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<h1>Pawn</h1>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
I welcome your feedback—see the Notes section.</p>
<h2>
Installing Pawn</h2>
<p>
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:</p>
<p class="codeblock">
<code>C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns</code><br />
<code>C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns</code><br />
<code>C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns</code>
</p>
<h2>Comparing items</h2>
<p>You can use Pawn to easily compare two items. Open the Pawn UI and
click the <strong>Compare</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<h4>Comparing an item that just dropped to what you currently have</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>Comparing items in AtlasLoot and other mods without clicking</h4>
<p>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 <strong>Compare left item</strong> and <strong>Compare
right item</strong> in the Key Bindings window. Pawn will try to bind the
<strong>[</strong> and <strong>]</strong> (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.</p>
<p>Once you have key bindings set up, hover over the left item and press the
Compare left item key <strong>[</strong>, and then hover over the right item and
press the Compare right item key <strong>]</strong>. (This doesn't work on "unsafe"
items with a red border in AtlasLoot.)</p>
<ul>
<li>You can use Compare right item to evaluate an item upgrade that drops
from the boss you're about to kill. Pawn will automatically fill in
the left item with whatever you have equipped.</li>
<li>You can use both Compare left item and Compare right item to see the
stat difference between two different badge rewards or the current PVP
season's Pendant of Dominance and Pendant of Subjugation.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p>If you're interested
in customizing Pawn further, check out the <b>Options</b> tab of the Pawn UI.</p>
<h3>Contacting the author</h3>
<p>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
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/vgermods" target="_blank">Facebook</a> or on the
<a href="http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/8214/" target="_blank">Pawn page at Curse</a>,
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
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.vgermods.com/">official site</a>, where you
can find links to all of my mods.</p>
<h3>Reporting bugs</h3>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Also, when reporting bugs, please make sure that you mention which language
you play World of Warcraft in.</p>
<h3>Slash command</h3>
<p>You can also open Pawn by typing <strong>/pawn</strong> into a chat box.</p>
<h3>Key bindings</h3>
<p>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." There are also key bindings for putting the item you're
currently hovering over into either slot of the Compare tab.</p>
<h3>Making a backup</h3>
<p>You can back up all of your custom scales. Just type <strong>/pawn
backup</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>The starter scales</h3>
<h4>Hiding</h4>
<p>(In Automatic mode, which is the default, this is handled for you
automatically when you change specs.) It's easy to hide any of the starter scales that you don't like from your
tooltips. Just select a scale from the list and then uncheck <b>Show in
tooltips</b> on the Scales tab. Or just shift-click the scale.</p>
<h4>Resetting</h4>
<p>It's possible to customize the colors of the starter scales. If you'd
like to undo any changes you've made to the starter scales, you can execute
these two commands at a chat window:</p>
<p class="codeblock">/script PawnResetProviderScales()<br />
/reload</p>
<h3>Developers</h3>
<p>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.)</p>
<h2>Item valuation notes</h2>
<p>Here are some notes that may help you while you're setting up your Pawn
scales.</p>
<h3>Gems and socket bonuses</h3>
<p>
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.</p>
<h4>
Base versus current values</h4>
<p>
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 <em>lower </em>than the base value. This makes it easy to compare socketed items with non-socketed items
based on their <em>potential</em> 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?")
</p>
<h3>Weapon speed</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Speed baseline shows up in the "special weapon stats" category.</p>
<h3>Special weapon stats</h3>
<p>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.</p>
You won't want to use all of the weapon min damage, max damage, and DPS
stats all at once.<ul>
<li>Do you care about top-end damage only? Use the max damage
stats. (max damage, 1H: max damage, Ranged: max damage, ...)</li>
<li>Do you care about damage per second only? Use the DPS stats.
(DPS, 1H: DPS, Ranged: DPS, ...)</li>
<li>Do you care about only melee weapons in general, but not which
hand? Use the Melee stats. (Melee: min damage, Melee: DPS, ...)</li>
<li>Do you care about the top end damage of all melee weapons that fit
in your main hand? Use MH: max damage <i>and</i> 1H: max damage.</li>
<li>If you use the specialized versions of stats, don't also use the
general ones. For example, if you use Melee: DPS, don't also use
DPS.
If you use Melee: min damage and/or Melee: max damage, you probably don't want
to also use Melee: DPS.</li>
<li>The OH: DPS stat and other off hand-related stats do not take
into account the decreased damage and hit rate of off-hand weapons.
The information is, as always, pulled straight from the tooltip.</li>
<li>If you care about average damage versus minimum and maximum damage,
take the value you would have assigned to average damage if it existed
as a stat, and add half to minimum damage and half to maximum damage.
For example, if you wanted to set Ranged: average damage to 10, but then found
out that Ranged: average damage doesn't exist, set Ranged: min
damage to 5 and Ranged: max damage to 5 instead.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Normalizing values (like Wowhead)</h3>
<p>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 <i>all</i>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Special effects and set bonuses</h3>
<p>Pawn doesn't have a value, for example, for "Equip: Increases the effect
that healing and mana potions have on the wearer by 40%" because only a few
items do that. Also, set bonuses are completely ignored by Pawn. You'll need
to take those special effects into account manually when deciding between an item that would give you a
bonus and an item that would not, as they won't be factored into the upgrade %
numbers shown by Pawn.</p>
<h2>Mod support</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Mods that have been tested and work with Pawn</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<ul>
<li>Ackis Recipe List</li>
<li>ArkInventory</li>
<li>AtlasLoot</li>
<li>Armory</li>
<li>CowTip</li>
<li>EQCompare</li>
<li>EquipCompare</li>
<li>FuBar</li>
<li>ItemSync</li>
<li>Link Wrangler</li>
<li>LootLink</li>
<li>Mendeleev</li>
<li>MobInfo-2</li>
<li>MonkeyQuest</li>
<li>MultiTips</li>
<li>Outfitter</li>
<li>RatingBuster</li>
<li>Skinner</li>
<li>Spyglass</li>
<li>tdItemTip</li>
<li>tekKompare</li>
</ul>
<h3>ArkInventory Rule</h3>
<p>When you have ArkInventory, ArkInventoryRules, and Pawn enabled, you can use the <code>pawnupgrade()</code> rule in
ArkInventory to run a Pawn comparison on items in your inventory for sorting. This will return true if the item is
an upgrade and false if not.</p>
<h3><span style="text-decoration: underline;">In</span>compatible addons</h3>
<ul>
<li>FreeUI<ul>
<li>FreeUI changes a bunch of text on tooltips that makes it impossible
for Pawn to read some stats off of them anymore. For example, it
redefines ITEM_MOD_CRIT_RATING so that what would normally be "+25
Critical Strike" shows up as "Crit +25". Pawn doesn't support any
addon that does that.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Combat Numbers Separator + Titan Panel Artifact Power<ul>
<li>These addons change the way that numbers are displayed on tooltips,
which causes Pawn to misread item stats. Right now I don't have
any way or plan to support them.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Undermine Journal</li>
<li>TipTac</li>
<li>TradeSkillMaster</li>
</ul>
<h2>Updates</h2>
<h3>Version 2.4.17</h3>
<h3>Version 2.4.16</h3>
<ul>
<li>Shadowlands: Pawn will now suggest the +16 stat jewel clusters instead
of +12 stat gems for items level 175 and higher.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.15</h3>
<ul>
<li>Shadowlands: Updated stat weights for Guardian Druid based on a new
simulation from Ask Mr. Robot.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.14</h3>
<ul>
<li>Spanish, Shadowlands only: Fixed a problem where off-hand frill items
were being misidentified as off-hand weapons, so they didn't show upgrades
or values for casters. (This problem didn't apply to Classic or to other
languages.)</li>
<li>Spanish, Spain only, Classic only: Fixed a problem where an error
message appeared when logging in.</li>
<li>Spanish: Fixed detection of Avoidance and Block Value on some items in
certain situations.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.13</h3>
<ul>
<li>Shadowlands: I've included a new set of stat weights from Ask Mr. Robot
yet again—the most notable changes will be for healers, who will see the
value of mastery increased significantly.</li>
<li>Improved a few bits of the Italian translation.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.12</h3>
<ul>
<li>Shadowlands: Pawn 2.4.11 included the wrong set of stat weights; this
version includes the stat weights that were <i>intended</i> to come with
2.4.11. Apologies for the error!</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.11</h3>
<ul>
<li>Shadowlands: Pawn now includes new default stat weights for all classes
and specs from Ask Mr. Robot, optimized for typical characters in Mythic
Keystone dungeons. These should give you much better gearing advice than the
previous defaults, but remember that you'll always get the most accurate
advice for your character if you import stat weights from your favorite
simulator (like Ask Mr. Robot).</li>
<li>Pawn's "compare item left" and "compare item right" keybinds work
with world quest item rewards once again.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.10</h3>
<ul>
<li>Worked around a bug in WoW that was causing Pawn to show incorrect
upgrade information for some Shadowlands quest rewards.</li>
<li>Fixed a bug where clicking links in chat and then right-clicking the
window that appeared would open Pawn's Compare tab even if it was for
something that wasn't an item, such as an achievement.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.9</h3>
<ul>
<li>Added Pawn annotations for tooltips of item rewards in the Great Vault.
(I think. Thanks Crazy Carl!)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.8</h3>
<ul>
<li>Pawn can now recover and continue working if another addon changes any
of the class colors and does so incorrectly.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.7</h3>
<ul>
<li>Changed the graphics in the Pawn UI to look more Maw-like.</li>
<li>WoW Classic: In German, mail armor is now properly detected again after
the Naxxramas patch.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.6</h3>
<ul>
<li>Pawn will no longer appear as "out of date" after updating to WoW 9.0.2.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.5</h3>
<ul>
<li>WoW Classic: In Russian, shadow spell damage is now properly recognized
on items. (This problem didn't affect other schools of magic or other
languages.)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.4</h3>
<ul>
<li>Pawn's bag icons should now cooperate with Can I Mog It?'s bag icons
again. Special thanks to the author of that addon, who inspired a much
simpler solution that what I had come up with.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.3</h3>
<ul>
<li>Pawn now has a more complete set of gem recommendations, including new
gems from the Shadowlands. For example, for resto shamans on an ilvl 100
item, Pawn will suggest five different +4 crit gems from different
expansions, so you can buy the one that's cheapest.<ul>
<li>This is just new recommendations, not a new feature—there still
isn't a way to further customize gem quality levels to your exact
tastes, but that's still on the to-do list.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Pawn was a little overzealous in resetting data that might have been
affected by the level squish, so I've changed the way it works to be less
annoying for people who have a lot of alts.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.2</h3>
<ul>
<li><b>Pawn's bag arrows integration will no longer work by default with
custom bag addons.</b><ul>
<li>The game no longer allows customizing that functionality while in
combat, so before this change, Pawn's bag arrow integration caused
errors while performing certain actions in combat, such as swapping
weapons from the character sheet. Disabling support for custom bag
addons is unfortunately the only way I can work around this.</li>
<li>To work around this, custom bag addons that call
IsContainerItemAnUpgrade directly can use
PawnIsContainerItemAnUpgrade when available instead, falling back to
IsContainerItemAnUpgrade if it's nil. Then Pawn will control the bag
arrows like it did before.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Pawn will now show two-handed weapons as potential upgrades for
two-handed Frost Death Knights. If you're all about the dual-wielding life
and want to turn this back off, you can go to Pawn's Values tab, select
"Axe: 2H" (or any other 2H type) under "Weapon types", and then select
"Don't show upgrades for 2H items."</li>
<li>You should no longer see a warning message about addon compatibility
when playing on Russian WoW 9.0.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4.1</h3>
<ul>
<li>WoW Classic: Hopefully fixed an error that occurred when turning in a
quest.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 2.4</h3>
<ul>
<li>Welcome to WoW 9.0 and the level squish! Pawn had to wipe its memory of
everything it knew about your characters before the squish since none of
that information is correct anymore, so for a little while it might show you
upgrades that aren't actually upgrades until it learns about your sweet
epics. This shouldn't last long, and will automatically resolve itself as
you play.<ul>
<li>This version is meant for WoW 9.0 (Shadowlands pre-patch) and WoW
Classic only.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Pawn should give reasonable gem recommendations and calculations in this
version, but I'll continue to refine them in the coming days to give more
helpful suggestions at lower levels.</li>
<li>Default stat weights have not been updated. Players participating in
high-level raiding may want to import custom weights from a simulator
instead of using the built-in guidance.</li>
<li>The Corruption stat has been removed, since it no longer has any effect
on your character and appears greyed out.</li>
<li>Fixed a problem where if a quest gave you a useful item and a junk item
(such as a gray artifact power item from Legion), Pawn would sometimes fail
to show upgrade arrows on the non-junk item.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Older versions and future improvements</h3>
<p>See the <a href="Version%20history.htm">version history</a> document for
information about older versions of Pawn, and a list of some of the features
I'm considering for future versions.</p>
<h2>The fine print</h2>
<p>© 2006-2021 Green Eclipse. This mod is released under the Creative Commons
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" target="_blank">
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0</a> 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.</p>
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