Simcraft Supplemental: Version Changes

The Simcraft UI has been revamped slightly. This post is here to cover a few of the changes.

Of minor note, the in-UI browser for importing off of Armory isn't broken anymore, it actually displays fairly well.

The Options Panel is of main note. It's been split into several sections. The raid support buffs and debuffs have their own panels, which is honestly a bit more inconvenient than the old way, but two good changes are included. There's a completely separate options tab for Scaling, and you can turn off scale factors you don't care about. This will shorten simulation times, since you can turn off melee stats, stats with trivial DPS contributions like intellect, and hit, which mots people treat as a binary capped/not capped problem and not a sliding scale.

There is a more interesting feature added, stat plotting. More on this one through the jump.

Some more pretty colors. Note that these are very process intensive charts, and it takes much longer to generate them than raw scale factors. Think carefully before you turn this option on.

Anyway, what this is here is a more dynamic view of scale factors, and also gives a glimpse into why they're such dynamic things.

The chart on the left is a wider view of what your scale factors can do, showing how your DPS will change with the gain or loss of up to 200 points in any given stat. Note the waviness in haste scaling, it even dips at certain points. I've mentioned this in other simcraft threads, it's an artifact of simcraft's shortcomings in certain fringe case scenarios. So when in doubt, it may be useful to plot both haste and crit, just to see if your current scale factor is an artifact or not.

Also note hit, it drops off rapidly below the hit cap, but is completely flat above. As you can see, it shows mine flatlining at just above +0, this is because Simcraft doesn't model the +1% hit from the Draenei racial aura, and I'm currently not hit capped without that aura.

The right chart is nothing really new, just a sort of speedometer of stats. It gives a nice visual look at your scale factors to make large decisions, like a spirit robe vs. a haste one, but it doesn't bring anything new to the table.

If you want to really use either feature, turn off haste scaling and haste plotting, because you'll get a heavily skewed graph. Haste, crit, spellpower, spirit... even intellect look very close in both charts because hit is pushing them all down the speedometer on the right, and is greatly extending the bottom of the plot on the left, in both cases crunching the other stats into a tiny window.