Legion Theorycrafting [7.3, All specs]

[3clipse]

So, a question on theorycrafting preferences from others. This weekend, I was hoping to populate Simcraft explorer with more gear from Legion and do some breakdowns. In the current trinket sims, I am using a high ilvl gearset from Mythic raiding in Emerald Dream and Nighthold. Any problem with me just using a mythic gearset for the other slot breakdowns too? Or are you guys wanting to see 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon profiles instead? I can probably eventually do both, but Simulationcraft has a horrendously slow xml generation phase that is many times more inefficient than the text or html output options, and this causes a single gear slot sim to potentially take 5-8 hours, assuming nothing goes wrong and I have to rerun them (this sometimes happens with on-use items, especially, with infinite hangs if they are not implemented in Simcraft). It's one of the reasons I've been holding off on running more of these because I needed to look at some other things with food and what not before I dove into the next round.

The only potential drawback I can see is if something in the quantity of stats/stat scaling ends up affecting stat weights between Mythic raid gear and Mythic dungeon gear (e.g. haste breakpoints, etc). Other than that, going for BiS obtainable gear seems a fine strategy to me.

[Deleted]

Why undead i soo high for survival? How much dps is the racial?

[Effinhunter]

The only potential drawback I can see is if something in the quantity of stats/stat scaling ends up affecting stat weights between Mythic raid gear and Mythic dungeon gear (e.g. haste breakpoints, etc). Other than that, going for BiS obtainable gear seems a fine strategy to me.

Well, the best way I've found to figure out these breakpoints is to do haste plots after we get to the new gear levels. The breakpoints tend to show up pretty readily in the graphs as the slopes change. I can work on these soon.

[Salsa]

Any ideas why Hati's damage is so low compared to a BM hunter's regular pet? Any thoughts that perhaps it's intentionally low to begin with and that Blizzard can/will use Hati's damage as a way to tune BM damage down the road when MM starts to pull ahead with better gear as it usually does?

[3clipse]

Well, the best way I've found to figure out these breakpoints is to do haste plots after we get to the new gear levels. The breakpoints tend to show up pretty readily in the graphs as the slopes change. I can work on these soon.

You have *not* been able to do talent sims at 110 yet, right?

[Effinhunter]

You have *not* been able to do talent sims at 110 yet, right?

Nope. I can take a look at that later tonight. I'm current running enchants for 110.

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I ran all of the enchants in single target with each spec because I had a suspicion that the recommended neck enchants might be different for each spec. That ended up being true. It appears that the Mark of the Distant Army (rains down arrows) is actually better than Mark of the Claw for MM. Below are the results of single target. I am running 3 targets next.

Simcraft settings: 50k iterations, 300s w/20% deviation, 840 ilvl mythic dungeon profile

BM Single Target (Simcraft Source)


MM Single Target (Simcraft Source)


SV Single Target (Simcraft Source)


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Three target enchant breakdown

Simcraft settings: 50k iterations, 300s w/20% deviation, 840 ilvl mythic dungeon profile

BM 3 Target (Simcraft Source)


MM 3 Target (Simcraft Source)


SV 3 Target (Simcraft Source)


Agility obviously is important to BM and SV, but check out Trained Soldier. Assuming this is implemented correctly in Simcraft, I think I'd have to definitely recommend that enchant over Mark of the Claw for MM. The potential seems great for both single and multi-target there. However, if you plan to switch between MM and BM a bit, there's certainly nothing wrong with going Claw (honestly both of these enchants are close enough to each other that it's not that huge of a deal, as long as you're doing one or the other and not just leaving yourself enchantless).

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Unfortunately, the talent sims take a while (each sim requires 243 talent combination profiles to exhaustively explore). I am currently running a batch of talent sims for each spec with 840 ilvl gear (mythic dungeons) and 870 ilvl artifact and 1 and 3 targets at 3m and 1m fights, respectively. Only BM and MM single target are done so far. SV single target may not finish by the time I turn in for the night. Here are the top results from the BM and MM comprehensive talent combination sims for mythic dungeon ilvl single target.

Simcraft settings: 10k iterations, 180s +/- 20%

BM Single Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)


MM Single Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)


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First post updated to here

[Deleted]

No survival?

[Effinhunter]

As I said in the post, the talent sims take a while because they are testing 3^5 talent combinations, and I had to sleep.

Single Target Continued (Mythic Dungeon Gearsets, First Raid ilvl)

Simcraft settings: 10k iterations, 180s +/- 20%

SV Single Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)


Multi-Target (Mythic Dungeon Gearsets, First Raid ilvl)

Simcraft settings: 10k iterations, 60s +/- 20% (these essentially test out AoE when you hold cds for the AoE pack)


BM Three Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)


MM Three Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)


SV Three Target, 840 ilvl Mythic Dungeon Gear (Simcraft Source)



BM does appear to get better and better as gear level goes up. As I've said before, it does appear that BM has all the strengths (high initial burst, insane cleave range AoE) that it did in SoO. Additionally, BM has really good legendary bonuses, and for those doing raid bosses, dungeons, etc., you have a reasonably good chance of picking up one (for a guide on this, see http://www.wowhead.com/guide=4149/a-...on-legendaries).

The most important thing I still haven't looked at are the tier bonuses. This usually has a huge impact on what the preferred raiding spec will be.

[Azortharion]

There are no set bonuses in Emerald Nightmare.

[Effinhunter]

Ugh, good point. So, we'll just be going purely off legendaries and stat-based gear then. Well, that's less fun to theorycraft

[Deleted]

I dont have beta (not rly care anymore) but is there a lot of AoE fights that will make BM better during this Emerald? Because i plan to be MM and for offspec survival but seems like bm has rly good aoe "on papper". BM has also good mobility but pet AI and target switching can be a problem. I dont think there will be a big changes for last 20 days.

[Azortharion]

There aren't. If Legion goes live today, the raiding spec would almost definitely be Marksmanship.

[eathdemon]

There aren't. If Legion goes live today, the raiding spec would almost definitely be Marksmanship.

of the raid bosses I have seen in legion, not of them seem to be awful for bm. your most likely right that mm is slightly better, but I dont think we are going to have a hfc situation where mm is far ahead of bm this time.

[Azortharion]

He asked if there are any fights that will make Beast Mastery better. That is the question I was answering.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure where to look this up exactly so I have to ask: Do the sims above take into account weapon traits and relics or merely ilvl?

[Deleted]

I'm not sure where to look this up exactly so I have to ask: Do the sims above take into account weapon traits and relics or merely ilvl?

Just look at the Simcraft Source.

[Effinhunter]

I'm not sure where to look this up exactly so I have to ask: Do the sims above take into account weapon traits and relics or merely ilvl?

Depends on the sim. All the recent ones have a full artifact and ilvl increases appropriate for rare artifact upgrades. Essentially, gear is 30 ilvls lower than the artifact.

Also, I've updated Simcraft Explorer to provide a wowhead link to the item in the ranking. I've rerun the Simcraft Explorer Reporter tool on the Legion trinket sims so that the webpages have been updated with these links. Hopefully, this will help people more easily find items and where they drop.

BM trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html
MM trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html
SV trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html

Because of browser cache settings, if you have looked at these pages before, make sure you force a refresh to the cache of the page (usually done by pressing Ctrl+F5 on browsers on Windows).

I'll be starting the head and shoulder sims for legion soon. Still tweaking some things.

[3clipse]

Dang, I was holding out a perverse glimmer of hope that losing the 4pc would devalue PS/Sidewinders because I rather dislike that playstyle. I didn't think that could possibly happen because those talents are just so much better than anything else available to MM, but you never know sometimes the math is different than your intuition. Thanks for doing those Effin, that's a monstrous number of iterations.

[GT4]

Depends on the sim. All the recent ones have a full artifact and ilvl increases appropriate for rare artifact upgrades. Essentially, gear is 30 ilvls lower than the artifact.

Also, I've updated Simcraft Explorer to provide a wowhead link to the item in the ranking. I've rerun the Simcraft Explorer Reporter tool on the Legion trinket sims so that the webpages have been updated with these links. Hopefully, this will help people more easily find items and where they drop.

BM trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html
MM trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html
SV trinkets: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/..._trinkets.html

Because of browser cache settings, if you have looked at these pages before, make sure you force a refresh to the cache of the page (usually done by pressing Ctrl+F5 on browsers on Windows).

I'll be starting the head and shoulder sims for legion soon. Still tweaking some things.

Could you add the respective item levels for any future simulations? It'd probably be helpful if you're looking for e.g. the strongest trinkets at the current maximum (895 for the first raid tier?).

[Effinhunter]

Could you add the respective item levels for any future simulations? It'd probably be helpful if you're looking for e.g. the strongest trinkets at the current maximum (895 for the first raid tier?).

The only way to get item levels to show up in the XML output of Simulationcraft is to specify a custom item level. I could potentially force item levels on all items, but that actually overrides the bonus_ids for item level distinctions and may cause more problems than it's worth.

Also, keep in mind that all of these items are from dungeons, world bosses, crafted, or raid bosses within Emerald Dream or Nighthold. The TF (Titanforged) versions of these can go up to 940 ilvl (similar to how we can get Titanforges to 755 or so in HFC right now). So, just looking for a breakoff of 895 doesn't mean that it would actually be available within Emerald Dream, for instance. The way Simcraft Explorer is currently setup is that you can restrict items to only, say, Emerald Dream, if you want to so that only items from that instance are included in the HTML page that you see above. However, Simcraft itself does not tag each item with where it came from or the item level in the XML outputs. I could maybe create another tool that looks at the item database files that I'm creating by hand and then looks at the Simcraft XML outputs, correlates the items, and prints out the item levels, dungeon/source, etc. But right now, the only forensic tool I have created just looks at the XML output files, which doesn't have that kind of information in it.

I'll think about that a bit more.

Here are the head and shoulder slot sims for BM, MM and SV. The crafted engineering helm is not correct right now. Wowhead does not have the bonus_ids for the secondary stats that are undoubtedly on this helm, just as we've had with previous crafted helms. What's interesting about this helm is the on-use it has, but we still need the secondary stats bonus_ids to be able to accurately model the dps increase. Anyway, these are not final sims. These are the first sims for the slots. As items get updated at Wowhead, closer to patch, I'll rerun everything. I'm just getting the lists and scripts ready.

BM:
__Head: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...n_st_head.html
__Shoulders: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...shoulders.html

MM:
__Head: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...n_st_head.html
__Shoulders: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...shoulders.html

SV:
__Head: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...n_st_head.html
__Shoulders: http://effin.highfiveguild.com/sims/...shoulders.html

Again, just a first look at this. As Wowhead gets updated (especially in the first 2 weeks of the expansion), I'll rerun all of these again to get better estimates.