Simulate World of Warcraft to Find the Best Gear Upgrades
While you can still be a terrible World of Warcraft player who can’t get good parsing to save your life, don’t let your gear hold you back. I can’t help you get better if you just press buttons throughout the game, but there are tons of technical tools you can use to ensure you don’t lose valuable DPS due to poor gear choices.
The “modeling” aspect is the fun part. To help you identify the best equipment for your character, including what improvements you should take when you will be offered a choice, there are a variety of tools with which you can run hundreds (or thousands) simulators Wacraft battle. They will give you a good idea of how different gear combinations can work in the game itself. Most of the tools, if good, will also give you advice on what exactly you should equip for maximum potential DPS.
While my lazy one used to rely on Wowhead guides to outfit my character, I appreciated the speed and completeness of modeling tools like Ask Mr. Robot , Raidbots and SimulationCraft . I’ve used them to make my (always terrible) Demon Hunter the best he can be, and they’re incredibly useful in helping me figure out what enhancement is, what’s the collateral, and what to ignore among the intimidating parts of the loot I’m getting it now.
To get started with the simulation, I recommend downloading and installing two add-ons for World of Warcraft : Ask Mr. Robot and Simulationcraft . You can use any of these for modeling, but I find it helpful to have both at hand.
I’ll start with the robot. In the game, you click the “Ask Mr. Robot” icon, which will give you a huge chunk of text to copy:
Once you’ve done that, head over to the Ask Mr. website . Robot in your browser. Find this field where you will insert this large amount of text:
Once you do this, your character should appear:
Ask Mr. Robot has tons of features you can play with – some are free and some require a premium subscription to the site. You will likely be using the Best of the Slot calculator the most, which looks at all of the skins available in all of the game’s dungeons and raids and gives you a list of what to look for.
Just choose your talents and equipment strategy (single target or multiple targets), and then set different parameters depending on your character’s achievements and / or your aspirations.
For example, you might want to specify the highest level of Mythic + dungeon that you can run, as well as the highest level of any legendary equipment you are holding. You will then want to choose which dungeons / raids and difficulties you want to check – for example, useful if you are moving into the heroic Sodium Castle and you are curious about what improvements await you, or if you just want to limit yourself to whichever mythical dungeons you are running right now. to see how optimized your character is (and how much he can be).
Once you’re done experimenting with the options, click Find the Best in a Slot to do so, which will bring up a screen similar to a shopping list that tells you what gear you should find and where you will get it:
You will also see a full breakdown of your character’s stats, as well as a suggestion for how much more damage you will inflict if you follow Ask Mr. Robot’s advice. At this point, I usually hit Return to Customization and tinker with other variables to figure out what my character’s future development might be like – and where I should devote my time, be it playing Mythics, playing PvP, or raiding.
This “Ask Mr. Robot” is probably one of the tools I’ve used the most so as not to waste time playing dungeons that don’t really have the gear I really need. As for Simulationcraft , another useful add-on, it works in much the same way. You install it and then copy a large line of text into other programs – even Simulationcraft itself, which also offers an application that you can install on your system to run your own complex combat simulators in any quantity.
However, I think it is much better to use Simulationcraft with the Raidbots website. To get started, go to World of Warcraft , click the Simulationcraft button and copy everything in the text box that appears:
Then you will open the Top Gear Raidbots page and paste this text into the box. This will give you a variety of things to choose from, which can be confusing at first. Here’s a simple version: whatever you choose will be compared to your original gear and whatever else you choose. So, for example, in my list of equipment I see the following:
The items that I currently have are in yellow. Everything else is either items in my inventory that I could equip, or items that I was offered as part of the weekly Grand Vault reward system in World of Warcraft – since I copied the text when my vault was open but before I chose the award because everyone has to do.
Anyway, I just need to click on any gear I want to compare and it will be highlighted in yellow. To start the simulation, simply click the large Find Top Gear button at the bottom once you have made your selection. And, yes, you can also use Raidbots to compare different channels, legendary items, soul bindings, enchantments, and even your character’s talents. It is completely free to use and is one of the most complete tools to make sure your character is set up for maximum performance.
The results screen will look something like this:
Everything highlighted in yellow is an update that the Raidbots think you should make based on the combat simulation results. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see how the different combinations of your gear worked. If you want to run another simulation with different variables – a different fighting style than just opening one target, a different duration of the fight, more bosses, and so on – you are welcome. It’s still free; you just have to wait in the queue to process the results, which usually takes no more than a minute or two.
While these modeling tools may seem daunting at first glance, I highly recommend you play with them. You will learn how they work fast enough that you won’t be able to stop using them every time you get new gear and want to check if this update is valid or not. To be honest, I found myself using these simulation sites even more often than the Pawn addon – and I was in a good way surprised at what they recommended to me. There is nothing more annoying than spending a whole week of in-game time on targeted gear, which in the end isn’t all that important.