Noticed the recent new changes to the tanking strategy on AMR and how its changed protection pallys. Not sure if its by design, but noticed with potency conduits there is no difference in rating between them when you dont meet the toughness threshold. I think this may then explain why it picked Punish The Guilty over Ringing Clarity…just so happens to be the first one in the list of potency conduits.
I dont think the simulation is taking into account the defensive bonus of Ringing Clarity when using the First Avenger talent which states it give a shield for 100% damage avenging shield gives. Its a pretty big shield when you pop Divine Toll, even more so when you have Ringing Clarity proc if you have the conduit as it causes the main target to take 3 shields instead of 1. This raises its defensive bonus even if its a potency conduit thus for meeting toughness ratings would probably be best to be recommended over the other conduits in the list.
I also think that you are over-estimating the value of some of these effects. In our experience, the actual value of special effects for tanks is volatile in the simulation model - mainly because the scale of any given effect compared to your total toughness is so small. Blizzard habitually tunes defensive effects really low, to the point that it is very hard to tell much difference between them when you do the math.
Its not really over-estimating. I mean i could go deep dive into it but im saying just look at it at the basic high level for now.
The scenario is im in a situation where the BiB is saying i need more toughness. im 190 im getting into mythic +. ok good. When it goes to pick conduits it picks the defensive path which is correct, but it includes one potency slot it cant avoid. So what does it choose?
Right now it has 3 options to choose from: Ringing Clarity, Punish The Guilty, and Vengeful Shock. All primarily single target dps conduits. Ringing Clarity gives Divine Toll the ability to hit 1 main target 3 times instead of once, Punish The Guilty causes target with judgement hit to take extra damage from SOTR, and Vengeful Shock causes target hit with avenging shield to take extra damage which can be aoe since shield bounces or divine toll was used.
So when toughness is concerned lets just say we dont care about dps. Vengeful Shock does a good amount of aoe dps, but who cares…we are focused on toughness. Punish the Guilty does probably the best ST damage and probably best for bosses and raids for dps…but again, cant dps if im dead right? Then we get to Ringing Clarity…yes it does dps to a single target, BUT…if choosing First Avenger talent and ONLY if choosing that talent then not only is it dps but it does have toughness rating to it as well. This makes it the only potency conduit that offers toughness, so by default it should be chosen in this scenario instead of the current choice of Punish the Guilty which offers no benefit.
Now the over analyzing stuff can come into play for DPS ratings sure, but for that particular scenario where First Avenger talent is chosen i would add some toughness rating to that conduit so its chosen by default over the others which are just dps.
Want something weird? After going through and checking some of the conduits and the values it gives for each one when entering in I noticed that removing the Punish the Guilty conduit actually is a 0.22% increase. It literally states that its a 0.22% increase to just leave that potency conduit blank or with Ringing Clarity…0.02% increase for using Vengeful Shock. But it still when left on its own picks Punish the Guilty (the first in the list) despite the downgrade.
Here is the snapshot id so you can check for yourself what i mean. Im looking at the conduit pop up page and the percentage value on the bottom left. d0c589bbee964970844b5480fd2ecc67
Yeah there’s something going on there where it isn’t choosing the highest-scoring soulbind tree path and conduits for some reason, I’ll fix that in the next update.
But you are also interpreting the score incorrectly on that screen. When you leave a conduit slot blank, the score it will show you is the highest possible score that you could get with any conduit in that slot, relative to the solution score. So in this case, leaving it blank means that some other conduit in that slot could score 0.22% higher than the conduit chosen by the solution (in this case, ringing clarity scores higher than punish the guilty).
If you were to lock in ringing clarity and re-optimize, then open the window again, you’d see that leaving the slot blank would show 0.00% and locking in punish the guilty would show -0.22%.