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.
I welcome your feedback—see the Notes section.
Pawn is installed like pretty much every other World of Warcraft mod on the planet. Extract the contents of the zip file to your Add-ons folder, generally located in one of these locations:
C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
Pawn works by reading the tooltips for items in-game, and annotating them with some useful information, based on your personal preferences. Let's say that you're a shaman, and someone links the once-popular Molten Core tank shield Drillborer Disk in trade chat. With Pawn installed and set up, you might see the following when clicking that link:
There are a couple differences between a Pawn-enhanced item tooltip and the normal one. The most obvious is the set of numbers at the bottom. I've set up Pawn to calculate two different values for each item I come across: one for my "healbot" gear set, and one for my "PvP" gear set. When I'm healing in raids, I don't care too much about my armor, or my block stats. So, this tank shield isn't very useful to me; it got a rating of 31 points. In contrast, in PVP and solo combat, I care a lot more about armor—maybe someday it will help me manage to get a spell off versus a rogue before I die. The value of this shield to me in a PVP situation is considerably higher: 292 points.
What are these points? They're exactly what I like them to be. Pawn lets you set up arbitrary valuation "scales" for every item you come across. For each scale, you get to assign a point value to each of a wide variety of stats. Pawn will then analyze the item for you, and quickly come up with a number score based on the criteria that you've set up. Without having to configure anything, Pawn will create a scale for you called "Pawn value" that mimics the way that Blizzard values the items. If you just want a quick overview of how many stats an item has, the default scale might work well for you.
Not every possible property of an item can be given a value. For example, the Drillborer Disk reflects 3 arcane damage to each enemy who hits the shield. This isn't a common property for items in World of Warcraft to have, and Pawn doesn't know how to value it. It tells you this by adding an asterisk (*) to that stat on the tooltip, and then adding a helpful message to the bottom. When making the decision of whether or not to use Drillborer Disk, you'll need to keep that in mind; if you find another PvP shield that also gets a rating of about 292 points, then you should choose Drillborer, because it has an extra stat that wasn't taken into account for the rating.
Let's get started. First, log into your character, making sure that the Pawn mod is enabled. Once you log in, start hovering over items in your inventory, or click links in the trade channel. When you hover over things like herbs and ores and quest items, you'll notice that the tooltip doesn't look any different than it used to; that's because those items don't have stats. When you hover over equipment that you're wearing, though, you should see a new line at the bottom that lists a "Pawn value." Without any input from you, Pawn is assigning a score to every item in your inventory, using a formula somewhat similar to what Blizzard uses when creating the items in the first place. (For more information on item level, check out the extensive WoWWiki page on the subject, which I used when developing these default settings.)
It's possible to use Pawn right "out of the box," but it's more likely that you'll want to customize its behavior after you try it out for a minute. So, without further ado, let's talk about customizing Pawn.
Each of your characters has a unique set of options for Pawn, and can have any number of valuation scales, which often (but not always) represent different sets of gear or situations you find your character in, or different talent specs. A valuation scale has two things: a name, such as "Pawn value", and a list of stats and how many points each stat is worth.
The first thing you'll need to do is decide what you'll do with Pawn. The important thing to remember is that Pawn doesn't decide which stats are best for your character! You need to make this decision for yourself, and tailor it to the way that you play. Once you "tell" Pawn which stats you like, it does all of the math to tell you which items are better than others, exactly according to what you think of each stat. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Or, maybe, someone has already shared a Pawn scale tag with you, so that you can use a scale that they created or found themselves.
Scale tags are a handy way that you can share your Pawn scales with other people, similar to how you can share talent specs with others just by giving them a link to the WoW talent calculator. A sample scale tag looks like this:
( Pawn: v1: "Total fire damage": SpellDamage=1, FireSpellDamage=1 )
Generally, they're considerably longer than that, but the overall format is still the same. A scale tag includes the parentheses ( ) on the ends and everything in-between.
It's possible to use Pawn along with scale tags that other people have created and never have to do any custom calculations or work yourself. Here's how you can use scale tags to share Pawn scales.
You can easily add Pawn scales that someone else shared with you as a scale tag to your own copy of Pawn. To access the Pawn configuration UI, open your character sheet and inventory (the C key) and click the Pawn button in the lower-right corner. Or, type the following slash command:
/pawn
From this screen, click Import. A window will appear where you can paste the entire scale tag that you got from someone else. Press Ctrl+V to paste a scale tag from the clipboard into this window. Once you're done, click OK, and that scale will be added to your copy of Pawn.
You can share one of your Pawn scales with others by exporting it from the configuration UI. Click the Pawn button on your character inventory window, or type the following slash command:
/pawn
From here, choose the scale that you want to export (if you have more than one) from the Current scale list, and then click Export. A window will appear containing your entire scale tag, but most of it will be scrolled off to the left where you can't see it. Press Ctrl+C to copy the scale tag to your clipboard. Then, switch to your web browser or an instant message window, or wherever you'd like to share your Pawn scale, and press Ctrl+V to paste the tag to that window.
You can find more Pawn scales on the unofficial Pawn Scales Resources Forum. Or, try the Pawn page at Curse or WoWUI.IncGamers.
You can customize your Pawn scale in the Pawn configuration UI. To show it, click the Pawn button in the lower-right corner of the character inventory window (the C key), or type the following slash command:
/pawn
Nobody thinks all statistics are created equal. Warrior tanks don't care about intellect and spirit. Priests don't care about strength. You can customize Pawn to only look at the stats that you care about. Let's do it now.
The Pawn configuration UI has everything you need to make changes to your scale, as well as import scales from other people, export them so you can share yours with others, and create multiple new scales for different situations. Right now, the "Pawn value" scale is selected and ready to be modified.
On the left, you see a long list of all of the different item stats that Pawn understands. They're grouped into categories—the primary stats like Stamina and Intellect are at the top, weapon stats are another section, spell-related state are another, sockets for gems are another, and so on. The default Pawn value scale that was created for you has a value for almost every stat.
So, let's make some changes. Let's delete the stats that we don't care about. If you're a melee class, you can get rid of intellect and spirit. To do this, click on Intellect in the list on the left (it's near the top). When you click on a stat, you see a little description about the stat to the right (there's not much to say about intellect), and a box where you can type a new value. To get rid of intellect, either delete the number from the box, or replace it with 0. Then, choose spirit from the list and delete it too. You can delete any stats you don't care about, and you can change the value of any stat in the list. (If you find yourself removing a lot of stats, you can also create a new empty scale and start from scratch. That would probably be easier than deleting everything individually. The downside is that you don't get to see the starting values we suggested for each stat.)
Cool. You don't have to do anything complicated just yet; that should be fine. Your changes will take effect immediately; you can hover over new items or click links in trade chat and you'll see updated values based on your newly-modified scale. Once you have thing set up the way you like them, Pawn will be customized to exactly what you care about in items.
If you ever manage to really screw things up, you can click Delete to delete the scale you're working on, and then click New default to create a new scale from the defaults. If you name it "Pawn value" you'll be right back where you started.
You don't have to have one scale called "Pawn value"; you can set up as many as you like. To do this, go into the Pawn configuration UI and click New empty to start a new scale with no values for any stat, or New default to start a new scale using the defaults as a starting point. When you have two different scales, Pawn will show two numbers on each item you hover over or click in chat. You can have any number of scales; just choose the one that you want to work on in the configuration UI before you start making changes to the stats.
Well, hopefully that's enough to get you started. If you're interested in customizing Pawn further, check out the Options tab of the Pawn UI, and rest of this document.
I'm interested in knowing what you think of Pawn, and what you use it for. Bug reports and suggestions are cool too. The best way to contact me is on the Pawn page at Curse or the Pawn page at IncGamers. I check both roughly daily. You can also contact me through in-game mail: Vger on Azjol-Nerub (US), Horde. (Just make sure that you keep a character on my server and check your mail, or I can't respond!) Also, check out my official site, where you can find links to all of my mods.
When reporting bugs, it's helpful to be as specific as possible. Does the problem always happen for you, or just sometimes? Can you think of any mods that you're running that might be related? Does the problem still occur if you disable all your mods except Pawn and VgerCore? What item does it happen on?
WoW now hides interface error information from you by default. Reenabling it in Interface Options would be helpful; the error text includes useful information about where the error occurred. Any information you can provide to help Vger track down the bug is great.
In addition to the options in the Pawn UI, you can also set a key binding to open and close the Pawn UI. Look for it in the list of key bindings under "Pawn."
Here are some notes that may help you while you're setting up your Pawn scales.
Pawn assumes that you'll fill in any item that has sockets with the gems that will maximize that item's value, whether it's using the best gems of the correct colors to get the socket bonus, or gems of all one color and ignoring the socket bonus. By default, Pawn will automatically assign a value to sockets for you, and will update those values as you change your scale. If you prefer, however, you can change the values assigned to sockets the same way you can change the values of any stats.
If you open the item socketing window, you'll notice that Pawn will add its suggestions on which gems to use to maximize the value of the item. If you socket the item with exactly those gems, the value won't change. If you use better gems, the value will go up, and if you use worse gems, the value will go down. You can see a full listing of which gems Pawn suggests for each of your scales on the Gems tab of the Pawn UI.
Socket values in your scales only apply to the unenchanted version of an item. No points are awarded for empty sockets in the enchanted version of an item. (You should gem your items and not be such a scrub!) So, for socketed items, the enchanted value for the item will be lower than the unenchanted value. This makes it easy to compare socketed items with non-socketed items based on their potential stats—just always compare the unenchanted values of the two items. The Compare tab already does that for you.
Meta gems are also special, since they contain both stats and a secondary effect. You can assign a value to both parts individually, though by default Pawn will automatically pick a value for the stats portion of the gem for you.
By default, Pawn assumes that you'll use rare-quality (blue) level 80 gems. You can change this for each of your scales individually on the Gems tab. The following table shows how many stats the gems of each "tier" have.
Gems at level 70 | |
Gem quality | Number of base stats |
White (vendor) | 4 |
Green (crafted) | 6 |
Blue (crafted) | 8 |
Epic (BoP heroic) | 9 |
Epic (raid crafted) | 10 |
Epic (BoP JC-only crafted) | 12 |
Gems at level 80 | |
Gem quality | Number of base stats |
Green (crafted) | 12 |
Green (perfect crafted) | 14 |
Blue (crafted) | 16 |
Epic (crafted) | 20 |
Epic (BoP JC-only crafted) | 34 |
For resistances, there's an "all resistances" stat and individual resistances. The +3 All Resistances cloak enchantment would add three points of "all resistances" to the cloak, but no points of "fire resistance." If you're putting together a scale for fire resistance, give points to both "all resistances" and "fire resistances."
Weapon speed can work a little differently than the other stats. Some people value weapon speed based on how much faster or slower a weapon is than a particular speed. The "speed baseline" stat (which isn't really a stat, per se) lets you choose this baseline speed, instead of 0, which is the speed baseline if you don't pick a different one. For example, to give an item 1 point for every tenth of a second slower than 2.9 seconds per swing (useful for, say, enhancement shamans), set speed to 10 (10 = 1 / 0.1) and speed baseline to 2.9. If you value faster weapons, pick your preferred speed baseline and then set the value speed to be negative, because higher numbers for speed are bad for you.
Speed baseline shows up in the "special weapon stats" category.
If you want to value different types of weapons differently, don't use the regular DPS, minimum damage, maximum damage, and speed stats; instead, use the ones in the "special weapon stats" category at the end of the list. For example, if you're a hunter, you might value ranged DPS much higher than melee DPS, since most of your damage comes from ranged attacks.
You won't want to use all of the weapon min damage, max damage, and DPS stats all at once.Most classes and specs will want to assign a single value to armor value. However, feral druids and death knights have abilities and talents that multiply their armor by a certain percentage. These abilities only multiply armor found on cloth (including cloaks), leather, mail, and plate armor ("base armor"), and not weapons, trinkets, rings, necklaces, enchantments, and armor kits ("bonus armor"). These classes can value the two types of armor separately by giving values to the appropriate stats. If they do, they should not assign a value to the normal "armor" stat, or armor will be counted twice.
Please note that pre-Wrath items that had bonus armor (in green text) will have the full armor value reported as base armor even though some is considered bonus armor by the game. There is currently no way for mods to know how much of that armor value is base and how much is bonus.
With the "Normalize values" option disabled (the default), Pawn calculates values by multiplying each stat on an item by the value of that stat in each of your scales. If you enable this option, Pawn will take that number and divide it by the sum of all of the stat values in each of your scales. This causes Pawn to generate the same sorts of numbers that Lootzor does.
For example, if your scale were ( Stamina = 1, Intellect = 2, Spell power = 1 ), then Lootzor would divide the item's value by 4. An item with 10 Stamina, 10 Intellect, and 20 Spell power would have a value of 50 with this option off, and 12.5 with this option on.
This option is not particularly useful for the default Pawn scale, as it includes too many stats. It's more useful if you use more focused scales, especially if you want to be able to compare values from two different scales. The numbers will not be exactly the same as you see on Lootzor in all cases, because Lootzor and Pawn still work a little differently. For example, Lootzor picks gems to socket for you, whereas Pawn lets you pick an explicit value for sockets.
It's normal for certain rare item characteristics to be listed with an asterisk (*). You need to decide how important that bonus is to you yourself. For example, Pawn doesn't have a value for "Equip: Increases the effect that healing and mana potions have on the wearer by 40%" because only one item is like that, and the value in Pawn comes from the fact that even though each item is different, the stats on items are mostly the same. But, if you come across an item that has a standard statistic, such as intellect, crit rating, or spell power, or fire resistance, and Pawn marks it with an asterisk, you might want to let Vger know—take a note of which item has the problem, and which statistic on the item that Pawn didn't understand. You can use the Show debug info calculation option (see "The Options tab" below) to learn more about how Pawn is calculating the stats for your item. Also, be sure to check the "known issues" section at the bottom of this document; I might already know about the problem.
Set bonuses are completely ignored by Pawn, and they won't get asterisks. You'll need to take them into account when deciding between an item that would give you a set bonus and an item that would not.
Have a favorite mod that doesn't seem to work with Pawn? Let me know. I may not be able to add support for your favorite, but I might be able to suggest a replacement, or update Pawn to work better in a future version for popular mods.
This is not a conclusive list. If any of these mods doesn't seem to be working with Pawn, please make sure that you have the latest version of both it and Pawn.
See the version history document for information about known issues and bugs.
See the version history document for a list of some of the features I'm considering for future versions of Pawn.
© 2006-2009 Green Eclipse. This mod is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. In short, this means that you can use it, copy it, and share it, but you can't sell it or distribute your own altered versions without permission. By using the mod you agree to the terms of the license. For more information, click the link.