Tanking trinkets

[lycanious]

TDLR: Is it worth simming for defensive trinkets and how do you do it.

I have the following trinkets and according to what I read this probably should be the order from strongest to weakest:
910 - Writhing Heart of Darkness
900 - Darkmoon Deck Immortality
930 - Feverish Carapace
895 - Animated Exoskeleton
905 - Recompiled Guardian Module
890 - Giant Ornamental Pearl

However, when I sim these trinkets the top 2 (in terms of both TMI and DR) are always:
895 - Animated Exoskeleton
890 - Giant Ornamental Pearl

Is there a way to set up SIMC so that it gives results which are more in line with the first list?
Legos are Chest/Neck.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

Writhing is only good in st though. As far as I know.

Don't know how to fix the Sims. Probably weighs hp too much. Or it's maybe bugged for those trinkets.

[coblade14]

There are two types of trinkets for tanks, dps oriented and survival oriented.

For dps ones, a simple dps sim should be easy and self-explanatory.

For survival ones, I think it is not worth to sim, because many survival trinkets serve very specific purposes, and you can't really tell how good a survival trinket is base on sims. You should pick defensive trinkets based on the encounter.

For example, for a fight with heavy spike damage, your Animated Exoskeleton is probably the best one out of the bunch, because the high hp and the shield is going to save your lives compared to other choices you have.

Feverish Carapace is useful when survivability and damage is equally important, like in a high 5m+.

Darkmoon Deck Immortality is very good when damage is linear.

Writhing Heart of Darkness need you to have a high amount of crit and haste, or it will suck.

I don't know how to rate Recompiled Guardian Module, I find it worthless, the shield is just too small.

Giant Ornamental Pearl serves the same purpose with Animated Exoskeleton, the on use shield might save your life on some fights, and close to worthless on some.

[lycanious]

Thanks Cenarius - Yes I was thinking primarily ST and my Crit is 25% (with 16% haste) so the WHoD buff stays up a lot.

Coblade thanks for the summary; your thinking matches mine. But what I'm confused about is why when I sim ST the GOP and AE come out better than the DM:I and the WHoD?

[Captain Fizz]

https://goo.gl/u7s0nm

Sums up the trinkets - I agree with pretty much all of it.

[lycanious]

yup seen that and its very good, however it ranks them as if they are all the same ilvl - but does not answer my question about simming nor dos it provide a guide as to how much ilvl is worth.

[Captain Fizz]

Encounter > ilvl tbh.

As said by coblade14... Big hits come in? Exo may be good.
Physical damage, DMD:I is unmatched. Regardless of ilvl.
Consistent heavy damage from mainly 1 target, WHoD would be good.

Can't sim defence when every fight is different.

Recompiled Guard module is useless at 955 ilvl... So again, ilvl doesn't really matter for that one.

[Nevcairiel]

Writhing is only good in st though. As far as I know.

WHOD is still OK in AoE cases. It always offers its full potential against your primary target and still some of it value against all secondaries.

I'm currently running with 925 WHOD and DMC:I for defensive setup.

[exochaft]

Don't know how to fix the Sims. Probably weighs hp too much. Or it's maybe bugged for those trinkets.

The sims, by default, don't really hit that hard when it comes to assessing damage taken for tanks. While you may be taking 1-3 million damage per melee swing in ToS from a boss, SimC default is probably melee you for 25k per melee swing (if even that). What this means is the weight of trinkets with finite absorb or damage reduction until X damage is taken will sim a LOT higher for survival because their uptime will be higher due to low damage intake. At the same time, trinkets that reduce damage via armor or %DR will likely sim lower in comparison because the hits are so small that the attack size really won't reduce much compared to how large our HP is in comparison.

For those interested, there is documentation in SimC that allows you to customize your target enemy, its behavior, how hard it hits, etc. If you really want to test how well a trinket stacks up in real applications, this is your best bet (although not perfect, just better than default settings). Be that as it may, this is probably only mostly accurate for trinkets that are passive (like DMC:I and Feverish Carapace) instead of on-use trinkets you use to line up for specific abilities (like Animated Exoskeleton and Infernal Contract). My general rule of thumb for non-DPS oriented trinkets is to use passive trinkets unless I need the on-use ability, but that's just my view on it.

[roi]

WHOD is still OK in AoE cases. It always offers its full potential against your primary target and still some of it value against all secondaries.

I'm currently running with 925 WHOD and DMC:I for defensive setup.

Yeah, in theory it shouldn't be (much) worse for aoe, you're only losing out on auto-attack crits on secondary targets pretty much. And maul crits I guess, but if you frequently use maul, you probably aren't running defensive trinkets anyway.

[lycanious]

Thanks to everyone who commented.

AMRs simulator is very easy to set up and use and provided some good empirical evidence for ST fights that made sense with my original thinking. It ranks the 910 WHoD and 895 AE as best for straight survivability for Bosses on high M+ tyrannical/raids. The DM:I ranks 3rd empirically (and will be better at overall DR than the AE).

The part that was really confusing me with SIMC was why the GOP and, to a lesser extent, the RGM were ranking so highly and Exochaft explained that nicely.