Frost Mage TBC BiS Calculator Advising Nonsense for Phase 3

Okay, now why on earth is this idiotic thing telling me to use pure int gems (nearly worthless to a frost mage) when every mana buff is enabled and it’s expecting 3 innervates?

Even if I drop it to a 2 minute fight and increase it to 5 innervates, making it absolutely impossible to OOM, it does this.

Something is broken.

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Also, doing this makes it advise swapping an existing epic gem for the rare equivalent … because that makes sense ever.

Has anyone ever told you that you’re not very nice?

I’m not sure why in that snapshot it is picking the intellect gems. If you unlock boots, it picks what you would expect. It seems to have gotten stuck in some sort of strange state. I’ll see if I can find out why.

When I pay for something, I kind of expect it to function in something that at least sort-of resembles a working manner. Every time I’ve told you there’s something wrong, your response has been to claim I’m wrong, which is false. Your simulator is busted.

The entire point of paying for this tool is to not have to figure out the answer to questions like “which gems should I use in particular sockets”, and when your tool tells me to use healer gems and pure int gems, it’s pretty obnoxious and frustrating.

You don’t say. But I don’t want it to regem my tank boots, and there’s no apparent reason why making these minor adjustments causes the entire thing to malfunction.

Also, it doesn’t ACTUALLY pick what I would expect. It randomly decides to put an orange gem in a blue socket on the boots. But I guess that’s “close enough” for you.

Oh. And it tells me to use int on my bracers, which is, of course, wrong.

It finds the right gear in like, 99% of cases. Bugs happen - read through this forum and you will see that all bugs get fixed in a timely manner.

It’s not a simulator.

It doesn’t care about the socket bonus on those boots because the hit is of lesser value

After looking at it, I don’t think it is wrong. We are optimizing for a situation in which you never stop casting, ever. 180 seconds never missing a global will result in being on the edge of mana-limited, even with all the mana options you have selected. Real fights include movement and times when you will regen. You need to take that into account when using the optimizer. I usually recommend people use fight times significantly shorter than their real fights to get the suggestions they often want/expect.

It has not found the correct gear for me once. I started this thread 3 months ago. It has taken you most of that time to figure out what I told you in the second post, 5 weeks ago.

Call it what you like, it is a simulator.

Then why not a second red gem to match the first one it selected and knows is of higher value than the orange it stuffed in there?

Are you REALLY going with this, even though you’re looking at a snapshot that says I have 3 innervates and a shadow priest on a 3 minute fight? Seriously?

And if you are, then why isn’t it sticking to the full int gemming scheme that it only chooses if the boots are locked?

Either way, SOMETHING is wrong.

Edit: I just set it to run a 60 second fight, and it decided to put an int gem back in my gloves (still wrong). Changed it to 30 seconds, and now it’s putting intellect on my weapon enchant. But sure. It’s because the not-a-simulator is optimizing correctly for these situations.

I already told you that something is wrong with the locks on that snapshot, and that we’re looking into it. Resetting the locks will get you around your issue for the time being. If you reset the locks, and then lock in the gems on those boots that you don’t want changed - the results look good.

It’s not the locks.

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100% wrong:
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At this point, it’s telling me to sacrifice 54 spell damage (4.5% of my total) in exchange for 30 intellect, on a 30 second fight where it thinks I have a shadow priest, 3 innervates, and I’m using mana potions (hell, add in demonic runes for good measure, it does the same).

But nothing’s wrong with that? It’s nonsensical.

Gems are an extremely complex optimization problem, even though it is fairly easy for a human to look at them and manually tweak them by eye to something slightly better. Most of the optimizer code is for gems.

It is possible that you can find a very slightly better set of gems than what the optimizer finds. We’ve always been very up front about that. We don’t do a brute-force exhaustive search - that is too slow. A small margin of error is acceptable for performance, in our opinion. The margin of error is well below what any human could notice by playing the game. Also, gems and enchants, in particular, have a miniscule impact on your performance in-game.

Regarding intellect: Intellect gives you more than mana. It gives you some chance to crit. When you are using innervate, your intellect scales the value of the innervate - so the optimizer will find that you might end up with a more optimal mana pool by having a certain amount of intellect. It is not as straightforward as you think.

If you are unsatisfied with the optimizer, I recommend you email customer support and ask for a refund. We would be glad to give you one if you aren’t happy with the product. That being said, I don’t think you are running into huge errors here - these are pretty small items in the scheme of the overall gear optimization.

You’re joking, right? 30 second fight. You can even reconfigure the talents to use arcane meditation AND mage armor, and you get the same nonsense.

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It’s off by at least 5% on that one decision alone.

I have 10,256 mana with only AI applied. A frost bolt costs 272 mana. With 0 mana regen, I can cast 37 of them before going OOM. At my current haste rating, that takes 2.37 seconds each. With IV active that drops to 1.98 seconds. That’s 73 seconds before it’s even theoretically possible for me to be mana constrained. Even if I had heroism, drums and IV active for the entire time, I couldn’t run out of mana in 30 seconds.

But you think your optimizer is right?

Guess there must be a bug. I’ll make sure to fix it. Probably after I help all the polite people on the forum, but don’t worry, I’ll fix it.

I posted a website update with a few tweaks and bug fixes, including a fix for the issue demonstrated in your snapshot above with the unusual gem choices when locking the boots in place. In theory it should all be sorted out now, let us know if you still run into any issues.

Why bother? You can just tell them all it’s not a bug and they’re doing it wrong, even after they do exactly what you advised. Don’t forget to blame their browser cache, and then call them impolite after you’ve repeatedly ignored them. And be sure to tell them how quickly you fix bugs, in their 3-month-old post.

Hey, look at that! Sensible results!

It’s still making one slightly odd choice by throwing in a single random orange gem on the boots, and if you lock it out there, it moves it into another slot. It does it with either epic or rare gems selected, and the error is larger with epic gems, but it’s less than 0.1% either way, so maybe not worth worrying about.

How about you treat this dev with a little more respect. He is super polite, responsive and doesn’t need your mouth.

Sounds to me that you’re just looking for something to complain about. Sure, we toss a little coin to the Witcher, but not enough to deserve your nasty mouth Sure we pay a little bit of cash but I can guarantee it isn’t enough to deal with the likes of you.