How to Simcraft: Part 1

Simcraft is big shit, people on EJ love it, people who love EJ love it, people who hate it hate it for the wrong reasons.

Basically, what Simcraft does is take the traditional DPS spreadsheet to the logical conclusion: Rather than using complicated derived math to determine DPS potential, it just takes your gear and uses the game's rules to simulate hundreds of boss fights one after another.

There's a lot of misconceptions on how Simcraft works, what it does, and how to use it. The first thing to know is that it's changed quite a bit recently. Simcraft's download now includes a very user-friendly interface, and no longer runs in DOS protected mode, making it much faster than it used to be.

Step one: Get the stuff. Head over to the Simcraft download page, and pick out the most recent file appropriate for your operating system. Extract the file to a folder wherever you want, and run the program simcqt, which has an icon like two red dice.




Step one (the real step one this time) is to get some data to work with. Click on the Import tab. What you'll see is an in-UI browser, though a terrible one (you can see in the screenshots how badly it breaks Armory). Tabs at the top will let you go to the US or EU armory websites, Wowhead, CharDev, or Warcrafter websites, where you can navigate to your profile and click Import. You can also pull profiles from your RAWR folder, or use the BiS tab to select best-in-slot profiles, though generally I find these less useful overall, since the point of using Simcraft is to improve your performance with your own character. Whichever you use, this will get your saved gear, spec, and glyphs, even if they deviate from cookie cutters (though some oddball specs may not simcraft the way you mean to play them - this is generally a good sign of a broken spec).

Once imported, you can check the Simulate tab to see the raw data being used for your character - this is the sort of stuff that you see on EJ that can be daunting to use. We don't actually care about any of this for today, but in future articles I'll cover some modifications you can make in this panel to test small changes without setting up a new CharDev profile or starting from scratch.

Before you're ready to go, there's some things to tweak before we're ready to roll.

That looks like a lot, right? Well, don't worry, it's not too bad. The middle and right panels are raid support. Ideal raid makeup will mean all of these will be checked, but if you want to test closer to your guild's actual performance, you'll want to make sure things you don't have are turned off. MMO-Champion's raidcomp tool is invaluable if you're not familiar with all the raid support all classes give - some things are often overlooked. These checkboxes apply if you turn off the Optimum Raid setting.

The left panel is the more important little things. Our first pick is the Patch selector - this will let you test using the current live build (3.2.2), or the most recent PTR build (3.3). Note any PTR build is only going to be as good as understanding of changes - bugged abilities, rapidly changing patch notes, untested changes, all make this potentially unreliable. Don't go selling your house because of what this says.

The latency selection can be set to low or high. If you regularly have severe latency effecting cast times, that may be useful to you, but I usually leave it at low. Iterations can be left at default - the more iterations you set, the more even your numbers will be, but I've found that at 1000, I get the same results to within a few damage every time. Length is how long of a fight to test - the default, 300 (5 minutes) is a good place to go.

Fight style is where one of the major arguments against simcraft fail. The default is Patchwerk, which is straight up target dummy stand and burn DPS. However, there's a second setting, which simulates a certain amount of movement during the fight. There are more complicated settings you can use to fine tune this, but the Helter Skelter setting generally aims to approximate the more hectic Ulduar fights.

Scale Factors is the most important setting in here. It defaults to no, but honestly, this is the single most useful feature of Simcraft. It tells you how good stats are for you, which determines gear selections and wether or not it's worth going for that socket bonus. Setting this will slow down the simulation, so if you're mainly seeing how a recent change effected you and don't need updated stat weights, turn it off.

This covers the important things about simcraft. You're now ready to click the Simulate button and wait for the results. The UI also formats the results, giving you useful graphs, casting priorities, mana gain breakdowns, buff uptimes, and down at the bottom, your scaling factors.

I'll give a more in depth look at the results and how to interpret them in my next piece, as well as smaller articles on how they'll influence your gem and gear selection. In the graphical form, much of it is pretty straightforward, but actually putting it to effective use takes a lighter touch.