magicsim - H2Priest Style Simming for the Masses

[semicolondash]

Introduction:

Every patch, Djriff, Publik, N1gh7h4wk, and Anshlun spend a great deal of time running sims of every gear and talent configuration known to man. They collect huge amounts of data and are able to make pretty damn good inferences about how the average shadow should play and gear.

That's great... for the average person. What about poor Publik himself, with 7k haste? How does that skew his stat weights? Well, in the 'olden days' you'd need to

1. Create and run 28+(!) different simc profiles using a few custom fight definitions
2. Collect all the results into an excel table and do a weighted tabulation

That's tedious and slow. Not to mention confusing / error prone if you don't have a background in SimulationCraft / Computer Science.

If only there was a way to do these kinda sims for someone of a non technical background?

Introducing magicsim:

Lucky for you, so-called 'magicsim' does just that. If you have been hanging around the Shadow discord (highly recommend), you might have seen my tool poking around and making some rounds and getting some oft suggestions for usage.

But what is magicsim? At the very core it's a combined aggregate simulation runner / analyzer, which means it is capable of creating a large number of simulations from simple parameters and is able to automatically run and collect the results. There is a bit of special work to make some of the 'magic' work, but for the most part, it's pretty extensible.

You can get the newest version here: https://github.com/phroph/magicsim/releases/latest

Cool name bro, but what really does it do?

How about I show you? Let's walk through the UI and show you all the magic that magicsim is really capable of (pro-tip: it's a lot).

But first off, let me show you how to run magicsim.

Click nw.exe

nw.png (13.73 KiB) Viewed 12911 times

And then you see

magicsim.png (20.21 KiB) Viewed 12911 times

Welcome to magicsim. This is the basic simming view. When you select a Region, it automatically populates the Realm list from Battle.net (it takes the servers which are online, so odd behavior may be seen during downtime). Once you have typed your character name, select the simulation model you want to use. The most accurate ones are Mythic+ Composite and Tomb of Sargeras Composite. These models try to simulate the average ToS/M+ scenarios but as a caveat are slow to run. This list also includes the individual boss models based on the H2Priest methodology, but they are not as accurate.

As for the other options, threads is the number of simc processes to execute (I recommend no more than 4 unless you have a beefy computer, less if your computer struggles to keep up). No Weights asks the sims to only return dps and not stat weights (this is faster), and PTR mode uses ptr abilities, etc.

Once you've selected your options, hit Simulate and you're on your way to personalized H2Priest style !sims

That's cool, but I want more

More you say? Well, I got your more right here. See that "Advanced" button above? Click it. I dare ya'.

Look's a little scary, but you've exposed the advanced modification panel. It allows you to modify aspects of a simulation that aren't particularly easy to modify (they require playing with the APL if you are familiar with the term). You can try out different potions, flasks, runes, races, and even play around with the new T20 set bonuses (though note, using T20 set bonuses automatically flips the PTR switch). And there will be more added as time goes on

Conclusion:

If you're looking to sim yourself, look no further. magicsim is here to provide the closest possible experience to the ones that H2Priest has.

Just follow the easy steps, wait for the simulation spinner to finish, and enjoy the results.



Note that magicsim is still in active development. There may be bugs, especially as new features are added. Development may not proceed at a consistent pace and may depend on external factors. I'd encourage you to add feature requests / bug reports to the GitHub. You can also ping semicolondash#3014 on Discord

(Consider this my Pi day present :P )

For Advanced Users:

magicsim can't do everything that you might want to do right now. But it does provide you ways to do it yourself as if you were working with a simc profile.

For every sim profile I create, I use a list of fight templates and populate them with data. Ontop of this, I prepend a file called prefix.simc and I append a file called postfix.simc (and I also insert a file called aplfix.simc after character declarations). What this means, it if you want to test things that are not supported by magicsim but are by simc (ie: gear modifications, adding abilities to the apl, etc.), you add these changes to prefix.simc / postfix.simc / aplfix.simc and they will automatically get picked up next time you try to simulate. It's recommended that you toggle advanced mode (you can leave all the fields default) because this mode toggles explicit generation of your characters apl, and allows you to modify this apl as well.

These files are found inside 'package.nw/build_profiles/'

Some Assorted Notes (Kinda a FAQ):

• Avast seems to like flagging nw.exe as a virus. It's not.
• How long does magicsim take? A long time. 25 minutes+ for ToS typically.
• It has been on the "Simulating" screen for 15 minutes, is it okay? If the progress amount is updating every few minutes, most likely. magicsim tries to handle failure as robustly as it can.

[tek]

Hi there,

Sadly i am not competent enough with Shadow Priest TC to know how accurate your results are !
However i am competent enough in IT to know how much work you have done, and for that i want to thank you!!

[Zoroth]

Oh my god you're the best. I've just been silently crying out for a tool like this and (a) totally incapable of building it myself because I don't understand the codemagick well enough and (b) feeling pretty bad about asking even more of our amazing H2P team.

<3

[Ohydra]

These models try to simulate the average Nighthold/M+ scenarios but as a caveat are slow to run. This list also includes the individual boss models based on the H2Priest methodology, but they are not as accurate.

If the individual boss models are not as accurate, how can your average Nighthold sim be more accurate?
Or are you saying that the stat weights returned from simming an individual encounter are not as representative as the weights returned from the average Nighthold sims?

I would assume the later, but I don't want to assume ;p

As for the other options, threads is the number of simc processes to execute

So the output of this tool would be the average of the results from the threads that were ran?

Thanks!

[Tyrannon]

Thanks for the program!

Can you please add a Pause button or even a save process button? My system is slow and it takes several hours to compute. Having a pause to play a game in between or having a save option after each completed sim would also allow to work on a sim in intervals.

[semicolondash]

These models try to simulate the average Nighthold/M+ scenarios but as a caveat are slow to run. This list also includes the individual boss models based on the H2Priest methodology, but they are not as accurate.

If the individual boss models are not as accurate, how can your average Nighthold sim be more accurate?
Or are you saying that the stat weights returned from simming an individual encounter are not as representative as the weights returned from the average Nighthold sims?

I would assume the later, but I don't want to assume ;p

As for the other options, threads is the number of simc processes to execute

So the output of this tool would be the average of the results from the threads that were ran?

Thanks!

You are right, I'm saying the stat weights from simming an individual encounter are not as representative as the weights returned from the average Nighthold sims.

And as for threads, they don't impact results, they simply impact how it runs on your computer. So for example, if you have a beefy computer with a top-end processor, your computer might be able to run 8 threads at once, while a computer with only a single core processor may have to turn down the setting to get acceptable sim performance without causing undue stress on their computer. Simply, once all the sims have finished, I collect all the results produced and average them together.

Thanks for the program!

Can you please add a Pause button or even a save process button? My system is slow and it takes several hours to compute. Having a pause to play a game in between or having a save option after each completed sim would also allow to work on a sim in intervals.

It's something multiple people have asked me for, so it's something I'll try to add in the next release. But no guarantees on a timeline, I've been pretty busy and caught up with other simming projects as well (I'm trying to keep ahead of Tomb of Sargeras). So since magicsim is pretty stable and usable right now, I don't have that burning impetus to try to crank out new features until I have a bit more time to sit down and think this through.

[boerninger]

Heya, i got a quick question.

Is magicsim updated for patch 7.2 (esp. Sephuz buff?)?

[semicolondash]

Heya, i got a quick question.

Is magicsim updated for patch 7.2 (esp. Sephuz buff?)?

Yes, but you need to toggle "PTR Mode" to the best of my knowledge until SimC updates to make those default.

Yes, it should be now working by default. No need for PTR Mode anymore.

[boerninger]

Heya, i got a quick question.

Is magicsim updated for patch 7.2 (esp. Sephuz buff?)?

Yes, but you need to toggle "PTR Mode" to the best of my knowledge until SimC updates to make those default.

Yes, it should be now working by default. No need for PTR Mode anymore.

Nice. Thank you for your great work

[semicolondash]

Hi all. Here with an important warning.
Blizzard has changed the Armory, this may break normal sims.
It appears that Advanced-sims still work, so if you are having issues simming, opening the advanced tab (and selecting no options) should resolve the issue.

The fix appears to be on SimC's side, so it may take some time for all the issues to be fully ironed out. Please be patient with transient errors that may come up and down as a result.