Cataclysm Mage Simulators and Formulators - Page 3

Power · 12/08/10, 9:47 AM

Originally Posted by Nathyiel

edit: Fro the FB/FFB discussion, what about hard casting FFB for refreshing the 3 stacked DOT ?

I tried this (actions+=/frostfire_bolt,if=dot.frostfire_bolt.remains<3) but it didn't change the results much (-14 DPS).

Lhivera · 12/08/10, 6:02 PM

Originally Posted by Power

Lhivera:
My action list casts 17 Frostbolts in a 300s fight. Your action list casts 0.

Something is wrong, then. .down should only be true if the buff is not active. .up should be true if the buff is active. .react should be true if the buff is active and the player has had time to notice that it is active before choosing the next cast.

Dedmonwakeen checked in an adjustment to the EF code today, but so far it isn't making any difference in my test runs. If he doesn't see this before I get home, I'll hop on IRC and explain the weirdness and maybe he can find the cause.

Edit: I apologize -- this is what I get for replying during lunch while dealing with other things. You're saying that the profile itself has dropped EF from the spec. That's probably my fault. I'll fix it and retest.

Edit again: You're correct! I get 24650 with your actions, vs 24891 with the default Frost actions, making FFB-Frost much stronger than I was estimating a few weeks ago.

You're also correct about using buff.early_frost.down -- I had not realized that because of its unique mechanic, the normal conditional syntax is reversed, as it's tracking more like a debuff than a buff.

Brainpower · 12/08/10, 11:25 PM

About playing frost with frostfirebolt, is there an amount of crit that would make this spec definitely better than the normal one because ignite works on ffb? This is something you may be able to sim. Also, does this effect the dps weight of mastery and if so is it stronger or weaker (mastery with ffb compared to fb). Could it be something viable for raiding in next tiers or would it be more like some counter-design spec that would be broken because blizzard said they wanted frost to use fb plus brain freeze becomes close to useless with this spec?

Roywyn · 12/11/10, 4:32 PM

Looking though the Sims and results, I noticed two things on Simulationcraft Results

1) The blue gear profile has 251 haste rating, 1.96% haste unbuffed, 7.06% haste raid buffed. This is for all profiles, including Arcane. Is Netherwind Presence properly implemented? It probably is and works in a layer behind the raid buffed stats, I'm just pointing out something that might look odd.

2) The blue gear set is below the first fire haste threshold. That's probably also the reason why is shows such a large DPS value for haste rating, since adding a decent amount of haste puts it above the haste threshold. The value to reach is 516 haste rating (12.5% haste total for a 5th tick on Pyro/LB) and can likely be reached easily through reforging, the set has 1690 total haste.
You can verify th results pretty easily, just compare the Living Bomb ticks to the quadruple of the Living Bombs explosions (Pyroblast gets overwritten instead). It's around 4 for the blue set and around 5 for the other sets.

The change to 516 (or slightly above) haste rating should be made for Fire and Frostfire specs.

3) How does Early Frost finally work? It reduces base cast time by 0.6s. But how is the GCD affected? Is it reduced to a fixed value? To a lower value that is then divided by (1+haste)? It was changed quite a few times and without an update on how it seems to be working right now, we can't really tell how good or bad it is and how it will scale.

[Edit i]: To avoid post clutter: I was referring to Frost Cataclysm Discussion [4.0 thread] which shows that Early Frost reduced the GCD to 0.8s, seemingly not further affected by other haste effects. It worked that way on live, but not on beta, so that's why I'm asking.

[Edit ii]: Early Frost grants you 0.6s/(1+haste) time every 15s, which is 0.6s/2s = 0.3 Frostbolts regardless of haste every 15s, or 0.02 Frostbolts per second. In raid gear, that's around 230 DPS or 1%, so the Simcraft results seem to be alright. There are also slightly more procs, so it's just a rough estimate.

Lhivera · 12/11/10, 8:51 PM

Roywyn:

1 & 2) I have not yet had any time at all to try and optimize the preraid or non-heroic T11 profiles. If anyone wants to put some time into that, it'd be appreciated!

3) I'm not aware of any changes to the EF GCD behavior since it started setting the GCD to a fixed value of 1.0 secs on the cast. It appears to be consumed at start of cast rather than end (probably to prevent "ghosting" the buff), and the cooldown appears to start then as well.

Update: So, this is kind of funny.

It turns out Arcane Power wasn't working.

Arcane now looks almost exactly equal to Frost. Which is still not quite ideal, because (a) Fire is still much higher than both, and (b) Arcane doesn't degrade as well as Frost as we deviate from Patchwerk parameters, but it's still considerably better than it used to be.

New results running now, should populate the directory over the next hour or so.

Power · 12/14/10, 6:32 AM

Lhivera:
I think I found a small improvement for your Frost sims:

Frostspec with Magearmor is mananegativ.
If you switch to Magearmor at 15% mana, the sim will run OOM (<5%) and use Evocation.
If you switch at 30% (300 sec Fight) the Frostsim will not use Evocation and gain ca. 200 DPS.

Kavan · 12/14/10, 9:49 PM

Has anyone investigated the impact of Power Torrent on arcane? I don't model all the details currently in Rawr, specifically I might be overpenalizing the negative impact on mana adept since when you're hovering close to max mana you could potentially go above normal max and negate some of it. But without that I'm getting that the enchant actually lowers your dps. Can someone do a comparison between Power Torrent and the LK straight spell power enchants?

EDIT: Ignore above, I had an error in calculations.

Cuhjo · 12/15/10, 5:44 AM

In Lhivera's sims frostfire uses the same logic as fire, namely cast scorch if mana <95% and evo CD > 60s. How would it effect frostfire dps if the sim would try to keep up 3 stacks of FFB DoT?

Venthos · 12/15/10, 6:08 AM

Something I noticed in arcane's priority list is that presence of mind is simply being activated for any arcane blast when it comes off cooldown/ gets to priority, rather than being saved for the highest stack, and/or right before popping AP and Gem. Is this intentional, and gave a dps increase not to save it, or was it simply an awkward thing to code?

Lhivera · 12/15/10, 7:17 AM

Kavan: I checked it anyway (or rather, Dedmonwakeen checked it for me), and it looks like SimC is not currently adjusting max mana with Int procs, so it's not currently measuring that.

Cuhjo: Yes, that's correct. It's definitely worth some experimentation.

Venthos: The original priority list saved it for the highest stack; removing that condition increased DPS a bit, rather than decreasing it -- I expect because during mana maintenance phases, POM never got used, and increased usage outweighed the increased crit. I have not tried using it in conjunction with Mana Gem; that's worth trying out (I did try delaying AP to line up with Mana Gem, that was a loss, not a gain).

Power: Yup, looks like a gain at both 5mins and 7mins; I've made that change. Thanks.

Silverwind · 12/15/10, 11:42 AM

Now that Shard of Woe is implemented, I did some short test runs with Theralion's Mirror and the Shard as trinkets.

In 372 gear, it seems to allow a mana-neutral AB4 conserve phase, and it may even be possible to go up to AB5 sometimes (permanent AB5 is mana-negative, but I think with enough max mana (120k+) it may even be close to be mana-neutral).

With some very rough changes to the priority list (longer burn phases), I was able to gain ~600 dps compared to the current trinkets, but I think with more optimization the trinket could be worth about 1000 dps (compared to the crit trinket).

Lhivera · 12/15/10, 11:15 PM

I switched the trinket and made a couple tweaks to the Arcane priority list. I did gain a couple hundred DPS, but couldn't get the 600 you did - could you provide the action list you used?

Kavan: For filling out the original post, does Rawr use formulation or simulation?

Power · 12/16/10, 5:58 AM

Lhivera:

The 30% switch was only an example to illustrate the problem for a 300 sec fight.

Frost-Frostbolt:
actions+=/mage_armor,if=(mana_pct*6)<target.time_to_die
Frost-Frostfirebolt:
actions+=/mage_armor,if=(mana_pct*3)<target.time_to_die

These actions should work better with different fight lengths.

PS:
actions+=/molten_armor,if=buff.mage_armor.down&buff.molten_armor.down&((mana_pct*3.5)>target.ti me_to_die)
actions+=/mage_armor,if=buff.mage_armor.down&buff.molten_armor.down
Can anyone tell me why this will always use Magearmor?

Kavan · 12/16/10, 7:36 AM

Originally Posted by Lhivera

Kavan: For filling out the original post, does Rawr use formulation or simulation?

It's using formulation.

Lhivera · 12/16/10, 7:44 AM

Hell, I didn't even know we could use math in the action strings.

There's a space in your string, but that could be an artifact of your copy/paste. If you run it with debug=1 and pipe the output to a file, you'll get a combat log-like output with all the actions detailed; it might show you if it's just sitting in mage armor, or switching to Molten and then immediately switching back.