Simcraft and Askmrrobot

[Reinholder]

For anyone that has experience with the two, how close are askmrrobot sims to the simcraft sims?

[Cracked]

They often use each other to check correctness of implementation, askmrrobot does it more often, so in terms of closeness, they are pretty close. Askmrrobot offers prebuilt fight models like Guarm or Ursoc or whatever, plus it has a simpler graphical interface and simpler construction of priority lists. But as it's not a community project, they are often slower to implement changes to classes.

Both require experienced user input to use to the fullest, the upside in askmrrobot is that it's way more datadriven, ie if you find a bug you can usually fix it yourself. If you are looking for something simple to get into, I suggest amr, but for an experienced user, simc is a lot better in how fast you can change stuff, tinker with parameters, etc.

[Backlashe]

They often use each other to check correctness of implementation, askmrrobot does it more often, so in terms of closeness, they are pretty close. Askmrrobot offers prebuilt fight models like Guarm or Ursoc or whatever, plus it has a simpler graphical interface and simpler construction of priority lists. But as it's not a community project, they are often slower to implement changes to classes.

Both require experienced user input to use to the fullest, the upside in askmrrobot is that it's way more datadriven, ie if you find a bug you can usually fix it yourself. If you are looking for something simple to get into, I suggest amr, but for an experienced user, simc is a lot better in how fast you can change stuff, tinker with parameters, etc.

Yup, pretty much all this. Used to be a time when AMR was a bad word, people would chastise you for using it. It has become a LOT better now and while I still use SimC for my day to day sims, I often take the info from there and plug it into AMR to see what bosses Ishould be bonus rolling on for item upgrades.

[Reinholder]

Thanks for the responses.

[Tziva]

AMR is great, but you should get your stat weights from a sim and plug it in on AMR instead of using their prefilled ones if possible.

[Zoopercat]

@Reinholder - I'm from AMR and have a few things to add:

1. We are dedicated to quality assurance - in that we test and retest our simulations. We're still going through a few classes to make sure we didn't miss any last minute stealth changes or anything else. And this week I start comparing sim reports to actual logs on WCL. I go through each spell, line by line, to make sure the damage is correct and the # of uses is lining up with what people actual are casting (this helps verify the rotation is good).

2. Our stat weight generation is really advanced.
- We look at 1000s of data points (simC looks at 2 per stat)
- We factor in stat interactions (simC looks at them in isolation, but if you check out their reforge plots, those DO take interactions into account)
- We also simulate every item with a proc at various iLevels (and include that data in the stat weight report) so that all procs are ranked directly from simulations. To generate a custom one for your character, follow this guide.

3. We also have a beta version of our "Machine Learning" approach to gear, which is better than stat weights. Stat weights don't take into account how stats can interact with each other, but our machine learning approach does. Here's a blog post that talks about it: http://blog.askmrrobot.com/machine-learning/
@Cracked - quick question, have you tried our batch sims yet? That's one of our most popular power user features. It lets you pick any number of talents, legendaries, whatevers, and then we create every combination of what you picked, automatically. We run that and give you the results in a report (which you can customize, or click on to view a specific instance of that simulation, usually useful for troubleshooting). If you want to check it out, change the 'sim type' on the right from 'single run' to 'custom batch.' Then the options will appear and should be mostly self-explanatory.
@Backlashe @Tziva Have you tried our custom stat weights or machine learning yet? As I mentioned above, they are really thorough. Hit me up with any feedback if you do play with the system.

Lastly, we work with a bunch of the SimC devs (and they work with us), especially around patch time. We are usually sharing info back and forth about stealth nerfs, oddities we find, or (gasp) bugs in each other's simulators (bugs never happen, amirite?!!). SimC doesn't have dedicated testers like we do, so we usually try to test out both simulators around patch time and pass along what we find. Having 2 simulators is very good for the community!

[Tziva]

Thanks for checking in, @Zoopercat, good info!

[Cracked]

@Cracked - quick question, have you tried our batch sims yet? That's one of our most popular power user features. It lets you pick any number of talents, legendaries, whatevers, and then we create every combination of what you picked, automatically. We run that and give you the results in a report (which you can customize, or click on to view a specific instance of that simulation, usually useful for troubleshooting). If you want to check it out, change the 'sim type' on the right from 'single run' to 'custom batch.' Then the options will appear and should be mostly self-explanatory.

I used it at the start of legion to decide which artifact route to take, because it was superior to what simc provided. To be honest I stick to simc because when i want to change something simple in the APL (say when to use potion), I need to either have at least 2 tabs open (I see you added 300 to default scripts, so at least that, and you actually made fight length a parameter, which was my big gripe, before it would be more if i want to change stuff like fight length without having already made dozens of sim profiles in advance - last I tried the scripts were lacking for my needs, stuff like 600s sims, etc), and browsing a website is obviously not as fast as doing a couple of changes in a textfile.

[Deleted]

Used to be a time when AMR was a bad word, people would chastise you for using it.

That was only the case for people who didn't know you could put in custom stat weights. It's always been pretty decent (but required a bit of work)

[Zoopercat]

@Cracked - Yeah, we are pulling out the most common adjustments into the options. Like you mentioned, fight length was a really big one. We also moved the potions, and when you use bloodlust into the options as well. Can you elaborate on the 600ms sim thing (if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it, not sure what that might be referring to, other than a gearing strat/stat weight run?)

[Cracked]

@Cracked - Yeah, we are pulling out the most common adjustments into the options. Like you mentioned, fight length was a really big one. We also moved the potions, and when you use bloodlust into the options as well. Can you elaborate on the 600ms sim thing (if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it, not sure what that might be referring to, other than a gearing strat/stat weight run?)

It was just an example of the fight length parameter, I worded it a bit strangely.

[Zoopercat]

ahha, that makes sense then. Anyway, ty for that feedback