Step-by-step guide to simming
This is the most important part of the guide. I will try to explain as clearly as possible how you can sim the effect of gemming on your simulated DPS.
1) Open Rawr.
2) Select “Load from the Armory” on the start page you get.
3) Enter your character name and armory, as well as the realm zone (EU/US)
4) After a few moments, your character should be loaded from the armory.
5) You may want to save what you have now, so you don’t need to reload from the armory (which expends bandwidth) in event of a crash. Do so by “File” -> “Save”. Another reason to save is so you always have access to your character. If you want to open your character, select “File”-> “Open”
6) Now, you will want to use hit and expertise gems until you have reached the spell hit cap and the soft expertise cap (368 Horde (342 Draenei) and 26 respectively). Do so by right-clicking the item you want to place those gems in (usually ones with yellow sockets for hit and red sockets for expertise) and select “Equip Custom Gemming”. (Alternatively, you could just left click the item and select the gemming you want from the list that appears, but depending on gear setup, those might appear rather deep in the list. Also, those only suggest the top 3 gemming, which could differ from other gemmings which could be better) Select the gem you want by left-clicking the slot and left-clicking again on the gem you would like to be in that slot.
7) Once you have selected the desired gems for your caps, you can start to gem for either haste or AP. There is no hard-or-fast rule on what to gem, so the only real solution is to sim both full AP and full haste. It is easiest to create 2 new XML files, one with full haste gems and one with full AP gems. Do so by first using the method described in 6 to gem for all AP gems, and after that use the method in 5) to save that setup. Also make a setup with the recommended gemming of Rawr for each slot.
7a) (optional, but recommended) On the right side of the screen, select the available items, enchants and gems for each slot as explained in the Rawr tutorial video. Then go to “Tools” -> “Optimize”. You can optimize for a number of factors. The optimized file in the zip-file is optimized using the “DPS-rating” method, meaning it forgoes any survival stats like stamina.
8 ) Once you have made those 3 (or 4) setups, you need to load the XML file with the starting setup, and then go to the options pane, then the EnhSim pane. Select that one, then click the button that says “Export Stats to EnhSim config file”.
9) Then open EnhSim. First, select “File”-> “Open” and select “config.txt”. This ensures most simulation-independent variables are set correctly. After that, click the large “Copy from Clipboard” button.
10) Now to set some options! One of the options most likely to change is the priority queue. For ease of calculation, use the one from the Elitist Jerks Shaman BiS thread found here: http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t88300-e...on_3_3_onward/ . Also, if any other settings are unclear, it is best to first search that thread. If they are good enough for calculating BiS DPS, they should be good enough for you.
11) Now, press the button “simulate”, wait for the sim to complete (should take about a minute) and search the output in the command box for a line starting with “DPS”. That should be your DPS for that calculation. Write down that number (you’ll need it later).
12) (Optional, if you want greater accuracy. Normally 1 simulation should be enough to get a good idea of the DPS potential of a set) Repeat step 11) until you have 5 different DPS calculations. this should give a fairly large sample size (about 25,000 hours, or about 1,500,000 minutes, which is about 214,285 7 minute fights).
For instance, these are my numbers for the base “narizha.enh.xml” file:
Code:
First run: 10095.72
Second run: 10096.73
Third run: 10093.69
Fourth run: 10095.86
Fifth run: 10094.45
You see here that these numbers are within 3 DPS of each other. Now, we calculate the average of this. We get 10095.29. this is your maximum DPS you should get with that gear setup. This might seem like a lot of work, but do keep in mind that with the exact same gear setup in Rawr 2.3.11, I only got 9309 DPS. A DPS difference of almost 800 DPS! That’s why you should simulate, because it can be such a big difference. In reality, the true value will often lie between the two values, due to human errors and fluctuations in reaction time and lag.
13) Repeat step 8 ) through 11) (or 12) with every other set you saved (you did save the sets, didn’t you?).
These are the results I got (remember, they need to be more than 10095.29 to be an upgrade).
Code:
Narizha.enh.haste.xml: 10,144.39 DPS
Narizha.enh.attackpower.xml: 10,004.10 DPS.
Narizha.enh.recommended.xml: 10,153.24 DPS
Narizha.enh.optimized.xml: 10,193.57 DPS.
So if we would rank these from highest to lowest DPS:
Optimized -> recommended -> haste -> start -> attack power.
IMPORTANT!! These numbers are for this character with this gear setup only. You might get completely different results with your character.
What I want to add here is that the optimized setup will 99/100 times get the highest result, because you calculate every outcome for every possible combination. However, I still only got 9,337 DPS with the optimized setup versus Rawr. Also, both full haste and attack power showed up as lower DPS versus the original setup. Haste did sim higher in the end.
Also, don’t enchant your gloves or bracers with expertise. You are giving up 44-50 AP (more than a gem’s worth) for 15-20 expertise (less than a gem’s worth). As you can see, just by switching some gems and enchants around, we got 100 DPS more. That is more than RNG can account for. Generally, if a sim is only 5-10 DPS difference, you can assume it to be due to RNG.