How do I sim for boomie night fae?

[yuze]

It's saying I should equip crit gear but thats redundant with BoaT isnt it?

[dawawe]

Mastery

/10char

[Myztikrice]

It's only 40%, crits are not guaranteed outside of CA

[skitzin]

As a NF boomkin you want to focus Intellect > Mastery > Haste = Crit = Versatility.

In essence, this gives you two points to focus on for gearing:
- higher ilvl being better in most cases.
- secondary stats wise you basically want mastery and a mixture of everything else.

The reason for focusing mastery is because it's a flat increase to spell damage which brings up your average damage rather than relying on critical damage. And given that Mastery works well for us regardless of a fight being ST, AoE, or some other form of cleave so it becomes a solid default choice to make.

Now covenant choice does change the stats around slightly - in the case of NF and convoke causes you to get slightly better value out of crit and vers versus haste. However, mastery still rules supreme over them. Combine this with using BoAT means crit drops back down again.

Thus you would look to reduce your Crit as best you can without dropping ilvl since intellect gives such good value to us.

When you SimCraft gear etc you need to understand a few things:

- What type of simulation model you are running - is it AoE, Cleave, ST? For how long is the fight?
- What is the gear you are actually comparing? Are you comparing 184 ilvl pieces to 200 ilvl pieces? If so then higher ilvl wins out every time due to the increase in intellect.
- How many times have you run the simulation? The more times it runs the closer to an average DPS output you will reach as it will have more results and variations to draw from.
- What specifically are you modeling? Are you comparing two pieces of specific gear? Are you calculating raw stat weights?

Stat weights are a constantly moving target. The moment you remove one piece of gear they change, the moment you add another piece of gear in that empty slot they change again, the moment you swap an enchant or a gem they change. Think of it like this, you run a stat weight simulation and you get your stat weights. The instant you take of a piece off gear to swap for another piece the stat weights have already changed and thus are no longer truly accurate.

This made a lot harder by the fact there is no real cutoff point we can reach. No specific haste or crit caps etc. So because of this stat weights are not as important as they have been in previous expansions where you could focus a specific stat weight to a specific cap point and then switch to another stat as the focus. Thus we use a generalized list as I mention above - we know that Intellect and Mastery stand tall over our other stats so much so that there is little concern for the smaller fluctuations between crit, haste, and vers as they don't have the same impact as getting more of these desirable stats.

So when you get a few pieces of gear of the same ilvl simply use the top gear option in raidbots to find whatever piece is best and roll with it. You will find this will favour ilvl for the higher intellect and mastery pieces with whatever the other secondary stat being whatever it is. Do NOT use stat weights for boomkin at the present time.

This might change in future patches as we reach higher ilvl gear and thus have a larger stat budget to work with and thus could potentially be able to reach a specific stat cap point but for now we should be doing the above.

[Myztikrice]

Versatility and sometimes on rare occasions even crit or haste oftentimes sim higher to me than Mastery. Mastery is not the end all

[Raugnaut]

Versatility and sometimes on rare occasions even crit or haste oftentimes sim higher to me than Mastery. Mastery is not the end all

Versatility, Mastery, Crit, and Haste all provide a similar increase to sustain single target DPS. However, Celestial Alignment, our primary burst CD, causes all Astral Damage to receive twice the normal benefit from Mastery. Combine with the popular Convoke makes Mastery THE end-all in PvE, as a significant amount of damage comes from Convoke, and Convoke strongly benefits from Mastery, does not benefit at all from Haste, and if you have BoAT, has somewhat reduced benefits from Crit.

Because of this, Mastery is the strongest secondary stat for Night Fae Boomkins. Might be different for other covenant Boomkins, but they are such a minority that it's not worth finding out.

[skitzin]

Versatility and sometimes on rare occasions even crit or haste oftentimes sim higher to me than Mastery. Mastery is not the end all

As I mentioned right now doing stat weight sims are somewhat pointless as they far too easy to misunderstand and are extremely sensitive when simulating these with the current models. Just alone there can be a difference in stat weights based solely on how long set the simulated fight to be as this will include or exclude specific cooldowns etc which will further adjust the value of a given stat for that given point in time. And given that stat weights for a NF boomkin are fairly tight changes occur more frequently.

Unfortunately, both intellect and mastery are the top default choices for PVE content regardless of if you are raiding, doing mythic pluses, torghast, or world quests when you select NF as your covenant. As Raugnaut explains in further detail there is solid reasoning behind why this is beyond my own original post which was just a quick cover of the topic where I am summarising the results of the previous theory-crafting in this area. This does NOT mean we hate other stats other than mastery but rather we are indifferent to stacking anything specific outside of mastery.

If you, as a NF boomkin, were to compare two pieces of equal ilvl gear in the same slot with no other effects or benefits on them you would favour whichever has mastery and <Crit/Haste/Vers> over the item that has no mastery. In the event you have two items with mastery you would favour the one with more mastery over the one with less mastery. If both pieces had equal amounts of mastery you would then follow a top gear simulation on Raidbots to see which piece gives you the overall better dps. You would basically never use a stat weight simulation to determine the answer to this question and get the correct answer consistently.

[NightZero88]

It's saying I should equip crit gear but thats redundant with BoaT isnt it?

You shouldn't use stat weights. Go into top gear, plug in your character, and pick whatever it tells you is the best gear. Stat weights for balance druid and in general are terrible and don't work now. You should also join the druid discord dreamgove.

[TickTickTick]

If you, as a NF boomkin, were to compare two pieces of equal ilvl gear in the same slot with no other effects or benefits on them you would favour whichever has mastery and <Crit/Haste/Vers> over the item that has no mastery.

That's simply not true.

While mastery IS our go to secondary and the most potent one, on several occasions raidbots showed a, for example, haste/crit piece as a higher dps item than a mastery/whatever.

This is because at some point you'll have so much mastery that 1 point of it gives overall less dps than 1 point of other stat.

For example, a raidbots scan tells me to put in a weird mix of crit/haste/versa gems/enchants because it'd give a bit more dps than my full mastery gem/enchants. Not that I bothered with it though.

In short, dont go with a simple "we love mastery so i need to have everything with mastery". Instead sim everytime.