I have a feeling that most of my readers play WoW...probably because like 99% of the people I tell that I have a blog are in WoW. But up until recently, I knew that there was something called SimulationCraft, but I had no idea what it was. I take that back, I knew what it was, but I thought only uber nerds were using it to min/max to a ridiculous degree. Until I downloaded it. And started playing with it.
So, you google Simulationcraft. You click the first link, for simulationcraft.org. You click that "Download Latest Release" in the top right. It downloads the current version that is most compatible with WoW, and just unpack the folder wherever you want, mine is on my desktop, ymmv. After that, open the folder, and you can pin or just double click the SimulationCraft file to run it.
Now you get a lot of options. I don't know exactly what everything does, but I know enough to get to actually running a simulation of myself and getting relevant information.
I start off in the "Options" tab. There are several sub tabs on it. Starting in "Globals", I keep "Version" set to "Live", because I don't play on the PTR. "Iterations" you will want to set to anything higher than the 1000 mark, because having SimCraft run 1000 or less simulated fights is not enough of a sample size to truly find out what is important to you. "World Lag", "Length (sec)" and "Vary Length" I leave at their default settings. "Fight Style" is interesting. Normally I keep it set to "Patchwerk", which is just a setting that tells SimCraft that there is little to no movement, it's a single target fight, just sit there and do the max dps you can. I like that setting because it gives me a max single target dps to look for, and I can use that as a benchmark once in the game.
All the rest of the settings after that I leave at their defaults, except for one of them, the "Threads" options. You can change this option based on how many CPU's you have in your computer, like myself I change this to 2, since I have two cores, again ymmv based on your own hardware. Under "Advanced Options" on the right (or further down if you don't have a widescreen monitor or split screen), I leave all of those on their default settings as well.
Now on the "Buffs/Debuffs" sub tab, you want to make sure you have everything toggled on, because if you are like me, you are wanting to know what you will be doing in a raid environment, not while solo.
On the "Scaling" sub option, this is where it will be different for everyone, whether you are a tank, healer, caster, agi melee, str melee, etc. For me, I play an Enhance shaman, so I'm looking to see what to gem/enchant/reforge for. For that, my stats I'm looking at are Agility, Crit Rating, Haste Rating, and Mastery Rating. Those four options, "Analyze Agility", "Analyze Crit Rating", "Analyze Haste Rating" and "Analyze Mastery Rating", I will check mark. But you might check on something else, like an dps dk may check everything the same except they would check Strength instead of Agility.
The next sub option, "Plots", may seem confusing. since we are dealing with a large amount of stats on our gear, I usually go for a combination of 50 for the "Number of Plot Points", and 250 for "Plot Step Amount". The reason I choose 250 instead of 500 is that usually whenever we're reforging, it's in amounts around 200-350 (except for some trinket reforges, but that's the exception and not the rule). It gives me accurate information, but you can do however much you want to here.
And then the last sub option, "Reforge Plots". You want to go with 5000 on the "Reforge Amount" to see how your stat performs at the widest range of stats possible. "Step Amount" you actually want to set this to a low number, because a lower number here means that the simulations will look at reforge breaks by however you set this to each time. Meaning, if you set "Step Amount" to 500, the reforge sim will give you results based on reforges every 500 points, or just 10 reforge breaks if you have the "Reforge Amount" set to 5k. If you have "Step Amount" set to 50, then it will do 100 reforge breaks. Basically, the smaller the number you put for "Step Amount" the more detailed information you will get. And Since you cannot ever reforge out your primary stat (agi, str, int, stam), you want to make sure you are checking off under "Secondary Stats" the appropriate stats for your class, which again in my case is between Crit, Haste, and Mastery.
Now back up to the main options tabs at the very top, I'll click on "Import" next. Usually I just import myself from Battle.Net, which is the default sub option when you click on this tab. On your screen you will see the WoW webpage, and you have the usual "Search characters, items, forums, and more ..." field at the top right of the page to click in and search for your toon. I look up my character's name, click on the right one, and I see the normal armory page for myself. Don't I look sexy! Then on the bottom right corner of SimCraft, you can then click on the "Import" button.
When you click import, it will flip over to the "Simulate" tab in the main options tabs on the right, and your screen will fill up with a whole bunch of crap, all sorts of code-ish looking things that are important for SimCraft to know what to do. At this point, you can click on the "Simulate!" button on the bottom right.
Once you click on "Simulate!", you are in for a long wait, unless you have the world's fastest computer. So at this point, go do your normal stuff, because when I say you are in for a long wait, I mean potentially days. Go play WoW, surf the web, etc, just leave SimCraft running in the background. Oh, and make sure you don't have your computer set to auto update and reboot windows or anything like that. If your computer restarts itself, SimCraft forgets everything it was doing. So please, please, please, make sure your computer will be able to stay on for days in a row. It's not something that overly taxes your computer, I can play LoL, WoW, surf the web, do whatever I want, it just takes a lot of time for the computer to simulate 50,000 WoW boss fights, while reforging and plotting data and collecting information and running a bajillion RNG type systems that WoW uses. So really, go enjoy your life. Just every day, a few times a day, click back to SimCraft. You will know it is done when, instead of seeing all that programming crap looking code stuff, you see beautiful looking bar graphs, pie graphs, and charts telling you how much Haste is worth, or Agility is worth, etc.
So when it is done, you will get all kinds of information. I mean all kinds of information. Most of it I ignore, because my brain explodes when I look at it. However, I do look at the first bits of information. Right at the beginning, you should see a chart that says something like it just did for me, which was "Scale Factors for Saichotick Damage Per Second", but it will say your own character's name and role, based on what you simulated.
The nitty gritty, in this chart, is going to be those stats you were focusing on, Agi, Str, Crit, Haste, etc. Look at that chart. For me, my stats I was comparing were Agi, Crit, Haste, and Mastery. In the "Scale Factors" line, you will now see numbers, numbers like 6.30, or 2.95, or 3.45. These are your "stat weights". This means, for example, where my Agi says "6.30" it means that for every point of Agility that I have, I will see a direct increase in damage per second of 6.30. Everyone can then go to their favorite website that they use for reforging and finding their "BiS" list (Best in Slot, meaning what piece of gear is the best in the game currently for them). I like www.askmrrobot.com, mainly because the interface is clean, you can manipulate things in very easy to understand ways, and it is very customizable. On that site, I can go into the options and then put in the values for each stat that SimCraft gives me, and the website then does a whole bunch of reforge and gems and enchants and updating my BiS lists and stuff for me, useful information that I can then apply in-game to make myself the best I can be.
How often should this be done? The whole process? Well, I usually recommend after any patch that changes how much damage or healing or whatever that you actually do, but make sure that SimCraft is actually up-to-date with the changes. Currently, as of the time of this post, SimCraft is updated for 5.3. On SimCraft's website it will tell you what version of WoW it is compatible for. I would also run SimCraft after you have gotten a lot of new gear. Say you go from ilvl 490 to ilvl 505. I would definitely run a sim at that point, because at certain ilvls, you may have gotten enough total amount of stats, or certain tier bonuses, that some stats may actually become less or more helpful for you. Enhancement is an easy case of this. At the very start of MoP, Enhancement Shamans wanted to gem and reforge for Agi and Crit, since the amount of Haste and Mastery we could actually have at the time was very low, since we were dealing with a low ilvl and total amount of stats. Once you get into the 470-490 ilvl range, the stat focus actually shifts to a Mastery build, since we're starting to get enough of the other stats for them to be shifted into Mastery to make a noticeable difference in dps done. But once you break out of the 490 ilvl, Haste now becomes the most effective stat, since we're getting enough crit to make sure our classes passive abilities have an effective up-time, and our weapon damage starts to get higher and higher, to the point where we want as many melee swings as we can get.
But every class is different. Some classes it may be very basic, like no matter how many times you run a simulation, you may end up always just stacking as much of a particular stat as you can. Other times, you may find out that you are getting enough gear to where you may need to regem every single slot into something else
I hope people have found this helpful. I know it has really helped me to figure out a lot about my own class that I didn't fully understand before. Maybe it will help you too.
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