Snapshot 1: ec9091801fc340efbad2d391fee547d7
Snapshot 2: 14f483571cb440e4bc4747fee9076d3f
Snapshot 1 is taken with M+ gear and spec, and Snapshot 2 is taken with Raid gear and spec. They give drastically different BiB results.
Those results are not drastically different: they are functionally identical. Use whichever you prefer.
If you take your second snapshot and lock the Back slot to the Cave Topographer’s Drape, you will see that it then produces an identical solution to the first snapshot.
With the Back slot locked on the second snapshot, you will see that it estimates a 1.10% upgrade.
Unlock it to go back to the original suggested solution: it estimates a 1.09% upgrade.
The majority of that difference comes from swapping your trinket to match in both cases. The rest of the difference (different Back item and weapon enchant and a gem swap) is extremely small: less than 0.01%.
If you give the optimizer a different starting point it can sometimes find a slightly different solution – given the massive number of combinations there just isn’t any way around that. When this happens the goal is that no matter what solution it finds that solution is very close to the optimal one. This particular case shows that it has succeeded: you can’t really find two different solutions that score any closer than that!
We realize that this can sometimes lead to wasted gold from swapping gems/enchants, which is exactly why we created the Gem+Enchant threshold setting. If you put it to its lowest value (0.1%) it avoids suggesting any gem/enchant changes and finds another solution that is very close (within 0.03%).
Once you get into differences that are this tiny, you aren’t really talking about improving your performance in-game anymore. All three of the aforementioned solutions are functionally identical. We try to avoid cases like this where it bounces between two near-identical solutions… but it just happens from time to time.
It’s possible we could play with the Gem+Enchant threshold logic to find the solution with your other cloak in this case when you have it set to 0.1%… I’ll give it a try. But in general, there’s no way that we can guarantee the optimizer won’t sometimes find a solution that is a tiny bit different when given a different starting point. What we can guarantee is that the different solution will be functionally identical for all practical purposes in-game.
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Ah, thanks for the explanation.