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Warlock fashion tips - Ynir - 03-15-2010
Yumyum is my Horde warlock, raiding ICC10 in Frost emblem gear, mostly. I wrote this for the guild website when asked about gear choices that I didn't have a quick answer for.
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I am posting an easy way to use Simulationcraft to help you make choices about gear items, gemming and enchants. Simulationcraft is basically a command driven program that takes text files as input and delivers information about a character profile, principally raid DPS. It was a real bear to use in its original form, not worth the effort.
The program now has a GUI that makes it quick and easy to use. I am hooked: I don't buy or equip or modify a piece of gear without first checking the effect it will have on my DPS according to Simulationcraft.
First, I'll list some other sources of information on that topic. I read the latest posts on The Warlock's Den almost daily, especially now when there is a new patch upcoming.
Some topics there that are very useful:
Patch 3.3 raiding specs
Spell hit cap
Emblem spending guide
Rhadatip gear and gemming mod
Rhadatip is a mod that assigns a gear score to every piece of gear that you mouse over. It will calculate the combination of gear from what you are wearing and carrying in your bags that produces the highest DPS. It will also list the gem that will produce the highest DPS in each gem slot.
This is a quick way of comparing items, and I don't take it too literally. Anything with hit, for example, has a high score even if you are hit capped. Its comparison of trinkets is hard to understand sometimes. But it is great for raiding, when you see something drop that may or may not be worth the DKP, and you need to think fast.
If all of my gear came from raid drops it wouldn't be worthwhile to do calculations because I can't plan drops. But most of the gear I use right now is either bought with emblems, or crafted: only 3 of 18 pieces are raid drops. This means that I can plan my gear progression, with raid drops as occasional wild cards.
Simulationcraft is a numerical method for calculating your raid DPS based on gear items, gems, enhants, buffs, and other factors. You can read a quick summary of how it works here:
Simulationcraft on WoW.com
It is important to understand that the number that Simulationcraft produces for raid DPS is not actually what you will achieve. I use it to establish a baseline value for DPS with the gear I have at present, and change items one or two at a time to see how computed DPS changes.
To get started:
1. Create an account on http://www.wowhead.com/ (it's free). Import your character from the WoW armory to create a profile, and save it. (You can import your character directly into Simulationcraft from the Armory, but you can't change your Armory profile.) Your Wowhead account has room for ten profiles. You create new profiles by changing a piece of gear, or several, or gems, enchants, talents or entire specs, then saving the result to another profile name, which generates another URL.
2. Simulationcraft will take the URL to a profile as input and deliver an HTML report with a lot of numbers, tables and graphs. The number you want is at the top of the first page, computed DPS. Best to write this number down along with the profile name or URL to keep track of your computed "progression". I find the table of normalized scale factors helps decide whether to make small changes, like shifting gems around, since it shows how DPS changes with each stat.
3. Keep things simple at first. Turn off all the buffs and debuffs under the options tab before importing your profiles. You want to make sure that changes you see in DPS are caused by gear changes, for example, and not by accidentally turning on a buff for one profile and not for the next. Leave the globals at their defaults. Get scaling data for Intellect, Spirit, Spell Power, Hit, Crit and Haste. Don't make plots, because they take a lot of time to generate.
4. Check once in a while to make sure you haven't changed a setting accidentally: run your baseline profile again to make sure you get the same DPS as before. A typical DPS change from a single upgrade is less than 100 DPS. If you suddenly gain a thousand, something is wrong.
100 DPS doesn't sound like a lot, but it is an increase calculated over an entire raid fight, not one hit or crit. A gear swap that increases computed DPS by 100 makes you feel as if you can put your fist through a wall. I don't bother with changes below 20 DPS.
5. Another check is to compare the results from Rhadatip with those from Simulationcraft. You can mouse over an item in a badge vendor's inventory to see how the Rhadatip gear score would change if you equipped the item. That number and computed DPS from Simulationcraft won't be the same, but the direction of change should be. You can make this kind of comparison with RatingBuster, also.
6. Don't get hung up on BiS items that you will never see. No point planning to equip Frostmourne when the guild is wiping on Marrowgar. Except just for fun. More specifically, the stat balance for ilvl 277 items is very different from the ilvl 251 - 264 range that we live in, at least for locks. Don't make spec changes based on what you read in ElitistJerks that was computed for gear that you can't have.
The Simulationcraft program is now an easy way analyze your gear progression and to explore other options such as changing your talents. Real life is not so simple. I would like my raid DPS to become higher than my gear score, but that seems to take a lot of practice. I think I need to become a mouse turner instead of a key turner. There is a setting in Simulationcraft for that.
PS. Simulationcraft can analyze DPS from any class, not just locks.
Warlock fashion tips - Tal - 03-16-2010
None of the profile links work:(
Warlock fashion tips - Ynir - 03-16-2010
Quote:None of the profile links work:(I would have to reserve three profiles in perpetuity for this to work, so the examples were deleted.
Warlock fashion tips - Klaus - 03-16-2010
The SimulationCraft link is actually a copy of the Rhadatip mod link. :(
Warlock fashion tips - Ynir - 03-19-2010
fixed...