A guild mate had two Azerite pieces he was using for the best in bags option, both were 340. However, between the two pieces one was showing as an absurdly high 40% upgrade over the other because of this trait. Naturally he was confused so we started to look into it. Especially since the trait revolves around casting Maul, as spell not used that often since it’s usually better to use the rage to keep as high of an uptime on ironfur as possible (as far as we can tell).
So i did some digging to try to see if it was just the items having the wrong ranking. I ran two tank talent batch sims, one with the default Guardian with the default zero traits. And another with the trait taken (conveniently on the default shoulders). Note that i disabled buffs, that’s because i like to run sims as a default “Worst case” on what the spec is baseline capable of.
The results were… rather extreme. Just that one change resulted in a 90% reduction to death chance, 32.5% all the way down to 3%.
What I’m trying to determine is if one of three things are happening:
1: We just are way wrong about how to play the class in terms of ironfur usage. So we don’t understand how the sim uses it in the rotation to achieve these results.
2: The sim is somehow bugged, and causing this trait to do more than it says.
3: Ths sim is bugged in a way that causes wako results for tanks.
No, because as i stated i was using the default guardian template.
However i do have some more things to add. Somehow, the sim states that dumping rage into maul results in a higher up time on ironfur, with almost 50% more casts than a sim where maul was never used at all.
This makes absolutely zero sense, as it’s mathematically impossible to cast more ironfurs if you are dumping rage into 40 mauls as the sim states. Sure, with the trait 33% of the cost is recovered in reduction to ironfur but you still lose rage.
The only change to the default sim rotation that i made, was that if over 90 power (rage) cast ironfur instead of maul. I left in the condition to use maul if the trait was in use, and you had no stacks.
Additional information, in the last two sims i posted, it shows roughly the same amount of wasted rage between the two. However, the sim with maul casts 125 rage cost abilities, vs 58.
I just don’t see how that is possible, unless the sim with 58 is wasting rage but it says it’s within single digits on gain/waste.
We are in the process of debugging the simulator prior to creating our adaptive gearing strategies. I hadn’t found this bug yet, but something that big would have been caught during our process once I got to Guardian
I don’t know what guides out there base their recommendations on. If it was simulations using our simulator, then this fix would certainly affect the ranking.
