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As you can see despite having upgrades set to max, many trinkets and rings are simmed at a sub max level and some trinkets like Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows - Item - World of Warcraft aren’t simmed at all
The Best in Slot optimizer will only consider items at max upgrade level. If you look at the solution that it found, you will notice that all items it actually chose are at max level.
The per-slot list is separate from the optimization. It is just a way for you to manually browse available items and lock in other options if you wish. You can use the little down arrow to the left of each row in the item list to modify it to any version of that item that is available.
ok…
but when i set the ring in the second screenshot to max itemlevel and socket and lock it in, i get a higher dps + of 16.91% compared to 16.77% from the no locked item snapshot above
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Those differences are so tiny… I couldn’t really tell you which would perform better in-game or not.
It is impossible for the optimizer to examine every possible combination of items, gems, and enchants. There are quadrillions (or more) of combinations – it would take hours or even days to do an exhaustive search. Instead we guarantee to get an answer that is very close to the highest theoretical score (if not the actual highest) in a very short amount of time – a few seconds.
But as I said above… if everyone is being honest, we can’t really say if two sets of gear within 0.5% of each other according to a theoretical model would be better or worse in game. No model is perfect enough, and the game is too random to do enough trials in-game to actually test it.
And maybe one is better on the 1st boss of your raid and the other is better on the 4th boss. Or maybe depending on who shows up to your raid that day, the timing of your kills is shifted a little and now another set becomes slightly better… there are tons of variables that no model or simulation account for.
Thus, the amount of variation in any real game situation from any theoretical result is always going to be significantly larger than 0.5%… so it’s not really worth worrying about. You want to think of “Best in Slot” as a representative solution, not The One and Only Solution – anything that looks pretty similar will perform essentially the same.