Super common questions are snappily answered below, there are more detailed questions/answers lower down.
The Short Short Version
Is Raidbots accurate/reliable/good?
Mostly. It’s less accurate around patches. But everything is made by humans and nothing is perfect.
Does Raidbots handle Azerite powers/trinkets/set bonuses/etc
Yes.
What’s the difference between Raidbots and SimulationCraft?
Raidbots runs SimulationCraft on cloud hardware.
Why do I get different results from Raidbots and SimC on my own machine?
Different version of SimC or different settings. More details and a whole other blog post about this below.
Why are the stat weights different than other sites/guides?
Raidbots Stat Weights are personal to your character and current set of gear. Stat weights change often. Be wary of stat weights.
Why does Pawn give me weird results / flip flop between two items?
Stat weights are an approximation with several problems. Use them as a quick guide. Direct sims are better.
Why is my Armory character/avatar wrong?
Use the SimulationCraft addon. Blizzard’s Armory API sometimes has issues.
More Details If You Like To Read Words
Raidbots is a site made by Seriallos to make SimulationCraft as easy to use as possible. SimulationCraft is an open source project that simulates WoW combat used to help figure out such things as optimal skill rotations, ideal stat weights, best gear to use, and all kinds other things.
My current goals with Raidbots are to 1) make a nice web-based interface for SimC and 2) run the simulations on powerful servers.
How Accurate is Raidbots?
It’s complicated! But in general, pretty good for most purposes, especially for DPS specs.
Raidbots is running SimC so check with your class Discord/forums/etc to see if your community is successfully using SimC to answer common questions (stat weights, gear/trinket/legendary choices, etc).
SimC has an amazing community of developers who are constantly working on improving and updating SimC. It has a strong foundation for simulating WoW combat so it’s pretty good at answering questions like “which stat will provide the most DPS gain given a fight style” or “which piece of gear/legendary/trinket/etc will improve my DPS the most”
How up-to-date is Raidbots? What version of SimC is being used?
By default, Raidbots uses a custom “weekly” build that is compiled from the latest changes on Monday nights (built at about 10:45pm EST, there are notifications in the Raidbots Discord if you want to know when new builds are available).
In the “Advanced Options” on any page, you can choose to use a Nightly version (built every night at about 10:45pm EST) or the Weekly version.
The basic breakdown of the versions:
Nightly: contains the latest changes, could vary from day to day, slightly higher chance of running into new bugs.
Weekly: same code for a full raid lockout, tends to be slightly more stable as I’ll rebuild it if there are serious bugs found or if there are important changes that pop up mid-week.
Does Raidbots support tanks or healers?
Tanks: Sorta, mostly DPS
Healers: No
When possible, Raidbots will run DPS sims for tanks. There aren’t that many tank devs right now and the survival simming is not maintained.
Healers are not supported at all by SimC at this time. Simulating healers is a difficult problem to solve and no one is working on the problem at this time (as far as I know)
Why is there a queue? How does the queue work?
SimulationCraft is computationally expensive and fast servers are expensive. Raidbots uses a queue to balance cost and user experience (running enough servers to handle simulations immediately would be extraordinarily expensive although it would be awesome).
For non-patrons, when you submit a simulation request, your job is placed at the end of the line. The Raidbots worker machines just keep grabbing the job at the start of the line, process it, save the reports, and then repeat. The site attempts to run as many servers as needed to keep the public queue at a reasonable wait time (my goal is to keep the wait time below 5 minutes as often as possible).
Patrons get to skip ahead of the non-patrons — their jobs start just ahead of the public jobs but behind any other patron jobs already in queue. So patrons will usually see themselves at position #1 in the line and just have to wait for an open worker machine (generally no more than 10–15 seconds) unless there are multiple patrons using the site at the same time, in which case they’ll still be pretty close to the front but might not land at #1.
For the various levels of skip-the-line, it operates basically the same — Legendary patrons get placed ahead of Epic patrons, Epic in front of Rare, Rare in front of public users.
How do the Patron levels work?
Patrons can receive various perks based on the contribution amount:
- Skip the line (see above)
- Guild skip-the-line for the Discord bot
- Higher iteration limit in Top Gear
- Longer time limits (simulations are stopped after a certain amount of time to ensure no one user hogs all the resources)
Why is Raidbots showing different DPS than what I see when running my own version of SimC?
I wrote another blog post going into more details on this. Read it here.
The biggest reasons you might run into this:
- Small differences are expected. SimC is a simulation that runs thousands of fights but it does use RNG internally — two runs with the exact same settings will result in slightly different numbers . Stat Weights in particular may look different from run to run but the relationship between the stats will usually be fairly consistent.
- Different versions of SimC on Raidbots versus on your machine. Even small differences in builds could result in large differences if your class/spec has had a change that’s not in one or the other.
- Your local SimC has a different configuration than Raidbots (fight style, fight length, player skill, etc)
- Finally, the Raidbots Nightly build is never more than 24 hours old. If you do not update your own version of SimC regularly, Raidbots is more likely to have a more recent SimC build that contains any recent hot fixes or simulation updates.
The exact version of SimC is listed at the top of every HTML report and on the Raidbots report page (both the release number and the exact git commit hash). SimC Nightly and Raidbots Nightly will usually be fairly close but there’s a small chance a significant change for your class is present in one but not the other. You can click through the git hash to see the exact point-in-time of the codebase that is being used.
Some common configuration differences that you should check:
- Player Skill — Raidbots uses the default value of “Elite” which should be used in just about every case. Changing this is not particularly well supported in SimC so just don’t touch it.
- World Lag — Default value is “Medium — 100ms”. This is another one that you probably shouldn’t change. Spell queueing in the WoW client handles latency effectively in nearly all scenarios.
- Double check all the fight options (style, length, vary, number of bosses, etc). Raidbots uses 20% vary by default right now so this could somewhat change things.
I found a bug, what do?
Please let me know if you find a problem! There are several places where you can report issues that you find:
