I finally decided to take a look at SimulationCraft. I’d taken this long specifically because, okay I’m lying to you, I’d had a look before and I didn’t understand what the heck I was doing with it. Until I came across this guide, which admittedly did take me a while to read through but it’s so utterly simple that I feel a bit silly for waiting so long.
I thought I’d go through with you the basics of how to use this programme. I’m sure there are ways to use it that will tell you so much more, but SimulationCraft isn’t the simplest of programmes as far as I can tell so I’m starting with the basics and I’ll find more guides, tips, and fiddle a bit. If, like me, you’ve never used SimulationCraft before but would like to see your own scaling factors and details to improve yourself rather than base your theory on somebody else’s numbers, then hopefully this will be helpful to you.
The only thing you’ll need to change is in the scaling tab. You will want it to look like the following as a Shadow Priest.
Next, import your armory for analysis. You will have the armory page open up, and a few other options. The only bits you really need to care about are these, to keep it simple. Top left, bottom left, and bottom right.
Once you have imported, your character’s details will appear. At the bottom right, the same place as the import button, you will see this.
While you wait for your profile to load you will be able to see the bar moving. Then you can see the results.
The results page will give you a range of information about your character. Have a look through, it’s very useful. Just a few examples from my own results. With an optimal raid situation, I should be capable of about 9k dps. As with anything, this won’t take into account movement time, taking care of adds, any stuns i.e. the bone spikes on Lord Marrowgar, however, it’s nice to see what you could be doing with full raid buffs on a Patchwerk style fight.
This pie chart tells me which of my abilities should be doing the most damage. If you use a damage meter, probably Recount or Skada, or a parse, ((Usually World of Logs, but there are others)) this will show you what you should be doing, which you can compare to what you are doing. If there’s a big difference then this will allow you to play around with things a bit to improve a little.
Further down, there is an ‘action priority list’, which tells you how to prioritise any spells and buffs while in combat. Generally, you will probably know all of this already. Food buffs, flasks, speed potions, Shadowfiend, followed by DoTs, and so on. There are plenty of topics about it on ShadowPriest.com though if you’d like to have a look, it’s there. It isn’t specifically a rotation list, but it does tell you what you should prioritise, i.e. if Shadow Word: Pain falls off, it should be the first thing you refresh.
The part I’m most interested in is the scaling factors. In basic, these tell you how each stat will scale with your gear, spec, glyphs, and so on. Hit will always be ranked as the highest stat because if you don’t have enough it will net you a nice dps loss. However, you also don’t want to have too much, because then it becomes useless. I think most people’s scaling factors will be fairly similar, spell power being the major stat with haste being fairly close to it, crit a little behind, and spirit and intellect at the bottom. Mine interested me, take a look.
As you can see, haste is rated a tiny bit higher than spell power, whereas I expected it to be the other way around. Crit and spirit are ranked fairly close to each other as well, I expected intellect and spirit to be quite low down near enough equal, nowhere near as high as crit. Very interesting.
SimulationCraft works with other classes and specs too, so do take a look at your results if you’re interested.
Posted Edited: Because apparently people get testy over the tiniest of things.
