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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-18-2011 @ 12:31PM
Althor said...
The Priest_Shadow_T11_359.simc profile isn't necessarily a good one to base decisions off.
If you check out its mana timeline and its Resources you can see it runs into mana issues and is forced to use Dispersion. In such a situation adding more Haste will only increase the mana issues and so you'll see less of a gain than you would if mana wasn't a problem.
And so, as you see if you calculate scale factors with this profile you see Haste valued lower than something like Crit because more Crit means more Sin & Punishment procs meaning a shorter cooldown on Shadowfiend and thus more mana regen.
And all of the secondary stats are worth relatively less than +Intellect with this profile in part because more +Intellect is also giving a higher base mana pool and regen.
Basically at the 359 gear level mana is still a significant problem.
Things improve at the 372 gear level and are better yet at the 378 and 391 item levels.
As for Haste acting "weird" with SimulationCraft there are some things to bare in mind. Haste is not really a true linear stat. All of our DoTs have breakpoints where they will suddenly gain an extra tick and their duration will increase by a full ticks worth. An increased duration on our DoTs means we have to recast them less often meaning more time to cast Mind Flay and Mind Blast etc.
Now for Shadow Word: Pain gaining the next breakpoint is mostly irrelevant as we refresh it so often anyway.
It matters more for VT and the DoT portion of DP as these don't auto-refresh. VT is only 5 ticks as well at 0 haste and averages a 15second duration but it can drop lower than that just before the next breakpoint. If this happen you're casting VT a lot more often which means less time on the fillers.
The biggest thing for haste breakpoints however is with Improved Devouring Plague. Thanks to a bug Improved Devouring Plague doesn't actually get calculated with the same Haste % buffs as our DoTs (for example Darkness and DI's haste% have no effect on its calculations) nor does it start gaining "ticks" the same way as our DoTs. However, much like Conflag with Destruction Warlocks (though to a lesser extent) getting that next "tick" on your Improved Devouring Plague can give you a nice extra chunk of DPS (and without worrying about external things like latency/reaction times with more haste).
Now scale factor generation in SimulationCraft is pretty simplistic. We generate a baseline run with the current gear and then for each stat we want to find the scale factor for we do another run with that stat modified. For most stats we add 300 of it by default (for Hit and Spirit we lower it by 300). We then divide the DPS difference between each run and the baseline to calculate the scale factor for that stat.
It doesn't worry about breakpoints or even hit caps. It just performs that simple task described above.
And so, if because you've added 300 haste rating and you suddenly reach a new breakpoint etc. you'll see the scale factor value of Haste spike up. And if it doesn't cross a breakpoint it will seem lower than it "should" if you're used to have seen it being higher.
Also it's expected behaviour than Mastery will catch up to Haste as gear progresses. The more Haste we have the faster we generate Shadow Orbs which in turn increases the damage boost to Mind Blast (which hits like a truck on PTR with 4pc Tier 12 heh).
Hope this helps.
-- Althor/Delmortis.
Reply
6-18-2011 @ 1:45PM
Kilee said...
I see now. That clears up a lot of randomness with the results. Thanks, Althor.
As an addendum to Althor's post, the closest "break point" for DP after the first burst tick is 3202. This is not necessarily impossible to reach if you had 2 haste trinkets on your person, but from what I see of 391 gear this is going to be more or less impossible to reach.
As a result of this, our nearest achievable "break point" is centered around the spell VT - at 2140 with DI and 2588 without DI. If you stop stacking haste at both of these points in Simulationcraft and start stacking mastery or crit, it seems to increase DPS (with DI either turned on or off).
The trouble comes where you can't garantee having DI all the time. So it seems to me that where you choose to stop stacking haste would be heavily dependant on your raid composition. In general I would think you would want to go for 2588 as a minimum before you start stacking other stats. I can't fathom being allowed to collet two shadow sets in a tier just to build around these break points.
The other thing I'm seeing is that stacking Mastery and/or Crit after you hit this haste point seems to drive the other one up. (ie if you stack mastery, crit weights higher, and vica versa).
6-18-2011 @ 2:08PM
Kilee said...
Additional to my previous reply:
Reforging around haste points doesn't work at the 372 gear level because Mastery/Crit have not scaled up to a high enough value to overtake haste between each breakpoint. So basically that information is useless until we are deep into 4.2 gear.