You should probably sim yourself.
You should probably sim yourself.
They always told me I would miss my family... but I never miss from close range.
You have no idea how SimCraft works.
You act like SimCraft is some arcane thing that's difficult to understand. It's actually pretty easy, and with RaidBots there's literally no difficulty at all. There is plenty of discussion to be found in a lot of different places, but asking "which item is better", unless they are wildly different ilvls, is like asking "what's the weather like outside right now?" The answer is going to be extremely specific to your particular case and you can easily figure it out yourself. In most such cases, "sim it" is the appropriate answer.
Beta Club Brosquad
Its actually very true. Whenever people post sim results, or you see them in guides, its almost always patchwerk... which is what I was saying. Not that other fight styles don't exist in the sim. I know the reason for this is its the most reliable fight type, less outside factors and applicable to everything.. but doesn't change the fact that its not the type of fights you run into in the live game.
I mentioned Helterskelter in my post so I know there are multiple "fight styles" and I usually recommend people to test using various styles and compare the results.... like test with patchwerk, cleave, lightmovement and helter skelter then compare them and make your own judgement. This is because movement can really change things and patchwerk isn't a common fight type in the actual game. The problem for me as I mentioned in my post is that you only have a few fight styles to pick from and like "lightmobility" is too light where movement occurs every 1m 25sec or "highmobility" which is super high at every 10 sec... there isn't any middle ground of every 30-45 sec, the closest is helter skelter which is why I prefer that one even tho it adds alot of other variables.
As far as I know from reading the wiki and guides, there isn't any simple way to customize the fight style to pick your own mechanics like movement or stuns and stuff. You have use coding to program your own custom raid event in the code... which doesn't seem too complicated using the wiki but still a bit advanced considering you can customize other things like fight length or iterations. Again, dunno if anything has changed recently to make this easier, in which case I may be wrong about customization here.
Example of the code:
#This example will make the raid spend 15s moving every 30s.
raid_events+=/movement,cooldown=30,duration=15
So you program your own raid event/fight style and can customize the factors but I dunno why you can't do it using the GUI when they give you lots of other things to customize like fight length.
Another thing is the preset Action priority list for each class. I think another reason that patchwerk is used it because the priority list works best for a stationary fight, while extra variables like movement or adds could have small errors from a poorly coded priority list or just a bit buggy with less testing then the standard patchwerk. Again, this all depends on who is updating the sims for each class.... from what I have seen, the people working on Shaman do a pretty good job but there is still room for error.
So while there are various fight types not many people use them or report anything other then patchwerk, which should change I think. Should be like patchwerk, cleave, and helter skelter or something for 3 diff types of raid fights that factor stuff like adds or movement also. This gives a much more well rounded picture. I have seen people do this more often, like I think the ele guide site stormearthlava posts diff fight styles for their sim results, but alot still just stick to patchwerk and base everything off that.
I went into detail about the different raid events above so won't repeat it again but I think more people should report their results using say patchwerk, cleave, and helter skelter to reflect stationary, aoe, and movement instead of just stationary for more well rounded results. I know the sim is not supposed to be an actual combat sim, just a basic way to see how differences in stats or gear can change your average dps over thousands of sims, but I still think it would be a much better resource if more people compared various fight styles then just patchwerk.
There is also the whole "sims are gospel" attitude. I often see sim results like various talent setups or trinket combos that have very close results of only a couple thousand DPS with overlapping margins of error, but just cause one setup is on top (even if only like a 5k dps difference) it is always stated to be the best when other variables, like movement, could greatly effect the actual ingame effectiveness of that setup. Thankfully from what I've seen of shaman guides like werdup's he goes out of his way to state that the numbers are close when posting his simresults but not everyone does or understands that.
As for looking at wowlogs, you are right about that top % of players skewing data by cheesing fights and stuff but still good for the same thing as simcraft, a general idea of what works and what doesn't.... with added benefit of being ingame data.
Not trying to trash the sims, they are a very useful tool that are usually pretty accurate but I do think there is room for improvement.