Pawn calculates scores for items to help you easily find upgrades for your gear. It's completely customizable, and applicable to any class and situation: for example, it can help you decide whether to equip the ring with a higher item level but one stat you don't want (say, strength for shamans), or the ring with the lower item level but all good stats. It's that level of customization that makes it very different from more general mods like GearScore and more specialized mods like TankPoints.
Pawn can be used by new players right off the bat without needing to change any options, or by advanced players who plan out their gear upgrades, build Excel spreadsheets, install Rawr, and read Elitist Jerks.
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 World of Warcraft's AddOns 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
Note: Newer versions of Pawn don't show item values by default, which makes a lot of this section inaccurate now. I'll get around to updating this thing sometime! To make Pawn behave like it's described here, choose the "Show scale values and upgrade %" option on the Pawn Options tab.
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 healing 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. (That said, it is of course quite terrible these days for shamans in both PvE and PvP. Man, I really need to update this section.)
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 includes values appropriate for your class from Wowhead, so it's possible you may never need to configure anything else.
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 that special effect. It tells you this by adding a special (?) icon to that effect 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 effect 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 new lines at the bottom that list your class and spec. Without any input from you, Pawn is assigning a score to every item in your inventory, using stat weights from Wowhead appropriate for your class. For example, if you're a shaman, Pawn will enable elemental, enhancement, and resto PvE scales for your items. If you see two gloves with a higher resto score, then the one with the higher score is most likely the best item for that spec. The other item might, however, have a higher score according to the enhancement scale. Each scale is independent, because each item is better for different things.
For items with gems or enchantments, you may see two numbers. The second one is the "base value" for an item, which ignores enchantments and which gems you have in it. Use the base values to see if an item is an upgrade for you.
It's quite possible to use Pawn right "out of the box," but you may want to customize its behavior after you try it out for a while. 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 "Shaman: elemental", 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. Many people can be perfectly happy just using the scales from Wowhead that come with Pawn, and not need to customize a thing. But, you can customize Pawn to do much more. You can make your own personal version of the Wowhead scales with slightly tweaked stat values, import scale values from Rawr, or even create a completely new scale:
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: "Healer stats": Intellect=1, Spirit=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 on a website as a scale tag to your own copy of Pawn. Highlight the entire scale tab, including the parentheses ( ), and then press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard. Then, switch to WoW. 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
Click the Scale tab on this window, and then 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.
The popular program Rawr can generate highly-customized Pawn scales for you, ready for import. Open Rawr, load your character, and then find the Slot dropdown in the Comparisons tab on the right. Click it and select Relative stat values. Then, click the Export dropdown in the upper-right and click Copy Pawn string to clipboard. You can then use the normal Import feature to add this scale to Pawn. (Unfortunately, all scales that Rawr produces will be called "Rawr", so if you use Rawr for more than one class or spec, you'll need to rename the scale yourself.)
You can share one of your Pawn scales with others by exporting it from the Scale tab of the Pawn configuration UI. From here, choose the scale that you want to export (if you have more than one) from the Select a 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, build your own scale using the Wowhead stat weights as a starting point: just click Copy on the Scale tab to get started.
If, for example, you're a druid who likes to play as a kitty and occasionally heals, but never plays as a boomkin and never tanks, you might want to hide the default Wowhead scales "Druid: balance" and "Druid: guardian" that come with Pawn. That way there's less clutter on your tooltips, you aren't notified about upgrades to gear you don't care about, and so on. To hide a scale, open up the Pawn configuration UI, and then just shift-click the scale in the list. To show any scale that's hidden, shift-click it. (If you are not fond of shift-clicking things, you can also just click the scale and then check or uncheck the "Show scale in tooltips" checkbox at the bottom of the list.)
You can have any number of scales visible. Your scales and settings are shared between all of your characters, but the ones that are shown are specific to which character you're currently playing.
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).
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 start with a new default scale and delete the stats that we don't care about. Go to the Scale tab and click Empty and give it a name to create a new one. Now you're on the Values tab and can customize the numbers. 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, replace it with 0, or just click Remove. 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 aren't limited to just one scale or a few; you can set up as many as you like. To do this, go to the Scale tab on the Pawn configuration UI and click Empty to start a new scale with no values for any stat, or Defaults 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.
You can use Pawn to easily compare two items. Open the Pawn UI and click the Compare tab. Then, place an equippable item from your inventory in the empty box in the upper-right corner. Once you do this, Pawn will automatically fill in the slot on the left with whichever item you currently have equipped in that slot. (For example, if you put a cloak in the right slot, Pawn will automatically put your currently equipped cloak in the left slot.) In the case of trinkets and rings, you can switch between both equipped items using buttons in the lower-left corner.
The Compare tab shows you a breakdown of the two items by stats, and makes it easy to tell which item is better by showing the total Pawn value for each item, and highlighting the item with the higher value. Only stats in the currently selected scale appear in the stat breakdown, so if you're viewing two DPS axes but have a frost mage scale selected, the stat list will be pretty empty since your frost mage probably doesn't care about agility and expertise.
The Compare tab always compares the base versions of items, ignoring currently socketed gems and enchantments. (Items with empty sockets will get points based on the gem that Pawn suggests putting in those sockets.)
If you're deciding whether to roll or bid on an item, you can't pick it up and put it in a slot in the Compare tab, but you can still easily compare it to what you already have. Just right-click on an item's icon in the roll window to put it into the Compare tab. If it's an upgrade the Loot Upgrade Advisor appeared, you can click anywhere on the big yellow tooltip. Or, if the item was linked in trade chat, click on the link to open the item link, and then right-click on the window (tooltip) that appears.
You can also compare items without having to click on them, which is useful for items you see in mods such as AtlasLoot. To do this, you'll need to set up key bindings to Compare left item and Compare right item in the Key Bindings window. Pawn will try to bind the [ and ] (left bracket and right bracket) keys to those commands if those keys aren't already bound to something else, but you can customize the key bindings to whatever you want.
Once you have key bindings set up, hover over the left item and press the Compare left item key [, and then hover over the right item and press the Compare right item key ]. (This doesn't work on "unsafe" items with a red border in AtlasLoot.)
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 through Facebook or on the Pawn page at Curse, which I check 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? 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.
Please remember that Pawn is language-specific. The official English version of Pawn only works on the English version of World of Warcraft. The non-English versions are maintained by other people.
This version of Pawn is designed for the English version of World of Warcraft only. For links to non-English versions of Pawn maintained by friendly volunteers, check out the Pawn page at Curse.
You can also open Pawn by typing /pawn into a chat box.
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."
You can back up all of your custom scales. Just type /pawn backup in the chat box, and a window will appear. Press Ctrl+C to copy its contents to the clipboard. Then, create or open a file on your computer where you'd like to save the backup, and press Ctrl+V to paste your scales to that file. Save the file, and now you have a backup of all of your custom scales in case you accidentally delete them, or just want to share them all with someone else.
Note: The scale Import feature only lets you import a single scale at a time, so to restore your scales from this backup you'll have to copy and paste them one-by-one.
You can also back up your SavedVariables file. Open your World of Warcraft folder, and then in that location there is a folder named WTF. Open it, and then the folder inside it with your account name, and then the SavedVariables folder. Look for the file named "Pawn.lua" and save a copy of that file to a safe location.
The Wowhead stat weights are used with permission. If you have feedback on the scale values, please direct it to Wowhead.
It's easy to hide any of the Wowhead scales that you don't like from your tooltips. Just select a scale from the list and then uncheck Show in tooltips.
If you want to hide all Wowhead scales on all of your characters and have them not even show up in the list of scales, you can delete the file Wowhead.lua that comes with Pawn.
It's possible to customize the colors of the Wowhead scales. If you'd like to undo any changes you've made to the Wowhead scales, you can execute these two commands at a chat window:
/script PawnResetProviderScales()
/reload
If you have a World of Warcraft mod that you'd like to integrate with Pawn, please consider getting in touch with me. I may have suggestions that will make your life easier. I've also made it possible for other developers to create their own "scale providers" that can feed stat weights into Pawn just like the Wowhead scales. If you'd like to create your own scale provider, take a look at Wowhead.lua, and contact me if you have any questions, or suggestions on ways that Pawn could be improved to work with your mod better. (I can't, of course, guarantee that I'll make changes, but I might be able to help.)
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 appropriate-level 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. (In past versions of Pawn it was possible to manually set a value for sockets, but Pawn's smarter now and that manual override is no longer present.) There's no way to fine-tune what Pawn considers "appropriate-level" gems, but in general it's what you'd expect—a blue-quality or better Mists of Pandaria item will use blue-quality Mists of Pandaria gems when determining the value of the item, Wrath of the Lich King epics will use Wrath of the Lich King epic gems, and so on. You can use the Gems tab and type in a specific item level to see exactly which gems Pawn suggests that you use for a given scale and item level—the items that it suggests there are the same ones it uses in its calculations, and they're the same ones that it suggests in the socketing advisor that appears when you shift-right-click an item.
Pawn also supports cogwheels (used in engineering helms) and crystals of fear (used for Sha-Touched weapons) the same way that it supports normal colored gems.
Meta gems are special, since they contain both stats and a secondary effect. You can assign a value to the special effect portion of a meta gem in the Values tab. (If you leave this at zero then, for example, your "crits do 3% more damage" or "crits heal for 3% more" bonus won't be counted for anything, which isn't really fair.)
The socket values based on the gems that Pawn suggests for you only apply to the base version of an item. No points are awarded for empty sockets in the current version of an item. (You should gem your items and not be such a scrub!) So, for items with empty sockets, the current value for the item will be lower than the base value. This makes it easy to compare socketed items with non-socketed items based on their potential stats—just always compare the base values of the two items. The Compare tab already does that for you. (In almost all cases you always want to compare the base values of items. The only time you really want to compare anything else is when answering the question "should I equip this item right this very moment before I have a chance to gem, enchant, and reforge it?")
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 items that have 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 helps to compensate for how some scales might use numbers that average out to about 1.0, and others use numbers in the tens.
For example, if your scale were ( Stamina = 1, Intellect = 2, Crit = 1 ), then Wowhead would divide the item's total value by 4. An item with 10 Stamina, 10 Intellect, and 20 Crit would have a value of 50 with this option off, and 12.5 with this option on.
It's normal for certain special item effects to be listed with an icon (?). You need to decide how important that effect 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 a few items do that. You'll need to decide how to adjust that item's value yourself, based on how much benefit you receive from that special effect.
Set bonuses are completely ignored by Pawn, and they won't get the special effect icon. 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 a list of some of the features I'm considering for future versions of Pawn.
© 2006-2012 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.