A Tool That Helps You Make Gear Choices In Two Seconds – One Piece Of New Loot At A Time

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You know that guy – he’s probably one of the dudes, maybe even the Fonz himself.  Always knows exactly what a particular piece of gear means to his current set, and probably every other spec for not only his toon but everyone in the raid.  The fellow who seems to be able to see the game code in his head and actually understand how it all works together.

You may actually be that guy, if so you probably won’t use this tool at all.  But for everyone who ever wondered whether to take the Staff with a bit more haste over the main hand/off hand with spirit, this little gem will make processing those decisions a matter of about three seconds worth of work.  If you can look at two numbers and tell which one is higher than the other one – you’re set.

The Tool is the Simcraft Engine from Wowwikki.  Over the last couple of months we’ve been posting builds and specs from the engine for different classes and talent trees, but never really used the engine ourselves until last week.  The reason behind this is that trying to figure out all the possible parameters and commands just makes my teeth hurt to even think about, but there are some interesting things you can do with the engine that applies to your own toon, and not some made up best-in-slot mega toon.

First you’ll need to download Simcraft to your computer – Simcracft Engine Downloads – and install the thing on your hard drive.  (no there isn’t going to be a big long explanation of this – f you can’t figure it out on your own, you’ll never be able to use it anyway, so tech challenged folks will have to go to the wikki forums for the engine itself for help, this isn’t going to turn into product support for someone else’s stuff).

There are versions for both Mac and PC, so no matter what you’re platform, you should be good to go.  Launch the engine and set your options in the first tab.  I prefer to use Helter-Skelter and Player Skill = good.  Those settings seem to most realistically mirror what I can expect out of my toons in a real life boss encounter.

Next, just import your toon from the armory.  Find your toon in the armory interface and click Import at the bottom right, once the import is done, the same button will then read “Simulate!”  Hit the simulate button and you will end up with a wealth of information about your toon.

The engine will run your toon through a simulated boss fight 1,000 times and then generate a LOT of numbers.  It will tell you almost everything you need to know about how to get more out of your DPS.  It will show you how to maximize your priorities, what buffs to use and most importantly, how stats scale for you with your current gear.

You see, stats are never quite static.  Almost everything suffers from diminishing returns.  You can only get so much out of stacking Haste, for example, before more Haste is not worth as much as more Spell power or something else.  Unfortunately, trying to figure all that out as a human being is the realm of the uber geekoids and those blessed with some sort of freakishly natural ability to do so.

I ain’t that guy, but I know a good machine when I see it.  I don’t have to build the dang thing myself, but if it makes my life easier and gets me something 99.5% as good without having to re-invent the wheel, I’m all over it.  The Simcraft scales are my kind of machine.

Near the top you will see the custom generated scale factors for your toon based on your current gear.  I did this for my mother’s poor little shadow priest and got the numbers you see below:

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OK, so you cant read the pawn scales all that well in that format, but there they are.  All I have to do is drop those suckers into Pawn for her and when the very next piece of gear drops, she can tell in two seconds just how much better it is than what she’s got.

Now here is the really slick part.  All of that took me about 2 minutes.  The next time you get a piece of gear, you just reload your toon into the engine and then run it through the simulator again to re-balance your scales.  Every new piece of gear will affect all future pieces of gear.  With up-to-date scales, you never have to wonder if you are giving enough weight to Crit or Spirit or whatever, you can just pop in a new Pawn scale and go one with your day.

Basically what this means is that now you can theory-craft and min/max every single piece of gear you ever get on the fly and then update your entire set of scales with every new piece of gear you get.  And you can do it without having to scratch your head and look at five web sites and threads all over the internet, all you have to do is read a couple of number, and that is very Dominating.