Part 1: The Basics of SimulationCraft How you all doing. I am Jaerv, a DPS player in Method and a theorycrafter for Shadow Priests over at WarcraftPriests. I thought we would talk a little bit about Simulations. This post will go through several important questions. - What is simming and Why is it important to sim yourself?  - How do you sim?  - Raiding, M+ and more! - Utilizing specific functions when simming - Top Gear, Gear Compare, Quick Sim etc. Why is it important to sim yourself? In modern WoW, it is essential to understand the tools we have so that you can optimize your performance and character. The game is a lot more complex today than it was 10 years ago, and we have so many different mechanics that change the value of everything that makes it impossible to just eyeball everything. Furthermore, there is so much variance and RNG in the game that your standard Target Dummy testing can vary by 10-20% from procs and rotational mistakes, and even 5-10% from just variance in crits. Simulations solve this issue by running anywhere from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands iterations of that scenario to narrow the error margin down to 0.05% - 0.1% despite the inherent variance of modern WoW. Often the differences in performance in talent configurations is 1-3%, how is that possible to figure out during Target Dummy testings when your variance is twice or five times that amount and often misses important buffs like Bloodlust? To that end, every high-end DPS player uses Raidbots and Simulations in some way. - Whether it’s to figure out what the best gems and enchants are. - How big of an upgrade certain items are. - How does the APL do my rotation? - What dungeon do I need to do to get the biggest upgrade? The tools are endless, and if you do not utilize them, you are always going to be playing from behind. But with all that said, I do want to preface this by saying that it is always

Part 2: Advanced Sims Welcome back, I am Jaerv, a DPS player in Method and a theorycrafter for Shadow Priests over at WarcraftPriests This is the second part of a series on How to Sim in World of Warcraft. In Part 1 we covered the basics of sims. - Why is it important to sim yourself? - How do you sim? - What do I need to sim myself? - Different ways to sim yourself - Simulation Options - Dungeon Sims and why it's hard and in Part 2 we will cover the Advanced section of Raidbots. - What is Advanced sims - When should you use Advanced sims - Different ways to use Advanced sims - Copy/Profilesets - Racial/Consumable Sims - External Sims - Expansion Options - SimC Expert Mode What is Advanced sims? Most of the article will be covering the section on Raidbots called Advanced but also the Expert Mode section that you can find at the bottom of any non-advanced Raidbots section. The Advanced section is basically the sandbox version of Raidbots where you can run almost any SimulationCraft script or command, without the help of a graphical user interface. So you can do anything you can do in for example Top Gear, Droptimizer or Gear compare, but you have to manually add every script/command/setting yourself. So to truly utilize it you need to understand how to use and configure SimC via manual commands and scripts. And on top of that, you can also do anything you CANNOT do in Top Gear, Droptimizer or Gear Compare. When should you use Advanced sims? This is a very hard question to answer since the Advanced section is so broad, and lets you do pretty much anything you want. So you CAN use it whenever you want, but if we are asking ourselves when you SHOULD use it instead. I would say that you use Advanced whenever you can’t do what you are trying to do