I believe there is something just plain wrong with the Haste scaling analysis. I'm working on it....

r3055 Mage_*.simcraft

'actions+=/mana_gem,trigger=1000'

As I understand 'trigger' this means use mana gem when you have lost a minimum of 1000 mana. My mana gems give me 3500 mana. We haven't had a spell damage proc on use since T7, why does this keep getting put back in?

Change to 'actions+=/mana_gem,trigger=3500'.

This at least temporarily solves the the strangeness of the simulator claiming spirit is our best stat, you can see it in the link further down.


'actions+=/fire_blast,moving=1'

Will it only cast moving=1 events when moving or will it use other instant casts if it can? If I know I have a move coming up I'll try and do it when my instant pyro's proc so I don't lose DPS.


Evocation

There is something wrong here, evocation restores 60% of your total mana, if you look at your mana pie chart for the mages evocation is much less than 60%. It could be just that sometimes it is used and sometimes not, I have another theory that some times the mage is running out of mana just before the end of the fight and the boss dies during the evocation cutting it off. I think what's needed is for the mage to estimate if she is going to run out before the end and if so evocate as early as possible.

A nice mage trick that would be good to model is evocation on your last tick of a haste proc. In my case that would be at the end of a Scale of Fates or Hyperspeed Gloves.


19_52_00 should be 20_51_00

I've yet to find an encounter in Wrath where 33 yard scorch and 38 yard everything else is a problem.
Take one point of flame throwing and put it in Student of the Mind or Arcane Meditation. I'd recommend arcane meditation because the numbers simcraft is giving screams I need mana (Evocation should really be saved for a rainy day as it is not very reliable).

I've done a 10k iteration scale factors here: Simulationcraft Results

• You can see how much better it is not to waste your first mana gem charge and the scale factors look more sensible.
• If their are two points in Arcane meditation she does not need to evocate at all and the difference in damage is almost none existent.
• 3/3 Student of the mind is better than your current spec from damage and mana point of view.

Ok it's not going to make us beat warlocks but it's still an improvement. I will be sticking with 2/3 arcane meditation until I can take more Student of the Mind without the need to evocate in a normal fight, I prefer to have it as a backup. I know I've said in the past we have enough spirit to drop AM but I think mana regen got nerfed. Might be a good idea to keep both in and see what happens with the new gear.


SIMCRAFT.BAT

A minor annoyance but if your going to have things like threads and iterations in globals don't then overwrite them in the .bat! Plus calling it raidsimcraft.bat means it sits next to the file I want to drop onto it!


Thanks

Fizz.

Thanks, Fizzl!

I switched to auto-generating the Mage configs from wowhead profiles and there was a bug in the default action setup. I'll switch back to 20/51. Not sure why I was playing with 19/52......

We were definitely running into scenarios where some iterations need to Evocate and some do not. Unfortunately, I think this means that there is still a snake in the grass, but we're just not walking in that part of the garden.

I also think that calculating scale factors while in a raid env may not be the greatest for limiting the effects of variance.

EDIT: Results are looking better. I'll try to put out another release later tonight.

SimulationCraft r3080 is available for download.

Major Fixes:
(1) Mage mana-gem trigers
(2) Fire Mage talent spec
(3) Wide-spread HAT updates, including a "donor" report
(4) Smooth scale factor generation turned off for Haste Rating until more analysis is performed
(5) Fixes for Elemental Focus to ensure charges are not eaten inappropriately

Roywyn has done this analysis in the past, and the simplified answer is: Don't worry about up-time as much as putting it on the class that scales with crti the most.

I'm not worried about uptime but realistically in the simulation who gets the most from it since in 3.2 moonkin eclipse was changed. I think I've taken care of it with some simulations i ran. One thing though, on the simulation output is the raid down-time listing time when you are oom or something?

Also I posted this in the druid specific thread but I suppose it would get answered much faster here.

How does the Innervate trigger actually work? It used to be something like "actions+=/innervate,trigger=19000" which I took to mean, when you are 19000 mana from max to use innervate. Now I'm getting things like "actions+=/innervate,trigger=-2000" in my character configs obtained through armory, which is just confusing me.

Also is the list of actions basically setting a priority list? If so, I'm not exactly sure this is the proper way to go without a much bigger list to take into account the time left on eclipse and the time left on buffs and whatnot to get proper optimal eclipse modeling.

I define "waiting" or "down-time" as time when NOT in the GCD and NOT pressing buttons/keys. For Arcane Mages, this is usually because they are OOM. The AI tries to switch between dps/dpm rotations such that they are at zero mana at the end of the fight. Energy-driven specs (Rogues, FeralCats) have periods where they are just auto-attacking and waiting on regen.

Regarding Innervate: We'll rename the "trigger" option such that it easier to understand. Looking at the code I see that a positive trigger means you must be DOWN that much mana for the action to fire. A negative trigger implies you need to have less than -trigger mana REMAINING for the action to fire.

Regarding the priority lists: We found that the unlinking of the Eclipse CDs dramatically reduced the benefits of our "more complicated" setups. If you have a prio list (even just in pseudo-code) that you think is exceptional, post it and we'll show you how to get that behavior.

If it makes you feel any better, I recently screwed up the mana_gem trigger values........ so I just removed the option from the auto-generated actions and forced it to a good default.

We really should change all of these to mana<= and mana_spent>=. Perhaps "mana_spent" is not really a great choice either.... but you get the idea.

How does simulationcraft handle molten fury? I specified the fight length as 570 sec. Does it just assume a section of that time is in execute range?

It handles it just like it is ingame, as soon as the target is <35% hp the bonus becomes active.
The following happens when you specify max_time=570
First iteration is started, when it reaches max_time/2 = 285s it looks how much damage has been done yet to the target.
SC now just assumes that the target is now at 50% hp and runs normal to the end.
At the end it looks at the time it took to kill the target:
Is it >570? Decrease the health
Is it <570? Increase the health
This is then done after every iteration so your average fight length is what you specified in max_time

Hit and expertise are derived with negativ deltas, the sim looks how much dps you lose from substracting X hit rating.