Some time back while hanging around Ironforge on a lazy weekend afternoon I received a whisper from a lower level character about my gear. It turned out that this mystery person had a druid main and we had a good chat about being feral tanks. Later in the conversation we got on to talking about choosing the best gear for our roles and he asked if I’d heard of a program called ‘Rawr’.

Saate: My first question for you is how did Rawr come about?

Astrylian: Well Rawr started about when I was tanking Molten Core. I wanted something to help figure out which gear to use. At the time there was a prominent druid on the Blizzard WoW forums named Hugehoss who was a pioneer of tanking for druids. He had a spreadsheet that was pretty good at telling what gear was best.

I took some of the ideas from that and started making a Windows application, a tool for myself, to help figure things out on a larger scale and to make calculations more accurately.

Saate: So when did you start to share it with people and when did it start to expand into other classes?

Astrylian: Let’s see… I think it was about 2 or 3 months of just releasing betas and posting announcements on the Blizzard druid forums and everybody liking it. After 2 or 3 months I added support for cats. I did it in such a way that Rawr itself was a framework for adding these models… so I had a bear and a cat model. So another 2 or 3 months after that my friend Kavan, a mage, asked if he could make a mage model. From there it just kept going and going.

Penfold: So how to you actually decide on the models? Obviously you go off Elitist Jerks theorycrafting and all that but is it something… do you get experts on the class to create the model or do you do it yourself?

Astrylian: Yeah… experts pretty much. Each model is developed by a different person for the most part. I do Bear and Cat, Kavan does Mage, Ermad does Retribution and Healadin. There’s pretty much a different person for each class if not each class and spec, and sometimes multiple people on each class and spec just so we can really have experts on each class. A lot of the theorycrafting we figure out ourselves, things come from Elitist Jerks, a lot of sources, a lot of just trying things in game and figuring out how things work.

Penfold: Since WOTLK came out class changes have been pretty frequent and often drastic. Does that make it a pain in the ass for you to update? Or do you think Rawr actually helps figuring out the new best rotations and stuff?

Astrylian: Oh Rawr definitely helps figure out that sort of thing. It’s not so much a pain in the ass… only really when there’s nobody to make the changes to the models. For example at the time of chatting here 3.2.2 patch notes have just come out and it includes a bunch of changes for arcane mages. In just last night and today Kavan’s been working on those and pretty much has all the changes done for 3.2.2 and based on his changes all the arcane mages on EJ are now learning the right way to play in 3.2.2.

Penfold: Ahh well I’m a mage and that interests me quite a lot!

Saate: Have you been surprised by the takeup by the community? And how you seem to have a massive following on EJ which really gives it credit on how good it is?

Astrylian: Yeah it started out with just a few dozen people liking it on the druid forums and at around April of ‘08 we released the mage model and at that point it started really taking off and becoming very popular. Then I think around last December it had another huge jump where the user base doubled in size and since then it’s stayed pretty stable since then, steadily growing. Somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 users at the moment.

Saate: If I was in your shoes and had a runaway success like that I’d be thinking “screw this, I’m getting PAID!”. How has Rawr remained free and what do you get out of it?

Astrylian: We have fun! We enjoy it, we like doing it. It IS free but we accept donations although those don’t amount to a whole lot. We considered advertisements, the Rawr website has one little banner ad on the side of a couple of pages but it doesn’t make a lot of money. Basically our first loyalty is to our userbase.

Penfold: It’s obviously pretty mathy, what’s your background? Do you have any background in maths or anything? Obviously a bit of computer knowledge..

Astrylian: No college level education in math or anything. Really just maths in highschool and nothing too advanced beyond that. Most of the computer knowledge… Well I’ve been a programmer for a number of years and that translates pretty well.

Saate: I think Penfold had a question about some of the classes having limited support?

Penfold: Yeah, I’m a mage and had support really early and it was good, but it seems some classes and specs don’t seem to be quite as well supported. Is it just a matter of getting the right people on board or what?

Astrylian: Yeah I mentioned earlier that it’s not so much a pain in the ass when they make changes to WoW. It’s a pain in the ass when we don’t have someone to make those changes to Rawr. That pretty much comes down to we need a dedicated person to maintain each model and fix its bugs and work on it.

It’s a decent amount of work and each model is pretty much on its own beyond what the Rawr framework provides, which is quite a lot, but the class specific stuff still needs to be handled. You can really tell which models we have very good dedicated developers for like paladins, priests, mages and druids. Then there’s some like Warlocks and Rogues which are pretty weak, we could really use a good warlock or rogues developer.

Hunters was another good example but we’ve recently gotten someone who is pretty dedicated to it and has been making a whole lot of changes and upgrades to Hunter. So it’s pretty much just finding the right people and having those people remain dedicated.

Penfold: I’m certainly very grateful for the mage one. Couldn’t live without it!

Astrylian: Yeah Kavan’s awesome. He’s my right hand man and Rawr probably wouldn’t exist anymore if not for Kavan being there with me the whole time.

Saate: So for anyone listening that might want to see how they can contribute or help out is there somewhere they can get more information?

Astrylian: Absolutely! http://rawr.codeplex.com is our website for the development of Rawr. It’s also where you download Rawr. You can find the full source code there and download it, getting it running locally, make some changes. Let me know if you want to start contributing!

Penfold: Rawr does have a bit of a steep learning curve. I know when I first loaded up it was telling me to get int gems and gear with MP5 because I had sort of…hadn’t set up all the parameters correctly. Then when I got my guildleader Seth, who is also a mage, to download it he went through the same thing.

Are there any thoughts towards setting up defaults so someone who’s a newb can open it up and see ‘oh that’s what I should be getting’ and give them a general sort of idea?

Astrylian: Absolutely. There’s this constant back and forth struggle between adding more and more features to Rawr and making it easier to use. So it pretty much comes in the order of…we add a great new feature to Rawr and then a little while later we add default features to it.

So in that interim time it’s not obvious to new users. Like in your example of it suggesting you gem int and mp5 was probably because you didn’t have any mana regen buffs on but now a month or two ago we added ‘default buffs’ so you start with a decent level of raid buffs so that doesn’t happen anymore.

Penfold: So…say for example new patch notes come out and there’s a bunch of druid changes how do you work it out? What sort of steps do you go through? Do you just go onto the PTR and start whacking away at dummies or what?

Astrylian: Well it depends on the change. In some cases we go on the test realm and use dummies. In others…for example 3.2 included several druid changes, they changed the base values for several of the feral attacks but those were really well detailed in the patch notes so they were easy to just copy straight into the code.

Sometimes they don’t make it so easy though and we have to do extensive testing. Sometimes we have to rely on the extensive testing performed by others.

Saate: I was chatting to Penfold the other day about some of the legendary theorycrafting math nerd arguments on EJ in the past where you have pages and pages of algorithms for and against. What do you do when there’s a huge divide in the community on what the best way to do or model something is?

Astrylian: I go with the math. Pretty much anytime where the math doesn’t agree with what very smart people are saying is pretty much a good indication that there’s something incomplete in the math. If what Rawr says doesn’t work in practice then it just means there’s something wrong in the model somewhere.

Penfold: So Rawr ends up proving the experts right, do you think?

Astrylian: Yeah pretty much…at least we hope so anyway :)

Thanks so much for your time!

You can find Rawr at http://rawr.codeplex.com/. You can also check out the video below for a walkthrough of its great features too!