Comment by uzerfcwn
3 hours ago
I did similar analysis a couple years ago for optimizing item builds in WoW classic. The tricky part in WoW is that there are 15ish item slots with hundreds of item choices for each slot, so the total number of builds is well over 100^15.
I ended up using a divide-and-conquer style approach, where I 1) pruned items that weren't on the Pareto frontier individually for each slot, 2) took the two slots X and Y that had the least items after pruning and grouped them by calculating Z:={x+y|x∈X,y∈Y}, 3) pruned items that weren't on the Pareto frontier in Z, and 4) repeated steps 2-3 until there was only one group remaining, comprised of the full Pareto-optimal item builds.
This ran in a couple of seconds, as opposed to the other solutions I tried that took somewhere between minutes and years. The downside was that including set bonuses into the model took extra work.
Fascinating! Do you still have any of the code or datasets/datasources laying around?
The data came from wow.tools (which has since been replaced by https://wago.tools) and Wowhead. I still have some code but it has so many ad-hoc scripts and sections that I commented in/out while experimenting that I'd feel embarrassed sharing it.