Resource Site: Ask Mr Robot

Reading through comments on Killing 'em Softly on reforging, someone suggested using the AskMrRobot.com. After reviewing this site, I am really excited about it.


Why do I want to Ask Mr Robot? 
First blush, Mr Robot provides you a breakdown of your current gear, what gems and enchants each item has and if you've reforged it. At the top, you get an overall gear score for this build. My first impression was Wow-Heroes, without the "you could be running" information or MaxDPS with more functionality.

Now looking a little closer. In your gear column, note those red arrows. These are items that you could still upgrade (based on the filter at bottom you selected). For example, if I select the filter to NOT include Darkmoon Cards, the Witching Hourglass turns into the BIS pre-raiding trinket. There are 6 different filter options (rep, money, archaeology, darkmoon cards, BOE World drops and random drops) and 3 levels of gear (pre-raid, raiding and raiding heroics). According to Mr Robot's dev team, the BIS slot is determined by SimCraft results:
Mr. Robot noticed that SimulationCraft is very popular amongst warlock theorycrafters, so he used it to generate his weights. But SimC is in beta, so these will need regular updates.

Mr Robot Optimal gems, enchants and reforged stats.
If you don't like the stat weights, check out the Stat weight editor. It's very basic, but I really like this. Not only can you set a weight, but you can set a (soft) cap for some stats (i.e. Haste for locks). Right now looking at Mr Robot's suggestions for my current gear, the site suggests reforging almost everything for hit. When I reach 17% hit, the prioritization will switch heavier to Haste, automagically. Tweaking the stat weights even does a number of the gear selection. I ramped up Crit to 100% and my offhand immediately changed from +hit +haste gear to +hit +crit gear.

 Once you find BIS gear that's personally achievable, select the "Drop Locations" tab and now you'll be presented with how and where to get it. This is wonderful when you combine this with the weighted table available under the [...] button. Now I can see how much better that World Drop is than the Exalted item is. I'd definitely consider buying the rep item at a 9 point loss personally (over a best possible 0.1% drop rate).

BIS Gear selections
BIS details

Suggestions:
As a gear site, there isn't features that I openly hated. My comments about the site are more improvement suggestions.
  • The stat weights don't allow for adding other stats, i.e. I can't add a stat weight to include resilience on gear. I could see this being really handy if you wanted to use this same site to build a PVP set and gem/reforge priorities.
  • I'd like a comparison feature between gear sets. What would I do differently between an Affliction set vs a Destruction set? How is my gear compared to another guildie? 
  • Don't see where I could save my profile. When I access the site, it gives me the last few toons I looked at, but if pull this up from home, I think I am going to have to start all over again; rebuild stat weights, select my toons, etc. 
Overall, I see a definite use and benefit from this site. I confirmed that I need to keep running the Ramkahen tabard to get the exalted boots. I see I shouldn't have bought the Justice belt, but sent the mats for the crafted one. Instead, I would have purchased the Justice neck.

Last night, before logging out, I blindly followed some of the suggestions under "Optimize" and watched my spell power go from 5400 to 5800. Yes, part of it was the cata spellthread enchant on my pants (vs the high-end wrath) because the price really dropped. Part of it was the boots that dropped in SFK the other night. I also replaced my i318 dagger (and JP offhand) to the Very Manly staff (from CoC). I'll let you know if this in turn means higher DPS.

Comments

  1. A friend pointed me to your review since you had a few suggestions. I'm one of the people behind Mr. Robot's tool, and we love getting feedback from fans. So first of all, thanks for the review, you did a great job explaining the different features :)

    A few notes:
    1. You had a suggestion to add your own stats, like resilience. Accommodating PVP stats is actually at the top of our list (it will probably be done after our Mobile app)... which is soon.

    2. You wanted to see more about your gear. First, I wanted to make sure you saw the 'more stats' link, directly to the right of your character name (we're going to make it a button in our next release, a lot of people miss it!). However, that doesn't accomplish exactly what you were looking for, and we're planning out a few extra features, or even separate tool for more gear comparisons :) But that's a bit further out.

    3. You noted that all of the work on your character doesn't save, and that's correct - if you come back, your stats and preferences don't save. However, at the top, right above your character name, there is a link that says, 'link to this gear set.' That will allow you to customize a link to save. Also, as you change preferences, you will notice that the url in the address bar changes too - it is actually changing to save all of your preferences. So you can just bookmark that url. We might improve this in the future.

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  2. Thanks for the feedback, Team Robot.

    Interesting hadn't thought about a mobile app. All I have to say is don't forget Windows Phone 7 users (even if just a mobile view of your page). I'd love to have something that would be more useful than the Armory apps they have now.

    Speaking of Armory, it would be great to see a relationship of your score, to the gear score that Blizzard requires for entrance to, say, Heroics.

    For the stats, that's not quite what I was thinking. I was thinking of the gear comparison, like Wow-Heroes had, where I could enter the name for another toon and compare gear. This specifically came in useful when comparing the performance of two warlocks. What specific changes could be done to the lower performer or was it gear that made that guy do so much better. In addition, I think this would be great in aspect of turning that same view against myself, running a talent spec optimized for Affliction vs Destruction.

    Yeah, I put the bookmark on my side bar >>>>.
    I was thinking of LootRank's feature to allow for log-on to the site. Understandable that is a bit of an overhead, and can cause issues, but definitely nice to be able to come back months later and still have all my preferences set.

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