Balance Druid -- nowhere near my sim results on target dummy

Character specific
1

I’ve done a stripped down, non-buffed sim on my Balance druid – only buff of any kind is haste food. Wanted to simulate what I might do on a similar trial on a raiding dummy. AMR says my character with current gear and talents can potentially do about 5100 dps, but on the raiding dummy I’m hovering somewhere around 3,400.

Looking at the sim results, it’s expecting me to be able to get off 38.6 Star surges in the 271 second sim. That’s a starsurge every seven seconds. That means I have to average 5.7 astral power gen per second. Keeping in mind that the GCD for starsurge itself generates no astral power, that’s really more like 6.6 Astral power per second . I haven’t been able to generate anywhere near the amount of astral power to pull that off. Am I completely missing something? How am I supposed to be able to generate that much astral power? My base cast time on Solar wrath is 1.3 sec and lunar strike is 2 sec. That’s about 6 ap/sec, and up over 8 when I have Lunda/Solar Empowerment, but in the real world I can keep that rate up at all. Every refresh of Moonfire and Sunfire is a net loss, and just human delay in my casing and my real-world astral generation rate is only 3.7/sec. and I’m only getting a Starsurge off about every 11 seconds. Is it possible to tighten my rotation up to this theoretical maximum? Am I missing some source of Astral Power generation?

The sim is also expecting me to get off about 60 Lunar Strike’s and 67 Solar Wrath, and I am not coming any where near that – only 26 and 54, respectively. I’m using Warrior of Elune and Celestial alignment on cooldown – which works to one Celestial Alignment at the beginning of the fight, and I active my first Warrior of Elune after that runs out, because Haste doesn’t help WoE and and I get about three over the course of a 3 minute fight. I can fit a fourth in if I do everything right, but that won’t make a 1700 dps difference.

I feel like I’m chasing an impossible standard.

Meanwhile, with my BM hunter, I can usually get target dummy results that are comparable to my AMR sims, but I’ve been playing my hunter for 10 years and I’m new to Druid/

2

Can you post a link to the simulation report that you are looking at? With that we can see what you are seeing and give a detailed response.

3

Simulation link

4

I’ve been looking at balance a lot lately… I know that the simulator is putting out realistic numbers for the spec, since I’ve been comparing to logs of real players.

To really help you figure out what might be tripping you up, we’d probably need you to log what you are doing and upload it to something like warcraft logs so that we could see exactly what spells you are casting and when. If you are significantly below the numbers of spells cast in the simulation, that usually indicates a problem like gaps between your spell casts. Maybe you aren’t taking advantage of the spell queue?

5

Back in legion when I was playin boomkin I used to look at the the simulation log to see in which order it casts the spells. Then I was able to reproduce the same order and get the nice dps once I mastered the rotation.

To get the log you need to enable it in the setup before starting the simulation.