What's BEST for your CHARACTER? Simulationcraft basics!

Hey guys! I am Nagura and today i'll show you how to sim your character, so a lot of times people are asking other people something about their class or spec and you get the answer

just send me your character but a lot of people don't actually know how to sim your character and a lot of people constantly ask me okay but how do you actually sim that character and this is why i'm making this guide to quickly explain to you how that works.

So first of all i want to just make a quick disclaimer about simming, first of all sim is only really good for damage dealers, it really doesn't give you any accurate results for healers or

tanks.

Secondly simming is a really really great tool but it definitely can't figure out everything for you, you still have to just look at the results and logically apply the results to like real scenarios that are happening in game.

And thirdly simcraft only works properly with a working apl, apl is an action priority list that is written by theory crafters for your spec and if that apl is not updated or it doesn't work properly then you also do not get proper results.

All right so let's get into it!

First of all you want to make sure you have the add-on simulation craft installed as you can see right here, once you have that add-on installed you can start using a command that will open up a window that you can copy.

Now before we do that make sure you have your desired talent selected that you want to sim, in my case i want to sim single target so i select my single target talent and then i type /simc in my chat, this will open up this window and i will just ctrl c um all of this information, doesn't actually matter what it says just copy it.

All right and once we have done that we will go to the website raidbots.com, so this is what this website looks like, once you open it now there's a bunch of different options that i will explain in a minute but first we're going to do a very simple sim just so you understand how this works.

So let's go to quick sim, once we open this up there's going to be this this window here this this gray box and in this box we're going to be pasting our information that we just copied in

game, once you have pasted this information we will select the simulation options down here  all right, and this custom apl you should just never touch and just report notification, options

also not really, and also not the same craft input, we only really care about this simulation option here.

Okay so we open this up and first of all we look at fight style, the fight style is actually very important because the only fight style that really really works properly for almost all of the stacks is patchwerk, almost none of these other options work properly because the thing is the apl the action priority list is written by the theory crafters and it basically just describes your perfect rotation in every situation but on all of these kind of fights there is no perfect rotation for each situation so there's no apl that really works for all of all of these um different styles and almost no specs actually write these apls so none of them are actually really working properly and won't give you an accurate result so i would just focus on patchwork.

Maybe sometimes you can like look at dungeon slides a little but even that i wouldn't really do very often i would just really focus on this patchwerk.

Now some people are asking well but uh what do i do for aoe and it's simple, if you want to sim aoe you don't change the fight style you change the number of bosses, okay it says number of bosses one but you can actually change this for to up to 10 bosses so if you want to be seeming your aoe damage for a mythic plus or whatever then you just increase the number of bosses to five but you keep the fight style at patchwerk and then you might want to decrease the fight length because it's pretty unrealistic that you're fighting five targets at

For five minutes.

Right so you can decrease this to like a more realistic time and then you can figure out the numbers for aoe, basically it's still something that you want to make sure that you're applying logically the aoe numbers but this is an option that you can do but yeah we're going back to one boss because this is what we do for single target sims, patchwerk one boss and then fight length is usually five minutes by default but you can adjust this if you want to sim your character for a specific fight.

Let's say you're struggling on a certain boss and that boss fight takes eight minute, well then you might as well just seem like eight minutes even though five minutes and eight minutes are a very small difference if any difference at all.

There's quite a few differences between fight lengths. For example four minutes and three minutes can be a really big difference depending on your cooldowns right, if you have three minute cooldowns then three minutes would be the absolute worst case scenario for you because then you use your cooldowns on a pull and you can't use them again but if it's

four minutes you can use your cooldowns twice and all of a sudden there's a really big difference in fight length, so definitely consider changing this for certain boss fights.

Then for the simc version you can either go weekly or nightly weekly just puts in the

version that is being updated every week and nightly it's just like a nightly version that might get some things adjusted more recently, so i personally like using the nightly version to get updates into the apl that might not have been there in the weekly version.

All right then at the bottom you can change a bunch of things as well, here for your consumables, raid buffs and so on, this might actually be something that you want to do

specifically for comparing potions for example, comparing food buffs, comparing flasks

and so on.

So what you can do here is the potions and food flasks are being usually selected by default you don't have to change this if you don't want to do but if you really want to figure out what the best potion would be for you or what the best food would be then you would change these potions here and just compare them to one another and here at the bottom right you can restore the default options.

All right so once we have selected this all we have to do is run the sim, now once it's running the sim it's going to tell me how much gps i would be doing on a five minute one target patchwerk fight and it also tells me a breakdown on how much damage my abilities are doing, this is decently important because if you're struggling to hit the dps numbers that you should be doing in theory then you can look at the breakdown of the abilities here and you can also see it account.

So let's say this patchwerk sim here um casted 57 star surges so now i can compare how many star surges did i cast uh what happened did i move too much did i refresh my dots too many times did i miss certain eclipse windows and so on, so that's definitely something you can compare but this is a very basic sim and this is not actually going to help you very much with your decisions on what gear you should be equipping so let's go into a more important tab.

Here when we go back to raidbots, we can see this one here which is probably the most used tab and actually the most important tab for you and it's top gear.

So now that we understood simcraft a little bit more this is going to make a little bit more sense to you because once we open up this window we have a disk gray box again where we paste our input that we have in from in-game and now we have a bunch of options here

and this might look overwhelming at first but it's actually just very simple.

All this is doing this top gear option is it's um letting you select things that you want to compare to your current gear, right first of all you can see what we have equipped this is the head i have grip this or the shoulders have equipped, this is the chest and additionally it's also showing me items that i have in my bag but not equipped so for example this neck i have in my bag i have also these wrists and these two rings, so if i click on those items it will actually compare them to the ones that i have already equipped so i want to just make sure i select them if i want to compare them.

I don't want to compare the neck because i know it's worse because my neck is better but one of these rings might actually be better because of a bunch of different rings and my stat weights are really close to each other, so i'm going to sim these rings and see if one of them is actually better than the others that i have equipped, so let's send the rings and then i'll explain the other areas here to you that are a little bit more complicated but still not very complicated.

So first if you would only want to compare the gear like the items that you have in your bag

like i did just now with the rings then you can leave everything else as it is you just scroll all the way down and then you click on find top gear but if you want to look at all the apps other options first then you can see that there's for example something that is called runecarver

legendaries, now what this is doing is it's actually adding legendaries to your gear that you can select.

So let's say i'm going to select item level 210 because that's the rank two legendaries we can craft, next idea or this idea and then we're also going to select the secondary stats and then we click on this button and now you can see there's a lot of items appearing on all of your slots so now we can actually select the legendaries and compare them to one another, so for example i could compare balance of all things to own its clear vision or i can compare balance of all things in my boots slot versus balance of all things in my leg slot and see which one will give me more dps right now and so on.

So here in this scenario you can just select whatever legendaries you want to compare to one another which is going to be very useful for a lot of people.

And then moving on, we can here in this step we can compare the enhancements so we can compare and chance to one another see which enchant is the best by just clicking on them right and then we can also compare stats to one another, we can compare different kinds of gems to one another and so on.

Just keep in mind simming gems if you have a lot of gem slots is actually adding a lot of iterations to the sim and the more iterations you have the longer the calculation is going to take and sometimes you might not even be able to sim very high iterations depending on your account i'm actually paying for premium account so i can have really high durations because i am seeing a lot, so that's something you might want to think about, so anyway moving on.

Here in soulbind tree you can actually select the soulbinds that you want to be comparing at, let's say you're in your silver entry you don't know should i go with the left one middle right so here very simple you can just select the different kinds of soul binds that you can choose from and then on top you can also select the different conduit options that you have here on

the side.

This is also going to be very useful for later on when you're unsure on which covenants to choose or which conduits.

All right then moving on you can also select different kinds of talents here if you want to compare incarnation to starlord for example, right you just select the different kinds of talents you want to compare and here it tells you which talent combination it is sitting and that's it.

Now we could also sim again here in this simulation option, you can also change the fight style again so if you want to be simming for aoe for example you just um change the number of targets to five or however many there was going to be depending on the boss fight right or

depending on them plus you want to sim and here you can change the fight length if you want to.

And here at the bottom you can also change potions and so on and then we're just going to be simming thi,s i'm not going to zoom this now because it's going to take a while this is just for an explanation.

Another thing that is actually very nice that a lot of people don't necessarily know about

This tab here is called drop optimizer and this tab here is actually showing you what the best upgrades are going to be in a certain area.

So you copy your input here in this grey box and then you can select whatever you want to be looking at so for example once the dungeons come out and you can farm mythic plus you can actually check okay so which dungeon would be the most worth it for me to farm

so you select dungeons here and then you can look at all the dungeons and here on the dungeon level i would be selecting plus 10 because that's the level i am farming and then you can just click on run optimizer and now we'll calculate which kind of items are going to be a very strong upgrade for you and then it will tell you which dungeons you should be running because those have the highest chances to give you the biggest upgrades so this is actually a very very nice thing.

You can also do this exact same thing for raid and you can also do this for honor for pvp items and so on so just doing this will help you a lot to choose on which kind of content you want to do to give your character the biggest chance of an upgrade.

While this is calculating we're just going to go back and look at the last thing i want to show you gear compare and tell and compare is something that you can also do, gear compare specifically is here for comparing items that you don't already have in your bag.

Okay so for example if you're killing a boss and that's an item that drops that the person that won the item can trade and now your raid leader might be asking okay so how good is this item for everyone because maybe three or four people want this item, now so you can go to gear compare then you paste your character's input and then you can enter a second gear set for example boots if the boots drop that you want to compare then you just look for the name of the item and you just type it in here and then you can select it.

You can select the item level, you can select it to your socket or not and so on and once

you've selected that item. It will replace your existing item and we'll compare those two and you click on compare items, so this is really nice for those kinds of situations.

And then you have one more thing that i want to talk about and it's the stat weights because um the stat weight tab here will generate your stat weights which might be very important for deciding what kind of enchants you want, deciding what gems you want to put and so on.

So first of all let's go back to this drop optimizer sim that we just did here. It shows me uh what kind of dungeons give me the most upgrades, you can see here the other side is actually giving me the most upgrades.

As you can see the weapon would be an upgrade, this trinket is an upgrade, the legs, shoulders, boots, gloves, ring and a belt i could actually loot in this dungeon so you can see also other damages here at the bottom but you can see the priority number here, mists and the other side would be the highest priority and then second highest priority would be halls of atonement and so on so this is definitely very very awesome to see what kind of upgrades i would be getting from these dungeons.

Now going back to the set weights uh you can see my stat weights are being calculated here, i'm actually assuming five targets here that's why my dps number is so high so don't worry about it i just forgot to select one target instead of five.

What this is telling you here basically it's even described here at the bottom, it says one point of intellect will increase your dps by 6.26 right so if you would gain one point of intellect your dps would be increased by 6.26, if you gain one point of haste your dps will be increased by 2.19 and so on so this basically just tells me that my intellect is worth three times as much as my haste is or any secondary stat in a five target aoe scenario.

Now this tells me a lot of things, this tells me that high itemable items are going to be the

biggest upgrades for me no matter the secondaries that's right because higher item level means there's more main stat on it except on rings and the next so whenever i see a higher item level item with more mainstat i probably just want to equip it no matter if i think the stats are worse than it the secondary stats because as you can see my main set is so much more worth it and therefore it's very likely going to be better.

Another thing this is telling me is that the difference between my secondary sets is actually very very small so haste is 2.19 but crit is 1.99 and mastery 1.78 so all of these stat weights are very very close to each other and that means it's probably not worth it to drop your item level to a lower item just to get different secondary stats because they're so so close to one

another.

And another thing that this tells me is for example the gems that i should be using because um bfa intellect gems for example give you six intellect as far as i'm not mistaken and the shadowlands gems gives you 16 secondary stats so if you compare six intellect to 16 secondary stats you might want to think oh i should go for the secondary sets because that's a lot more 16 compared to six but if you look at the stat weights my intellect is worth triple as much as my secondary sets so it definitely means that 6 intellect is better than 16 secondary stats because 3 times 6 is 18, meaning that that's worth more than my secondary sets.

Right so this is how you read your secondary stats and this is just like a basic introduction into simcraft!

I really hope this helped you out and i really hope you can seem your character a little bit easier or at least have an easier time getting into simcraft and getting into raid bots because this can really give you a lot of information and make it a lot easier for you to apply this kind of knowledge into in-game scenarios.

Just make sure that you're using this information properly and don't just blindly follow these

results because you still have to apply logic to these um calculations and to these results that you are getting because as i said these are patchwerk fights that you're calculating which is not an actual realistic scenario when you're raiding you're not standing still and hitting one target and never moving your character and there's never any other characters so it always heavily depends on the situation and therefore i um like taking these kind of sim crap result as a guideline but then i adjust my logical knowledge to those actual results and apply them to my character into my in-game situation.

All right thank you so much for watching guys i really appreciate you uh giving me all of the support on youtube right now it really means so much to me because i really like doing youtube videos and getting all of the support right now and so many people telling me how much they like the videos really really means a lot to me.

If you have any suggestions on what kind of content and videos you want to see on youtube in the future you can just let me know in the comments below because i definitely want to make sure that i give you the guides that you really want to see you, so yeah thank you so much guys make sure you stop by on my twitch stream over at twitch.tv/nagura once in a while, if you feel like it and i'll see you at the next video, bye!