In continuation to my earlier blog on evaluating your SimulationCraft results, this post covers the stat weightings (or scale factors) in much more detail. These are the numbers that anyone new to SimulationCraft will generally be looking for, they are the way you decide one piece of gear is better (for you) than another, the way you chose your gems, enchants, how to reforge and even which buff food and flasks you use. There are a few things to note about stat weights, firstly they are variable, as your gear evolves, so do they; secondly they are unique to you and your gear, this means that the websites proclaiming the definitive stat weights for your class are, at best, an approximation of an approximation – unless they've been calculated with your stats in mind they won't necessarily be applicable to you; finally, and probably most important, the weightings are a reference, and nothing more – unless you are absolutely perfect in your DPS rotations and positioning, your play style will have a far bigger impact on your DPS, use the stats as a framework for improving your overall performance, but don't expect getting your stats right to instantly make you hit 18k DPS.
A word on variability of stat weights
As I mentioned above, stats weights will vary with your gear (and the level of the mob you're fighting) I've knocked together this graph to try and illustrate this from the five examples I made for my last post. Notice how Mastery gains in importance as your gear (or buff level) improves. You'll also notice that Spirit and Hit are useless to me in heroics, that is because I've reached the hit cap (Spirit gives hit with the xxxxx talent). The other weights vary as your stats change, this is why it's important to run a simulation yourself, I'd even go so far as to run one each time your gear changes so that you understand what the implications are. If you're a more serious raider, you might want to play around comparing what your performance should be like with and without raid buffs so that you can adapt your unbuffed gear to give you the best performance when in a raid.
A few evenings ago I ran an instance with a fellow guildie who I've known for a long time (I actually recruited him to the guild back in the day when I was levelling my priest in Stranglethorn Vale, so a VERY long time ago). He was a shaman back then, but sometime between then and now he's rolled a priest. He's one of those players who takes a little time to understand his class, and as such gains respect from myself in what he says, because he's not just repeating parrot-fashion what he's read elsewhere, or what others have told him, without knowing why he's saying it.
Now, we were running my favouritest place in the whole world, you guessed it, Grim Batol…as it happens, we were both melting faces as it was a guild run and one of our shammies decided they wanted to try their hand at healing; THREE healing types in a party, what a waste. We obviously both did the WoW equivalent of dogs meeting at the park boundary before walkies and sniffed each other's arses… inspecting each other's gear as I was mid whisper to him saying "my god you've got a lot of spirit", he whispered the exact opposite along the lines of "where the hell is your spirit man??". This conversation carried on throughout the instance, and spilled over into an impromptu target dummy session in Org afterwards, his gear was slightly better than mine at the time, and I didn't have enough stuff with spirit on going spare to make a noticeable difference by swapping gear sets.
Now I like spirit, I really do, and I wish I could use more of it, but seriously? The only thing it's useful for is the hit it gives you if you stick two points in twisted faith (which you should) and then only up to the hit cap. The mana regen it gives you in combat is about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest (thanks to Rowan Atkinson for that gem) due to the plethora of talents a Shadow Priest has at his disposal to regen mana. So in my view, Spirit chosen over any other stat, unless you're not hit capped, is a complete waste. Now I've spent a good few hours researching this (no just this, but stat priorities in general, I'm not quite that sad) and I can't find anything to the contrary. Am I right, and my priestly friend mistaken? Am I wrong and spirit is the best kept secret in the shadow priest's arsenal? Or is it a "you're both right, sorta" kind of answer? I'm more than happy to be proven wrong if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I know where my spirit is, and it's firmly in the "Spirit blows" camp.
