Infinite Stars all day, y’all
There’s been a lot of questions and usage of the new Preserved Contaminant feature on Top Gear. Here’s some quick answers.
Update May 24th: I just made a significant update to Preserved Contaminants that allows you to select far more items and should fix a number of performance issues. This post has been updated for the shiny new stuff. Reload the site if you don’t see the updated UI.
Is the Gushing Wounds nerf live on Raidbots?
Updated June 2nd: Gushing Wounds nerf is present in all sims. Tooltips from Wowhead may be out-of-date for a little bit as they get things updated.
Why isn’t Top Gear adding new corruption to anything?
You need to specify items to purify and/or select uncorrupted items. Without doing that, there won’t be any “corruption budget” available to stay under your Max Corruption when adding contaminants.
Also make sure to set “Contaminants to Apply” to 1 or higher.
Why isn’t Top Gear adding new corruption to multiple pieces?
Set the “Contaminants to Apply” choice to a higher value. This will attempt to use more contaminant items to add more corruption at once.
How do I get Top Gear to replace existing corruption?
Use the “Purify” button on any corrupted item or enable “Copy and Purify All Corrupted Items.” Purifying specific pieces is generally recommended so you can control the size of the sim more granularly.
Why isn’t Top Gear replacing corruption on a specific item?
Several potential reasons:
- There’s no way to apply your selected corruption based on “Max Corruption” and “Require 25 Corruption” options.
- You may need to increase “Contaminants to Apply” in order for Top Gear to find a corruption layout that works with that piece.
- Top Gear removes combinations that are functionally identical. If there are two items in a combination that could accept the corruption and result in the same DPS, Top Gear arbitrarily chooses one of them. In many cases, the precise item chosen doesn’t matter and you can choose based on your own preference.
Why is Top Gear trying to add corruption on a piece that I can’t contaminate in-game?
There were some issues shortly after release with various scenarios (crafted items, items cleansed before maintenance) but Blizzard has either fixed these or announced a fix for these.
- Hotfix for items cleansed before maintenance (May 21st)
- Hotfix for crafted items (May 20th)
I want to run larger sims, is that possible?
I do not have any immediate plans due to technical constraints. 16m Top Gear iterations is the maximum at the Epic level of Premium membership.
Larger sims are a constant long-term goal for Raidbots but it likely requires months of deep technical work to achieve.
Why does Top Gear love Infinite Stars so much?
The default fight style on Raidbots is Patchwerk — a single target fight with no movement. Infinite Stars performs exceptionally well when there is no target switching.
This does not match most in-game fights right now so it’s likely not a practical choice for many scenarios.
There are a couple of ways of dealing with this information:
- Choose a different fight style that has adds / multiple bosses
- Advanced users: there’s a SimC expansion option that can lower the efficacy of Infinite Stars,
bfa.infinite_stars_miss_chance— you can set this value in “Custom APL and SimC Options” on any Raidbots tool - Don’t select Infinite Stars
I recommend checking with class resources (class Discord, etc) for recommendations on how to sim your specific class/spec for multi-target fights.
Is there a way to figure out my BiS corruption?
There is no easy way to do this currently. It’s a pretty difficult problem to solve in general (given 8 equipment slots and 46 DPS-affecting corruptions, there are just over 1 billion possible combinations and that just ain’t happening). I am continuing to work on Top Gear to see what more is feasible — this first version was what I could quickly assemble in the 24 hours between announcement and release of the corruption vendor.
One lesser known feature on Top Gear that can be useful is the “triple dot” menu on report pages.
Every combination in a Top Gear report has a menu that lets you generate fake /simc input that can be used in subsequent sims. You can do things like purify individual items and create a new base input that has additional “room” for corruption. With a gearset with less corruption, you can run a series of sims that add 1 corruption at a time.
Folks are still figuring out the best way to tackle this problem so keep checking with your class resources to see what strategies emerge.
Ultimately, the number of possible ways to gear your character is larger than Raidbots can handle (and possibly larger than is computationally possible using a brute force simulation approach) so there is unlikely to be a “one shot” solution to the problem. You’ll have to use your own judgment based on all the tools available — guides, analysis, research, sims, logs, and intuition.
