(credit to gherkin on the warlock forum for the idea ^^)
Purpose of this thread:
- To assist people who have made a considered effort into their damage yet are struggling to meet their expected numbers. If you have exhausted other avenues and don't know what to do for further improvement this is the thread for you.
- To allow experienced players to share their oozing nuggets of wisdom with those eager to learn. Everyone who has a solution to share is welcome to contribute.
- To discuss alternate approaches to ability usage or gearing, just make sure you have good sources of information before making claims.
Before Posting:
Make sure you've read the relevant sticky guide (Fury, Arms, Prot) and understand the basics of preparing your spec. This thread isn't for teaching you how to gem, glyph, enchant correctly or of the basics of stat priority and rotation usage.
Don't just throw up links to your armory or logs and expect somebody to dig through it. Explain what you're not satisfied with, what you want to become better at and/or tell us when you think you're lacking.
What to Post:
- Your spec, general gear level, an armory-link and expectations in raids. Don't have people trawl armorys and parses for minor details when they can be given up front.
- Your problem in as much detail as is possible. Is it specific to an individual boss? in particular phases or situations? (AoE/execute/openers/movement/etc) or just a general patchwerk style low dps problem? The more detail you can give the more helpful answers we can provide.
- Any resources you have which can detail the problem are useful. World of Logs parses are especially helpful, but in the worst case other types of information like prints of Recount could suffice. To create World of Logs parses, simply type /combatlog into your chat ingame. Your combatlog will then be saved as a .txt in your WoW > Logs folder. Once leave combat or finish raiding for the day you can upload that log to your account on World of Logs.
What Not to Post:
- A question thats blatantly answered in your specs stickied guide.
- Stealth bragging damage logs.
- "How to reforge" questions. Use www.askmrrobot.com instead
- "Is Gear A > Gear B?" queries those are best simulated using Simcraft on your own character to find a personal solution. Situational gearing such as trinkets for specific bosses or the merits of tier bonuses are fine to ask.
SimulationCraft
What is SimulationCraft?
SimulationCraft is a tool to explore combat mechanics in World of Warcraft. It's a tool which simulates in-game combat based on variables you've set, like class, spec, gear, buffs/debuffs, ability prioritization, encounter type, fight length etc, then provides you with a breakdown of statistics similar to a World of Logs parse. SimulationCraft simulates combat tens of thousands of times to create as accurate avarages as possible.
It's most commonly used to find personal stat weights, find or test optimal ability prioritizations, test different gear approaches, or simply confirm that you're doing a good job at the combat dummy.
Simple 7-Step Guide to Using SimulationCraft
- Download from http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/
- Run the program and click the Options-tab. Specify the specifics of the simulation you want to do and how many times to simulate it.
- Scroll through the Buff/Debuff panes selecting the relevant spells (realistically you won't be getting Dark intent for example)
- Scroll through Scaling/Plot panes selecting all relevant Warrior stats (or just select everything). Note that simulating scaling for stat weights takes a lot of time and if you're not interested in finding your stat weights you should uncheck everything here
- Click Import, either pasting your armory link into the textbox at the bottom of the software or selecting the chardev pane and pasting the link for that under that heading
- Once imported click simulate and wait patiently
- This should show stat weights and an overall dps estimation. Through using altered chardev profiles you can estimate the potential benefit/loss from any specific gear change
2012-01-28 update: More aggressive title (because we're Warriors), emphasized the intent of the thread with modifications to the first paragraphs. ~Mest