Hello! I’m a long-time user of AMR, but lost confidence in the platform midway through Dragonflight. I very much like how AMR functions and would like to use it again, but am having a hard time believing its recommendations. For example: EVERYTHING I’m reading indicates that haste is top priority for a Discipline priest, especially when using Voidweaver. However, AMR is recommending I dump haste in favor of crit and vers for M+. I tried to adjust stat weights, but it looks like that feature was removed (around the time I first lost confidence, I believe). Is there any sort of explanation for why such choices are being made? The new site layout seems to remove a lot of “under the hood” tools that I used to appreciate, and the seemingly bizarre recommendations are causing me to second-guess giving the tool another try. Can anyone shed light on why AMR is making the decisions it is?
For reference, the snapshot ID for the results I received is here: ed8dc938615840dfac3e3d2bdbdb7f8a
In general, the optimizer will try to get a lot of haste for Discipline. If you were to look at a generic Discipline priest and run BiS with no restrictions, you will see this result. Your specific BiB case is, of course, restricted to your available gear. Sometimes, the robot is able to find a “local” solution when constrained by gear choices that is counter-intuitive or off-meta, but calculates out to optimal.
For discipline, specifically, I do the calculations using a very “on-meta” healing pattern. The calculations are centered around how much healing you can do on your allies when you put up atonement via pw: radiance and follow the recommended healing pattern suggested in most guides. I calculate this specifically, in a pseudo-simulation style for discipline, since the order you cast your spells has a lot of impact on the result.
The general stat priorities you see out there are all with respect to Best in Slot gear using the preferred on-meta talent builds. Our calculations have the ability to adapt to any situation you throw at it, so it is inevitable that off-meta results will pop up from time to time.
All that being said, healing is about the feeling, so we have multiple ways to customize the optimizer if you don’t want to change your preferred stats due to current gear availability. An easy-to-find tutorial for all of this is on my short list to add to the site now that I finished the new healer code.
There are three things you can do to push it more towards haste:
Move the healing level slider all the way towards HPS, which tends to favor more haste than pure dps for discipline
In the custom settings, under Spec Options, move the Healer Playstyle all the way to “reactive”. (I recently finished a healer overhaul, so I’m going to rename this, since for disc you aren’t really playing reactively, you are setting up healing windows)
Thank you very much. I hadn’t considered that the angle of “this is what’s in your bags” might generate an answer so contradictory to the meta, but it makes perfect sense. I appreciate you taking the time to give me such a detailed response, and I’ll play more with the strategy customization.
