Shadowlands Gear Optimization Roadmap

[yellowfive]

Castle Nathria Update

We have just released a round of tweaks based on data and feedback gathered in the last two weeks in preparation for Castle Nathria. We fully expect Blizzard to tune things a bit over the first couple weeks of raiding, so we’ll keep an eye on that and do another update when appopriate.

Here are the highlights:

Guides!

The guide pages are back up and running! We will of course be tweaking things over the next few weeks, but they should be in a pretty good spot for all specs. You can view Covenant recommendations, Talent recommendations, and use our interactive Rotation viewer to get a detailed yet easy-to-read flow chart describing how to play your spec. The rotation adapts to talents, covenant, legendaries, and conduits that you choose – be sure to customize it!

Updated legendary and trinket rankings

We have updated the rankings for several legendary items and trinkets. A few of them were more difficult cases to test on the beta, such as the Inscrutable Quantum Device and Mistcaller’s Ocarina – those should be ranked for all specs now. The Inscrutable Quantum Device is one of those trinkets that you may have to use personal judgment – the value that you get out of it will depend a lot on your specific situation.

A few legendaries have been updated, e.g. Reanimated Shambler is filtered to Unholy DKs only in the game data, but can be used by other specs. We have manually overridden that spec requirement and added rankings for Blood and Frost.

In the upgrade finder legendary ranking, some legendaries where the special effect doesn’t have any value for a particular build were getting small non-zero values (e.g. a 0.5% upgrade). This wasn’t an error – it was actually pretty clever. That legendary ranking doesn’t look at the legendary effect in a vacuum: it predicts how well that legendary will fit into a near-BiS set of gear. Thus other gear options in that slot and others can influence the value of a legendary (as it should).

Therefore, simply being able to make a high item level item with perfect stats for a slot has a small value, even if the legendary effect does not. That said, we feel that such legendaries should show up as zero in the list anyway – since you can only use one legendary, there’s no point making one just for the stats. We are now ranking legendaries at zero if the effect is of no value for your talents+covenant.

Updated low-level tank optimizations

We create all of our “toughness” data for tanking around max-level content for the current tier. In this case, that will be Mythic+ and normal or higher raids, where people will quickly be at ilvl200+. When you are significantly lower than that item level, the toughness data generated for those higher item levels doesn’t really apply. It’s also not that beneficial to really worry about toughness until you get a bit higher anyway.

That said, our new system can handle toughness rankings down to a much lower item level now, so we have enabled that. If you leave the toughness slider at “All TUF”, we’ll rank gear based on toughness no matter your item level now. As soon as you move it away from “All TUF”, we’ll rank your gear based on DPS if you are below around ilvl180, and we’ll do your desired “blend” of the two if you are above about ilvl180.

We can’t do the “blend” below around item level 180 because the toughness data isn’t calibrated for it, and as mentioned above, it doesn’t really matter that much. Blending becomes more interesting at higher item levels.

Pawn export

For people who like the pawn export, we have tweaked it for tanks and healers. If you have your toughness/healing slider set below the half-way mark, we’ll output DPS weights. If above half, we’ll output TUF/HPS weights. We don’t generate “blended” weights because they don’t make a whole lot of sense. As always, take Pawn weights with a massive grain of salt – we really don’t recommend it as a way to make serious gear choices, it is more of a casual convenience while leveling or something.

[fozzgate]

Thanks for all your help.

[tarix]

@Swol

In my experience the simc APL authors include a lot of extremely complicated conditions that often only specifically yield DPS increases in patchwerk simc sims.

Everyone should really look at this for their own specs because you’ll be shocked how dumb some of the rotations are and how unreasonable they are for a regular human to recreate. If you need a visual representation of them load up Hekili sometime and try doing their rotation on a raid target dummy and see if it even makes sense.

Over many expansions, at least for the specs that I’ve personally played and checked, the AMR ones are just more realistic out of the box or they are quickly updated when new usable tricks are discovered.

[lagunad]

@tarix

Over many expansions, at least for the specs that I’ve personally played and checked, the AMR ones are just more realistic out of the box or they are quickly updated when new usable tricks are discovered.

I found what seems to me an anomaly in the ranking of Resto Shaman conduits for Mythic+.

Obviously healing simulation presents many issues beyond those for DPS.

For my item-level 182 Resto Shaman, with sim-optimal talents, Mr.Robot thinks the best Potency conduit is Heavy Rainfall (“Using Healing Tide Totem increases the healing of your Healing Rain by 90% for 20 seconds”). In fact, this conduit is the only one which gives results statistically different from using no conduit at all!

Based on my experience in M+, I think it’s very bad advice, though.

HTT has a 3-minute c/d, and Healing Rain has a 10s c/d. So the maximum bonus is easy to calculate: You get a 90% bonus on at most two HR casts every 3 minutes. If you are using HR on c/d, it is a 90% bonus to 1/9 of the casts, or a 10% increase in HR healing.

But HR is rarely useful in M+ fights. HR heals for 29.5% of spellpower per target initially, and then ticks for 5/(1+haste) times for the same amount. According to Mr. Robot, Haste is the worst stat for Resto Shaman, so let’s ignore it for simplicity (my Resto Shaman has only 3% Haste). Best case heal for HR in M+ is then 177% of spellpower per target on five targets, so 885% of spellpower total, absolute best case.

The best case is very optimistic in M+ though, as situations where all five people can remain stacked inside a 10-yard circle for 10 seconds during a heavy damage period are extremely rare. And a heavy damage period is precisely when you would use HTT, but if you want to prepare, you would cast HR first (just before the damage comes) and HTT second (as the damage starts). Realistically, you would then spot heal the people in greatest danger and be unable to cast HR again (to benefit from the conduit buff) for almost ten seconds.

tldr; HR is a preparatory/maintenance spell, and HTT is a reactive spell, and the conduit buff requires using them in the “wrong” order. While it may make sense in a raid, as the only healer (in M+), you do not cast HR while people are in danger of dying.

Baseline Chain Heal, by comparison, heals for up to 510% of spellpower total (if it hits four targets), it does it right now instead of over 10 seconds, and it allows you to prioritize the target who needs healing most in many cases.

I tried to understand the logic behind this questionable simulation result. It appears the mythic healing simulator assumes HTT will be cast at least once in every single fight. If it is not triggered by the “panic button” of many heavily-injured allies, it is always triggered at the start of a fight longer than 3m30s, and in the last 30s. So the Heavy Rainfall buff will get close to theoretically maximum uptime.

The normal logic for HR is to use it when 3+ allies are in a 7.5 yard radius. But if the conduit is present and the buff is up, it uses it unconditionally. It’s unclear whether there is any additional internal logic to discount the raw healing amount based on the number of allies it will actually hit over the next 10 seconds, in that case.

[Swol]

You’re right that the mythic+ simulation will get fairly optimistic use out of healing rain in general. We’ll see how it changes as I implement a new mythic+ healing script in the weeks to come.

If you find you can’t get practical use out of the heavy rainfall conduit, go ahead and exclude it. The way I look at it right now: the numbers are showing you that if you are using healing tide totem in a tough fight and you can heal 3 or 4 of your group members with healing rain afterwards… it’s probably the best conduit (the script heals 4 of the 5 group members with healing rain). Conduits are weak and fairly invisible in general, though - so it’ll be hard to tell a difference in practice.