Spriest Simcraft Action List

[Worshaka]

I'm using the following action list to model MS use under AA/Fiend conditions:

actions=flask,type=draconic_mind
actions+=/food,type=seafood_magnifique_feast
actions+=/fortitude
actions+=/inner_fire
actions+=/shadow_form
actions+=/vampiric_embrace
actions+=/snapshot_stats
actions+=/volcanic_potion,if=!in_combat
actions+=/volcanic_potion,if=buff.bloodlust.react|target.time_to_die<=40
actions+=/mind_flay,if=buff.dark_evangelism.stack<5&cooldown.shadow_fiend.remains<=3
actions+=/shadow_fiend,if=(buff.dark_evangelism.stack>=5&cooldown.archangel.remains<=0.1)|cooldown.a rchangel.remains>=35|target.time_to_die<=20
actions+=/archangel,if=buff.dark_evangelism.stack>=5&(pet.shadow_fiend.active|cooldown.shadow_fiend. remains>=100)|target.time_to_die<=20
actions+=/cancel_buff,name=mind_melt,if=cooldown.mind_blast.remains<=0.1
actions+=/stop_moving,health_percentage<=25,if=cooldown.shadow_word_death.remains>=0.2&pet.shadow_fi end.active
actions+=/mind_blast
actions+=/start_moving,health_percentage<=25,if=cooldown.shadow_word_death.remains<=0.1&pet.shadow_f iend.active
actions+=/shadow_word_death,health_percentage<=25,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active
actions+=/mind_spike,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active&buff.bloodlust.down
actions+=/berserking
actions+=/vampiric_touch,if=(!ticking|dot.vampiric_touch.remains<cast_time+2*gcd)&miss_react
actions+=/shadow_word_pain,if=(!ticking|dot.shadow_word_pain.remains<gcd+0.5)&miss_react
actions+=/stop_moving,health_percentage<=25,if=cooldown.shadow_word_death.remains>=0.2|dot.vampiric_ touch.remains<cast_time+2*gcd
actions+=/start_moving,health_percentage<=25,if=cooldown.shadow_word_death.remains<=0.1
actions+=/shadow_word_death,health_percentage<=25
actions+=/stop_moving,if=dot.devouring_plague.remains>15
actions+=/start_moving,if=dot.devouring_plague.remains<=15
actions+=/devouring_plague,if=(!ticking|dot.devouring_plague.remains<=15)&miss_react
actions+=/shadow_word_death,if=mana_pct<10
actions+=/mind_flay
actions+=/shadow_word_death,moving=1
actions+=/devouring_plague,moving=1,if=mana_pct>10
actions+=/dispersion

Can anyone see something glaringly wrong with that? The reason I ask is because simcraft is trying to tell me that MB0 is > DPeT than MB1 or MB2 and that the DPeT of DP is only 44K which is less than MB3. This is obviously incorrect, although it seems to model my DPS about 1K higher than the default action list which is what I would expect.

So is there some bugs with simcraft or am I doing something incorrectly?

[zakaluka]

I can't say more without seeing your results, but yes there are bugs in simcraft.

Can you post a link to the full report somewhere? It's tricky to find out if there's an error in your actionlist or a bug with simcraft, but it can be done.

Compare your actionlist to kilee's actionlist, she has posted it in a few places.... probably easier to come up with it from a search of H2P.

[Taradenha]

MB0 has higher DPET than MB1 and MB2 due to the higher crit chance.
DP has a low DPET because it's being recast every ~10s.

[Zarqa]

actions+=/shadow_fiend,if=(buff.dark_evangelism.stack>=5&cooldown.archangel.remains<=0.1)|cooldown.a rchangel.remains>=35|target.time_to_die<=20

Is it indeed higher dps to cast shadowfiend when AA has more than 35 seconds cooldown instead of waiting to line them up? Or do I understand the code wrong?

[zakaluka]

MB0 has higher DPET than MB1 and MB2 due to the higher crit chance.
DP has a low DPET because it's being recast every ~10s.

This line:

actions+=/cancel_buff,name=mind_melt,if=cooldown.mind_blast.remains<=0.1

should prevent MB0 from having a higher crit chance, in fact mb3 should have the highest crit chance. Yes?

pull up the spell details for mb0, compare its crit rate in the results against mb1-mb3. If as he says mb0 has a higher crit chance it's not canceling mind melt for some reason.

[Taradenha]

The MB0 is happening after the SF ends, to prevent this the correct line should be actions+=/mind_spike,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active&pet.shadow_fiend.remains>gcd+0.6 to prevent consuming the last set of orbs with mind spike.
MB3 happens with a much higher frequency than MB0, that's why the MB0 is more skewed towards 100% crit than MB3.

[silverhatred]

theres like 5 spaces in your action list pissing me off

---------- Post added 2012-01-28 at 04:38 AM ----------

This is a slight dps increase for me over elitist jerks mindspike rotation, which was slightly over default.

[Worshaka]

Firstly the actionlist I'm using is pretty much identical to the one Kilee posted at howtopriest except I had to remove a condition from the mind spike line as simcraft didn't seem able to interpret it and I added in berserking.

Is it indeed higher dps to cast shadowfiend when AA has more than 35 seconds cooldown instead of waiting to line them up? Or do I understand the code wrong?

Yes as I understand it, you don't want to wait to line up AA with Fiend if the gap between them is too large. It would seem simcraft suggest the magic figure of when it's ok to wait and when it's not ok is 35 seconds.

MB0 has higher DPET than MB1 and MB2 due to the higher crit chance.
DP has a low DPET because it's being recast every ~10s.

Why? At most you will mind spike cast for 10 seconds every 1.5 mins, this isn't enough to lower the duration on DP from near full duration to less than half. I might expect to see a slight lowering of DPeT but nothing this dramatic.

The MB0 is happening after the SF ends, to prevent this the correct line should be actions+=/mind_spike,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active&pet.shadow_fiend.remains>gcd+0.6 to prevent consuming the last set of orbs with mind spike.
MB3 happens with a much higher frequency than MB0, that's why the MB0 is more skewed towards 100% crit than MB3.

Ah I get what you are saying, im recording a MB0 with a 100% crit chance because the last set of fiend orbs are being used up on the preceeding MS. I'll try it again with:

actions+=/mind_spike,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active&buff.bloodlust.down&pet.shadow_fiend.remains>gcd+0.6

However I have a feeling that was the portion of the action list I had to remove to get simcraft to work when I first put this together, i'll check when I can next.

theres like 5 spaces in your action list pissing me off

The spaces are something to do with these forums, I don't have spaces in my notepad file at all, but when I copy and paste to here they get inserted for some reason. If check out the action list posted at howtopriest it too has spaces in it. I know because I had to find and remove them all which annoyed me as well.

---------- Post added 2012-01-30 at 11:03 AM ----------

Is there an API or documentation on how to create an action list in simcraft?

[Taradenha]

Yes as I understand it, you don't want to wait to line up AA with Fiend if the gap between them is too large. It would seem simcraft suggest the magic figure of when it's ok to wait and when it's not ok is 35 seconds.

The optimal value varies with gear but changing the value doesn't have a huge impact in dps, even if you always wait to use both SF and AA together the dps loss is not big.

Why? At most you will mind spike cast for 10 seconds every 1.5 mins, this isn't enough to lower the duration on DP from near full duration to less than half. I might expect to see a slight lowering of DPeT but nothing this dramatic.

You're casting DP because IDP is a dps increase over MF, the bis gear has a lot of haste and more crit than the current gear of most people, therefore that setup is able to cast DP a lot without mana or SF sync problems.
You should change the DP casting rate for your gear, just change the value "15" in the DP line to a lower value.

Is there an API or documentation on how to create an action list in simcraft?

http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...ki/ActionLists

[Worshaka]

You should change the DP casting rate for your gear, just change the value "15" in the DP line to a lower value.

actions+=/devouring_plague,if=(!ticking|dot.devouring_plague.remains<=15)

I never really analysed this part coz I copied and pasted the action list... now it makes sense. However I think doing it this way is counter intuative, surely you would only recast DP if you had 3 orbs and when you did it you couldn't do it with back to back casts due to the fact you can get a more powerful spell exists error. The way simcraft is doing it wouldn't be the way I'd implement it in game.

But thanks for the heads up.

[Taradenha]

It's not counter intuitive, you cast DP because IDP gives more dps than MF.
Most people seem oblivious to this fact, but as long as you can reset SF cooldown and don't have mana problems DP is better than MF.
Also, there's no problem with the mechanics, you're not casting back to back DPs with this line.

[Worshaka]

By casting more DP in place of MF you might be doing a higher nominal DPeT spell, however MF creates Shadow Orbs which in turn buff MB damage and account to ES uptime. That aspect is not factored into the MF DPeT calculation. By comparing the DPeT of both spells you are not comparing apples with apples. If we had infinite mana and could cast DP at will and even if back to back DP worked fine, it wouldn't be higher DPS to drop MF.

So that begs the question, when and how many times can we substitute DP for MF? I suspect it would only really be safe to do so if you have maxed out on 3 orbs, and that's how I would implement that spell substitution in game.

---------- Post added 2012-01-30 at 07:32 PM ----------

My simcraft still doesn't like the line:

actions+=/mind_spike,if=pet.shadow_fiend.active&pet.shadow_fiend.remains>gcd+0.6&buff.bloodlust.down

Specifically it doesn't like pet.shadow_fiend.remains>gcd+0.6, can anyone shed some light why?

[Taradenha]

ES uptime is not even an issue.
You can deny if you want, but IDP does more dps than MF. Also, you can move while casting DP and this increases the orb generation, suggesting that for some reason the simulation wouldn't account for the change in orb generation is silly.

Edit:
Just to make myself clear, you might be right in the sense that there are better conditionals to recast DP, but you're wrong if you think that only recasting it when it's about to drop is optimal.

[Worshaka]

I'm not sure you actually read or understood my post.

Let's just ignore the fact that casting DP consecutively causes an issue and assume that it doesn't for the context of this discussion. Also, let's assume we have infinite mana as well.

If we take that IDP > DPeT than MF then with the above conditions we should drop MF from spell priority. However I'm positive that in doing that you would do substantially less damage.

1. Orb generation would be limited to chances on SW:P ticks only.
2. Total less orb generation would reduce the DPeT on MB.
3. ES uptime would be substantially lower.

The DPeT of MF is for the spell only, there is no consideration to the effect of it's orb generation factored into that figure. So the question really is (and this is the point I really want you to pay attention), how many times is it ok to substitute IDP for MF? Under what conditions will it generate a DPS increase because we know it's not all the time.

Now if we remove the assumptions I made at the start we can say straight up that casting IDP consecutively won't be and we know we have a somewhat finite mana pool. So do we cast it inbetween every MF cast? Do we cast it when we reach a certain orb level? Do we cast it based on existing DP duration?

To simply isolate the DPeT of the spells and have no regard for the synergies of the spells is not a precise way to analyse the issue.

---------- Post added 2012-01-31 at 07:02 AM ----------

Just to try to qualify this a little...

The difference between MB(x) and MB(x-1) is about 8K damage in terms of DPeT in BiS T13 gear (according to simcraft). The DPeT of MF is 18.5K and IDP is 25K. If you cast MF and it generates an orb it means your next MB will hit for 8K more. You can make an argument that the real DPeT of that specific MF was 18.5K + 8K = 26.5K which makes it > IDP.

However it's very hard to qualify how may orbs MF will be responsible for, because:
1. SW:P will generate some
2. T13 4pc will generate some in an inconsistent manner
3. Orbs cap at 3 and any generation beyond 3 does nothing

Looking at an ultraxion log of mine, MF generates 60% more orbs than SW:P, so out of the 62 I generated it's likely ~37 of them resulted from MF. That means MF is responsible for 37 * the damage effect of an orb to my MB damage which works out to be ~296k. IDP in my log did 18.6k damage per execution time in my log, and MF did a total of 2,356,408 over 2:31 channel time.

Now the trick here is try to deduce the DPeT of my MF. I can't work this out in DPS because the cast time of IDP is longer. I know with my haste my GCD is ~1.15 seconds, so using that figure I can deduce my DPeT of MF was ~13,570 when I don't account for the orb generation. Add the portion of MB damage that MF was likely responsible for (on average) and the DPeT of my MF increases to ~15,274.

So you might conclude that I was better off not to cast MF at all as i'm about ~3k behind each execute time. However if I didnt have those 37 orb procs I would have been left with only 25 orbs for the encounter and that would have reduced my ES uptime significantly. How exactly is hard to say, if the 25 orbs proc'd nicely you could theoretically still maintain a 100% uptime but in all likelyhood you would get a lot of procs close together and others a lot further apart. You then have to factor in extra GCD's on VT and DP while ES was active... it all gets very hard to quantify.

[Brusalk]

To throw another wrench in your calculations, have you considered that with 4 set, being able to move around and generate apparitions while casting DP could also yield the same, if not more orbs than you would have using mind flay?

[Worshaka]

That's another good point however it gets even murkier for several reasons:

1) SW:P is not guaranteed to tick in the GCD's worth of movement time while casting DP and double casting DP results in a gap between casts due to the more powerful spell erorr.
2) There is a varied delay from the apparition spawning to when it procs, you don't always stand the same distance from your dps target.
3) How do you distinguish between an apparition proc from a standard SW:P tick vs a movement proc?
4) If you spawn mulitple apparitions quickly only the first is adding orbs.
5) The value of adding the orbs changes depending on how many you have. There can be an example where you move and proc an apparaition only to have MF and normal SW:P ticks cap you at 3 orbs before the apparaition reaches the target.

So I ask the question... when is it optimal to cast DP over MF? Under what conditions will it yield a DPS increase? Should I weave DP between MF casts? If I do this how do we do it without clipping MF ticks? It's very hard to cancel a MF cast immediately after a tick, meaning the DPeT of DP is likely to infringe on your MF ticks occasionaly or have added time to account fo rthe dead time between the last MF tick and when DP was cast.

All I'm saying, this makes it very hard to qualify when DP is > MF. And I for one like to quantify something before I believe in it blindly.

[FieryBull]

There is no such thing as spamming DP. If you read the action list, you'll see it only does it when there is 15 sec remaining on it.

And there is also no such thing as believing blindly, we're talking about sim results here. Turns out you get more dps by doing it that way.

[Brusalk]

Actually, if you have DI and are at 3202 haste or more, you can spam DP while raid buffed. I'm not entirely sure why, but it is actually possible to spam it every gcd. It's something I've noticed while raiding, and I haven't had the time to look into exactly why it works. Maybe DP ticks faster than a GCD at that haste point, I dunno.

[Arlee]

That would be the logical reason for it to work that way Brusalk... not that I am in any way saying that the game should be logical or anything...

[FieryBull]

What I was saying is that action list doesn't spam DP. It's obvious that it would be a loss to only spam DP instead of MF, since you need the sfiend to sync up with aa.