BM Hunter - Current Gear vs BiB - DPS loss

amiyuy · May 18, 2017, 4:51am

When I looted 890 tier pants AMR BiB decided I need to switch up 4 gear pieces (including switching legendaries from Call of the Wild to The Apex Predator’s Claw) and change my gems and enchants to drop ~3-5.5% haste to gain ~5.5-7.5 mastery, 1% crit, and 1.49% versatility.

I have 2 problems with the recommendations:

I’m not interested in entirely regemming/enchanting.
Sims don’t agree that the new gearing strategy will give me more DPS.

AMR Single Run with 0.05% error rate:

Current Gear: 799,206 DPS
Recommended gear from fresh Gearing Strategy runs: 796,745 DPS
Beta! Strategy V2: 796,381 DPS

I am aware that ~2,400-2,800 DPS difference is small.

RaidBots comparison:

Current gear (Mastery gems/enchants) - 891,213 DPS
Recommended by Gearing Strategy (Haste gems/enchants) - 883,574 DPS

That’s a more severe decrease at 7,639 DPS.

For super clarity I put everything into a spreadsheet: 2017-05-17 AMR - Google Sheets.

I understand these are sims, but I’m just trying to understand why AMR is recommending such a huge change, which from what I can tell would be a worse result.

Addon export:

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Swol · May 18, 2017, 12:05pm

What I recommend is that you lock in your two legendary items that you were using when you made your custom gearing strategy. If you do that, the BiB suggestion will slightly increase your DPS instead of slightly decrease it.

In this case, the results are so close in value that they fall below margin of error. BiB right now aims to get within 1-2% of the optimal result, and we’re working towards 1%. So, this is not really an anomalous case.

In order to pick legendary items, you really need to use multiple gearing strategies and simulations, since the legendary items change your desired stats. This is what we’re currently working on for ToS. For the current site, like I mentioned, locking in your preferred legendary items is going to be best when using custom gearing strategies, since the strategy depends on those particular legendary effects you had when you created it.

Zoop made a blog post that gives some context for this whole gear optimization problem and why we can’t just “sim everything” to pick BiB sets that are 100% perfect:
http://blog.askmrrobot.com/best-bags-vs-simming-best-gear/

Also, in your spreadsheet you were comparing a 480 second fight on AMR to a 300 second fight on raid bots. You used the Ursoc script, which doesn’t lust on the pull - it lusts at 30%. That will also cause differences. AMR right now is a more accurate simulator for hunters, since we have taken the time to compare everything to actual combat logs and make sure the results match. Your sims should get DPS in this neighborhood:
http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/simulator/report/b857d724cbba40909848ebc9b2444326

amiyuy · May 18, 2017, 8:31pm

Thank you for taking the time to respond and for the awesome site.

I understand how huge it gets and why it’s impossible for BiB to be perfect and I’m not really asking for it to be. I also do realize the fight setup is different, but I was comparing Raidbot against Raidbot and AMR against AMR.

Locking in Call of the Wild does get more reasonable results and much more balanced stats. So basically, if I’m not going to change legendaries, lock it in. If I want to change legendaries or trinkets or talents, do new sims and then a custom gearing strategy based off of that combination?

So the issue was that it made a huge swinging recommendation for no apparent to me reason. The stat goals barely changed, so I didn’t understand why it decided to suddenly change so many things (5 pieces of gear, 4 new gems, 3 new enchants). Automation is awesome, but without context for a user, it can be confusing and frustrating.

I’d expect there to be a big “Warning! This legendary setup is different than the one the Custom Gearing Strategy ran with, this may affect your recommendations!” message. Or somehow informing the user about this without digging through blog posts. Question mark buttons that link to specific support articles/blog posts are often used for this.

Right now there’s very little context throughout most of the Character Page, so unless you go digging, you won’t even know that Custom Gearing Strategies exist and especially not caveats like this.

This is probably the biggest drawback of AMR right now. There are tons of awesome powerful tools, but unless a user goes searching out how-to articles, they end up confused and annoyed at the differences between what it is saying and what SimCraft returns. SimCraft is oldschool, trusted, and expected to be difficult whereas AMR is billed as new, better, and easy. Right now AMR is new and often easier, but better is very debated because most everyone doesn’t understand the results it gives or how to use it to get what they want.

A guildmate tried AMR for the trial and complained about the trinket results. At the time all I could really do was shrug because I was confused too. When I pointed him towards a Custom Batch sim, he promptly overloaded it with as many possible gear combos as possible, and it took literal days to complete. There was no context for him about how long it would take so until he clicked Simulate! For comparison, Raidbots’ Top Gear has an iteration counter that updates every time you select an item.

Specific places I think might help:

Boss/Script: Add a description underneath like you do with Rotation of what to use the selected script for.
Sim Type: Add article links/FAQ pop-ups to all types like you have for Artifact Path.
Character Page: Add a hover information ? on item selection pop-up.
Character Page: Add some hover or FAQ links in every section.

Anyway…that was a long ramble, sorry. This is a great site, and you do have a lot of awesome info and already existing how-tos, descriptions and tooltips, just linking the articles in with the actual site more would probably help as right now the blog is an entirely different entity. Also some user-friendly “Something’s weird! Try this.” messages.

Thank you again!

Swol · May 18, 2017, 8:47pm

Yeah, since we created our own simulator for Legion, we’ve been going through some growing pains as far as making the site exactly what we want.

We don’t really want people to NEED a custom gearing strategy. But, with how the game has evolved, there is no “one-sized fits all” set of stat weights, trinket list, etc.

We’re almost finished with our “version 2” gearing strategies (and UI updates to go with them) that should address a lot of these issues. We’ve ditched stat weights as a way to rank gear - but now we need a display that makes it clearer to people why the stats can shift around. Stat weights have benefit because they are simple to understand. The drawback is that they cull out many good sets of gear that could be created from the list of available gear people put into the site.

For this big update, we’ve got code that is going to automatically find all the “important” combinations of talents, legendaries, set bonuses, etc. that affect stats and create dozens of gearing strategies out of the box. Then we’re going to update the optimizer to be able to choose gear based on multiple gearing strategies, instead of just one. This should get us to where you can get customized gearing advice “out of the box” without needing to take a bunch of time to simulate custom gearing strategies. Then we can offer options to “refine” the results with your own simulations if you really want to make sure that, say, the trinkets you have equipped simulate to the highest DPS (as opposed to just within 1% of the highest).

You hear a lot of people always say: you have to sim yourself to get the right stats. There is some truth to that. Our vision for the site is to do all that simulation beforehand, so that people can come to our site and just get the answer. When it comes down to it… most people don’t really want to do their own simulations - they just want the right answer.