Team Robot Simulator and Gear Comparison Tool
 

The Team Robot Simulator and Gear Comparison Tool is live!

Features

• Completely web-based: no downloading, installing, or updating! (Requires Microsoft Silverlight. Tested and works with IE, FF, Chrome on Windows, and FF, Safari on Mac.)
• Load your characters from the armory
• Easy, visual interface for customizing talents, gear, gems, enchants, glyphs, and buffs
• Powerful rotation editor that allows you to create your own priority-based DPS rotations
• Save versions of your entire character, sets of gear, talent specs, and rotations
• Easily share any of your saved data with a simple yet effective import/export feature
• Detailed, visual simulation summary and searchable combat log
• Ranks gear, gems, and enchants using a DPS estimation technique that extrapolates the value of items from over 600,000 cached simulation runs.

We hope that you find the site useful. We welcome any feedback, positive or negative. You can post here, or on our own forum if you need technical support.

Why another DK tool?
Kahorie has a very accurate simulator already... there's a gear optimization program... a rawr DK module... what gives?

We started work on this simulator before Kahorie's simulator was available... we chose DKs because they're (relatively) new and shiny, and no real tools existed at the time. But... work got in the way, and we had to shelf the project for a while. When we picked it back up, we had to complete it quickly for a Silverlight Competition (there are a lot of cool silverlight projects up there if you're into that kind of thing), and DK was the only class that we had made any progress on. Thus, DKs first. We will be adding more classes in the near future though.

The overall motivation for the project is straightforward: we want to create an easy-to-use, web-based theorycrafting tool that works for any class and requires minimal maintenance. Creating user interfaces is very time-consuming, so most people just skip it and focus on the theory -- well we decided to take the time and create a general UI, thus making these powerful tools available to a wider user base.

And for the hardcore theorycrafters, we wanted to enable you to test out your ideas without having to do a lot of back-and-forth with the developer of a tool, thus the rotation editor. It is still a little rough around the edges, but with a little imagination, I think that you'll find it to be incredibly flexible.

The DPS estimation features are pretty basic compared to rawr -- far less options. Our goal was not to recreate rawr, but to give a simple comparison between items that compliments and builds on the core simulator. Our approach is different too: we don't do complex score functions. A simulator is much more "basic" in a sense, so we created a similarly "basic" estimation technique: just run a bunch of simulations and do an approximation using the cached data and your current gear. No assumptions, no formulas -- just data. It worked out much better than we expected, though it isn't perfect yet. Always hit the 'Simulate' button to get the "true" DPS.

Seems like it's more of an item comparison tool instead of a complex simulator. I get a different result for each run, but the item table doesn't change due to your cached simulations. The results seem to be wrong, I get the PvP helmet as the second best choice and the summary shows unusual rankings. I saw 40k autoattacks. The interface could be more accessible, e.g. I clicked on DK instead of load.
The idea of a web based simulator is nice, but you should make a beta sign on it for now.

The item customization rating seems to automatically include set bonuses in the rating, thus vastly preferring set pieces over non-set. It would be nice to have an option to turn this off, for the purpose of rating items when wearing 1, 3 or 5 pieces of the set where the set bonus doesn't add anything.

Edit: Alternatively, of course, you could only rate the set bonuses according to pieces actually worn. For instance if you are wearing 3 pieces of T9, the rating would add the 4 piece set bonus for slots not currently worn (rating the pieces higher) and not add it for pieces worn (rating them lower).

I tried out your character, but you were in tank gear, so I was unable to determine why it thought the PvP helmet should be ranked so highly.

Somebody else mentioned these "40k" auto-attacks... I'm pretty sure that it's a display error somehow, because someone else was getting item tooltips with extra zeroes on the end for some stats. What culture settings do you have on your computer? e.g. mine is en-US for english-United States. I'm going to try and test various cultures this weekend.

It is a complex simulator... I'm curious as to what leads you to believe that it is not? It models every DPS-relevant DK ability, talent, trinket proc, etc. with as accurate information as I could locate. The only fundamental difference between ours and others that I have seen, is that it is web-based and has a "point-and-click" user interface on top of it.

By default it runs 100 5-minute fight simulations, which isn't quite enough to get the same result every time (you can see the margin of error next to the DPS result). It seemed like a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. We plan to expose those settings though, so that people can run longer simulations if they desire.

Yes, it is automatically factoring in set bonuses...

The item comparisons use a very simple approach right now: as a baseline, it estimates your DPS using your current gear, but with nothing equipped in the slot that you are looking at. Then, it goes through and equips each item in the list and calculates your DPS: the difference becomes your DPS gain if you were to use that item. It then normalizes the result shown on the UI to your currently equipped item.

So to be clear, right now you see the following behavior:

If you are wearing shoulder, helmet, and legs of the T9 set:
- T9 gloves will be ranked very highly, because equipping them would give you the 4-piece bonus of awesomeness.
- T9 shoulders will be ranked like any other item, because removing it won't cause you to gain or lose a set bonus.

If you are wearing helmet, shoulders of the T9 set:
- T9 gloves will be ranked like any other item, because adding it won't cause you to gain a set bonus.
- T9 shoulders will be ranked very highly, because removing it would cause you to lose a valuable set bonus.


For now, I think that this behavior makes sense, and is "good enough". Long term, I would really like to separate set bonuses out entirely, and rank them/display them independently.

First off, very nice UI, tool is very smooth and pleasing to the eye.

With 5 minutes it seems to reach a point where 1 extra auto attack based on haste messes with the numbers quite a bit, for instance in my current gear, replacing my Armbands of Bedlam with bracers rated higher (although armbands are BiS btw) the higher rated bracers are constantly around 8650+- and current ones around 8750+- making that extra auto attack have a rather large impact.

A option for fight length will be nice (thanks for bottom post)

The sim is doing multiple 5 minute sims, which reflect modern encounters better than 20. I am pretty sure Blizzard doesn't want to make more 20 minute encounters (Illidan was one, and it wasn't nice if you wiped). However, I use 6 minute for the Ret Rawr files since that matches ToC better than 5 minutes.

This is actually an interesting point... haste is a funny stat like that, where it actually has "thresholds" of usefulness. These are very hard to predict though, because there are so many random factors that go into a boss fight -- you might have to move around, timing on heroism, and so on. A simulator is a much more "consistent" situation though, where you always get in the same number of attacks.

I cached a version of your character that's showing these numbers, and I'll take a look at it and see if I can get it to behave better.

Yes, I'll put in an option for fight length and number of iterations. There are merits to both using really long fights, and doing a lot of really short fights, so I'll let people choose whichever setting suits their needs.

Interesting tool, and it's nice that I don't have to download anything like with other simulators/gear comparison programs. I'll be using this in the future for sure, it has a neat interface. If at all possible it would be nice to be able to reset talents by right clicking them instead of hitting them until they're full and then hitting them one more time. I found that part a little annoying.

I found this tool to be quite effective and I admit I was rather impressed. Most notably is the speed of simulation. One thing i noticed however, after loading my character profile, then individually selecting the 'best in-slot' that Mr. Robot assumed I only wished to gem Bold Scarlet Ruby's which left me significantly below hit cap (4.2%). I notice depending on some gear choices I make, the weighted values change for individual items (this is great for determining side grades) but it doesn't seem to work for hit rating with regards to gemming.

I guess my questions is:

If its capable of calculating optimal side grades, does it also take into consideration hit and expertise caps? Perhaps a decent way of solving this would be to give users the option of selecting preset gems and calculating various combination of particular gems to force a cap.

All in all, its a smooth and clean program, and in time with some community feedback and your continued support could definitely surpass other options available.

Yeah I would have preferred right-click too. For now, you can control-click to remove a talent point, and I also allow it to cycle once you hit the end (if you control-click on an empty talent, it will fill it to the max if you have enough points available, good for quickly doing a spec).

Silverlight (and Flash) do not natively support any right-click events... kind of irritating. I'm pretty sure that there is a way to do it though that involves interacting with some javascript. I'll look into it when I get some time.

The DPS estimates do indeed take hit/expertise caps into consideration. But you are right, the gemming logic is very simplistic right now... it just stuffs strength gems into every socket. I've thought a little about how to do this better... but it's kind of difficult to make it user-friendly. One idea that I had is to provide a couple of "canned" options like, "redo all my gems to get me to the hit cap," or "redo all my gems to maximize armor penetration."

There is an issue i have with unbuffed character having 29.62% crit in game char sheet, and only 21,6% crit in team robot stats list, for blood spec 51-0-20. I tried to change talents within the team robot and as far as i can tell, it seem to get the dark conviction talent properly. Not sure where the difference is coming from, nor if it is just for show or it enters in simulations or not, i am just signaling that this difference exists, on completelly unbuffed comparison, no horn even. Didnt investigated any further, so it may be normal aswell, its just a frist look feedback. Also a note about the built in talent spec, most of the tooltips with % have an extra 2 digits of "00" - two extra zeroes in percentages tooltips.

On the overall i loved the tool, very well done, looks great and promises to be very usefull. Thumbs definatelly up!

To agree with cyberial. I am also noticing a loss of 8% crit as 51/0/20. And can also confirm that Dark Conviction is seemingly adding 1% crit per talent point as it should.

There is another issue with the BS socket on bracers. When I load my character in the socket appears empty and I can not socket it. I can however reselect the bracers and the BS socket comes with a Bold Cardinal Ruby already socketed, but this then causes an issue that I cannot change the gem as the option list does not come up.

One final thing to mention is that it is reporting gemming Expertise to cap is a DPS loss over gemming Strength. As far I was aware, this was not the case.

But all in all, as above, yes it has it's issues currently, however it's a nice tool, and could prove useful with certain adjustments.


EDIT: phrasing

For those of you out there who want to play around with Unholy builds, I've worked out this priority that simulates the IT>PS>SS>BS>BS>Dump Repeat 10s rotation as accurately as I can. As is, this particular rotation will use Blood Boil if you have Desolation up - but it's easier to delete rather than re-add for people who are DWing. Also, if you are DWing, and you have a Frost subspec, I recommend updating the condition on Deathcoil (the one in #6) to "HAVE LEAST 119 POWER" to account for only firing DC's if you'll otherwise RP cap yourself. The good ol' fashioned dump is at the bottom.

EDIT - also forgot to mention, in addition to deleting Blood Boil for 2h priority, you'll also need to delete the Desolation condition from Blood Strike.

To use this, copy the code below and save it as an .xml file, then you ought to be able to simply click ROTATION, LOAD, then IMPORT.