How to NOT use SimulationCraft and Pawn

[Nidana]

Hello there ladies and gentlemen.

I do think that most people use SimulationCraft and Pawn in order to find out which items work the best for their characters, but I'm almost completely sure that most people don't know how to use it properly and it makes them decrease their simDPS rather than increase it.

So, what I think they do is (WARNING: IT'S NOT THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT):
1) Open SimCraft, enable scaling in order to find out their stat weights, simulate their character and copy the Pawn string.
2) Go to WoW, open Pawn addon, import the Pawn string so an additional line appears in items' tooltips saying whether this item is an upgrade or not.
3) Start equipping everything Pawn tells them to.

This is NOT how it works.
Stat weights are DYNAMIC VALUES and they CHANGE every time you equip a different piece of gear.

What you should be doing is STOP after you're done with step 2, you equip ONE item at a time, export your character again and simulate. Import the NEW stat weights, equip the next item, export your character and simulate. Repeat until you've tested all the slots.

You could also manually change your gems/enchants (edit the text you import into SimCraft) if your stat weights are really close to each other.

The reason behind posting is a rumour that ret paladins don't need more than 22% haste, however this is not a rule everyone should follow because the stat values are different for each character and dependant on the gear you've got. In my case, I'm currently at 31% haste which works the best according to SimDPS.

Thanks for reading.

[NeckWenxiao]

You're basically saying what every guide out there about simcraft and pawn says already......

[Nidana]

You're basically saying what every guide out there about simcraft and pawn says already......

Haven't seen one, could you provide a link please?

All these guides say "download simcraft, download pawn, import stat weights, do what pawn says and become much strong" which is incorrect.

[NeckWenxiao]

And all these guides also says how important it is to keep the string updated, by simming your character everytime you get an upgrade e.g.

[banzor]

Haven't seen one, could you provide a link please?

All these guides say "download simcraft, download pawn, import stat weights, do what pawn says and become much strong" which is incorrect.

Not exactly what you wanted, but here is a guide on how to correctly sim your character: SYOC – Short tutorial - Google Docs

From there, just take the pawn string and update your string as needed.

[Nidana]

Not exactly what you wanted, but here is a guide on how to correctly sim your character: SYOC – Short tutorial - Google Docs

From there, just take the pawn string and update your string as needed.

Alright, here's an example: this Pawn thingie wants me to equip different shoulders which are a 14% upgrade, but equipping it and simming myself again results in 2k DPS loss.
You can't blindly trust Pawn as there's no caps you can manually set, it doesn't keep in mind which legendaries you've got etc.

Pawn only shows you how much you benefit from the item if you SOMEHOW MANAGE TO KEEP ALL YOUR STATS AT THEIR CURRENT VALUES.
But that's impossible unless you replace an item with another item with the same stats.