[Shadow] Stacking haste might not be the most optimal.

[Deleted]

Simulations done with S2M/Legacy and AS/San'layn and all their combinations. Patchwerk (tank n spank) and helterskelter (movements, interrupts, stuns, target switching AKA realistic fight) both tested on 1 and 3 targets.

This is the result of my simulations:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

A note is that I don't have my second gold trait, not sure if this would change the stat weights anything.
Everything claimed here is only true for my characters current stats and gear,
which mostly consists of haste gear.

The simulations may consist of errors as each simulation "only" had 25000 iterations.

tl:dr I didn't finish high school math -
Generally for encounters at 400 seconds (raid bosses in general) :
Crit > Mastery > Int > Haste > Vers

Generally for encounters at 100 seconds (mythic dungeon bosses in general):
Haste > Crit > int > Mastery > Vers

So you might wanna consider having some crit/mastery in you gear if you want to perform in raid environment.

[GT4]

Those values are completely useless without more context such as your current artifact traits or relics.

In addition to that, I bet you're using the default APL which doesn't work very well for profiles at >10k haste or low crit values. E.g. it pops S2M way too early because the formula for activating S2M is based linearly on your haste which doesn't hold true for high haste values.

Having said that, you were never supposed to go double haste (crafted) on each piece of gear anyway. You won't have that choice for raid/mythic+ gear anyway and it completely trashes the value of AS which is directly reliant on your crit chance. If e.g. you're comparing 10% crit and 40% haste to 20% crit and 30% haste, the latter will get 0.2 * 1.3 / (0.1 * 1.4) = 1.857 times as many AS procs.

If anything, going double haste on each piece would only really make sense if you were using SI and the legendary belt.

Edit: Some of your sims are messed up as well. You claim 392k DPS for LotV/AS single target 100s fight and 235k DPS for LotV/AS 3 target 100s fight. Having more targets available can never drop your DPS, let alone by 1/3.

[Ponk]

Go ahead and re-gear with those stats. Report back with results

[Djriff]

You also need to sim all the interactions between all the talent tiers.

S2M is only ran with RoS, AS, PI, and StM.

LotV/MS can be ran with a number of talents and you would need to sim all of the combinations across all the different fight type/lengths to get a more accurate average.

Something along these lines: https://www.beotorch.com/batch.php?r...9-008cfa070490

[Kilee25]

You don't have to sim talent combinations that don't work well together, or that you wouldn't use. Unless you have some inclination that it might reveal something new or interesting. And not doing that doesn't necessarily invalidate results. Not saying the OP is right or wrong, just simply that adding more talent combos won't help explain the behavior being observed.

A better test will be to run several of the same tests with different gearsets, and try to draw some conclusions about how different ratios of stats interact with each other.

Edit: You also don't have to sim every fight type, and averaging them all together is a bad idea. You generally want to stick with practical scenerios and shy away from heavy interrupt type sims - those are generally just more of a curiosity. One and two target sims, occasionally with some light movement, are plenty good enough to get ballpark answers about how the spec behaves and how it's affected by stats.

[GT4]

OP's post doesn't even specify which exact talents he ran to begin with. Outside of S2M, there' actually a surprising variety in talents that can give best results depending on gear, fight, artifact traits, etc.

[Kilee25]

Wouldn't that be fun to explore.

[tiptopmemer]

Shadow is simple, we want to be in void form as much as possible.

The question isnt a matter of what stats give the most dps value, its what keeps us in void form longer.

if we're talking surrender to madness, you only have 2 talent choices.

Auspicious spirits vs SI, one is good with high crit, the other with a legendary belt, so either you get this <1% drop item or live with your crit.

Power Infusion vs Mindbender, both effectively get you through tough S2M periods, Mindbender is on the GCD, who cares.

So how do we value stats?

Verse costs more points per percentage, its off the board.
Crit is simple, 1% damage per 1% of crit (subject to spooky rng)
Haste is also simple 1% damage per 1% of haste (even though 1% haste isnt -1% casting speed, its GCD reduction and cheaper rating up its value)
Mastery is confusing 1% damage increase to 60%** of your damage, but mastery is cheap (around 41% of the cost of haste or crit), this equals ~145% better than haste/crit at face value.

But spriests want to be in void form longer, this is objectively a better means to dps than face value... obviously

Other than S2M, the 2 most straight forward methods are
1. Cast more spells
2. Make SWP/VT crit more.

Without a doubt i will say Haste will be top dog in nighthold because of how much a meme the 2 set is (which we will be holding on til until mythic ilvl of the next tier atleast.

But right now, we want crit, its far more effective than haste to bring in tasty insanity.

But when you go into S2M, you value haste more, because voidform stacks are multiplicative, thanks blizz!, and depending on the fight duration, haste will be either incredibly valuable or only slightly more valuable, a shorter fight makes haste better, because haste is exclusively stronger when using S2M, if you dont have good S2M uptime, crit claws back some value.

So where is mastery in all of this?

Who the fuck cares..it gets really strong (with mass hysteria) towards the ends of your S2M, but you would rather a better duration S2M (which makes your dots stronger anyway) than stronger dots through a stat you need to sacrifice.

In some distant future, we might see mastery becoming insanely strong, really depends how blizz decide to fuck us up


TLDR 840-850ilvl;
For non-s2m situations, mastery will never be relevant except in Council fights.

For s2m, stack that haste, its multiplicative. But if the fight is really long, crit isnt so bad, mastery isnt terrible if the fight is short, it makes it slightly better than crit.

I dont see why sims are relevant if people just think about interactions.

[Deleted]

With belt I assume SI will be better for single target, but council AS is a must?

[Djriff]

You don't have to sim talent combinations that don't work well together, or that you wouldn't use. Unless you have some inclination that it might reveal something new or interesting. And not doing that doesn't necessarily invalidate results. Not saying the OP is right or wrong, just simply that adding more talent combos won't help explain the behavior being observed.

You know, I ran a few of these tests myself to see if in any situation ToF was subpar. Even though sims can't simulate ToF sniping very well, it was still well and far ahead of the other talents.

For the other rows, they are fairly close, but your gear is a big factor. Take Void Lord and RoS as an example. In a non StM build I found Void Lord beating out RoS in my gear and it didn't make any sense since I knew I was getting higher VF stacks with RoS. After a lot of digging and spreadsheets to figure out why this was happening, it ended up even though I was getting 5-10 lower VF stacks, the 8 seconds of previous VF haste was trumping that extra 5-10 seconds of 20% increased damage. Add to the fact that you can pop Vtor on 2nd Voidform with PI with your previous Voidform stacks to do a ridiculous amount of damage in a short window made a lot of sense to me.

When it comes to our Insanity generation row, ie AS vs SI I was pleasantly surprised to find that San'layn actually preforms quite well at low levels of crit. SI is basically mandatory if you have the belt, and your gearing strategy changes drastically, but I was still surprised.

A better test will be to run several of the same tests with different gearsets, and try to draw some conclusions about how different ratios of stats interact with each other.

I agree, even then be cautious about that, there's a lot of variance once you have different sets of gear.

You also don't have to sim every fight type, and averaging them all together is a bad idea. You generally want to stick with practical scenerios and shy away from heavy interrupt type sims - those are generally just more of a curiosity. One and two target sims, occasionally with some light movement, are plenty good enough to get ballpark answers about how the spec behaves and how it's affected by stats.

Well no, there's no reason to sim a beastlord fight for example since we know we'll be shitty at that. However with StM you could ideally only sim patchwerk fights since you can do your entire rotation on the move. However it's better to do a mix of light movement and heavy movement since you won't be in VF with StM the entire fight.

I do wish we had some more scenarios I could sling my priest through to get some more accurate results, unfortunately I'm not savy enough with the APL to make my own.

Wouldn't that be fun to explore.

It is loads of fun, see above.

With belt I assume SI will be better for single target, but council AS is a must?

No, SI will still be better, you'll just get more procs.

[Deleted]

Surely on 3 targets you generate more insanity with AS than DI when using belt. As when you reach 130% haste all the belt does for you is replace one MF every 3.5 with a MB. Which is overall a 4 insanity gain. Where as thats the same insanity gain as literally one apparition in that window.

Come to think of it AS should beat DI(when using belt) on 2 targets, and on 1 its prolly close.

[Djriff]

Surely on 3 targets you generate more insanity with AS than DI when using belt. As when you reach 130% haste all the belt does for you is replace one MF every 3.5 with a MB. Which is overall a 4 insanity gain. Where as thats the same insanity gain as literally one apparition in that window.

Come to think of it AS should beat DI(when using belt) on 2 targets, and on 1 its prolly close.

Don't call me Shirley!

It largely depends on crit as well. Besides with 3 targets you have more of a chance to proc a free MB so you'll probably just never have to cast MF which is a bonus imo.

[GT4]

Don't call me Shirley!

It largely depends on crit as well. Besides with 3 targets you have more of a chance to proc a free MB so you'll probably just never have to cast MF which is a bonus imo.

When I tested a lot of different setups using the belt, once you had as high crit as you'd want anyway (even with the belt mastery seems inferior to crit because the belt shifts some relative DPS from to MB which isn't affected by mastery), AS was once again even to SI for single target. In that scenario, it would certainly outperform SI by a significant margin for multi-target because you wouldn't be able to use all SI procs efficiently.

If you think about it, it also makes a lot of sense. When it comes to insanity generation, we have:
AS: 4 insanity * crit * haste / 2 seconds + 4 insanity * crit * haste * (0.15 * unleash) / 3 seconds
SI at most allows you to replace two ticks of MF with one MB, resulting in: (12 insanity - 4 insanity) * haste * 0.1 / 2 seconds

That's per set of DoTs whereas AS would scale linearly with amount of targets whereas SI would eventually cap out because you can't spend all the procs efficiently.

Anyway, comparing the two, you get:
4 * crit * haste / 2 + 4 * crit * haste * 0.15 * unleash / 3 = 8 * haste * 0.05
<=> crit = 0.2 / (1 + 0.1 unleash)

Assuming no relics but full artifact, you'd only need ~15% crit to break even for insanity with SW:P and VT up (and 20% crit without VT up obviously). With three unleash relics, you'd only need 12.5% crit to break even for insanity. Obviously you'd still gain significantly more single target DPS from SI at those values because of the added MB damage being significantly higher than the doubled apparition damage but at some point the increased insanity generation starts to outscale the damage you gain from more MB casts.

Edit: It's worth mentioning that SI also increases your mobility by a lot which isn't taken into account here. It's also worth mentioning that the belt is still a decent legendary without SI because it effectively reduces your MB cooldown by preventing charges from being lost due to MB and VB coming up at the same time.

[Deleted]

GT4 you perfectly summed up my assumptions thanks.

So with belt and S2M, DI on 1 target, AS whenever anything else gets added.

Fwiw in dungeons DI reigns supreme.