How accurate is SimCraft?

[Pale Cat]

Hello everyone!

I've got a bit of trouble understanding the SimCraft. What I do:
1. Simulate profile of my character.
2. Copy stat weights to AMR.
3. Reforge.
4. Simulate again.

The problem is every time I simulate profile after reforging, SimCraft tells me that now the best stat is one that was worst before. For example, first SimCraft tells me the following:
– Haste: 2.68;
– Mastery: 2.42;
– Crit: 2.41.
I say ok and reforge according to these weights. Then I simulate again, and now weights are:
– Haste: 2.37;
– Mastery: 2.45;
– Crit: 2.51.

And if I reforge to crit, it will become the worst stat. Am I doing something wrong? Or should I find a balance and use SimCraft to reforge to stats with lowest weights?

My armory.

[Deleted]

I'm kind of having the same type of issue.

So, I'm just sticking to the AMR defaults. Just because we aren't really that progression-focused. But I would like to know what other "good" locks and players do in this type of situation where your stat weights are changing after every single reforge.

[Deleted]

Basically, the key to understanding stat weights is that they are only valid based on your current gear set up.

Say you have 1000 mastery and 1000 haste.

Both are worth 1 point of dps each, for example, as they scale synergistically with each other.

If you were to change that to 1500 mastery and 500 haste, you might find that in your second simulation, haste is now worth a lot more than before, and mastery's stat weight has diminished.

This is because you would stand to gain more dps by raising your haste than you would by raising your mastery. Going solely of stat weights, you would then end up reforging to 500 mastery and 1500 haste, and haste's value would now be greater than mastery's.

Sorry if this is a shit explanation, I'm hung over and the words aren't coming to me, but that's the basic premise.

The best way to reforge would be to run a reforge plot. In simcraft click the tab for Reforge Plot, set the number to 2000 or something, and the step size to say 250. Tick the boxes for haste and mastery and click simulate.

What this does is run the set of sims over and over again, changing haste to mastery and vice versa in steps of 200, and will plot on a graph how your dps goes up or down. Find the value of haste to mastery or mastery to haste where your dps gain is the highest, and go reforge to that amount using reforgelite or whatever. If you want it to be even more accurate, log out and back in, then repeat the process with much smaller steps (like 50 is the lowest afaik), though obviously you can set it to only reforge 500 at a time as you're already in the ball park of where your dps will be highest.

[Khadjid]

SimCraft stat weights simply show you how much DPS you'd gain from arbitrarily adding more of a certain stat on top of everything you already have on your gear. The nature of this makes a good indication of what you should look at on new items, but it's completely irrelevant to reforging because reforges remove from one stat in order to increase another stat. For reforging there's another tool called "Reforge Plots" in SimCraft that mimics this mechanic and will give you a better idea of how you might want to reforge.

[rijn dael]

Simcraft's stat evaluations are not perfect, it favours haste, and only models X target(s), rather than the particular fight you are progressing on.

If you combine it with a tool to reforge/gem/chant your gear via different stat priorities (askmrrobot has an export to simcraft button) you can generally set things like mastery higher (destro example), you will see the simcraft dps go up - even though at every stage it will typically tell you haste is a better stat.

The major problem I see with simc vs actual single target dps is the rng variation in warlock dps - if I compare my warlock dps to my monk dps, my warlocks dps floats anywhere within 50k of my simmed dps. My monk sits within 5-10k.

tl;dr: You won't go wrong with any spec if you go haste to ~9k (spec threshold) > mastery > haste > crit.

[Pale Cat]

Thanks everyone! Reforge plots did the trick.