“Follow Up” Article slightly more updated.
With Legion and how easy to come by the gear is and how easily you can tailor your perfect set of stats, more and more people have been coming in and asking about gearing and, specifically, stats weights.
However, “stats weight” is probably the single most misunderstood theorycrafting tool laying around. Most of the terms associated with it are misunderstood or used in the wrong way (diminishing returns, soft cap, hard cap, breakpoints, …). The concept itself is not clear and leads to a lot of issues within guides. However, most people don’t really care: they want numbers telling them what to do and have no way to check whether those numbers are true or not.
We’d like to enlighten you with some of the information on how it works. First, I’ll just give rough information on how stats weights work, how to get them and what to do with it, as well as our simplified stats balancing method. Eventually I’ll try to elaborate for those who want to look further into it, explaining those scary words and some advanced things about weights.
What are stats weights?
Stats weights are numbers associated with primary/secondary stats meant to give relative « weights » of importance. If one stat weight is twice as big as another, it means gaining some of that stat will increase the dps twice as much as the other one does. Stats weights are, in essence, local. They are calculated (usually via Simulation tools like SimulationCraft, notably) at one specific gearset, for one specific type of fight (oftentimes single target), duration, etc.
To calculate stats weights, SimCraft basically calculates the gains in dps that would result from a very small increase in each stat, then divides those gains by the amount of stats gained. It is very similar, in that regard, to calculus and the computation of a derivative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative):
We assume that damage per second is a continuous function of your stats and derive stats weights out of the gains the same why we’d do it for a function of several variables (here, we consider dps as a continuous function of primary stats, versatility, haste, critical chance, mastery ratings.) If you’re into that, look further into partial derivation of a multiple variable function at set values for all variables except one. Here, our multiple variables are all your different stats and we’re doing partial derivation on one stat.
One other thing worth noting: for gear gain, it is often risky to look at very small gains and take the results as definitive. Some amount of haste gain could push it to some amount that allows one extra cast during each Serenity, or each momentum window, or each combustion or whatnot. Pushing these very small breakpoints will result in huge stats weights which do not reflect the reality of things or are only true for a very small gain.
For instance, if you’re calculating your stat weight at a point where haste is reaching such a breakpoint, SimCraft will go crazy and tell you haste is 12 times better than any other stat. Of course, if you’d watched a bit further, you’d have seen than in fact it wasn’t, and as soon as you had one extra haste gem SimCraft went back to telling you that haste was not your best stat. Furthermore, just because SimCraft saw such a breakpoint doesn’t mean it really exists. It could be due to action priority lists being rigid and not reacting the way humans do to some things lining up or not.
To avoid this happening to you, there is a tool in SimulationCraft called plotting that allows you to see how your dps evolves with your stats by small increments (you can control all these aspects) and see how smoothly they evolve.
TL;DR: Stats weights tell you how much of a dps increase each secondary stat is compared to your primary stat. They are tied to your current gear set and change as you change it. Usually, the more you stack one stat, the worse it gets, meaning you will likely have to sim regularly.
How do I get stats weights?
This, to some extent, is the easy part. First solution is to go to Beotorch.com, create an account, find your character from armory, check the « Calculate Scale Factors » and you’re good to go. After a few minutes, you’ll have results including a list of values associated with each stats. This is literally the best tool to get Simcraft stats weights easily as it was designed for exactly that. It will use the base action priority list for it, which is usually very decent/the best available work from Hinalover for Windwalkers. It will allow you to sim variable fight lengths, number of targets, AoE spawns…
If you wanna look further into it, or into this « plotting » I mentioned earlier, then try the real SimulationCraft engine. It is what Beotorch.com runs to get you these, but running it yourself grants you extra freedom. You can change anything on your gear, your stats, your race, any sort of settings. Just go to options -> stats scaling and check the « all stats » options.
If you wanna check plotting it’s in there as well; there are many options I’ll let you discover.
What do I do with these numbers then?
While Pawn is a great add-on that tells you how much of an upgrade each item you drop can be, it has it’s limit. The limits are not in the add-on itself, they are in how you use them. If I was to use this string coming out of leveling, in 800 gear, the following would happen.
First all the big ilvl upgrades would win just because of the amount of stats I’d gain. However, my gear would slowly turn into a more mastery heavy one and low haste one, up until a point where it becomes obvious I’ve overdone it and mastery is my worst stat and haste my best one.
To avoid this, two solutions:
First one is what this article has been about: simulate it. Beotorch.com is an excessively easy tool to use, takes a couple minutes. I know it’s hard to simulate your gear when the loot drops and you have to decide whether to take it or leave it for someone else. But you probably won’t change 5 items in one run, or when you do most will be obvious gains because of crazy ilvl increases.
Therefore, whenever you change a couple items, when you go offline run a sim on Beotorch.com or Simcraft and update your stats weights string. It’ll cover changes for your next run just fine.
If you’re ever looking to determine if X item is better than Y, its always best to sim your character with that slot empty. This will provide you with the stat weights needed to best compare two or more items directly.
The other solution is one I fancy a lot. What follows is only valuable for Windwalkers.
I don’t like trusting all my gear management in a tool like Simcraft. Not because Simcraft doesn’t work, it’s usually very good. But rather because of my own possible failures. Therefore, I always like to do some napkin math to sanity check results.
Babylonius and I, with the help of some very solid people (Navv from simcraft, FieryDemise from RavenHoldt, Hinalover) have done a lot of calculations to try and push the idea that stats weights are simple partial derivations. Thanks to that work, we ended up finding the exact « gaps » between stats that would allow us to balance our gear.
When following these rules, you should find your stats weights even out very nicely and have roughly Crit=Vers=Mastery >> haste.
Of course, this is not absolute. Having a strong trinket that values critical chance, haste and versatility but not mastery can change these numbers quite a bit (aka telling you to drop 700-1000 mastery rating for instance.) But this is the best we could achieve as general rules:
Outdated as of 7.1.5, just examples of the interaction between stats.
-Blood elf: Mastery 4500 above Versatility, Versatility 800 above Crit rating; haste anywhere between 5% and 10%
-Other races: Mastery 4500 above versatility, Versatility 400 above Crit rating; haste anywhere between 5% and 10%
This rule is not very important: you should not go crazy about them and end up having mastery OCDs. Just because versatility is less than 800 ahead of Crit rating doesn’t mean you should absolutely go for versatility; you probably are still looking for some mastery. However it gives you guidelines to how well balanced gear probably looks like.
I’ll try to develop where these estimations come from and the mathematical justifications in next stats weights post.
Conclusion
With these two ways of approximating what your stats should look like, you could always compare them to sanity check for yourself. If you run, for instance, a trinket like Faulty Countermeasure, you might find that in your sims the amount mastery should be above other stats is rather 3500 or something. Something like a trinket proccing a specific stat will drop that stat’s weight quickly.
When it comes to stats weight, always use them with a grain of salt. If you have different ways of obtaining them do so every now and then (SimCraft, Beotorch.com, AskMrRobot, our sanity checks) rather than using one blindly.
And as some very smart people would say, for most items you’ll go after item lvl anyways.
TL:DR – Stat weights are not valid forever, just for the next small portion of stats that you gain. They don’t dictate replacing items, just what stat you want next. Best practice is to sim your character regularly. If you want to determine if one item is better than another, sim your character with that socket empty and use the stat weights generated to compare them. Take all stat weights with a grain of salt. Scroll up slightly to see the stat gaps that help dictate what stat is better than another.
Hopefully, this answers more questions than it creates. As always you can find us on Discord to answer questions, and if you liked what you read don’t hesitate to scroll down or to the top and subscribe and support WtW.
I absolutely LOVE this post. All too often I find people bragging about how perfectly itemized their gear is because they stacked mastery to the sky and have next to no haste. I’ll be sure to link them this article in the future, as you explain it better than I ever could.
Thank you for taking the time to write this Panda!
Thanks for the detailed write up! You inspired me to finally give simulationcraft a go. I checked out the legion-dev branch (seems to be the most up to date) and built it on linux. It appears to work for my warlock but instantly dies when I attempt my monk with the following string:
simc armory=us,area-52,malsung calculate_scale_factors=1 html=output.html
Do you use the simc cli? If so, could you update the post to include some strings you’ve used successfully? Also, if you’re building it from source too, maybe you could let me know which branch/commit you used such that monk sims actually work.
Navv told me he fixed this, it was probably not something I could help with anyways!
Does mastery have some sort of softcap? I’m a little confused how vers could ever pull ahead if it just flat out gives less damage per point.
Think about this, if you ability does 100k damage, 20% Mastery will make it do 120k no?, the thing is mastery isn’t applied to mastery itself while Versa is applied after Mastery, so 1% of versa would take 100k to 101k, while 1% of versa at 20% of mastery would take 120k to 121.200, 21% of Mastery would take 100k to simply 121.000. The other thing to have in mind is that Versa is 1% more damage to everything, included trinket procs, while Mastery only applies to abilities that aren’t a repeat of the last, so no AA damage buff or trinkets, etc.
Basically what Ways said 🙂 getting more mastery makes versatility/crit better, getting more versatility makes crit/mastery better.
Mastery is flat out better than crit/versatility until you have a decent amount more than those two. That’s the amount we tried to estimate, but it still depends on trinkets, fight types etc!
So i am basically sitting on 46% mastery 31% Crit and very low Versa. Is this a case where i should actually try to get more versatility to improve my dps? take the example of a Patchwerk fight where you just have to stand and hit untill your fists bleed. i feel like 46% might be abit overkill in this Instance and could easily be Replaced by Versa
Yes, in that situation where theres a large gap, you may see benefit from gemming/enchanting for Vers.
Thanks for this very informative article! I look forward to the next one.
I would be very interested in the actual *logic* behind some of these weights, as I find the results to be somewhat counterintuitive. For instance, I am quite surprised at the comparatively low value given to haste by the sims. To me, the fact that haste both reduces our rotational cooldowns and increases energy regen should theoretically mean that, from a mechanics perspective, haste ought to be right behind mastery in terms of value (at least up to a certain point). After all, more energy = more Tiger Palm = more chi, and more chi and shorter CDs = more chances to punch-kick the bad guy in the face. Therefore more damage. So I am therefore quite confused to see haste falling behind not only versatility (which I can sort of understand) but also crit (which really doesn’t make much sense since we have no crit-related procs).
Short version I guess is, how do the raw stat weights derived from the sims relate (if at all) to the logic of how the stats work? The answer to that question would, I think, be a very interesting follow-up.
Haste is a tough one, and sims lie to us very often about it.
We all expected haste to be one of our top stats for new windwalker.
And thinking about it it makes sense: haste starts at 0%, gets 1% increase at the low cost of 325 rating. It increases our base energy regen by X% AND increases the max number of casts of Fists of Fury, Rising Sun Kick, Whirling Dragon Punch by the same amount.
So if you actually manage to hit all these spells on cooldown it should be looking very good and amongst our top stats.
However, haste doesn’t affect all of our stuff. It doesn’t touch Strike of the windlord’s cooldown, doesn’t affect touch of death. It does increase our base energy regen but not arcane torrent+energizing elixir which can quickly amount for 6-7 chi per minute on average, aka 20% of our energy regen. Also, the more energy you have, the harder it gets to spend it all in due time and on the right spells, the more conflicts you get, the less useful energizin elixir gets…
It could’ve been a crazy stat, but it doesn’t affect some tools which are insanely strong in our kit.
It is still worth quite a lot for the first few %s, when all these issues are still not too bad.
We might be slightly wrong on haste’s value but unfortunately the results we’re getting make a lot of sense as well.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
This helped so much .. thanks a lot .)
Absolute legend Panda, V informative write up.
It is funny though, I’m not trying to stack mastery but at i848(no legendary) I’m at 10,000 mastery and that’s with no enchants or mastery gems. (I do have them enchanted and a bunch of stacks of mastery food because I didn’t think I would be getting only mastery on every single piece of gear.
Yes, gear available is so good right now that you pretty much get the stats you want on each piece of gear. That’s because of item cap so we’re stacking what looks bis in each slot, ending up with a large overkill on mastery for many of us. Hopefully raid gear being part of our kit (and unfortunately tier 19 having low mastery on it) will “fix” this and keep mastery attractive for us.
Keep an eye out for this
That’s a good point, raid gear is most likely going to drop my mastery so I should be fine.
Thanks for this. I know this is off-topic, but any chance we’ll see a post on Transfer the Power? I’m still not sure how long (if at all) we should delay FoF to build stacks.
Hey there; I don’t know if we want a full post about transfer the power. It sure is strong, can be misleading too, but do we want to be spammy about everything? If several people feel it’s needed though, I’ll do it!
In general you don’t want to delay FoF ever for transfer the power; delaying FoF costs you FoF cooldown, risks losing you a cast. Any stacks you don’t use on current FoF will be used on following one anyways (you’ll pretty much never cap TtP!)
Only scenarios I’d consider pooling TtP:
1) Big burst coming up soon and I need to nuke a specific target, or lust will be up very soon and I want FoF to benefit from it
2) Large pack of adds soon which I want to nuke down with FoF
3) Last Fists of Fury of the fight or something, so I want to squeeze an extra stack on it? Unlikely
Hi guys,
i have a problem with the Pawn String here, i can’t insert it ingame in the AddOn. But the noxxic one for example, works flawless. What’s the matter?
Hi. iv’e started using the Pawn addons and the Simcraft program.
I’ve relogged everytime i had a new equipment upgrade according to pawn.
I started with the values you can read at the top.
This is the string i ran from the start “( Pawn: v1: “windwalker”: Agility=1, HasteRating=0.46, MasteryRating=0.62, Versatility=0.53, CritRating=0.54, Stamina=0.01 )”
Funny thing is, now my string is completely different, and wants me to stack more haste? i have 14%..
The new string looks like this: “( Pawn: v1: “Threé”: Agility=9.50, Ap=8.94, CritRating=5.49, HasteRating=5.78, MasteryRating=5.67, Versatility=5.29, Dps=2.62 )”
Im sorry for not normalizing the values, but as you can see haste is most preferable now.
Ingame i have 23% crit (2546)/ 14% haste(4532) / 35% Mastery(7077) / 9% Versatility (3476)
What i can read from the guide this seems to be correct, according to “-Blood elf: Mastery 4500 above Versatility, Versatility 800 above Crit rating; haste anywhere between 5% and 10%”
And im a BE.
I just want to m
ake sure im doing this correct or im screwing myself over ?!
Our best information comes from the sims. Like Panda talks about in his article, haste is weird. It’s possible that by adding a little haste, you will add an extra cast of something during the sample time you’re testing, which would make haste’s value jump slightly l
Are you sure you used an import of your character with an addon? If you used armory, chances are it didn’t factor in artifact traits or strike of the windlord for instance. What kind of fight, fight length you ran etc all have influence. I can see haste being good but at 14%?
What talents are you running? You could also try “force feeding” 15% haste into simcraft to see if that remains or if it was just local (best way to do this would probably be plotting though.)
Hi. I’m using the SimulationCraft 703-02 Webengine on windows 10 to import my character. Not using the battle.net tab. im running a 5min fight with 10k iterations on patchwerk. i can see in html file on simcraft that it counts my artifact traits.
This is my talents right now: http://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/monk/windwalker/cjDM
Right now after changing a ring i have another string again, with haste being the worst, ( Pawn: v1: “Threé”: Agility=8.09, Ap=7.65, CritRating=4.71, HasteRating=-5.28, MasteryRating=5.23, Versatility=4.82, Dps=3.56 )
might be that i forgot to Imoprt the character each time aswell ?
ilvl 851, 872 Artifact, Mastery of 41%(8,556), Crit of 31%, Versatility of 2% and my sims came back at 280k meanwhile, monks of lesser ilvl, lower artifact are simming higher. Serenity really a big jump in dps in a sim? I went from 260k to 280k in a matter of switching 1 talent.
Character is Vallack on Sargeras. I’m struggling in raids on the dps charts. I should be doing more than I am and its quite concerning. Any helps appreciated
Serenity can be a big jump in a sim because the sim knows exactly how to use it and executes it perfectly. If you want to look at your performance in raids then check out CheckMyWow.com, the WW profile works pretty well to tell you where you may be lacking.
Kinda confused going from 280K+ dps(single target, on bosses) in dungeons to hovering around 150k overall in EN last night. Granted, I know dungeon encounters are quicker but even on the long ass encounters, I still hover around 280+. It was a huge surprise seeing how long my dps plummeted in the raid setting. I’m at a loss for words to be completely honest and want to figure out what the hell went wrong, or better yet, what did I do wrong.
What do you mean the WW profile works pretty well? Where do I find that?
I mean that site works well for telling a WW what they can improve upon.
There isn’t a reason you’d drop to 150k other than your personal performance.
Ouch, ok yeah, pulled up the logs from the encounters. My hit combo % was loooow on certain encounters. My cast efficiency was low on some encounters.
I am confused by some things on this log.
Under “Performance” it has a number 229971/s. Is that my DPS? Because if so, something isn’t matching up. If that means what I think it means, that says I did 229k dps for that encounter yet on other logs, and my details meter, I was much lower. Ursoc said I did 228445/s yet other logs and details meter says otherwise. Which is accurate? Am I actually doing more dps than I thought or no?
Link me your logs, if it’s an issue with the site then I’ll PM the author
Ouch, ok yeah, pulled up the logs from the encounters. My hit combo % was loooow on certain encounters. My cast efficiency was low on some encounters.
I am confused by some things on this log.
Under “Performance” it has a number 229971/s. Is that my DPS? Because if so, something isn’t matching up. If that means what I think it means, that says I did 229k dps for that encounter yet on other logs, and my details meter, I was much lower. Ursoc said I did 228445/s yet other logs and details meter says otherwise. Which is accurate? Am I actually doing more dps than I thought or no?
http://www.checkmywow.com/players/92130540
There’s the link
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/A9Bc6w8TyNrtx7Rd
Then there’s ^ log which shows completely different numbers for everybody. So I don’t know what to go off. My own damage meter(details) showed a lot closer to this link than what Checkmywow showed. A tad confused.
It doesnt look that off to me. On the kills I think the most was 1000 dps or so, relatively minor, but I’ll pass it on to the site’s developer. Thanks
Wow, I am a complete retard. I was looking at the heroic pull. I still can make improvements though. I am seeing logs of monks less geared than myself doing a lot more dps and I think its because they’re getting off more abilities. Though, I did notice those monks that were less geared did have MORE Versatility than I do. My Versatility is only 2% while they were 10%+. I had more Mastery but less Vers. Need to make some changes.
Also, one thing I am confused about is when to use FoF in relation to the buff we have to manage to increase its damage(I cant think of the name off the top of my head, at work). Ive read using FoF at around 7 stacks is good but what if FoF is up before that many stacks? Keep building until then or use it on cooldown regardless of stacks? Some little changes here and there I can make to improve things.
Thanks Babylonius for the help!
You want to use FoF on cooldown, don’t delay it for any number of stacks. Where did you read 7? If you can remember I can see about getting it fixed, unless its Noxxic.
I figured that was the case. I used to do that until I read somewhere about waiting till 7 to use it. That might explain why I got less FoF off in my raid which resulted in less DPS. Should have just stuck with my gut feeling on that. No, it wasn’t Noxxic. Honestly, I have never even looked at Noxxic. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about it. Thanks Babylonius
Hi panda, i have a little question about serenity’s weight stats, i checked the logs of the emerald nightmare of the top WW, and it seems that everyone that plays with serenity is going full Mastery>Crit, completly ignoring Versatility. Is this normal ?
Need to pick your brain again Babylonius,
So I just got a neck item out of my Mythic crate in my class hall that has a ton of Versatility and crit on it but no Mastery. With my current neck on my stats are:
42%(9,030) Mastery, 3%(1,194) Versatility, 30% Crit.
With the new neck(If I were to wear it) they would be:
38%(7,747) Mastery, 5%(1,860) Versatility, 32% Crit.
I’d be sacrificing more Mastery to gain Versatility. So, again, if things hold true with stat weights, I should wear the new neck for the rise in Vers even though I lose some Mastery, no?
Hi, i’m kinda new to all this stuff and i’m finding it impressive. It’s really interesting but at the same time quite confusing…
In the article you said that Mastery should be 4500 above Versa and Versa 800 (i’m blood elf) above crit, but actually i’ve:
Mastery: 8325 (39.73%)
Versa: 1694 (4.24%)
Crit: 4990 (30.26%)
Now, mastery is way above versa, but versa is way too low compared to crit. How should i know if is Mastery too high (so i’m going to sacrifice it for raising Versa) or is Crit the one too high? I mean, i thought that Crit at 30% was pretty important to have, and also mastery at 40% or even higher….
Thanks in advance for the answers, you do an incredible work ^^
Well, you would need to sacrifice a little of both to match them up. Given your current stats, you can find your ideal numbers by using the forumula X + (X-800) + (X + 4500) = Total stats (15009 in your case). Where X is Vers, X-800 is crit, and X+4500 is mastery. Based on that that formula, Vers should be roughly 3769, Crit 2969, and Mastery 8269.
ok got it, thanks a lot ^^
IM currently a ww monk and “overdosin” mastery has got me better results i have
4428 crit, 3592 haste, 7423 mastery and 1156 vers. I know i have too little vers and too much mastery
The gear i decide between are
855 ring
695 haste
1176 mastery
+ 100 mastery from socket
865 ring
1109 crit
832 versatility
no socket
I noticed with the lower i lvl ring (more mastery, less vers/crit) i got more dps
Explanation?
The Socket on the ring is worth 20 ilvl worth of stats with a 150 gem in there, so the sheer increase in stats makes it worth it. The stat weight gaps we found are guidelines, not hard rules that you’re screwed if you dont follow.
Daaaamn so i replace it after 20 ilvls lol?
Babylonius,
What’s your thoughts on the addon, Pawn? I installed it to check it out, entered the stat weights and on a few pieces of gear that have no mastery or ver, but are an ilvl upgrade show roughly a 10% upgrade on some items. Whats your thoughts on this addon? Legit? Bad?
Pawn is a good general indicator, however, you will always want to run your character through sims before you swap a gear piece and after you swap a gear piece.
Hey,
First of all: Thanks to your amazing work here. ive learned a lot on this site about the monk.
But there is still 1 little problem left for me.
I already tried to figure it out by myself the last few hours. Still dont got it^^
Its like every WW Monk (first 200 player) on warcraftlogs is ignoring versa completly and getting the stats like mastery>crit>versa.
But everytime i simulate my character it tells me i should go for mastery>versa>crit
Best regards
RageTry
ps: sorry english is not my native language but i hope u understand my issue 🙂
If the monks you’re looking at have mostly gear from the raid, there is just almost no Vers on raid gear.
The amount of stats you have control upon is a small amount (gems, enchants, a couple items you could swap around). It prolly amounts for a few percents of your dps overall.
The difference between versatility and crit is also a very small amount, a few percents of the value of each stats.
The difference overall between mastery, crit and versatility enchants is likely to be a few percents of a few percents, aka pretty much nothing. You probably noticed huge differences in between top logs; those are mostly due to skill, gear, kill timers. NOT to wether they went for 200 versatility or 200 crit.
Don’t overthink it!
Why is my Simcraft telling me haste is my priority???
my stats are 30% crit, 15% haste, 38% mastery, 1% vers
sim craft results ( Agility=10.02, CritRating=5.87, HasteRating=6.75, MasteryRating=6.63, Versatility=6.62 )
Im really confused
Haste bounces around. You could add 10 haste and see the stat weight become negative. You can mostly ignore the haste weight.