I’m really delighted to have this guest post! Enjoy. – Gravity

Rawr.TankDK

Hello, I’m Shazear the current contributing developer for the Tank DK module in Rawr. For those who don’t know, Rawr is a 3rd party tool to help evaluate gear for your PvE endgame WoW character. It does not have a direct in-game corresponding addon, but rather can import characters from the Character Profiler addon or via WoW Armory. Each module does its own evaluation of your character appropriate by class/role, so most gear-evaluation bugs are unique for the module, e.g.: between DPS and Tank DK.

What TankDK Does Poorly

Blood. This tree tanks differently than any of the more classic models of Survival and Mitigation. The talents don’t model very well in the current structure of evaluating only what the Tank itself can bring and possibly what additional buffs may be provided by the raid. There are key +health temp buffs as well as +incoming healing bonuses, be it through damage done or through healing buffs to take the raw healing burden off your healers.

My initial implementation of key blood talents: Vampiric Blood and Mark of Blood caused problems with the model, either through completely tearing apart the results in the case of VB, or causing a weird loop/hang with Mark of Blood. After getting some Rawr3 implementation taken care of, getting the Blood talents integrated more reliably is next up on my list of work to do.

The other challenge is dealing with the variety of bosses. Each boss mechanic in the current raid scene are different enough that tanks are swapping out some pieces of gear to better tackle whichever boss they may be looking at any time. Some raid teams swap out different types of tanks for some fights, and just look at that as being the normal way of dealing with leading content. In the coming versions of Rawr, we’re working to implement the ability for any character to tune their gear for a specific boss encounter. This is not just for tanks, but it will be generic so all classes can have good expectations for the bosses they have to deal with. I see this really helping the tanking modules so that we are no longer just trying to guestimate the type of boss in very vague terms.

Accuracy and Comparisons

Within Rawr, there are many stats and evaluations. Something most users need to remember is that it doesn’t just model the static values of what’s equipped like Pawn or most of the other evaluators out there. Most of the stats include the procs of the trinkets and such, and are relayed in the context of the boss level for the current raid content. So for example Dodge/Parry values will be lower than you see in the Armory or in-game because the level difference decreases your effective avoidance.

I don’t use other addons or simulators to compare to the results of Rawr. I rather would work to ensure the accuracy of the model. Because Rawr has the full power of a compiled application, I can, given enough time, make the model exceptionally accurate. Right now, however, I still feel like I’m just getting the model to stand on its own. A key point that contrasts Rawr with other addons/simulation tools out there is the active modeling of procs and buffs. Most addons simply can’t do the work to make those evaluations very accurately. Even the accuracy within Rawr can vary depending on the situation. As we integrate better boss-modeling we should see some of the tanking procs and such come into their own even more.

What TankDK Does Well

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