3. Configuring the Sim
When you first run the sim, you will be greeted by a screen like this.
This is the Gear tab, where you can change your character's gear -- their equipment, enchants and gems.
By default, your character will have the best-in-slot equipment for the current phase of the game.
You can change your equipment by clicking on the item you want your character to have equipped, and it will become highlighted in blue. You can click on the tabs on the top, like Chest, Legs, etc to change your equipment in other slots.
If you click your mouse's middle button while hovering over any item, the sim will open that item's Wowhead page.
By default, your character will have best-in-slot enchants.
You can switch enchants for each slot by navigating to that slot's tab and selecting an enchant on the drop-down menu on the bottom right side of the Gear tab.
By default, your character will have some reasonable gems in each socket of each item.
You can see what gems are socketed in each item by hovering your cursor over the socket's color under the Socket 1, Socket 2 and Socket 3 columns.
The color listed under those columns represents the socket's color, not the gem's. If there are square brackets (for example, [Red]) around the socket's color, that means a gem is socketed into it. A checkmark under the Bonus column represents that you have activated that item's socket bonus.
To change out gems in a socket, double click the socket's color, which will open up a small window that looks like this.
Once on this screen, you can double click any gem of your choice to insert it into your selected socket. If you opened the Gems window by mistake, you can click on the X icon on the top right to close it without changing gems.
For the sake of convenience, the sim has a way to change multiple gems at once, which will be detailed in the Settings section.
Next, click on "Settings" on the top right. This will take you to a screen that looks like this.
Here you can change various things about your character, such as their race, talents and buffs.
By ticking and unticking the checkboxes under the Phases section on the top side of the Settings tab, you can change which items will be shown in the Gear tab.
If you deselect a phase and you have items from that phase equipped, those items will be unequipped. You will need to select a different item for that slot.
You can change various settings about the encounter and the simulation by changing the options under the Encounter and Sim sections of the Settings tab.
Here you can change which boss you are fighting, which affects its armor and creature type (Demon, Undead, etc). If you are unsure about armor values and creature types, we recommend you set this to Magtheridon (Demon, 7684 armor) as most bosses have similar parameters to him.
You may also change the minimum and maximum amount of time you would like the encounter to last. These values are in milliseconds, so if you want to input 2 minutes, you would have to set it to 12000 (2 minutes * 60 seconds * 1000 milliseconds). Each simulation will then last for a randomly determined amount between the two values you input. You may set the minimum and maximum duration to the same amount to eliminate duration variance.
Lastly, you can change the amount of simulations that are performed. The higher you set this number to, the more simulations will be performed, which will make the results more accurate, but your computer will need more time to complete the total simulation. 10,000 is a good starting point for quickly comparing items and gauging your character's strength, but if you want to compare different items in detail, we recommend you set it to a minimum of 20,000, with 30,000 being ideal.
If you click on the buttons with the triple dots under the Gems section, the following window will open up.
If you double click on a gem in this window, that gem will be applied to every socket of that color in every item, overriding the choices you made through the Gems interface.