Kilt: Simcraft vs. Reality?

[Delandel]

I have a ton of gear to choose from including all legendaries. Simming the top gear with Raidbots for both 1 target Patchwerk and 4 target Patchwerk, however, not once does it show Kilt as a top performer for me. For single target it shows double ring, 4 targets it shows shoulder + sephuz.

But if you look at Warcraftlogs, top Mythic parses for Arcane, it shows a very different story: Kilt shows up a ton! For single target, yes, double ring seems to be performing the best on average despite a large showing of kilt + shard too. However, on a fight like Antoran High Command, only 4/100 top parses don't use Kilt! 4%!

I understand that Kilt is simply easier to use so more people will use it even if it's not the very best DPS-wise. I also understand that because more people are parsing with Kilt that there's a higher likelihood of super lucky RNG Kilt parses showing up. However, when only 4% of the top 100 parses is without Kilt, and my Raidbots is simming Kilt as a 400k DPS loss (4.6mil shoulder + sephuz vs. 4.2 mil shoulder + kilt) with a similar setting, something's not right is it?

So what's up with Kilt? Is Raidbots right and all the people running Kilt wrong, or are raid fights so drastically different from Patchwerk that Kilt gets a lot of extra value for some reason?

[magictricks]

If things fuck up (which they usually do) kilt is about 100 times more forgiving.

If you know you have to move in 4 seconds you can just spam 4AB a few extra times in the hope to get a AM proc so you lose no dps at all, and then if you dont get them you can clear and AE on the move and you'll end up with more mana and back at 4AC with basically no dps lost at all.
You can't do that with double ring.

Things like seeing your pantheon or concordance proc and just spamming 4AB until it runs out then regening mana is worth more then people give it credit for.

[Delandel]

Yeah Kilt is absolutely more forgiving. I can imagine tons of Arcane players would still play Kilt even if it was a little behind in DPS just because you'll never be in a position where a mistake puts you out of mana and out of dps.

You're also right about fishing for AM procs when there's predictable movement and you're running Slipstream. Simcraft assumes Patchwerk or else results get funky. So Kilt gets a boost when it comes to movement so that's a good point, but I don't know how big a boost that is overall.

Things like seeing your pantheon or concordance proc and just spamming 4AB until it runs out then regening mana is worth more then people give it credit for.

I would assume simcraft already accounts for this however.

[nickseng]

I would assume simcraft already accounts for this however.

It doesn't

[Corpze]

One of the main problems with simcraft is its unreliability in all given encounters. Mainly, if you look at the up-time it has to sephuz it is highly unrealistic that you can maintain it at all on a fight like highcommand. At best it would be staggered haste buffs in unpredictable windows. Kilt makes it much easier to move and like everyone else said, its just so much more forgiving. Additionally, if youre running shoulders/kilt and you get a lucky string of orb procs youre not going to completely OOM yourself tallying up all that dps.

[timmywitt]

One of the main problems with simcraft is its unreliability in all given encounters. Mainly, if you look at the up-time it has to sephuz it is highly unrealistic that you can maintain it at all on a fight like highcommand. At best it would be staggered haste buffs in unpredictable windows.

Sephuz can be somewhat reliably proc'd with Frost Nova when there's adds around or stuff to interrupt. It works better on High Command than most fights, but I bet simcraft just procs it based on its internal cooldown instead of actually using a GCD for an interrupt or nova. (Not an API writer, I don't know that for sure.)

[nickseng]

Simc uses Counterspell to proc Sephuz. That's why sephuz will not rank highly unless you use casting patchwek, in which cases it procs sephuz once a minute.

You can also modify the APL to reflect your raid situation, but most don't bother.

[Strini]

Something else to consider as well... Sims are a veryyyy heavy AVERAGE ranking. It runs thousands if not hundreds of thousands of "parses" and gives you the AVERAGE (which means 50% of the time will be higher than this, and 50% lower). Then you're comparing this to warcraft logs, which the top parses are literally the extreme outliers. A lot can be skewing the differences, maybe kilt has a much larger variance to it's dps therefore the high outliers rank higher and the low outliers rank lower, and also the amount of luck that goes into being a top parse (procs, maybe mechanics don't target you much, maybe you have a better raid group that kills it faster which leads to higher uptime% for bloodlust, etc.)