How to find the PERFECT glyph combination

I write this guide from a DPS perspective, but the same principles and methods will work for Healing and Tanking. You just need to know your starting point and what you want to end up at. Eg, I start with 120 hit from the Kingdom signet and want to end at 700 hit, 900 pen, and the rest in crit power.

PLEASE NOTE! This guide will demonstrate how to take combinations of combinations and perform a depth first search of yet more combinations. Or in other words, a lot of work. I'll include my end result so you can just skip to that if you are a DPS who uses a Kingdom signet, the Woodcutter's Wrath, and want an end result of 700 hit, 899 pen, 780 crit power and 336 crit rating. If any of that is different for you than it is for me, you have to do the work yourself to find YOUR perfect stats.

I have no doubt this process could be automated into a computer program, but it has been too many years since my programming days to remember how. If you want to take my method and write a program from it by all means feel free to do so.

First we state the problem.
We have 1 head glyph, 2 major glyphs (assuming the neck is the Woodcutter's Wrath), and 3 minor glyphs. You can have 0 or 1 head glyph filled for a given stat, 0 1 or 2 major glyphs, and 0 1 2 or 3 minor glyphs. We find all the possible values for a head glyph for a given stat at a given glyph QL eg 10.5 (for pen/hit it is 363,272,182,91) then do the same for major glyphs (328,246,164,82) and finally with the minor glyphs (211,158,105,53) notice how there is no overlap in values?

With that done we have the sets for “pick 0 or pick 1” completed but we need the sets for “pick 2” and for “pick 3.” So next we run the numbers through a combination calculator to fill the remaining sets. I like this combination calculator:
https://www.mathsisfun.com/combinatorics/combinations-permutations-calculator.html

With n = 4, r = 1 or 2 or 3, order = no, repetition = yes – we get the following results:

Head:

Majors:

Minors:

These are all the possible ways you could have individual glyphs, but we want to see all the possible combinations of glyphs used together. Having it set up this way simplifies things a great deal from how I used to do it because to find any given combination of glyphs used together one need only pick one item from the Head set, one from the Majors set, and one from the Minors set. The combinations calculator linked above is able to do this with some added rules.

First run a text editor like:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
So you can ctrl-f and replace all instances of ',' with '+' replace all instances of ' ' with ',' and remove all '{' and '}' so your sets now look like the following:


Crush that down to one line by adding commas at the end of lines and deleting the <enter> between them so you end up with:


Now when we plug it into the combinations calculator, we need to add rules that state you can only pick one item from the Head set, one from the Majors set, and one from the Minors set. The syntax is as follows, and this is what we plug into the combinations calculator:


With n = 52, r = 1 or 2 or 3, order = no, repetition = no – we end up with three results and they are too long to post here but you end up with:
r = 1 "List has 52 entries."
r = 2 "List has 668 entries."
r = 3 "List has 1904 entries."
Add them together and that is 2624 possible combinations of glyphs used together.

Using the text editor again, replace all instances of '{' with '=' replace all instances of ',' with '+' replace all instances of '} ' with '/n' (note the space in there) and finally remove the last three '}' (those which had no space behind them)

Paste the resulting column of numbers into an Excel sheet, sort that column, and you can now see the combination of glyphs needed to get EXACTLY eg 900 pen rating. After that you just have to match up your ideal first value with your ideal 2nd value in such a way that the two glyph sets are compatible with one another.

You can eyeball the list, or you can repeat step 2 and remove all incompatible glyph combinations to produce a list of only compatible glyph combinations with the given entry in the column. I'll include my spreadsheet so you can see it for yourself. I only ran this last step for values of hit that interested me; namely 570, 580, 605 +/- 1. And the only results for penetration rating I cared about ran between 700 and 900.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ahlvc4d6dtsbvx/2624%20glyph%20combinations.ods?dl=0

Plug it into tswcalc and you get my perfect glyph combination of:
http://joakibj.com/tswcalc/#weapon=9,7,5,1,0,4,0,3,6&weapon2=9,8,5,2,0,4,0,3,3&head=9,3,5,3,2,3,1,3,53&ring=9,3,5,3,2,3,1,3,62&neck=9,3,5,2,0,4,0,heroic,92&wrist=9,3,5,3,0,4,0,3,68&luck=4,3,5,4,3,3,1,3,86&waist=9,3,5,4,0,4,0,3,59&occult=9,3,5,4,0,4,0,3,65

I hope this was relatively clear, like I said it is a complicated process. If you run into problems I can try and help troubleshoot them. Otherwise thank you for taking a look at my guide, and remember to rate, like, and favorite this guide if you found it helpful

If you enjoyed this guide for TSW you may also like my other guides:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=640689609
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=704586959