Why do people keep recommending Simcraft?

[scuac]

I have been playing Frost since the expansion started, and even though I am topping dps on my raid, I am thinking to give Fire a try. So before I started doing the whole respeccing/reforging I thought to sim it and see what to expect. I put my current Frost mage through Simcraft and on a Patchwerk fight it is saying my average dps is around 64k. That is RIDICULOUS! I am consistently doing over 80k dps on real fights in MSV normal.

What I found really odd is that it shows my top damage spell to be Frostbolt. I checked the logs for our last boss kill and Ice Lance was #1 followed by Living Bomb. After this I really lost any trust in this Simcraft tool. Is there anything out there that can give more realistic simulations?

[Azgraal]

Simcraft won't give you your DPS as is, it is a tool that measures your gear and calculates its possible dps with a group of conditions, not what dps you will do. Take those numbers well salted, in my opinion they should only be used to compare against other simcraft results, not actual results from recount/skada.

That being said, i've found Simcraft to be awesomely useful.

[scuac]

Simcraft won't give you your DPS as is, it is a tool that measures your gear and calculates its possible dps with a group of conditions, not what dps you will do. Take those numbers well salted, in my opinion they should only be used to compare against other simcraft results, not actual results from recount/skada.

That being said, i've found Simcraft to be awesomely useful.

Yes, compare sim results to sim results only is sound advice. However, since Simcraft is supposedly simulating a Patchwerk fight, were I am standing still and simply unloading my dps without worrying about movement, shouldn't the dps by higher than in any real fight or am I missing something?

[mrgreenthump]

I put my current Frost mage through Simcraft and on a Patchwerk fight it is saying my average dps is around 64k. That is RIDICULOUS! I am consistently doing over 80k dps on real fights in MSV normal.

So what dps do you do on Feng and spirit kings? cause those are the only 2 fights in whole MSV that you can compare to patchwerk results..

[Deleted]

SimC is only a tool.

And like all tools, the result depend on how it is used. It's used to show only statistic result on a given situation.
So yes, there's difference with live. It can be due to a bug in SimC or in Live, it can be a specific fight buff that isn't include in SimC. It can be Human error.

[Fim]

If you just imported directly from Armory and simmed then you are likely still setup with Frost reforges. Of course that'll be sub-optimal for fire. If you also picked IW, then Simcraft will sim you lower unless you add in some periodic raid damage to pop the shield and give you Incanter's Energy. I'd suggest importing your character into CharDev, figuring out your reforging and gemming for Fire, and exporting from CharDev into simcraft, and picking Invocation for the purpose of the sim.

[Xarganthos]

So what dps do you do on Feng and spirit kings? cause those are the only 2 fights in whole MSV that you can compare to patchwerk results..

lets not forget about garajal if you are not on totem duty

[Deleted]

Is there anything out there that can give more realistic simulations?

I myself have found quite a few issues with simcraft and talked them over with the developers of the tool. i.e. POM is/was bugged.
Looks like Alter Time is being used wrongly might even be bugged.

In the end there may just be a simple mistake in the actions that Simcraft is being told to take, I myself am fire, and have never really dug into Frost enough to really be able to say what rotation there is.
Ultimatley in simcraft the actions need to be "programmed" properly else the sims will not produce the results you expect.
I suggest you try reading thru the actions, they seem to be prette self explanatory and try and make sence of them... see if you see anything that seems out of place or even wrong.

[Ryoushi]

Most of it has been said above, so I'll leave that.

As to your "thinking of trying fire", definitely do it! I realllllly like frost, and reallllly dislike fire's rng at times (Not getting crits for 35 seconds of BL is cool..), but overall you'll do a lot better if you have decent gear for fire. It'll take some getting used to if you've, like me, rerolled to mage this expansion whilst never playing one before, but once you get the hang of building combustions and combusting at the right time you'll do a fair bit more. If I get a lucky crit or 2 on Garajal I peak at around 230k DPS before slooowly going back down, ending at around 100k if not on totem duty, and 90k if I have to go in once or twice. (479 equipped)

You'll curse the fire spec a few times when getting some bad luck (some will say there's no such thing..) and maybe go back to frost once or twice, but once you familliarize yourself with the spec it's very good to play. Do try it!

[JohnnyQuest]

I put my current Frost mage through Simcraft and on a Patchwerk fight it is saying my average dps is around 64k.

Are you sure? I suspect maybe you've messed something up on your sims, as I just ran my Fire mage, with Fire gemming and reforging but telling SimC to use my Frost spec and it gave me a DPS figure of 81k. With a proper spec and proper stat priorities I suspect that would be higher.

[herpecin]

simcraft is a tool, how good it works depends on the user.

you will never be able to actually reach the numbers simcraft tells you, you use it to see how changes in gearing/rotation can effect your possible DPS.

[scuac]

Thank you all for the advice. I finally did the switch today and ran a few LFR and already saw the difference, even messing up every other combustion I am doing better than with Frost. I did rerun Simcraft with the Fire setup out of curiosity, it told me that my dps would be 1kdps lower than it was with Frost. I don't know, maybe I accidentally flipped a config switch somewhere because it doesn't make sense to me.

[Jinivus]

Perhaps you unchecked buffs.

[Darcyn]

There is definetly something wrong with your settings or import. No way it can be 64k unless you are like ilvl460. Then you must be the best mage ever to do that dps on a patchwerk fight. Link to armory and logs please I'd like to check it.

[Deleted]

If you read the end of the patchnote, you will see there's bug fix for Icy Veins but it would have make SimC result better than yours.

[DeathDefier]

I've consistently done more dps than the sims say I should be doing for fire. I sat still on a gara'jal normal kill a couple weeks back, and did 109k whereas the sim said I should be doing something like 95k on a patchwerk fight with full buffs/debuffs.

[pyrostorm9001]

Seeing as I have a very limited understanding of Simulationcraft I was wondering if someone could answer this question for me.
Why do fire/frost/arcane all seem to sim very very closely to one another in a Patchwerk encounter. Yet be so very different in a real world setting like garajal or feng?
are arcane and frost just not being played correctly?
is fire siming lower than it should be?
are there bugs in the live game or simcraft?

[mrgreenthump]

Seeing as I have a very limited understanding of Simulationcraft I was wondering if someone could answer this question for me.
Why do fire/frost/arcane all seem to sim very very closely to one another in a Patchwerk encounter. Yet be so very different in a real world setting like garajal or feng?
are arcane and frost just not being played correctly?
is fire siming lower than it should be?
are there bugs in the live game or simcraft?

Its a combination of sims not counting everything fire can do and arcane being just really bad atm in live.. frost and fire difference is smaller than it says though, just that fire still does better dps by quite a margin, plus its easyer and has more lil tricks to keep dps'ing. Oh and the profile they are using for Simc firemage gear is just wrong so that accounts for 2-3k dps aswell

[Deleted]

I would bet my pants that you didn´t use Simcraft correctly.

[Deleted]

I've consistently done more dps than the sims say I should be doing for fire. I sat still on a gara'jal normal kill a couple weeks back, and did 109k whereas the sim said I should be doing something like 95k on a patchwerk fight with full buffs/debuffs.

Lot of things can make you do greater number than simcraft says
- Simcraft number is average over all test runs, lucky runs are well over average dps. There is graph in simcraft results which show dps spread of runs. Just like that you can have had simply good luck in that fight.
- Bugs in simcraft, for example glyphed combustion is losing half ticks in release version of simcraft afaik.
- External damage increases, like warrior crit banner, I guess simcraft does not take it account?