wrong", then its not Mr. Robots fault.

It is WRONG for Mr. Robot if I pick Mr. Robot, do what he says, then I go back and it's changed.. nothing to do with stat weights, or my class or anything.. It's WRONG if it moves haste to mastery, and then turn around and reforge crit to haste.. and that is under the "soft cap" haste ticks that's on the same Mr. robot site! It should keep me at 25.06%.

That's WRONG! At any rate, we can argue semantics all day long, you are only going to see what you want, when I already stipulated that Mr. Robot is my first choice, and I only use other sites (that one site being wowreforge) to validate Mr. Robot findings... and wowreforge recalcs correctly WITHOUT "stat weights" because I can verify in game and simulcraft as being so!

Ok if you still want to find fault with my post then there is nothing I can do about your opinion..I did NOT say I didn't like Mr. Robot in fact the contrary is true, if you want to say I IMPLIED, it wasn't done so implicitly.. So if you want to turn this into a dispute, that's up to you, but you will be arguing with a brick wall..

So it is NOT my point of view, YOU want to see and read into something on my post.. that's YOUR fault, not mine.

Mr. Robot is not perfect, that's what I said. I like Mr. Robot, that's what I said.. Where ever the rest of this is coming from, you are reading between the lines, doesn't make it true.

All of this is moot, they update beta code, and I am trying it out.. so if Pre-BETA Mr. Robot is so great, then there would be no NEED to update the code that was, for lack fo a better term, perfect.. eh mr. Computer Science? The code obviously was flawed, stat weights not withstanding.. still flawed!

My original statement stands.. people don't like (hate for those of you reading between the lines) Mr. Robot because of inherit flaws which they have since fixed.. people are quick to judge, and seldom forgive.... that's all I was trying to say!

Edited June 24, 2013 by rjparker1

[Cruzan 71]

I love Mr. Robot. Its a very powerful tool that you can use to get exactly the results that you need. I haven't had any issues with it that couldn't be fixed with a little tinkering.

Unfortunately I think that what I might consider "a little tinkering" might be a lot more work than more casual users might be willing to endure. Minor things like setting a soft haste cap, but still having AMR end dumping everything in to mastery. The simple fix is to give that soft cap stat weight a little more value than mastery's and BOOM, the exact results I want pop up. I've answered reforging questions where that was a common complaint, setting soft caps only for them to be ignored. Easy fix, but not apparent at first.

Trying out the new beta optimizer and I'm liking it so far, not that I had any problems with the old one . Does the quadrillion+ combo possibility come from the fact that I technically could toss agi or strength gems in to my gear or reforge crit in to parry? lol

[Zoopercat 22]

One clarification: the current algorithm gets you the best result, most of the time. But sometimes it's off by 0.1 or 0.5% of the best score. That's because of the algorithm. You need an algorithm because you can't brute-force check every single combination (of which there are quadrillions) in a short time.

The current algorithm won't steer you to 'bad' results, but sometimes they aren't PERFECT.

The NEW algorithm (in beta) WILL guarantee the absolute best result, while still being fast. It's a very complicated and hard problem to solve, but we did it

What rjparker was referring to is a phenomenon where Mr. Robot can seemingly just 'change his mind.' It's quite rare, but it happens (with the old algorithm, not the new one). Mr. Robot will recommend a set of changes, then a user makes them and should be 100% optimal. Well, if they 'update from armory' and click optimize again, Mr. Robot changes his mind (in rare cases) and suggests a different (and better) set of optimizations. This can happen when the original optimization wasn't actually the BEST result in the first place - a by product of the estimation process of the old algorithm.

I wouldn't say Mr. Robot was 'wrong' (neither would you if you were sitting next to him while he was holding a tazer...). It's more that his optimization fell into an optimized 'window.' But it is frustrating to update all of your gear and have him change his mind on you.

Note - this will NOT happen with the new algorithm, since it guarantees the best result the first time around

Hope that helps.

ps: thanks for upgrading (the first time, and the second time). We really do appreciate it and I hope you are liking the premium features. The new algorithm is obviously part of the free tool - we try to balance feature development for both free and paying users evenly :)

Edited June 24, 2013 by Zoopercat

[Zoopercat 22]

Cruzan, regarding your question about the quadrillion combinations: it's actually only including smart combinations. So we rule out agi and str options for a mage, for example.

If this number seems unusually high, consider the following: in the simpler cases (e.g. a 1-cap case, hit cap for a DPS caster), you will typically have 3 reforges per slot that might make sense (one that doesn’t impact hit, one that adds more, one that removes hit). If you are only doing reforging, that would be 3^16 combos, or 43 million. Now add in gems… even if you only had 2 relevant gem configurations for each item and 10 items with sockets, your total combos now goes up to 44 billion.

If you have a 2-cap case (Hit and Haste), the numbers increase again. Why, you might ask? Here's an example, if you DON'T cap Haste, haste is your best yellow stat. We will use a yellow gem (or a haste hybrid) every single time we need to. But if you cap haste, now we have to look at your next best secondary stat, say Mastery. Now we have to keep more gem combos around - pure mastery, plus a mastery hybrid for the other colors. Since Hit is capped, we need hit-mastery and spirit-mastery, and int-mastery. Now you're getting into the quadrillions.

I don't know if you saw it on the beta optimizer yet - but there's a red results box. In there, it will show the number of relevant combinations for your specific character with the stat weights you used. Fun measurement :)

Edited June 24, 2013 by Zoopercat

[Krazyito 521]

I will admit that when it would change your stats (never that drastically, but it did) that it was annoying to see. The stat weight change was already address, the reason being was because Mr. Robot was coded to estimate the best optimization, which in some cases led to it finding a better one after it narrowed it down some more. This is the result of old code that has probably been used since the inception of the website. To some people that is a flaw, but it its simply doing what it was programmed to do, which in this case was to estimate the best possible optimization. This new beta optimizer is just the product of the developers realizing they need better and faster running code. Still does not mean that the old optimizer was wrong.

Edit: Looks like Zoopercat beat me to this. She pretty much said this. ^

I have no idea what class/spec you play, so those stats are not very meaningful to me because I don't know what you want to go for. But, again as I stated, the optimizer will always optimize according to the stat weights given. If you give it default weights that you do not agree with then you probably will not enjoy the outcome.

I also apologize for any misconceptions you had of my post or of mine to yours. I was simply restating my original post emphasizing the importance of custom stat weights. Simply stating that he optimizes wrong (by using default stat weights) is not the correct approach because they weights are either too general, or too specific.

Edited June 24, 2013 by Krazyito

[Guest WeeWilly]

maybe I shouldn't say anything, but what the heck, I like Mr Robot.

Edited June 25, 2013 by WeeWilly

[Zagam 1,982]

I utilize them as a tool while doing my own theorycrafting. It's always nice to see that I still know how to calculate haste thresholds. I've also subscribed to them because they deserve money for the work they do. Just like my guides suggest, stat weights are unique to fights and should not be taken literally. My guides, just like AMR, are guides and tools to be used, not bibles to be worshipped and regarded over all other things.

[Stoove 347]

That algorithm is absolutely stonking!

[Tarazet 144]

When I use Ask Mr. Robot and don't like the results, my next question is, why don't I like the results?

I play a Guardian Druid. I've used Ask Mr. Robot to optimize since I was a fresh 90. In some cases, when I knew I was undergeared or my healers would have trouble, I used their "high stamina" formula, which will keep you in a correct Rage build but give you an extra 150k or so in health. Then I started ticking it down until I was using their "low stamina" formula, which uses no stamina enchants or gems at all, at the point I was farming the content and could really push DPS.

At certain times, I found that it would heavily favor Crit but put my Expertise down around 9%. So I would have to change the weighting so it would give me more Expertise first before it would load on the Crit. But for the most part, I think that it's pretty much bang-on all the time, and I've always gotten great results running with AMR builds. I've even ranked on ToT 10N fights with a lot less gear than most of the rankers.

[Krazyito 521]

When I use Ask Mr. Robot and don't like the results, my next question is, why don't I like the results?

This is pretty much the realization I came to after so many times of going back and forth between Mr Robot and what I wanted. When I first started out I would take most of the suggestions, but If i felt like i could optimize just slightly better (due to Mr. Robots "estimation" optimization) I would make my own change.

[Annoroth 5]

This might be an untraditional use, but I enjoy AMR's feature to swap out gear. It's pretty much the only one I use (simc + reforge lite usually) but to me, it's really useful to see what changing around some gear, or regemmimg/reforging or upgrading will do to my stats without having to set up excel or do it in game.

[Krazyito 521]

I'm bumping this thread because I've already seen 2 instances where people are asking why Mr. Robot is doing something.  I explain it here and changed the title from "To all those who don't like Mr. Robot"

 

TL;DR: ADJUST THE STAT WEIGHTS.

[Icepick 3]

I've liked using AmR's gear upgrade list. It tells me where my current gear ranks according to what I could be using and where to go to get better stuff.

I use it for  Gem/ enchant suggestions and in game do my actual reforging with Reforge lite.

[Krazyito 521]

Time to bump this again because people don't understand still

[clawfury 0]

Great post, I enjoyed reading this. Specificaly to Zoopercat - with the upcoming expansion (and removal of reforging) - how will AMR change? Obviously no more reforging algorithms/etc - I'm assuming just continue with gem/enchant suggestions, BiS list, talent choices....? Or is there other plans?

[Krazyito 521]

I doubt she will read this, but they are planning on doing combat logging. Go to their blog (blog.askmrrobot.com) to see what they are doing