SimulationCraft Model Development - Page 4

Erdluf · 10/29/08, 4:41 PM

For the druid, the five points in Genesis probably added a total of 1% to his DPS (5% boost to IS and MF, and they were 21% of his DPS).

Move a couple of those points to Intensity (or Dreamstate or Moonglow) and the mana should be fine for your sample fight. For a longer fight, you could also take points from Improved Moonfire (those two talent points provided a total of 1% of his DPS).

I'd play with it, but I'm about to hit the road.

The build/rotation is a bit artificial. Most Balance Druids will probably leave IMotW to restoration druids (who won't spec Furor). Most will not be casting FF either (and many won't spec IFF). Misery will take care of the spellhit portion of IFF, and Ferals will cast FF (Feral) for the Armor debuf. Feral's are typically not GC limited, and FFF does not cost any rage or energy.

dedmonwakeen · 10/29/08, 6:33 PM

Originally Posted by Erdluf

For the druid, the five points in Genesis probably added a total of 1% to his DPS (5% boost to IS and MF, and they were 21% of his DPS).

Move a couple of those points to Intensity (or Dreamstate or Moonglow) and the mana should be fine for your sample fight. For a longer fight, you could also take points from Improved Moonfire (those two talent points provided a total of 1% of his DPS).

I'd play with it, but I'm about to hit the road.

The build/rotation is a bit artificial. Most Balance Druids will probably leave IMotW to restoration druids (who won't spec Furor). Most will not be casting FF either (and many won't spec IFF). Misery will take care of the spellhit portion of IFF, and Ferals will cast FF (Feral) for the Armor debuf. Feral's are typically not GC limited, and FFF does not cost any rage or energy.

Okay, I'll juggle the talents. Thanks for the info.

Your post implies that it is sufficient to take IFF (but not cast it) to get the buff? I didn't realize someone finally went through the pain to confirm this.....

Erdluf · 10/30/08, 10:09 AM

Originally Posted by dedmonwakeen

Your post implies that it is sufficient to take IFF (but not cast it) to get the buff? I didn't realize someone finally went through the pain to confirm this.....

Bullocks did some testing, where he had a very low (about 3.5% on paper doll) crit rate. Over a few hundred casts, with no feral FF, his actual crit rate was in the 3-5% range. With FFF on the target, but only 300 casts, he saw a crit rate of almost 9%.

That is few enough casts that a false positive was a real possibility (any statisticians want to figure the odds?). Until we see a more thorough test, I'm inclined to believe his results (and the wording on the tooltip).

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Improved FF is indeed affected by Feral FF

Also, Starfall is borderline effective in a single-target rotation (may have higher DPET than a non-eclipse Starfire, particularly at low +spellpower). If you want to model it:

A single target, at range, will be hit by 10 stars (should be 12 with Starfall Glyph at 80). The stars have a 2% spellpower coefficient, each. Starfall is affected by Nature's Majesty, Vengeance, and Moonglow. In 3.02, Starfall crits cause Moonkin mana regen, but Blue has said that will be nerfed. Base damage for each star is

80: 433-503
70: 250-290

Enemies near the moonkin (tooltip says "within five yards of the enemy target", but that is not the observed behavior) take some additional damage, but as a general rule Moonkin won't want to be in melee range of bosses. Coefficient for these stars is 0.5% (each). Damage is

80: 78
70: 45 <-- Edited

I'm not sure if this matters in the Simulationcraft context, but Starfall is treated as a buff on the Druid, not as a DoT. This means that changes in the Druid's state can affect affect future stars. For instance, if the Druid dies, Starfall goes away. If the Druid gains (or loses) Owlkin Frenzy, the damage of future stars goes up (or down).

dedmonwakeen · 10/30/08, 10:19 AM

Originally Posted by Erdluf

Bullocks did some testing, where he had a very low (about 3.5% on paper doll) crit rate. Over a few hundred casts, with no feral FF, his actual crit rate was in the 3-5% range. With FFF on the target, but only 300 casts, he saw a crit rate of almost 9%.

I guess I better stop fooling around with tweaks and multi-threading and get back into gear expanding the class support.

I can force a FFF debuff.... but I'd rather have a real Feral Druid putting it up.....

Munorion · 10/30/08, 10:42 AM

Regarding IFF, using the numbers Erdluf linked to and very rough napkin math, it's something like a 2.5 sigma effect. Which, if you assume a normal distribution, should correspond to below 5% probability that there is no effect from the faerie fire.

Edit:
Actually, forgot what I wrote above. The 2 sigma (=95% confidence level) intervals of the two values overlap pretty strongly (it's something like [2.9; 6.1]% for the crit without FF and [5.45; 12.25]% for the crit with FF), and it obviously gets worse if you go to 3 sigma. So, the sample size is simply too small to say anything definite.

Tifi · 11/01/08, 4:23 AM

1. The RNG is broken, at least when USE_SFMT is undefined. At an expected resist rate of about 3% the simulation produced almost 100% resists.
Here's the correct code for using rand() in the roll function:

  if( rand() < chance*(RAND_MAX+1) ) 
  {
    return 1;
  }
  else
  {
    return 0;
  }

Please don't use % in conjunction with an RNG. Most of the time it's both unneccessary and detrimental, as it maps a uniform distribution to a non-uniform distribution.

Using rand(), recommended reading

2. My shadowfiend always does 10 swings per summon. At an attack speed of 1.5 this would require the shadowfiend expiration time to be something between 13.5 and 15, not 18.1. (Edit: According to wowhead, the tooltip actually says "Lasts 15 sec.")
Edit: Also, in report_t::print_action(), dodges and parries are not added to the miss % in the displayed results, only RESULT_MISS.

3. SWP deals the same damage whether or not shadow_weaving_wait is set. Is the current behavior of SWP not implemented?

dedmonwakeen · 11/01/08, 5:58 AM

Originally Posted by Tifi

1. The RNG is broken, at least when USE_SFMT is undefined. At an expected resist rate of about 3% the simulation produced almost 100% resists.
Here's the correct code for using rand() in the roll function:

  if( rand() < chance*(RAND_MAX+1) ) 
  {
    return 1;
  }
  else
  {
    return 0;
  }

Please don't use % in conjunction with an RNG. Most of the time it's both unneccessary and detrimental, as it maps a uniform distribution to a non-uniform distribution.

Using rand(), recommended reading

2. My shadowfiend always does 10 swings per summon. At an attack speed of 1.5 this would require the shadowfiend expiration time to be something between 13.5 and 15, not 18.1. (Edit: According to wowhead, the tooltip actually says "Lasts 15 sec.")
Edit: Also, in report_t::print_action(), dodges and parries are not added to the miss % in the displayed results, only RESULT_MISS.

3. SWP deals the same damage whether or not shadow_weaving_wait is set. Is the current behavior of SWP not implemented?

Thanks for the heads up on rand() usage. The code as originally written worked well on my linux laptop, but behaved very poorly on windows as you found out. This is why I introduced SFMT. (I actually made SFMT the default recently but that change has not yet made it into the tar.gz source download.)

SFMT was producing "more" random numbers across the entire spectrum enabling the use of the mod operator. The windows C runtime library version of rand was producing a very poor regression of values. I guess what I'm saying is that I'll certainly change the code, but my trust in windows rand() is so shattered that I'll probably stick with SFMT for a while.

Regarding shadowfiend: I could have sworn seeing a patch note about it getting increased..... but I can't find it now. He does an instant hit upon summoning. Are you including that in your "10 swings"?

Regarding SWP: In general, SimulationCraft simply will call player_buff() whenever DoT-refresh occurs. I really didn't want to make a special case for SWP. It would be easy enough to override the refresh_duration() method on SWP to cache the SW stack...... but I was assuming that Blizzard would be fixing the problem soon. By putting the "wait" conditional in the config I figured to model what people would be doing to get around the bug. However..... since Blizzard still hasn't made the change I suppose I should conform my model to their buggy behaviour.

EDIT: #1 and #2 are checked in. I'll get to #3 later tonight.

Tifi · 11/01/08, 6:36 AM

Originally Posted by dedmonwakeen

SFMT was producing "more" random numbers across the entire spectrum enabling the use of the mod operator.

Even with a greater range, you shouldn't use modulo. Consider this: You have a random number generator X that produces results in the range [0,1234], and you take %1000. Let's call this Y=X%1000. The values of X in [1000,1234] are now mapped to values of Y in [0,234], thus you effectively doubled the probability of values for Y in [0,234]. For example the result Y=100 can be produced by both X=100 and X=1100, with probability 2/1235. The result Y=900, however, can only be produced by X=900, with probability 1/1235.

Edit: Assuming SFMT produces any 32-bit unsigned int, you should use 4294967295.0 instead of RAND_MAX. (2^32-1)

dedmonwakeen · 11/01/08, 8:30 AM

Originally Posted by Tifi

Even with a greater range, you shouldn't use modulo. Consider this: You have a random number generator X that produces results in the range [0,1234], and you take %1000. Let's call this Y=X%1000. The values of X in [1000,1234] are now mapped to values of Y in [0,234], thus you effectively doubled the probability of values for Y in [0,234]. For example the result Y=100 can be produced by both X=100 and X=1100, with probability 2/1235. The result Y=900, however, can only be produced by X=900, with probability 1/1235.

Edit: Assuming SFMT produces any 32-bit unsigned int, you should use 4294967295.0 instead of RAND_MAX. (2^32-1)

Ah.... now I understand. I think I was getting "lucky" by the fact that my modulo divisor was so much smaller than the maximum random integer, significantly reducing the benefit given the low end of the range.

SFMT provides a utility to return a floating point number between zero and one..... so I've switched to use that.

• Nicarras · 11/02/08, 12:34 PM

How accurate are the shaman numbers? I have some ele/enh shaman telling me that the modeled rotations in the sample 80 file are way off.

dedmonwakeen · 11/02/08, 5:59 PM

Originally Posted by Nicarras

How accurate are the shaman numbers? I have some ele/enh shaman telling me that the modeled rotations in the sample 80 file are way off.

I would love for the Shaman numbers to be off because they just plain are not competitive and I feel bad for my Shammy guild-mates.

I haven't done a comparison against Enhsim in a while, so I could have drifted off-course.

I did a very detailed comparison against Binke's spreadsheet a while back and found bugs in both our models, but I thought I exited that process with a pretty decent model.

My recommendation to you is to run with "log=1" and "iterations=1" in the config file. This will generate a combat log allowing you to easily examine the spell choices and how much they tick for.

Bottom line: I'm buried right now. I'm just finishing up some massive infrastructure changes and some class polishing. My plan is to put currently supported classes on hold so that I can get Pally/Hunter/Rogue added.

I'm not really out to prove anything..... just doing the best I can, so.........

If someone just tells me "You're wrong." I'm probably not going to pay attention because I'm spread so thin.

If someone tells me "You're wrong because X/Y/Z and here are my counter examples A/B/C", well then I'm going to give them a TON of my attention and pester them with follow-up questions. So...... if your Shaman buddies have some specific data that is well-documented then I would be very grateful if they shared it with me.....

Eleven · 11/03/08, 11:45 AM

I think as far as elemental goes, it was shown that using earth shock in a rotation at 80 was a dps decrease and only a slight increase at 70 when using the ES glyph.

Btw, you still have mages/druids/spriests using wizard oil in the sample 80 file.

Sorry to nitpick, but keep up the good work, this project is amazing.

dedmonwakeen · 11/03/08, 12:51 PM

Originally Posted by Eleven

I think as far as elemental goes, it was shown that using earth shock in a rotation at 80 was a dps decrease and only a slight increase at 70 when using the ES glyph.

Btw, you still have mages/druids/spriests using wizard oil in the sample 80 file.

Sorry to nitpick, but keep up the good work, this project is amazing.

No need to apologize, nitpicking is exactly what the project needs in order to be successful.

Yeah, sorry about the Wizard Oil...... It keeps falling off the end of my list. I'll have it out by next release.

Regarding the Earth Shock testing: Was this a result of theorycraft, or somebody doing in-game testing? ie: Is it because the GCD is not being reduced properly due a bug..... Or do people simply believe it just sucks apriori?

Roywyn · 11/03/08, 12:58 PM

Originally Posted by dedmonwakeen

Regarding the Earth Shock testing: Was this a result of theorycraft, or somebody doing in-game testing? ie: Is it because the GCD is not being reduced properly due a bug..... Or do people simply believe it just sucks apriori?

Earth Shock GCD is hard capped at 1.0s like any other GCD. Tested on PTR 2-3 weeks ago.

GC said that it's intended to reduce the GCD further (to 0.5s or less with haste), and they're trying to fix it.
No news since then. I think it'll a lot of work to override the GCD hard cap.

[Edit]:

Originally Posted by Eleven

Unrelated, for arcane mages, I've been coming up with a 25-50 dps increase using a 57/14/0 build with arcane power/flows and glyphed mage armor over master of elements/ glyphed molten armor.

Arcane is riding the mana limit pretty hard. Whenever you change mana (like when 2T7 bonus gets added or JoW gets changed again), you'd have to flip back and forth with AP/MoW/Armour to see which one combination is better.

They've said that they want to nerf Arcane Barrage due to PvP and change some things to buff Arcane Blast or make it interact with Arcane Barrage, so it's not really worth changing right now.

Eleven · 11/03/08, 1:15 PM

Removing earth shock from the rotation puts elemental shaman back within that 8-10% deficit many people have been coming up with, I don't know if that would also change the scaling numbers you posted recently.

Unrelated, for arcane mages, I've been coming up with a 25-50 dps increase using a 57/14/0 build with arcane power/flows and glyphed mage armor over master of elements/ glyphed molten armor.