Quick Guide: What to do if someone says "sim yourself"

[Katsumi]

Hello everyone,

This short guide is meant to help players find answers to important questions more quickly and on their own. Its aim is to fill a knowledge gap between the general guides of high quality on this site and the answers to many questions which depend on your individual current setup. It is meant to continue after someone says "sim yourself" and I'm left with "great, but how do I do that?".

I'm not in any way affiliated with any of the addons nor involved in any other way with raidbots.com, but I do think the work done there is amazing and should be highlighted more. I'm sure this isn't news for many people, but in hindsight I wish I had had this information a lot earlier.


The setup

There's only one addon that you need: https://mods.curse.com/addons/wow/simulationcraft

Install that. You're now able to use /simc in game to obtain an export-ready string that you can copy and paste. This string describes your character, including your gear, your talents and whatever items you have in your inventory. That's it, you don't need to install anything else. Everything that comes out of this is going to be processed by https://www.raidbots.com/simbot, which we'll discuss in a minute.


The procedure

A) Let's say you want to obtain stat weights (you want to answer the question "Which stat should I get more of?").

1. Start the game and log into your character.
2. Type /simc and copy the string that the addon returns to your clipboard.
3. Open https://www.raidbots.com/simbot and click on "STAT WEIGHTS".
4. Paste the string from your clipboard into the little box that says "B) OR PASTE FROM SIMC ADDON".
5. Click on the green button that says "GENERATE STAT WEIGHTS".

You're done. The numbers returned unter "Stat Weights" now tell you how good a certain stat is given your current gear and setup. The higher the number, the more you want to prioritize that stat. Subject to simulation time, this takes about a minute. Of course you can also do this by loading your character from the armory, but using the addon does not require the armory to be updated. It will also be a requirement to answer the next question.

B) Another frequently arising question concerns the choice of trinkets. This is probably the question most likely to be answered with "sim yourself", because the answer strongly depends on your gear and talents (and choices for the simulated fight, but we'll get to that in a bit). Here's what you want to do to answer this question on your own.

1. Start the game and log into your character.
2. Put all the trinkets you want to compare in your character's inventory (not the bank).
3. Type /simc and copy the string that the addon returns.
4. Open https://www.raidbots.com/simbot and click on "TOP GEAR".
5. Paste the string from your clipboard into the little box.
6. Check the boxes for all trinkets you want to compare.
7. Run the simulation again (green button).

Now the simulation compares all possible combinations of your selected gear and trinkets, which takes a bit more time to calculate. However, your best two trinkets will be shown as included in your selection of top gear. You can do the same for every other item slot as well, including different combinations of set pieces.

C) In the same way you can find out how different sets of talents and relics compare in terms of DPS. Again, just import your personal setup and simulate the setups you're interested in. The raidbots.com interface is quite intuitive, so I won't go into much detail regarding the talent comparison.

However, for the relics you want to look up a relic that has your preferred trait and then add the item level you want to compare it at. I found the quickest way to compare relic setups was to add a setup based on your current relics, then change the one you want to compare. You can look up the relic of interest's name in the game's adventure guide (look at the boss where it drops).


Technical Note: Setting up the Simulation

The results you'll be getting not only depend on your gear and talent choices, they also strongly depend on the type of fight you choose to simulate. While the default is a fight with one target, five minutes fight duration and very little movement (Patchwerk), the simulation is capable of calculating all sorts of different fights. Play around with that. Simulate AOE fights with more adds, change the duration of the fight or adjust the movement patterns and you'll see your stat weights and optimal talents shift around considerably.

Finally, and without being connected to the sim community in any way, I do think their work is awesome and should be supported. Good luck simming yourself!

Thanks,

Katsu.

[Katsumi]

reserved

[Vorrum]

Every spec guide should link to this thread. Good work.