Pawn assesses the value of items for you to make it easy to decide which items are better than others. It's similar in purpose to mods such as Tank Points, but completely customizable, and applicable to any class and situation. You can use it to help create multiple gear sets, or decide whether to take that weapon with higher DPS or the one with more crit rating, or decide between a necklace with MP5 and one with bonus healing.
Pawn is a mod for hardcore World of Warcraft players—you may not like it if you're not the sort of person who agonizes over stats and itemization. You can use premade Pawn "scale tags" that other people make and post on forums to set up Pawn for your spec without any extra effort. And, if you're the kind of person who goes through Wowhead and Lootzor looking for exactly the items you want for your gear sets, builds Excel spreadsheets, installs TheoryCraft, reads Elitist Jerks... well, Pawn might just be right up your alley.
- See the readme file included with Pawn for more information on getting the most out of it.
Check out the Pawn scales that people have posted to the Unofficial Pawn forums.
Translated versions at WoWUI.IncGamers.com: German, Chinese
Version 1.0.1
* It's now possible to force Pawn to always calculate an item's value based on the correct color of gems (Pawn 0.8 and older behavior) instead of maximizing the item's value by potentially using the wrong colors and ignoring the socket bonus (Pawn 0.9 and later behavior). To change the option for one of your scales, choose that scale in the UI and then choose one of the colored sockets from the stat list.
* Added support for socket bonuses (and possible future gems) that give melee haste rating.
* Added shaman healing scales based on the popular Elitist Jerks thread to the sample scales document that comes with Pawn.
Installation Guide
- Exit "World of Warcraft" completely
- Download the mod you want to install
- Make a folder on your desktop called "My Mods"
- Save the .zip/.rar files to this folder.
- If, when you try to download the file, it automatically "opens" it... you need to RIGHT click on the link and "save as..." or "Save Target As".
- Extract the file - commonly known as 'unzipping'
Do this ONE FILE AT A TIME!
- Windows
- Windows XP a built in ZIP extractor. Double click on the file to open it, inside should be the file or folders needed. Copy these outside to the "My Mods" folder.
- WinRAR: Right click the file, select "Extract Here"
- WinZip: You MUST make sure the option to "Use Folder Names" is CHECKED or it will just extract the files and not make the proper folders how the Authors designed
- Mac Users
- StuffitExpander: Double click the archive to extract it to a folder in the current directory.
- Verify your WoW Installation Path
That is where you are running WoW from and THAT is where you need to install your mods.
- Move to the Addon folder
- Open your World of Warcraft folder. (default is C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\)
- Go into the "Interface" folder.
- Go into the "AddOns" folder.
- In a new window, open the "My Mods" folder.
- The "My Mods" folder should have the "Addonname" folder in it.
- Move the "Addonname" folder into the "AddOns" folder
- Start World of Warcraft
- Make sure AddOns are installed
- Log in
- At the Character Select screen, look in lower left corner for the "addons" button.
- If button is there: make sure all the mods you installed are listed and make sure "load out of date addons" is checked.
- If the button is NOT there: means you did not install the addons properly. Look at the above screenshots. Try repeating the steps or getting someone who knows more about computers than you do to help.
Translations
When you download a mod, please be sure that the mod is compatible with your translation of wow. Some mods only work on the US versions, while some only work on some of the various European versions. These variations are called "Localizations".
TOC Numbers (Out of Date Mods)
When Blizzard patches WoW, they change the Interface number. This means that all mods will be "out of date" unless or until the author releases a new version for that interface. Some people go into the .toc files and update the numbers themselves, but this is STRONGLY advised against as it will cause problems locating possible incompatibilities addons. When you log into WoW after a patch, you DO NOT have to delete your interface directory. All you have to do is simply tell WoW to ignore the interface numbers and load all the mods anyway. All you have to do is, while at the "character select" screen, look in the lower left corner and click on the "addons" button. A window will pop up listing all your installed mods.
If you look in the upper left corner of that window there should be a box that says "Load Out of Date AddOns". You want to CHECK this box. Now simply go into WoW normally and all your mods should load. As of the 1.9 patch, you will have to do this after EVERY patch/update that Blizzard posts! If you encounter any problems with a mod after a patch, please be sure to let the author of the mod know so they can fix it.
See also: About "Out Of Date AddOns"
Mac Support
WoW addons are not platformed based. As such, they can be used on either Mac or PC. You can extract both .zip and .rar files on a Mac using StuffitExpander.
Directory Structure
World of Warcraft
|_ Interface
|_AddOns
|_*AddonName*
|_ *AddonName*.toc
|_ *AddonName*.xml
|_ *AddonName*.lua
|_ (possibly others as well)...
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GraemeF saidJust a heads-up; the unofficial forums are down at the moment, limiting the usefulness for new users such as myself :(
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ealtson saidFantastic Addon. Absolutely essential.
One possible suggestion -
It would be nice if there was an option to allow your Pawn scales to be shared among your other characters (cross servers would be great, but...) so that if you have say, a banker character who does all your auction house purchases, they can calculate what would be the best item for another character without having to import all the various scales. Just a thought.
Again, great work!
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VgerAN saidThanks. That's certainly a possibility for a future version. I had originally sort of put that idea off to the side since I couldn't think of a reason why you'd share scales between characters, but bank alts make sense.
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VgerAN saidI think that Pawn is behaving correctly, even though it sounds a bit weird. When calculating an unenchanted item, it's giving you the item's value based on its potential when gemmed. So, unless you changed that option that I just added in 1.0.1, it will look at the colors of the sockets, and add the larger of two numbers: (1) the value of those sockets when gemmed with the correct colors plus the socket bonus, or (2) the value of those sockets when gemmed with the most valuable gems and no socket bonus.
Let's say that you like red and yellow gems, and you give each of those sockets 12 points each. You hate blue gems, so you give that socket 3 points. An item with a single red socket and a bonus worth 5 points will get 17 from the socket and the bonus, even in the "unenchanted" value, because Pawn assumes that you'd use a red (or orange/purple) gem in that case. An item with a single blue socket and a bonus worth 5 points would get 12, because Pawn assumes that you'd use a red or yellow gem in that case too, and ignore the bonus. For unenchanted items with empty sockets, Pawn always assumes that you would immediately fill it with your favorite gems in the way that would maximize its value.
Does that make sense?
(If you're still pretty sure that it's misbehaving, can you give me a scale tag and an item name so I can check it out?)
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Clueless0 saidHello ther VgerAN,
Great addon, keep the good work up!
I found 1 bug tho... or whatever you call it
When you calculate an item WITHOUT enchants/gems, it still calculates the socket bonus (which i assume is not wanted on a raw item, as I barely get the socket bonus since i only 2 typ of gems)
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VgerAN saidOkay, I've released Pawn 1.0.1, which lets you turn off the relatively new behavior where Pawn will calculate an item's value based on the best gems that could be inserted, ignoring socket bonuses, if that maximizes the value. You can turn that behavior off per individual scale; just choose that scale and click one of the colored sockets in the stat list and you'll see the option. Also, for you resto shamans out there, I've prepared three scales for the "sample scales" document that comes with Pawn based on the popular Elitist Jerks thread "How to Heal like a Pro."
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bum saidAwsome! Thanks for that little option.
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Veyska saidNosed around a bit (here and on unofficial forums) but couldn't seem to find an answer/solution...
Is there a way to handle +weapon damage items separately from weapons? Suspect this really only affects feral druids, but it would be nice to be able to weight items like Crystalforged Trinket or the +2 weapon damage ring enchant without making the calculated weight for my weapons useless (it more than doubles the value of my DPS staff). I can weight the weapons and not the item/enchant, but can't seem to figure out how to do the other way 'round...
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VgerAN said(Hmmm, I didn't realize that weapon damage bonuses on non-weapons worked for druids, but I see now that they do. Neato.)
Try this: let's say that the value you give to DPS is 7 points. I think that's what my druid uses, though it's been a long time. I'm assuming that you give no value at all to weapon DPS. What you could instead do is the following:
Min damage = 3.5
Max damage = 3.5
Melee: min damage = -3.5
Melee: max damage = -3.5
Ranged: min damage = -3.5
Ranged: max damage = -3.5
It's a bit roundabout, but I think that it should work for you. For weapons, the negative and positive numbers will cancel each other out. But, rings and trinkets will only have the base min damage and max damage, and not the melee/ranged versions, so for Crystalforged you'll end up with a positive number: 7 x 3.5 + 7 x 3.5 = 49. Since attack speed is 1.0 and the trinket gives you +7 weapon damage and you valued DPS at 7 points, the total of 49 is correct.
See if that works out for you.
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bum saidFirst off, I just want to say this is an awesome addon. It does exactly what i want it to do. But the only thing I didn't like about it was the new change with the socket bonus, where it would calculate the best gem instead base on the socket bonus.
I was just hoping if you could put in an option to disable that, or maybe a dl link to the older version. Probably some people, like myself, likes to match the socket by their colors.
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VgerAN saidYeah, my current thinking is that I'll add a per-scale option to turn off the "smart socketing" feature. The first person who requested it had a really simple scale that just summed up the total stamina an item would give, but that scale wasn't actually used to rank items, so it didn't make sense to use the "wrong" gem colors.
Can you explain why you don't want Pawn to choose the gem colors that give you the maximum item value? I'd like to understand more about why some people would be interested in that feature.
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bum saidWell, I think its more of a personal thing. For example a tanking gear with a yellow and red slot. Overall putting a 15stam gem in would be best for the most stamina wise, but in my case I like to socket them with like +def/+stam, or +agi/+stam, just to make up for missing stats. Also some tanks like being more of a mitigation tank, by increasing such other tank stats besides stamina alone. If you know what I mean that is.
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VgerAN saidFair enough. I think it's worth reevaluating whether your values for agility and defense are where you really want them versus stamina, though.
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VgerAN saidPawn 1.0.1 will give you the ability to go back to the old gem socketing behavior, where it just used the correct colors instead of maximizing the item value. I'll probably release it this weekend.
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doxxx saidI just noticed that Pawn wasn't recognizing stats which had text added after them by the RatingBuster addon. But this only seems to be happening in tooltips created/managed by LinkWrangler.
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VgerAN saidYeah, there's no workaround for that right now. Pawn either needs to be able to create a pristine copy of a tooltip that doesn't have any other added text (which LinkWrangler doesn't allow), or it needs to be able to determine which text is from addons and which text is from Blizzard (which is difficult with Rating Buster). Having too many addons that mess around with item tooltips installed at once can prevent Pawn from getting the item information it needs. I have some ideas on how I can work around this for Rating Buster in particular in the future, since that mod's pretty popular, but in general there isn't a workaround other than using fewer mods that mess around with your item tooltips.
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doxxx saidOh well, I can toggle linkwrangler to get it working it seems, so at least there's that.
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docthis saidCould you add itemlevel to the attributes? Some systems use it to calculate the item values.
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VgerAN saidI could add item level as a stat. I thought about it for 0.9, but couldn't think of any reason it would be useful. Do you have an example of a valuation system that uses item level that I could take a look at?
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VgerAN saidThe big day is here -- Pawn is now at version 1.0. Despite the big version number, there's not a ton of new features in this release (0.9 did, after all, just come out). The main thing in this release is that I've restored compatibility with Link Wrangler, and added some niceties to Link Wrangler tooltips: inventory icons and Pawn values on "currently equipped" LW tooltips.