Updated for The War Within Patch 11.1 – 02/25/2025

Excitement! Tuesday has rolled around and you’ve opened your weekly chest. But suddenly you’re faced with a problem: you don’t know whether your currently equipped gear is better than what you’ve got. Maybe you have a couple of new pieces from raid, and you’re not sure which stats are better. What now?

One of the easiest ways to determine if a piece of gear is an upgrade is to run a simulation of your current gear against your new gear to see which is the better option. Maybe these pants have stronger single-target stats, or that trinket is better for multi-target fights. What’s “better” changes with talent builds, rotations and any number of expansion specific factors. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to use the Simulationcraft addon in conjunction with raidbots.com to run simulations on gear, talents, stat distributions and dps. Feel free to click on the pictures to make them larger.

Disclaimer:

Sims only give the maximum damage output and they almost always assume perfect play and all possible damage buffs. Just because your sims show your character at a certain amount of dps doesn’t mean that you will automatically reach or even get close to that number. Assuming perfect play, most folks will be within 5-15% of their sim, due to a combination of non-optimal buffs, procs, downtime and getting targeted by mechanics. If you’re not within that range, chances are that you’re missing a major part of your rotation.

Getting Started

Step #1: Download the SimC addon available at the following link. We suggest using the WoWUp Client or another download manager to make this work easier. Assuming you’re using an addon manager, you can move to Step #3.

Step #2: Once downloaded, extract the files from compressed folder that was just downloaded and place them into your addons folder under Interface>Addons in your World of Warcraft files, that can be found under the retail version of your WoW install.

Step #3: Close WoW and then reopen it. Log onto your desired character and type in /simc into the chat box and then hit the Enter key. This should display a pop-up full text that is already highlighted. Copy this text, since you’ll need it later. The hotkey ctrl+C can be used to do this.

Step #4: Make your way to Raidbots. There, you’ll have the options of Top Gear, Droptimizer, Gear Compare, Quick Sim, Stat Weights, and Advanced. Top Gear, Droptimizer and Quick Sim will likely be your most used sims, while Gear Compare, Stat Weights and Advanced are best left for when you’re more familiar with running sims.

Step#5: Once an option is selected, you have the choice of selecting a character via the WoW Armory, or you can can paste the text from step #3 into the 2nd box. For example, Top Gear will display all the gear in your bags and you’ll need to pick what combinations you want to sim. If you’ve opened your Great Vault for the week, but haven’t selected anything yet, options from your Great Vault will be highlighted if you pasted in the text from step #3. Meanwhile, Gear Compare will ask you to provide different gear combinations that are manually entered in and then compare them to your current gear that your character is wearing.

Step #6: After you’ve selected your items, if applicable, scroll down and you can change the parameters for each kind of sim to see how your spec matches up for different fights. Fight durations, number of bosses, fight style and more can all be changed under the simulation options buttons. This is especially useful for specs that use dots as their main source of damage and specs with longer cooldowns that don’t line up with the usual 5 minute fight duration. Hit the green button near the bottom of the page to start the sim.

Step #7: Now you just wait for the sim to finish processing. There is some priority given to those that support raidbots via their Patreon, but it isn’t necessary to do so to get the full benefit of running these sims, unless you’re running a ton of simulations or your sim in question has a lot of combinations. When the sim is complete, you should get a screen similar to the one below; Most options will give you a direct comparison between different combos while Quick Sim will give you a damage profile. You can mouse-over the icons under your character’s portrait to read the specific piece or talent used.

General Notes and Caveats on how to use Simc and Raidbots

Unless some more advanced settings are used, most of the results given from raidbots are for single target fights with no movement and no mechanics with a 5 minute duration, known as the Patchwerk fight style (Named after the Patchwerk boss from Naxxramas). The default settings will also apply ideal food, stat and raid buffs, which might not be present if you’re practicing on a target dummy. Feel free to adjust the fight style, fight duration and number of bosses to fit the fight you’re simming for. Take note that not every fight style is supported for every spec outside of Patchwerk sims.

However, just because a character does well on the simulations does not mean your performance will immediately reflect it, nor does it mean that the results will be present in all situations. View the results instead as a goal to reach rather than a starting point.

Furthermore, Raidbots will not tell you how a rotation is being done by default. You can run a Quicksim and enable the Detailed SimC Report option under the More Options setting. When that sim finishes, you can scroll down and find a sample rotation that the sim used that you can also use for your opener/rotation. It won’t tell you the reasons why it’s using specific abilities, but most of the APLs for each spec are constructed with help from folks that write the Wowhead rotation guides.

In addition, what appears as your best upgrade from any sim might not match bis lists seen on wowhead or what high end folks are using on warcraftlogs. This may indicate that your secondary stats are out of line from what your spec wants. For example, someone with very low haste may see that their sims keep recommending gear without any haste regardless of the amount haste your spec actually needs.

Determining your Top Gear

Generally speaking, Top Gear sims are your go-to tool to determine if an item is an upgrade. By default, all your equipped gear is selected and will run your current talent loadout. From here, you can select different combos of gear, enchants, gems and talents; sockets can also be added to gear that supports it. With the expanded crafting system and the catalyst system added in Dragonflight, there is also the option to directly add in crafted pieces as well as converting your gear directly into tier pieces. The resulting sim will tell you what combination ends up on top.

Running a Patchwerk sim is a good starting point, but be aware that there is a limit on combinations per sim if you’re using the website for free. Sims with rings, trinkets, gems and enchants usually run against that limit fairly quickly and you may need to run multiple sims to cover everything.

Droptimizer and You

Droptimizer is the other side of the coin, to help you determine what items you should be rolling on and what dungeons you should be farming. Very handy, but you won’t be able to sim every source at once.

Conclusion

Raidbots is not the only source of sims, but it is the most readily available space for doing so. There have been other places to run sims throughout WoW’s history, but they’ve usually been niche and may not be up to date. Finally, simulations are not the be all, end all. Simulations can use your gear to show potential, but it is up to the player to prove that potential as reality.

Raidbots and other simulations like it are best used to simulate dps. Healing for healers and damage prevention for tanks have too many variables needed to actually run reliable sims for healing and tanking respectively. A site known as Questionably Epic can be used for simming healing output. However, you can still use raidbots to simulate your dps for most healing and tanking specializations. This can help push damage checks in progression fights, but do be mindful that those two roles have other duties to perform in combat.