I've been tinkering with the demonology priority list and talent build in Simcraft as I can see sevaral areas for improvement. One thing I'm investigating is using Fel Flame in cases where Hand of Gul'dan would fail to refresh Immolate, but something odd is going on.

I reduced the action list to the following:

actions+=/snapshot_stats
actions+=/fel_flame,if=dot.immolate.remains>travel_time&dot.immolate.remains<5&!in_flight
actions+=/immolate,if=!ticking

Which produces a run where the character casts immolate once and Fel Flame once every 4.66 seconds for the rest of the fight. This seems like correct behaviour.

If I add HoGd to the end of the list to create this action list:

actions+=/snapshot_stats
actions+=/fel_flame,if=dot.immolate.remains>travel_time&dot.immolate.remains<5&!in_flight
actions+=/immolate,if=!ticking
actions+=/hand_of_guldan

Then I would still expect only one Immolate as I've simply added another mechanism for refreshing it. Instead the sim claims to cast Immolate a little over 7 times. I can't understand why.

I'm not sure if this is a bug with Simcraft, a misuse of the action list, a misreading of the output on my part, or a misunderstanding of the mechanics of the spells involved. Any help would be most appreciated!

EDIT: This is using Simcraft version 403.2 which I downloaded about an hour ago.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with multi-target situations is not that the model only partially supports them, but the difficulty of deciding on something useful to model.

Other than Wrath-era trash, when you're in a situation where there are multiple targets there's usually some reason why some of them must be damaged more quickly than others and without being very fight-specific, Simcraft isn't going to be able to help with that. You also have the problem that adds may be very short-lived (which drastically changes the worth of DoT effects) multiple targets interact strangely with Decimation-like effects and some spells may only be present on one target. It can be difficult to predict what important debuffs are likely to be present on multiple targets. There's also the issue that you can't control what your other party members will do: if they choose to single-target an add down then it'll live only a fraction as long as if they uniformly AoE all targets.

If you're in a situation where you have multiple targets without a priority then it's probably not worth worrying too much and a simple rule of thumb will do.

I guess you could run a simulation where you just spam an AoE and multiply up its DPET for your number of targets (assuming you're under the AoE damage cap) and see where that overtakes the average DPET of whatever spells you feel you can apply to that number of targets, but even that glosses over a lot of the variables.

Currently the sim has both Affliction specs providing nearly the same DPS and I would like to determine which spec scales best targeting haste as the primary secondary stat and of course int and spell power before secondary stats.
Both Affliction specs favor Haste as the best secondary stat so assuming you target Haste in your gear, doing some simple math with the normalized scale factors shows that Affliction should scale better. If you target Mastery as the second best secondary stat Affliction should always be better than Aff_drain. Except that as I understand it haste has a cap where mastery does not currently.

(Haste_Aff) - (Haste_AffDrain) compared to (Mastery_Aff) - (Mastery_Affdrain)

Affliction gets +0.0736 more DPS per point of Haste
Aff_Drain gets + 0.0662 more DPS per point of Mastery

My understanding of Haste is a bit cloudy but at some point, perhaps not reachable at T11 but with raid buffs and procs I believe it is, shadowbolt will reach a maximum casting speed @ 50% haste from my understanding. Will this cause the Scale factor for haste in the Affliction profile to fall below the scale factor for haste in the Aff_Drain profile? With Eradication and Imp Soul Fire does that mean that @ 15% haste + 20% eradication + 15% imp soul fire shadowbolt is being casted as fast as possible and therefor the Scale Factor for haste is lower at that point? If this is the case how much lower is the scale factor and how does that affect the scaling of Affliction v Aff_drain? Another consideration is at that point I am assuming Glyph of UA is going to be useless and we would want to switch to Glyph of Corruption?

Finally as an aside with Aff_drain when nightfall procs do you immediately cast the instant shadowbolt in the middle of a Drain Life or wait for the Drain Life to complete and then cast the instant shadowbolt?

Not to nitpick, but isn't this an unrealistic scenario that the buff will be up 100% of the time with all 3 stacks? This is concerning dark intent, the above comment helped me remember this.