SimC help

Simulationcraft is a program available at http://simulationcraft.org

To quote their front page;

"SimulationCraft is a tool to explore combat mechanics in the popular MMO RPG World of Warcraft. It is a multi-player event-driven simulator written in C++ that models raid damage. Increasing class synergy and the prevalence of proc-based combat modifiers have eroded the accuracy of traditional calculators that rely upon closed-form approximations to model very complex mechanics. The goal of this simulator is to close the accuracy gap while maintaining a performance level high enough to calculate relative stat weights to aid gear selection."

Simulationcraft, or simc, is a piece off freeware that is very useful for all wow players who want to optimize their gearing, and do any amount of theorycrafting. There are currently 56 volunteer contributors to the code, including myself. If you ever get frustrated with simc, or have any problems with it, please remember that we are incredibly lucky that people have chosen to spend a great deal of time and expertise creating a very complex and accurate program, then given it away for free with no hope or chance at a profit, and kept it up to date with all the myriad changes WoW gets. We, as a community of players, are not entitled to such a great resource, and we must treat it as a gift, not a right.

That being said, any problems you have can be reported at the issues list to help us keep improving it.



A Beginner's Guide to SimC

Start by jumping onto http://simulationcraft.org.


You'll see the "Download Latest Release" Button in the top right corner. Click it to automatically grab your OS's version. Finish downloading and installing the program. Open it up, and it should look something like this:



First visit the options menu from the top screen.
Overview of useful options to tweak:

Version: Change between the live game and the PTR build (if there is one)
Iterations: How many times the sim runs, higher numbers give more accurate results, but take longer. I find 10k to be a good ballpark for dps comparisons, and 25k good for stat weights.
World Lag: Can be used to simulate lag, and find out how it effects your dps.
Length: The duration of the fight in seconds.
Vary Length: Let's the sim change the length +- a bit for each variation. For example, with length 1000, a vary length of 20% makes the fight length 800-1200 for every iteration.
Fight Style: The type of fight going on. Defaults to patchwerk, raid dummy is just a really long patchwerk, HecticAddCleave has regular movement and adds spawning, HelterSkelter has movement, interrupts, stuns, and target swaps, Ultraxion has stuns and raid damage, and light and heavy movement are exactly like they sound.
Target Level: Changes the target level, only really worth changing if you're trying to optimize for heroics or something.
Target Race: Changes the target race, for example to beast to see it's effect for trolls.
Num Enemies: Set's the number of targets that will be stacked together for the entire fight for you to AE down.
Challenge Mode: Scales all your gear down to 463.
Player Skill: The chance of the sim to skip over an action they should have performed. Varies from 0% at elite to 50% at ouch, fire is hot!
Threads: The number of your computer's threads used by the sim. Higher number runs faster, but takes up more of your processor power.
Armory Region: Change to whatever your region is.
Armory Spec: Tweak this if you want to import whatever spec was not active when the toon logged off.
Default Role: Just leave on auto unless you want to try to sim tanking as frost or something.


At the top of the screen, right under options, you'll see a bunch of other option tabs. Buffs/Debuffs allows you to turn off any of the raid buffs you want, they are all on by default. Next tab is scaling, here you will be able to select which stats you want to find the value for. I suggest strength, haste, crit, and mastery.
Next, jump over to the import tab up top. This is where we find your character. It defaults to battle.net, where you can search for your character, and bring up their armory page. When you've loaded up the page, hit import on the bottom right. You should get something like this.



# means comment, the sim will ignore any lines with this in front.
This is your "sim profile", and has 4 parts.

Basic info including race, spec, talents and such at the top.
The action list, or what abilities the sim will use. The sim tries to use the first ability on the list, if it can't (cd, not enough resources), it jumps down to the next ability. When it finds an ability it can use, it jumps back up to the top and starts over.
The gear list, which has all of your gear in text form.
The stat summary. This is all of the stats and bonuses you receive from gear, commented out. This is just for you, and won't effect the sim in any way. If you remove the # at the start, it will override the amount of the stat on gear, which easily let's you set up stats.


For the time being, don't touch any of this, and just hit the Simulate! button in the bottom right. After waiting a while, the sim results will show up! You'll see your simulated dps in the top, and if you ran scale factors, you'll see a box like this:




The "Scale Factors" tab at the top gives you your stat values! Plug these into reforgelight or AMR and hooray, you've got your own personal stat weights!



An Advanced Guide to SimC


Now that we've got the basics out of the way, and I have a place to send people who ask me how to do sims, let's look into some of the advanced uses. Starting with:

Reading the report
I'm going to assume the majority of the information is self explanatory, so let's look at the more interesting parts and what they mean.
At the top, the waiting statistic is how long the sim spent without anything to do, if it's at 0%, that means the sim was completely GCD capped for the entire duration of 7.5 minutes or whatever you set the length too. As you get more haste, or compare different spec, it's worth keeping an eye on this statistic.
In the abilities breakdown you can see how much dps you did total, versus how much of that dps came from a particular ability. This is useful when you change something and want to see where the dps was either lost or gained. You also see the count, or number of times performed, and the DPE, or total average damage per use, as well as useful things like crit %, uptime on DoTs, and average crit/average hit damage.
In the buffs breakdown, you'll see how many times each and every buff was started fresh, and how many times each buff was refreshed when still active. You can see the time between each fresh proc under interval, and the time between proc, old or new, as the trigger. The up-time is what % of the time the buff was up, and the benefit was how much value you got out of the buff, for example, pillar of frost has a higher benefit than uptime because it boosts the power of other strength cds up at the same time.
We can also take a look at resources, the most interesting stat being Overflow. Overflow is the amount of wasted resources, which directly equates to wasted dps, and should be kept as low as possible.
You can see overflow for both runic and rune regen. If you want to check overflow for procs, just check the refresh stat under buffs.
The last interesting part of the data is the action list report, which shows how many times each action on the list was executed, as well as a sample sequence. This is great for debugging new action lists.



Modifying the sim
One of the best parts about simc is the freedom to tweak things and use it to get useful information about the tweak. For example, item swaps.

Item swapping
Changing out one item for another to see exactly how big of an upgrade the item will be is a great use of simc. For example, I have this line for my chest item:

chest=breastplate_of_the_lost_catacomb,id=86913,upgrade=2,gems=80str_160mastery_80str_160mastery_120crit,enchant=80all,reforge=crit_mastery

Name, item id, upgrade level, gems, enchants, and reforges all need to be managed when properly swapping gear. Let's say I want to see how much of an upgrade the 522 tier chest is. First, I'd google the chest.
That takes me to the wowhead page, which has all the info I need. First off, the name.

chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw

Simc uses _ instead of spaces, and - just gets removed, so that's the right name. Next, I check the item ID, which happens to be the number in the URL for wowhead, and add that in.

chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw,id=95225

Now the sim knows what the item is, but we need to add gems and enchants as well, because the first chest is also gemmed and enchanted. Checking the wowhead page, I see 1 gem of each color, and a 180 str bonus. So for gems;

chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw,id=95225,gems=160str_80str160mastery_80str_160hit_180str

Remember to separate each stat with a _ and add in the socket bonus as well. Now, whats the enchant for a chest item? It's 80 to every stat, so.

chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw,id=95225,gems=160str_80str160mastery_80str_160hit_180str,enchant=80all

Now comes the tricky part, reforging. First, I check my first chest, and see it's got crit and haste on it, and it's reforged into mastery. That's good, no messy hit or expertise to screw up the caps. The new chest has haste and expertise though. Expertise is a messy stat, because even if you reforge it away, you still are going to be way over the cap, and really need to do a full set of reforges to get rid of it. But, that's a lot of work, so here is a great and easy approximation. Note that this does not work if you are unable to reforge away a significant portion of the total expertise over the cap.
Leave it unreforged, and add a gem with mastery in the amount of expertise on the item. The new chest has 994 expertise, so I'm basically saying that I'll be able to reforge away expertise elsewhere into mastery, or at least something similar in value. The final code becomes:

chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw,id=95225,gems=160str_80str160mastery_80str_160hit_180str_994mastery,enchant=80all

Now that we've created the item code, we just replace the old chest line with the new one and watch the dps go up or down, and that's how big of an upgrade this item is.

You can also leave the first profile alone, and add this to the bottom:

copy=new_chest
chest=breastplate_of_the_allconsuming_maw,id=95225,gems=160str_80str160mastery_80str_160hit_180str_994mastery,enchant=80all

This will make a new copy of your profile, and only change the chest to your new one, then it will rank them for you and show you the exact difference in dps and where it comes from.


AMS soaking
Recently implemented into simc, AMS soaking simulates our runic gain throughout the various fights, and helps to get even more accurate dps rankings and stat weights. I suggest some form of AMS soaking in every sim.

It's in by default right under auto attack as this line, but we can customize it if we want.


 actions+=/antimagic_shell,damage=100000

Now, you can obviously tweak the damage amount, and it's converted at 1000 damage to 1 runic. There are two other options you can also tweak to try to nail a particular fight. ,interval=X where X is a number will change the amount of time in-between the AMS soaks. It defaults to every 60 seconds, and cannot be set lower than 45 seconds.
,interval_stddev=X is the last option, which is the amount the time varies between casts. If specified as less than 1, it is interpreted as a percent of the mean, otherwise it is interpreted as seconds. For example ,interval_stddev=5 gives +- 5 seconds to each AMS interval, while ,interval_stddev=.2 gives a 20% +- to each interval. This defaults to 5%.

Example for some crazy ams soaking:
 actions+=/antimagic_shell,damage=1000000,interval=20,interval_stddev=.4
Fun with stats
Another fun thing to do in simc is to radically change the stat values. At the bottom of every import, you'll find the stat summary, with lines like this.
# gear_haste_rating=5256

If you remove the #, it overrides whatever actual amount of haste is on the gear.
gear_haste_rating=5256

Ever wondered what your damage breakdown would be with 50,000 haste?
gear_haste_rating=50000

This is how I modified the values of stats for the stat weight analysis.

As well as setting stats, you can set other things in the summary to override gear, such as:
# meta_gem=capacitive_primal or meta_gem=reverberating_primal
# tier15_2pc_melee=1 where 1 is true and 0 is false



Conclusion
SimC is an awesome tool, and I for one would like to thank the contributors(most of which do a hell of a lot more than me) for putting it together and keeping it up to date. It's one of our most valuable and versatile tools, and a basic understanding of it is well worth getting. I think I might be occasionally doing more posts on it in the future, and how to use it well.

If you are interested in learning more about it for the time being, you can check out the fantastic wiki which has a ton of documentation on things like plots and building your own action lists.