Pawn

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.

Installing Pawn

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\_retail_\Interface\AddOns
C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns
C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns

Comparing items

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.)

Comparing an item that just dropped to what you currently have

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.

Comparing items in AtlasLoot and other mods without clicking

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.)

• 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.
• 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.

Notes

If you're interested in customizing Pawn further, check out the Options tab of the Pawn UI.

Contacting the author

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.

Reporting bugs

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.

Also, when reporting bugs, please make sure that you mention which language you play World of Warcraft in.

Slash command

You can also open Pawn by typing /pawn into a chat box.

Key bindings

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.

Making a backup

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 starter scales

Hiding

(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 Show in tooltips on the Scales tab.  Or just shift-click the scale.

Resetting

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:

/script PawnResetProviderScales()
/reload

Developers

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.)

Item valuation notes

Here are some notes that may help you while you're setting up your Pawn scales.

Gems and socket bonuses

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.

Base versus current values

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

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.

Special weapon stats

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.

• Do you care about top-end damage only?  Use the max damage stats.  (max damage, 1H: max damage, Ranged: max damage, ...)
• Do you care about damage per second only?  Use the DPS stats.  (DPS, 1H: DPS, Ranged: DPS, ...)
• Do you care about only melee weapons in general, but not which hand?  Use the Melee stats.  (Melee: min damage, Melee: DPS, ...)
• Do you care about the top end damage of all melee weapons that fit in your main hand?  Use MH: max damage and 1H: max damage.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Normalizing values (like Wowhead)

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.

Special effects and set bonuses

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.

Mod support

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.

Mods that have been tested and work with Pawn

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.

• Ackis Recipe List
• AtlasLoot
• Armory
• CowTip
• EQCompare
• EquipCompare
• FuBar
• ItemSync
• Link Wrangler
• LootLink
• Mendeleev
• MobInfo-2
• MonkeyQuest
• MultiTips
• Outfitter
• RatingBuster
• Skinner
• Spyglass
• tdItemTip
• tekKompare
• TipTac (*reported to no longer work November 2014)

Incompatible addons

• FreeUI
  • 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.
• Undermine Journal
  • May prevent you from selecting scales in the Pawn UI.
• ElvUI + Bagnon (likely other bag addons)
  • When these bag addons support the game's built-in green arrows feature, they should work with Pawn, too.  (Pawn doesn't add those arrow icons to your items; it just changes when the game displays them.)
• Combat Numbers Separator + Titan Panel Artifact Power
  • 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.

Updates

Version 2.3.24

• WoW Classic: Fixed a problem where Pawn would cause an error when using the "Track for each scale (advanced)" option because it would try to scan your equipment sets, which don't exist on Classic.

Version 2.3.23

• Battle for Azeroth: Pawn now works in the new(-ish) 8.3.0 auction house.
  • Important: Items with random stats ("of the _____") will be undervalued on the main auction house browsing page, and will be unlikely to appear as upgrades.  When you click the item name to see all of the individual auctions for that item, those items will get accurate rankings from Pawn.  (This is because the game groups multiple similar items with varying stats together on the initial screen, but the items listed on the second screen have exact stats that Pawn can evaluate.)

Version 2.3.22

• WoW Classic: Fixed a lot of additional problems with the European Spanish version of WoW Classic.  (Latin American Spanish and Battle for Azeroth weren't affected.)

Version 2.3.21

• WoW Classic: Fixed a problem where Pawn couldn't read damage on weapons in the European Spanish version of WoW Classic.  (Latin American Spanish and Battle for Azeroth weren't affected.)
• WoW Classic: Fixed a problem where Pawn couldn't read damage on wands in the Portuguese version of WoW Classic.
• WoW Classic: Improved the Simplified Chinese translation.

Version 2.3.20

• WoW Classic: Fixed an issue where the new Classic stat weights included with Pawn valued stats like crit chance as if they were the Burning Crusade-style ratings, not percentages, so all of the percentage-based stats were severely undervalued.  (This has no effect on you if you're using your own stat weights, or if you're playing Battle for Azeroth.)

Version 2.3.19

• I worked around a bug in BankItems and other addons that use the old auction house that was causing Pawn to fail catastrophically.
• Pawn will now work with even more complicated corrupted items than before ("didn't expect to find 11 bonus IDs").

Version 2.3.18

• WoW Classic: Pawn now includes a full set of starter scales for each class and spec courtesy of HawsJon.  These stat weights were originally designed for use on The Burning Crusade, not Classic, but they're the best resource for Classic stat weights that I've found so far.
  • Druids have two scales for feral: DPS (cat) and tank (bear), since your preferred role will dictate which stats are most valuable.
  • Rogue off-hand weapons use different weights than other rogue gear, so there's a fourth scale for rogues that you should only use when comparing items for your off-hand slot.
• Removed an error message that appeared when playing in Spain.

Version 2.3.17

• Pawn can now handle more complicated items than before.  This fixes a problem where you could get an error like "didn't expect to find 9 bonus IDs" after looting a very complicated item.

Version 2.3.16

• Updated German translation.

Version 2.3.15

• WoW 8.3 PTR: Added support for the Corruption stat.  If you assign it a value, you probably want to assign it a negative value.
• WoW 8.3 PTR: Fixed a problem where high-level weapons would cause errors when playing in French.

Version 2.3.14

• WoW Classic: Scale tags can now specify a class like on retail.  When you import a scale that specifies a class, Pawn will now automatically mark all of the weapon and armor types that class can't equip as unusable just like it does on retail.  (Specs included in scale tags for Classic will be ignored.)
• WoW Classic: For Korean players, wand damage should now be interpreted correctly and no longer produce an error message.
• WoW Classic: Fixed a problem where the retail-only option to only use your class's preferred armor type after level 50 was still showing up on leather, mail, and plate armor.
• Improved the "Items with this are unusable" text on the Weights tab in English.
• Made a small tweak to the Pawn UI's tabs to help people who use custom fonts.

Version 2.3.13

• Updated the Pawn logo.
• Pawn dialogs that ask for scale names, and the delete scale confirmation dialog, have been returned to the more compact appearance that they had in version 2.3.10 and earlier.
• WoW 8.3 PTR: Fixed a problem where Pawn would no longer load on the PTR.
• WoW Classic: Ranged weapons are now properly supported.
• Added a special surprise.

Version 2.3.12

• When exporting Pawn scale tags, unusable stats will now appear simply as "Stat=X" instead of "Stat=-1000000".
• WoW Classic: A basic starter scale for each class is now available.
  • The starter scales include default values for all stats relevant to the class, loosely based on the game's item level formula.  (They're very similar to the default stat weights that came with Pawn a decade ago.)
  • There is just one starter scale per class, so for example, the druid template has values for Strength, Agility, Intellect, and Spirit.
  • The appropriate starter scale will be automatically enabled when starting Pawn for the first time (if you don't already have any scales) so it does something.
  • I still highly recommend customizing the default values.
  • The "Template" button on the Scales tab is now available, and creates a new scale based on your class's starter scale.
• WoW Classic: Pawn will now allow items that aren't your class's preferred armor type to be considered as upgrades after level 50, since non-cloth healers using cloth armor was commonplace and optimal in early WoW.  [Vger wistfully remembers her Crimson Felt Hat from Strat...]
  • The option that appears to enable this feature whenever you select an armor type on the Weights tab has been removed.
• WoW Classic: The Manual button on the Scales tab is now visible, even though you can't switch to Automatic on Classic so the button is always selected.  (Other parts of the Pawn UI refer to "switching to Manual mode" and I didn't want to have to change them all.)

Version 2.3.11

• WoW Classic: Now supports Korean and Traditional Chinese.  With that, Pawn now supports all WoW Classic languages!
• WoW Classic: Fixes for frost spell damage in Simplified Chinese.
• The Import and Export windows for scale tags are now larger and can be closed with the Esc key.
• If you experience a problem with Pawn incorrectly finding the stats for an item, you can put that item into the Compare tab and then Alt+click it to see a full list of the item's stats and a command that can be used to see the same item on a different computer.  (You probably won't have a reason to use this unless I ask you to.)

Version 2.3.10

• Additional updates to the Simplified Chinese translation.
• WoW Classic: Now supports Russian, thanks to drcrazy777.

Version 2.3.9

• Additional updates to the Simplified Chinese translation from wolfcon.

Version 2.3.8

• WoW Classic: Now supports Portuguese.
• WoW Classic: Now supports Simplified Chinese, thanks to wolfcon.
• Some updates to the Russian translation, courtesy of drcrazy777.

Version 2.3.7

• WoW Classic: Now supports Spanish and German.

Version 2.3.6

• WoW Classic: the Compare tab will now refresh itself after a moment to make sure it has the latest stats from your items.

Version 2.3.5

• /pawn compare can now compare two items at once: /pawn compare left 12345 right 67890
• Fixed a bug introduced in Pawn 2.3.0 that made it impossible to import a scale with a class and spec specified the first time you tried.
• Fixed problems with baguette damage in French WoW.

Version 2.3.4

• WoW Classic: Now supports French in addition to English.
• Fixed a problem introduced in WoW 8.2.5 where Pawn wouldn't recognize numbers 1,000 or larger in the Russian version of WoW—not the same one as for French and Spanish!

Version 2.3.3

• Added a new Pawn slash command: /pawn compare.  You can use this as an alternate way to put items into Pawn's Compare UI.  For example, "/pawn compare left 16795" puts Arcanist's Crown into the left slot of Pawn's Compare tab.
  • The compare command accepts item IDs, "item:12345:0:0" strings, or full shift+clicked item links ("/pawn compare [Arcanist's Crown]").
  • If your PC hasn't downloaded the stats for an item yet, the command might not do anything the first time.  Try it again (Enter, Shift+Up, Enter) after a second and it should work the second time.
  • Addon authors can use "PawnUI_SetCompareItemAndShow(1, 16795)" to accomplish the same thing.  (1 for left, 2 for right.)
• Fixed a problem where armor was being ignored in French WoW.
• WoW Classic: Worked around a problem where Pawn would sometimes not see all of the stats on an item (typically, the "green stats").
  • This workaround will result in slightly lower performance on WoW Classic.  I'm still investigating a better long-term solution.
  • For the curious, it's because the game client would get a partial list of stats for the item, then Pawn would do its calculations on that, and then shortly afterward the game would get the rest of the stats for the item, but at that point Pawn didn't know that it needed to re-scan the item, so it was evaluating the item based on just the first batch of stats it got.
• WoW Classic: Removed "All Resistances", which does not appear to exist on any items in Classic.
• WoW Classic: Added support for "of Concentration" items.
• Russian and Chinese: For consistency, Pawn's "debug" and "backup" slash commands are now always in English like they are for all other languages.

Version 2.3.2

• Fixed a problem introduced in WoW 8.2.5 where Pawn wouldn't recognize numbers 1,000 or larger in the French and European Spanish versions of WoW.
• I introduced a system that will make Pawn a little easier to translate in the future, and make it more resilient to changes in the way that non-English versions of WoW display numbers.
• WoW Classic: Added support for ranged weapon DPS, "of Defense" items, and probably more stuff I forgot about.

Version 2.3.1

• WoW Classic: Added support for "of Eluding" items.

Version 2.3

Consider this version a full release for Battle for Azeroth and a beta for WoW Classic.  WoW Classic is supported for English only in this version.  Pawn does not include any built-in scales for WoW Classic, so you'll need to create your own scales from scratch, or import them.  Not all Pawn features exist on WoW Classic, and some features are incomplete.

• There are no new features for Battle for Azeroth in this version.  If you run into any issues on the live/retail realms, you can return to 2.2.x and shouldn't miss out on anything.
• The "show item level upgrades" feature will default to OFF in Classic.  (But, if you've already used one of the earlier versions of Pawn on Classic, that option may already be on, so turn it off manually if you don't want it.)

Older versions and future improvements

See the version history document for information about older versions of Pawn, and a list of some of the features I'm considering for future versions.

The fine print

© 2006-2020 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.