Simulationcraft for Sage/Sorcerer

[Tacoman]

Does the sim for a 7/17/17 build take into account that you cut off your current FL as soon as wrath proc's to cast the next CD/CL/LS?

Obviously the dps would be higher than letting the cast finish.

[frmorrison]

(03-03-2012 03:36 AM)Tacoman Wrote:  Does the sim for a 7/17/17 build take into account that you cut off your current FL as soon as wrath proc's to cast the next CD/CL/LS?

Obviously the dps would be higher than letting the cast finish.

While what you say may be true, it is not obvious to me that you would want to stop casting FL to cast CL or if on cooldown CD. However, I am pretty sure you don't ever want to cast Lightning Strike. Save Wrath for CD/CL and instead cast Shock.

[CaseyTheRetard]

(03-03-2012 03:36 AM)Tacoman Wrote:  Does the sim for a 7/17/17 build take into account that you cut off your current FL as soon as wrath proc's to cast the next CD/CL/LS?

Obviously the dps would be higher than letting the cast finish.

No, the sim does not. It would "obviously" be higher if there was a reliable way to interrupt the FL channel immediately after a tick, but considering how poorly the animation typically syncs with the cast in-game I don't believe that's possible. As the game exists today I think that interrupting FL is effectively going to result in you wasting half a tick time on average. To determine the best strategy, you need to evaluate the alternatives:

1. Interrupt FL: lose half an FL tick.
2. Allow n FL ticks to complete before casting CL: lose n opportunities to proc Wrath.

An FL tick is around 630 damage, half of that is 315 damage - so that part's simple enough.

n opportunities to proc Wrath will result in 0.3n Wraths on average. Every Wrath gives you the chance to convert a GCD of FL to a GCD of CL. Wrathed CL is about 1980 damage, FL's non-LB DPET is about 880. So letting n ticks of FL complete - with Wrath up already - loses you n * 0.3 * (1980 - 880 * 1.5) ~= 200n damage. So 7/18/16 would gain average damage by interrupting non-LB FL to cast Wrath+CL when there are at least n >= 2 ticks remaining in the FL channel.

but

That implies that it's only a good idea to interrupt FL in the first 1/3 of the cast, which is impossible since the first 1/2 of the cast is inside the GCD.

Without a better way to time your interrupts to get them closer to the preceding FL tick, I'd say it's not a good idea to interrupt FL for Wrath: on average it will result in a minor DPS loss.

---

And like frmorrison said, I would never cast LS as 7/18/16. It's tempting to do so when you're moving and CL is on cooldown, but it is likely a damage loss vs. simply saving the Wrath for later considering that Wrath+LS has lower DPET than FL.

[frmorrison]

I looked at the Sim results using all the Sorc profiles and each one shows ~5-10% extra crit on CD and CL (also Death Field if available). Only those spells get the extra crit (without a supporting talent) and it happens for Sage profiles too.

Also I swapped the priority for the Suffusion build to use CD over CL when Wrath is up and got slightly higher dps.

[CaseyTheRetard]

(03-03-2012 07:10 AM)frmorrison Wrote:  I looked at the Sim results using all the Sorc profiles and each one shows ~5-10% extra crit on CD and CL (also Death Field if available). Only those spells get the extra crit (without a supporting talent) and it happens for Sage profiles too.

Recklessness|Force Potency.

(03-03-2012 07:10 AM)frmorrison Wrote:  Also I swapped the priority for the Suffusion build to use CD over CL when Wrath is up and got slightly higher dps.

That's not good - it contradicts the math I did over in the Madness thread that showed that Wrath adds more damage to CL than to CD for 7/18/16. I'll look into it.

[Kaedis]

Quote:Recklessness|Force Potency

Shouldn't Recklessness be being used on Force Lightning? A single charge for +60% crit to the entire FL channel is pretty solid, and I demonstrated at one point that it was usually the best spell to use it on. If the sim is using Recklessness charges on CD, we need to add a priority line for Recklessness charges.

[CaseyTheRetard]

(03-03-2012 08:15 AM)Kor Wrote:  

Quote:Recklessness|Force Potency

Shouldn't Recklessness be being used on Force Lightning? A single charge for +60% crit to the entire FL channel is pretty solid, and I demonstrated at one point that it was usually the best spell to use it on. If the sim is using Recklessness charges on CD, we need to add a priority line for Recklessness charges.

All the action lists are easily browseable directly from the GIT repo.

For the FL spam specs, the vast majority of Recklessness charges will be consumed by FL regardless of when and how you push the button for Recklessness, so they simply pop it on cooldown. Every conditional I've tried for Recklessness for Hybrid/Suffusion/Madness has resulted in a loss of DPS due to losing cooldown time.

Ironically enough, Lightning goes out of its way to hold Recklessness for FL or CL so as to avoid spending at least one charge on LS or auto-crit TBs:

Code:

...
actions+=/affliction,if=!ticking
actions+=/thundering_blast,if=dot.affliction.remains>cast_time
actions+=/recklessness,if=buff.lightning_barrage.react|buff.lightning_storm.react
actions+=/force_lightning,if=buff.lightning_barrage.react
actions+=/chain_lightning,if=buff.lightning_storm.react
...

Waiting exclusively for FL was a loss of a few DPS when I tested it, IIRC.

Anyone who can find a better way to use Recklessness, speak up and we'll change the actionlists. I'd be let down if a whole community of users can't improve on what I did over a couple days of testing while adding Recklessness to the actionlists

[CaseyTheRetard]

I should have said "Recklessness SHOULD be used on FL" because I found a bug researching frmorrison's comments: Recklessness|Force Potency was buffing and being consumed by direct damage attacks (correctly) but not dots (correctly) or channels (INCORRECTLY). Already bugfixed, we'll try and get a release over the weekend. Good catch, ffrmorrison, thanks.

[Kantern]

What is the easiest way to enter your stats for this? Simply modify all the armor in one of the profiles? Or can I just use one piece of armor and add all of the stats to it?

[CaseyTheRetard]

(03-03-2012 09:14 AM)Kantern Wrote:  What is the easiest way to enter your stats for this? Simply modify all the armor in one of the profiles? Or can I just use one piece of armor and add all of the stats to it?

"Just one piece" works fine. Make sure you are entering just the raw stats from gear, and not stuff from your character sheet that has been increased by talents or includes the base stats we have when naked.

Yes we know it's annoying to put stats it manually, we're working with the developers of AskMrRobot to hopefully be able to import profiles from their character builder soon.