When comparing AMR sims and SimC sims, the average damage of Kill Shot seems to be around 30% higher in AMR sims. Other physical abilities, such as auto attacks are nearly identical and the SimC reports show 29.99% mitigation on physical attacks.
My best effort calculation of base stats in addition to averaging buffs, procs, CDs, etc. weighted by uptime gives me a number similar to the AMR number before factoring in armor and a number similar to the SimC number after factoring in armor.
It may just be a coincidence that the mitigation from armor is approximately enough to account for this discrepancy, but there is a discrepancy and it’s enough to be noticeable.
Yeah, looks like I forgot armor reduction in the formula. Guess I was really asleep at the wheel on the day I added kill shot to the simulator back in the beta. I’ll post another update, thanks.
Usually stuff like that gets caught when we do a round of QA on the simulator, but this kill shot stuff slipped through somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
It’s all good. I actually got started down this path because I was looking into an issue in SimC with Chakrams. It’s generally the go to talent for PvP even though it’s not recommended in PvE. The numbers seemed too far off though so I wanted to check it against AMR to see where the differences were.
It turns out, the problem in SimC is that Chakrams was never being used when you chose that talent so it was the equivalent of having no T7 talent. I got that one fixed now too though.
I even ended up finding a bug in game with Volatile Bomb that I submitted to Blizzard.
Volatile Bomb doesn’t follow the “pandemic” rule for refreshing DoTs. Instead it sets the duration to the whatever the duration was last time you applied or refreshed Serpent Sting normally. So if you apply a fresh Serpent Sting (12s duration) and refresh it with Volatile Bomb, it will set the duration to 12s regardless of whether you refresh it at 0.1s or 11.9s. It won’t get the 3.6 second extension.
It works both ways though. If you use Serpent Sting twice in a row to get it to 15.6s duration and then refresh it with Volatile Bomb, it will set the duration to 15.6s regardless of the remaining duration when you use Volatile Bomb.
Technically, you could try to game this mechanic to gain an extra 1-2 GCDs worth of uptime from Serpent Sting for each Volatile Bomb, but in practice, that would be risky since the DoT is refreshed when the projectile impacts the target and not when you use the ability. Since it can only refresh but never apply Serpent Sting, you risk missing the refresh as well as the associated damage entirely if you cut it too close.
Heh, nice catch. Blizzard and DoTs… they’re so all over the place with how they implement those. At least they finally changed survival serpent sting in shadowlands to not have that bizarre hasted duration. I posted about that early on in BfA (and so did a bunch of other people) but they decided to leave it in for the whole xpac. It was the only DoT in the entire game that behaved that way. It’s not surprising there was some residual bug going on. The OCD in me wants to shake the blizz devs by the shoulders and just have them implement every DoT in the game consistently.
I wrote a blog post on the multitude of DoT mechanics at the end of BfA/beginning of shadowlands, just for my own sanity: