Simulation Craft, Pawn and You!

[Veritable]

I thought that I should write out this guide because a lot of people are getting confused with Legion's upgrade system. There are so many stats and random attributes (even within the same gear name it can have different stats) so there are a couple of things that you can do to make your gear choices easier to make when it comes to what is an upgrade for your character.

One special note, however, is that Pawn does not take into effect Relics or Trinkets because they have ignored most of it. If they do change this then it'll just automatically apply itself to those items as well, but be aware you will still have to research trinkets and relics, to find out what ones are the best for your class/spec.

You are going to need some software and a couple of addons, so here is the list:

• Simulation Craft Software: SimulationCraft - Download
• Simulation Craft Addon (SimC): Simulationcraft - Data Export - World of Warcraft Addons - Curse
• Pawn addon: Pawn - Bags & Inventory - World of Warcraft Addons - Curse

How To Set It Up!

*Note: After patches that have changes, it can take a few days for the class and specs to be updated by the developers of that part of the program, so it may not work perfectly after major patches.

Install the latest version for your operating system, then run the program. It should look something like this:


Next go to the Options and adjust the Globals section if you need any changes, but most of the settings are fine by default. Here are the settings that I use:


After that, the most important thing is to go into the Scaling tab, click Enable Scaling checkbox, and then change the Stats to Scale section to whatever the class and spec you are going to be simulating uses. I will do Feral Druid:



Once that is done, go into your game, and type /simc

This will pull up the simulation craft data export. It will be a big wall of text, so just press Ctrl-C or Command-C on a mac (i believe that's the copy command). Then you can close that window and go back to the Simulation Craft software.

Click the Simulate tab, and paste the text you just copied into a new tab by clicking the + button.

When it is pasted, click the Simulate! button on the bottom right of the window, and let it do its thing.

When it is complete it should come back with a page detailing the results. In that first section you are going to look for a Pawn String, then copy the entire thing as shown:


The final step, is to paste that string into Pawn. In wow, type /pawn and go to the "scale" tab on the bottom, choose the "Manual" option and then click "Import" to paste your string into it.

You are done! Now whenever you get a piece of gear, you can hover over it and it will give you a % upgrade based on the stat weights you imported with that pawn string.

A generally good idea, is every major upgrade or every 2-4 pieces of gear at least, redo this and import the new Pawn String so that your weights can be adjusted accordingly. Here is what the tooltips look like approximately:



I hope this helps people out, and removes a lot of the confusion. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask.

[buschaffe]

I never bothered to set this up myself. Thank you for the guide

[alexanjl12]

I have heard this is mostly for DPS and doesnt work as well for say a Prot pally, is this true?

[Veritable]

I have heard this is mostly for DPS and doesnt work as well for say a Prot pally, is this true?

The problem with using Simulation Craft for tanks, is the damage intake doesn't work very well. It works for the tank damage of course, but it is really hard to simulate the getting hit. The Tank Dummy option can kind of fix this, but it's not 100%. The problem with tanking is there are very situational things that happen, where you can't always have the perfect rotation for doing damage because you have to do things like use damage reduction cooldowns at particular times.

When the sim is going, it is wanting to use the cooldowns on cooldown, which doesn't really give an accurate representation of a tank's rotation during any given boss encounter unfortunately.

Take your tank sims with a grain of salt or do your own testing is the only solution

[Nidana]

Using Pawn as the only upgrade advisor is DANGEROUS and blindly following its advice may HURT your damage output (for some classes).

The guides on icy-veins are NOT accurate for some classes as well.
For example, the retribution paladin guide on icy-veins recommends you to have 20-22% haste since there's no point in having more than that.
My paladin is currently at 31% haste with versatility being the highest priority stat and haste being the second worst stat according to SimCraft, however replacing one of my haste gems with a versatility one results in a ~400 dps loss (according to SimCraft). Replacing all my gems and enchants with versatility ones results in ~3.8k DPS loss (even though I manage to reach the 22% haste cap mentioned in the guide and improve my "best" simmed stat this way)

The only reliable way to figure out if you're going to do more DPS after replacing a certain piece of gear is to simulate every piece of gear you've got and find out which combo works the best.

Stat weights are dynamic values and change every time you make changes to your character. Keep it in mind and only rely on SimCraft.

Pawn is a great tool to use while leveling / starting to gear up or if you're not minmaxing.
However, using it to help you maximize your DPS is completely unacceptable if you're doing hardcore PvE content.

[Veritable]

Using Pawn as the only upgrade advisor is DANGEROUS and blindly following its advice may HURT your damage output (for some classes).

The guides on icy-veins are NOT accurate for some classes as well.
For example, the retribution paladin guide on icy-veins recommends you to have 20-22% haste since there's no point in having more than that.
My paladin is currently at 31% haste with versatility being the highest priority stat and haste being the second worst stat according to SimCraft, however replacing one of my haste gems with a versatility one results in a ~400 dps loss (according to SimCraft). Replacing all my gems and enchants with versatility ones results in ~3.8k DPS loss (even though I manage to reach the 22% haste cap mentioned in the guide and improve my "best" simmed stat this way)

The only reliable way to figure out if you're going to do more DPS after replacing a certain piece of gear is to simulate every piece of gear you've got and find out which combo works the best.

Stat weights are dynamic values and change every time you make changes to your character. Keep it in mind and only rely on SimCraft.

Pawn is a great tool to use while leveling / starting to gear up or if you're not minmaxing.
However, using it to help you maximize your DPS is completely unacceptable if you're doing hardcore PvE content.

Yes it is bad to ONLY use this, you have to also think for yourself and do your own testing, I agree.

However, it is a great way to see by just randomly looking if it's actually an upgrade.

Regarding the dynamic nature of Pawn strings, I did state: "A generally good idea, is every major upgrade or every 2-4 pieces of gear at least, redo this and import the new Pawn String so that your weights can be adjusted accordingly. Here is what the tooltips look like approximately:"

The stat caps is a great point as well though. There were addons back when Reforging was a thing, that allowed to you specify caps like that. I put in a suggestion on the pawn curseforge developer board, to include a Stat Cap feature in the manual settings for your profile. Let us hope

[Nidana]

Yes it is bad to ONLY use this, you have to also think for yourself and do your own testing, I agree.

However, it is a great way to see by just randomly looking if it's actually an upgrade.

Regarding the dynamic nature of Pawn strings, I did state: "A generally good idea, is every major upgrade or every 2-4 pieces of gear at least, redo this and import the new Pawn String so that your weights can be adjusted accordingly. Here is what the tooltips look like approximately:"

The stat caps is a great point as well though. There were addons back when Reforging was a thing, that allowed to you specify caps like that. I put in a suggestion on the pawn curseforge developer board, to include a Stat Cap feature in the manual settings for your profile. Let us hope

I wanted to make a separate thread regarding the proper usage of SimC and Pawn, don't you mind if I do?

[Veritable]

Go for it

Also, I got a reply from Pawn's developer. He stated the following:

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. Right now it's intentional that there isn't a way to add caps/breakpoints. They only really make sense in the context of a full set of gear with buffs and consumables, but Pawn evaluates items individually. If I let you put caps on stats today, you'd end up in insane situations like getting new pants that were 15% better, and then you put them on and you're above your cap and now the pants that you just took off are 13% better than the ones you just put on, back and forth forever.

If you're an advanced enough player to want stat caps, I think a much better option is to just make sure that you're re-simming your character and importing new weights whenever you change gear. That should get you the most useful results.

So... if I am understanding how he did his addon... he is comparing the items directly based on weights. So he doesn't "Take the item off" and evaluate the stat changes that would occur. It is purely a math based comparison, which is kinda meh.

I would write an addon, but I don't know enough about how WoW's Lua works. I did Wildstar a bit, but I would have to relearn how things work ;s