High levels of crit / haste

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Hi there!

I’ve been trying to understand why when I sim the Best in Bags recommendation versus my equipped gear set for Shadow M+, my equipped gear sims at roughly 8% better while the BiB recommendation should be 3% better. (Note that I have set up a rule to exclude Thought Harvester as an azerite trait.)

Is this because we can now reach much higher levels of secondary stats than previously anticipated / modelled?

Thanks,
Kantor

Yeah, at this point the builds are able to get outside the bounds of the data we ran in these extreme stat cases. It is making it harder for the optimizer to predict what the simulator will do.

In this case, death throes is just not as valuable as the optimizer thinks it is, which is making it difficult to pick up the most desirable azerite traits. There is such a complex synergy between shadowy apparitions, chorus of insanity, and stats… shadow is a pretty tricky case.

We could try to run more data, but we’re not sure it would end up helping at this point… we’re working on some new models for shadowlands to try to anticipate these situations going forward. For now I’d exclude unbound force from your optimization and maybe go ahead and lock in the azerite items.

The optimizer will still prefer to gem/enchant for haste, but that will end up doing the same amount of damage as gem/enchant for crit - that’s another interesting problem in this case… makes it hard to pick the gear.

Azerite traits going away in shadowlands is going to help a lot, heh.