WoW: Using SimulationCraft for gear selection

Tags : wow simulationcraft, gear selection, wow guide, wow news    

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." ~ Leonardo da Vinci

As warlocks, we're used to delving into the mysterious depths of the occult to seek the knowledge that brings us power. This week I'm going to attempt to lift the veil of mystery that covers what is possibly the most powerful theorycrafting tool at our disposal. SimulationCraft is a tool that anyone who has frequented the Elitist Jerks forums will no doubt have run into at least once. In my experience many people take one look and run screaming from all the "maths" that starts to intrude on their game.

With this article I would like to reduce the "fear factor" of SimulationCraft and show one way in which it can be very useful. Many of us put together lists of upgrades that we would like to get our hands on and we all do that by comparing the stats on each item. We may also use lists produced by others or even give different values or weights to an item's stats by using scores we find -- these tend to be based on theoretical 'model' warlock's gear set. What I want to show you is how you can generate these lists and scores for yourself based on your own gear.

SimulationCraft is an application that will take in a load of conditions under which it can model a World of Warcraft boss fight and then runs that model hundreds or thousands of times. Each time it works out what the player wants to do, what the boss or the environment does and keeps score of the damage done; in much the same way as in-game damage meters do. After it has done this loads of times it produces an average DPS score for that character, in that situation. As with any model, it's not perfect but there is a lot you can do to produce sensible figures and while it might never match the DPS you actually achieve it does give a good measure of how gear, rotation, raid setup and the like perform under conditions very similar to those in a raid.

Getting started

The first thing you are going to need is a copy of the SimulationCraft application. You can download it from http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/. Once you have this downloaded, extract the files and you're ready to go, no installation required. By the way, I'm basing this on the PC version as I have never used the Mac one -- if there are significant differences I hope someone will point them out in the comments. Various files and folders appear but the only one you are interested in is the simcqt.exe. When you run this you are faced with a sceen that welcomes you to the application and goes on to tell you about some of its features. You now have everything up and running so lets get cracking.

In order to have it model a fight for us we need to tell it what the conditions of that fight should be. We do this in the 'Options' tab. There are five sub-tabs that we'll work though quickly:

• Globals - I would leave most of these as defaults to begin with though I move the 'Player Skill' from Elite to Good and the 'Threads' to match the number of processor cores my system has.
• Buffs - This is the buffs your modeled player has during the fight. A well balanced 25 man raid should have all of them but obviously 10 man raids will lose some. Tick the ones you want to model with.
• Debuffs - Much the same as buffs but this time the stuff that is debuffing the boss during the fight. Switch off the ones you don't want modeled.
• Scaling - This is not required to produce a DPS score but is key to what we're looking at today with gear, so tick the ones we care about as locks (Intellect, Spirit, Spell Power, Hit Rating, Crit Rating, Haste Rating).
• Plots - These are also not essential to have checked but again it's something I'm going to look at later, so check the same options as for scaling.

Importing your character

Right, that's about it, now we just need to get our warlock and test this thing out. Select the 'Import' tab and you should see the Armory search page (if you are not in the US then change the Armory Region setting on the Globals tab). Personally I prefer to use the Wowhead profile tab to import characters as this allows me more scope to play about with them, but for now just find your lock in the Armory and click the 'Import' button in the bottom right of the app. On doing this you will be moved to the 'Simulate' tab and a load of scary text will fill the screen. Don't be put off by this -- SimulationCraft has just converted the character information into a format it can understand. You can understand it too if you look closely.

The first few rows are general information about your character -- name, Armory URL, level, race, etc. Next is a number of lines that start with 'actions', these lines detail the rotation or priority of spells your character will use in the fight. You can edit this but I'm not going to explain about that in this article so best leave it for now. Generally what is there will be what has been found to work the best for your spec. After the actions comes your gear, name and stats. Finally there are several rows that show what the total stat values of that gear come to. Nothing too daunting there. We're ready to hit that 'simulate' button!

Analyzing results

Now, the app will take some time to think about all the details and simulate the fight loads of times. This may take a while depending on the speed of your computer and how many of the scaling and plotting options you select. Once it has finished you will be moved to the 'Results' tab and faced with a quite dizzying array of numbers and charts. I could probably spend the rest of the time until Cataclysm analyzing these numbers, what their significance is, how to modify them to best advantage etc, but that would get pretty dull pretty quickly (for you, I love this stuff). I will quickly run through some key features of what is on that report:

• DPS score - Right up near the top should be your warlock's name and a DPS score. This is the average total across all the fights simulated. Don't worry if you have never achieved this kind of number, it's there as a yard-stick. If you were to change something in your talent spec, gear or rotation and run the simulation again, this number will go up or down. If it goes up it will most likely go up if you do the same thing in game.
• Damage Per Execute Time (chart) - This shows you how efficient your spells are in terms of the time they take to cast and the damage they do. The bigger the bar the more damage done per second of casting.
• Damage Sources (chart) - This shows a proportional representation of damage done by each spell. This is excellent to compare with tools like World of Logs to show if you are following the spell priorities properly.
• Resource Gains (chart) - Where did you get your mana from? The bigger the slice of pie the more important that source of mana is to you.
• Mana Timeline (chart) - A representation of how much mana you have during the fight.
• DPS Timeline (chart) - A representation of your DPS throughout the fight. Particularly interesting if you have an execute phase.
• DPS Distribution (chart) - This shows the DPS scores for all the fights modeled.

The next two charts are the ones I'm especially interested in for this article, so we'll look at them on the next page.

:page:

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. ~ Stanley Gudder

Scale Factors

So, scale factors, what the devil are they? These are the relative value of each stat; in the same way apples, oranges and bananas don't cost the same as each other, not all stats are equally good at increasing your DPS. Spirit is nice to have and gives a decent damage boost but not as good as spell power. Hit typically gives the highest DPS gain of any stat but only until you reach the cap and then it's worthless. You can pick up many opinions on what are the respective values of each stat on any number of forums and websites but none of them are tailored to you -- the scale factors you just generated are.

If, for example, your scale factors showed that spell power had a value of 2 and crit 1 then SP is twice as important to increasing your DPS as crit. You would need to find an item that increased your crit by 20 to be as valuable to you as one that increased your SP by 10. Hit can be somewhat misleading in these things though. By default SimulationCraft considers the DPS gain from a gain in each stat except hit, where it works the value out by considering the DPS loss from losing some hit. This way you can consider swapping out some hit items or gems for SP, haste etc. and know if it's worth doing. You can get the app to not treat hit this way by selecting to "use Positive Deltas Only" in the scaling tab of the options.

If you have reached the hit cap then gaining more is worthless but losing some of what you have could be a bad move. This can be hard to judge with scale factors alone and this is where having SimulationCraft plot a graph of DPS gains for each stat is frankly, awesome. Call me a bookish nerd if you like but I love the DPS scaling chart, it just makes the whole issue of stat importance so simple.

DPS Gains chart

If you find this chart a little daunting take a little time to look at it. DPS is shown vertically, so the higher up the chart the better the DPS. Left to right is either an increase or decrease in each stat with your current value in the middle. So the chart starts on the left with showing what your DPS would be if you lost 200 points of each stat -- not all of them together, just which ever one you are looking at. So if you look at the purple spell power line and see where it is furthest left, that gives an idea of what your DPS would be if you lost 200 points of SP.

If you look at the chart at the top of the page you can see that most of the stat lines are fairly straight. The red one for hit however rises more steeply than all the others and then flattens off. The point at which it flattens is the hit cap -- the point at which gaining more hit (moving right on the chart) doesn't increase DPS (moving up on the chart). You can see that this cap is about 50 points below their current level. Also in that example chart you can see that the steepest line on it is the spell power one - both for gains and losses of the stat. This means that this character would gain the most by gaining SP and lose the most by losing it. Very handy to know when choosing gear upgrades.

One final little tip for helping with gear choices. You may have noticed that links were provided to Wowhead and Lootrank. These links are based on your scale factors and will show a list of gear for each slot and the total value of each item. Both these sites do the job very well, I like Wowhead for it's filtering and tabbing of the slots and I think the way Lootrank allows you to baseline your own gear is fantastic. I would strongly recommend people try them both and see what they offer. Personally I use Lootrank as they attempt to include proc bonuses for trinkets and weapons but you have to be careful here as it assumes they will always proc to the maximum they can, which isn't going to be the case for those that trigger from "your healing spells". Neither of these sites will include set bonuses in their scoring either but don't let that put you off, just factor it into your consideration when reviewing them. Don't forget you can try out upgrades in the Wowhead profiler and then import them into SimulationCraft to try them out -- SimulationCraft does factor in set bonuses.

SimulationCraft offers many more tools and toys to play with and really takes the strain out of number crunching. As Blizzard introduce more proc-based mechanics into the game it is tools like this that will have a better chance of modeling them than static calculators and spreadsheets. It's certainly not a perfect tool and it's definitely not going to magic you into a better player. What it does though is make analysis a whole lot quicker, easier and more measurable.

Source: wow.com

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