Well, I smell a post. Let’s get started with a quick tour of Kahorie’s fine, fine tool!

Caveat: I use Windows. I am not a Mac person anymore, though not by choice. Anyway – these instructions should work fine on a Mac if you use BootCamp or some sort of tool that lets you use Windows apps on OS X – Parallels and VMware Fusion both being popular choices. It’s not a terribly complex app, and if you can run .NET apps, you can run this sim.

First things first, you need to download the simulator. On the downloads tab, you’ll see a big list of downloads – but the only one you need to worry about is the very first one, Kahorie’s DK Simulator.zip, because it always points to the newest version. Unzip it, and place the folder inside somewhere convenient – your desktop, a downloads folder. There’s no installer to run – open up this folder, and look for this icon, then double-click it. Kahorie’s DK Simulator runs right out of the box. (Yours probably won’t have a little green checkmark on it – mine does, because I keep my simulator stored in my Dropbox, which is a whole ‘nother story altogether.)

Upon opening Kahorie’s DK Simulator (which I’m just going to call "the DK Simulator" from now on because I’m already tired of typing out the whole thing), you’ll be greeted with this slightly intimidating window full of dropdowns and options (as always, click to embiggen):

None of this is too difficult once you’ve done it a time or two, but I’ll walk you through the basic steps.

Character

This is the first dropdown; a few pre-built characters come with the DK Simulator, usually representing ‘ideal’ DKs at a given point in raiding progress. Usually I like to create one of these as a sandbox representing my current stats, then a second to test potential gear changes. Since my character is somewhere between T9 10-man and T10 10-man at the moment, I’ve chosen "2h ToC Blood.xml" from the dropdown list, and clicked Edit to get to the character editor. Here’s what that screen looks like:

This is pretty straightforward: essentially it’s your statistics, trinkets, procs (the DK Simulator models several trinkets, procs, and profession enchant procs), and set bonuses, as well as racial bonuses. Obviously I can see that some of these differ from the ‘stock’ character to my own death knight. For instance, Rajaat would gain a small main hand expertise bonus for being human, and his stats are definitely different from the ones shown. Unfortunately, the DK simulator doesn’t have a way to directly import toons from the Armory yet, so you’ll have to do the copying by hand.

A couple things might be confusing for first-timers.

• Attack Power (the green part): If you mouse over your AP in the Armory (or, I believe, in-game), you’ll see your attack power written as something like: Melee Attack Power 4333 (3738 + 595). The only part you put in this blank is the portion in green (here, 595), not the total (here, 4333). This will lead to wildly inflated max possible DPS, if you do, and it’ll leave you wondering exactly why you’re underperforming.
• Haste Rating: On the armory, this can be found by mousing over your melee speed.
• Armor Penetration Rating: Similarly, this can be found by mousing over your melee hit rating.
• Expertise: This is really confusing on the Armory. For instance, on Rajaat, I see Expertise: 24. If I mouse over it, I see Expertise 124, but expertise rating 24. I’ll be 100% honest with you: I usually add this up by hand. 124 is what’s on my gear, so 124 is what I put here.
• Racial: If you’re an orc, turn on the "Blood Fury + Pet damage" checkbox, and put in 5 for your expertise on the appropriate hand if you’re using an axe in that hand. (For two-handed weapon wielders, just use the main hand expertise box.) Dwarves put a 5 into the expertise box if they’re wielding a mace; humans put a 3 if they’re using a sword or a mace. Trolls and blood elves check the appropriate box for Berserking or Arcane Torrent, respectively. Everyone else, sorry, your racial talents aren’t relevant to your DPS.
• Misc: 3% crit damage is from, I believe, meta gems – either old and busted or the new hotness. Tailor Enchant is referring to Swordguard Embroidery. The rest are fairly explanatory.

The rest should be fairly self-explanatory – choose your trinkets, choose your weapon proc if you’re wielding one of the Onyxia one-handers or the new weapons from Icecrown with a proc (right now that’s Bryntroll and the two one-handers from Onyxia; you can bet on Shadowmourne being added once it’s available), and pick any set bonuses you happen to have. One note, if you happen to not have any set bonuses – which could happen as you’re mixing and matching gear – there’s no blank option. Just delete the entry in those dropdowns with the Backspace or Delete key.

Once you’ve gotten all these finished, click Save As (or Save if you’re saving an already-modified character), type in a filename, and hit enter. Choose your new file from the dropdown next to character, then it’s on to the next step. This is important – saving the new file will not pick it from the dropdown for you. I’ve gotten incorrect tests many times because I was looking at the wrong character.

Template

This is just a fancy way of saying "talents and glyphs." The most common builds for the current patch are included, and I can probably go with the stock "Blood 51-00-20-01-GoD.xml," but let’s see what the edit screen looks like, in case you’ve got a non-standard build or glyph setup. If you need to edit a template, or want to make sure the stock ones are the same as what you’ve got, pick a template from the dropdown and click Edit.

That’s pretty much it. If you’ve ever used a talent calculator before – whether on the Armory, on Wowhead or MMO-Champion, or even in-game – you’ve seen this. It only gets a little weird when PTRs are out and the functioning of a glyph is changing – for instance, prior to 3.3, the DK Simulator included IcyTouch and IcyTouchII – the former representing how it used to work (extra runic power), as opposed to how it works now.

Oh, and the StartTalentDpsValue button will figure out how much DPS a given talent point is worth – so for instance, if you got down to having enough talent points to maximize Blood-Caked Blade or Necrosis, but not both, this button would help you figure out which one you wanted to max out to eke out that last itty bitty pesky point of DPS.

A caveat, this will let you put in illegal talent builds like 71/71/71, so, uh, double-check before you save, yeah? Save. Now back to the main screen. Pick your template from the dropdown, and it’s on to the next step.

Intro

This just lets you model an introductory round to your rotation. Some builds, such as the blood/Glyph of Disease spec, use this – the first round of a DPS rotation will be radically different from the others. You can also choose NoIntro.xml, which models no special introductory round. If you do choose to make and edit an intro, you’ll be using the rotation editor, which I’ll cover below. Skip down to rotation editing if you want to edit your priority.

Priority and Rotation

A lot of noise is made about the different between priority and rotation. Most builds can be defined as either, and honestly it’s up to your individual playstyle to decide how you define your priority or rotation. Some builds even switch – for example, in my build, my introduction is a flat rotation (PS > IT > DS > HS > Pest > RP dump), while after that it becomes a priority system (Keep diseases up > Heart Strike > Death Strike > Death Coil). You may find that a straight-up rotation works fine for you – a lot of Unholy players use one, for instance. It’s really a matter of preference – so, pick the one you prefer.

Now, one of the two boxes – priority or rotation – will be greyed out, and the one you chose can be selected from. Choose, then edit, because I guarantee most of the time it’s not going to match what you’re actually doing in play. (You want to, if at all possible, not save over these base rotations – they’re usually examples of cookie cutter rotations, and it’s possible they’re better than what you’re doing, but I digress).

Both priority and rotation editing (and intro editing) use the Rotation Editor tab. Here’s what that looks like.

Oh, hey, this looks familiar. What this says is that Frost Fever is a higher priority than Blood Plague (only because it won’t let you set them equal…), then Heart Strikes, then Death Strikes, then lastly Death Coil. Essentially the list on the right represents both abilities and combinations of abilities to work into your priority or rotation. Use the arrows on the items on the left column to move them up, down, or out of your rotation/priority; use the arrows on the items in the right column to move them into your rotation/priority. A few of them might be unfamiliar, because a lot of them apply to Frost:

• KMFrostStrike, KMHowlingBlast, KMRime: These Frost-specific abilities represent waiting until you have a Killing Machine proc, then using Frost Strike or Howling Blast. KMRime actually represents having both Killing Machine and Rime procs up simultaneously.
• FrostStrikeMaxRp, DeathCoilMaxRp: These represent dumping RP abilities because you are close to, or at, maximum RP, and generating any more would be a waste.
• SaveRpForRuneStrike: Self-explanatory, I figure.
• CinderDisease: For those of you still using Rune of Cinderglacier, Cinderglacier increases your disease damage but does not consume the proc.
• DRMObliterate, DRMDeathStrike: Being honest, I’m a little shaky on the meaning of these. I presume it means waiting until you have two Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery to fire off one of these abilities. None of the current rotations uses them, so I suspect they might represent things that have fallen out of favor in the current DK DPS landscape.
• FadeRime: This represents casting Howling Blast when your Rime buff is just about to fade, whether you got a Killing Machine proc or not. No sense wasting it!

Cooldowns are not represented here (like the gargoyle, dancing rune weapon, etc.) because they are not part of a standard rotation or priority system. Now, if you are editing a rotation instead of a priority (or if you’re editing an intro – intro segments are, by definition, rotations), you’ll notice an additional checkbox:

All the retry/wait checkbox does is ask you if you want to try something, or wait for it to be available again, if you missed it. As you can see, in this intro, I’ll retry anything out of PS > IT > DS > BS > Pest if it misses or I have to move, because that’s the only way I can get my priority system running – but I won’t wait on Death Coils, mostly because if you miss, you don’t get that runic power back, so I could be waiting a long time…

As usual, once finished, Save or Save As, return to the main screen, and choose your new saved intro/rotation/priority from the dropdown.

Presence, Sigil, Main Hand, and Off Hand

Fairly self-explanatory: the presence you’re running in for DPS (almost universally Blood these days), the Sigil you’re using, your main hand weapon’s runeforge, and your off-hand weapon’s runeforge (if any). Two-hand wielders, leave your off-hand runeforge blank.

Other Settings

Some of these settings you’ll need to touch; some you won’t. Here’s the most important ones to look at, in my opinion, and you can investigate the rest if you wish:

• Latency in ms: VERY IMPORTANT! Latency plays a huge part in your DPS (just ask any Australian playing on US servers), and setting this to your average latency will generate much more reliable results.
• Number of enemies: Choosing 1 enemy gets you something like a Patchwerk fight; choosing multiples can represent any kind of fight where your DK is fighting multiple enemies at once, and whether or not you want to keep diseases up on all of them at once.
• Use Bone Shield/UA: This just chooses when you want to re-apply Bone Shield or Unbreakable Armor when they fall off. Your choices are kind of limited: apply them after a Blood Strike/Blood Boil, or apply them instead of a Blood Strike/Blood Boil.
• Wait for FC proc for GG/DRW: This will stop Gargoyle/Dancing rune weapon from being used until your Fallen Crusader runeforge procs. I’m not entirely sure, but if you’re not using Fallen Crusader at all (I’m not sure why… but maybe you’re running some crazy Unholy build with Cinderglacier on a two-hander or something), you may want to uncheck this or it may never use the GG or DRW.
• Generate Combat Log: If your DPS seems very low in the report – or very high – you should check this on and see what is going on in the generated combat log. Sometimes priorities (especially priorities) can be very difficult to model correctly. I once accidentally somehow made a build that prioritized blood taps and keeping Bone Shield and Horn of Winter up higher than everything else.
• Show Procs/Non-Damaging Spells: Useful, but probably not necessary. Useful for seeing how often your procs were up during a given fight.
• Report Name: Good if you’re doing multiple reports in a row.

Buffs

There’s a buffs tab along the top that we haven’t, as of yet, touched. It’s very important to edit this. By default, every single buff is on, and let me tell you, this is how you get some vastly inflated numbers. You’ll probably want to pare down the selection to get the buffs that you’re more likely to have in your raid. To get your "test dummy" DPS, get rid of everything except Str/Agi.

Let’s Go!

Now, there’s two big buttons at the bottom: Start Simulator, and Start EP. Start Simulator is pretty straightforward: a progress bar pops up, and it will run a raid boss simulation with the parameters you’ve put in, generating an output that looks something like this (try not to laugh too hard):

A very precise breakdown of what you used, when you used it, what hit, what missed, what critted, so on and so forth. Those numbers are actually fairly consistent with what I’ve seen recently, too – and higher than what I’ve seen in 5-mans, which I suppose can be accounted for by raid buffs.

The other button, Start EP, is more useful to help you figure out what you want to look for on new loot to get an upgrade…at least, this is how it was explained to me. EP is, if I remember correctly, "equivalency points," or something along those lines – essentially, a guide to what stats are more valuable to you on new gear, and what ones are less valuable. There are options on the EP Options and Stat Scaling tabs that you can fiddle with; honestly, the defaults have always seemed reasonable to me (though I do add trinkets and stats I know I need more of, like armor penetration). This will take much longer to run (and will also put a crapton of progress bars on your screen that you can’t minimize and that are always on top of everything… annoying), but once it’s finished, you’ll get something that looks like this (I turned on a bunch of additional options):

The nice part is, you can plug these directly into Wowhead’s loot filters, or LootRank, or really anything of that kind – and get customized lists of loot for you. Neat, eh? (Looks like I could do with a little less Expertise and a little more Armor Pen and Strength… oh, and a Greatness card… and should stick with 4P T9 until I can get at least 2P T10, since those two are nearly equivalent.)

Any questions? Ask in the comments and I’ll answer them as best as I can.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Kahorie’s DK Simulator

Regardless, here’s my profile, which consists of me doing things with my shadow priest and a few duplicate posts as I eventually figure out that a /reload and re-upload won’t work because it doesn’t clear uploaded data.

C’est la vie.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Experiment in progress

(3:37:17 PM) Nibuca: Lesson learned: make sure to delete your wow combat log more often than once every 4 months

For those of you who log, for use with WoW Web Stats or one of its ilk, you may not have noticed but there are a couple interesting facts about the WoW combat log:

1. It’s super-verbose, meaning it grows really quickly as a result, and
2. WoW never deletes it, archives it, or starts a new one – when you turn off then turn on logging, WoW will gleefully keep appending to the same file.

As a result you can end up with a combat log over 5 million lines long, like Nibs above. Yikes! Well, if you’re a Windows user, I’ve got a solution you can use to automate some of this, to take the tedium out of needing to edit a log or archive it manually. Follow me past the break…

Installing PowerShell and Preparing to Run Scripts

Alright, the first thing you’ll need to do is download and install Windows PowerShell. This was one of the much-touted features of Vista back when Vista was still called Longhorn, but like many of those pie-in-the-sky features it got stripped out. This is unfortunate, because the eventual result – PowerShell – is a nice flexible scripting language for Windows, with some built-in safety mechanisms that things like batch files just don’t have. (In fact, execution of scripts is actually disabled by default. We’ll work around that.)

On the other hand, since it’s not a pack-in with Vista, you’re actually able to install it on Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. Snazzy! Anyway, hit the download page to grab it. The install is fairly straightforward, and you shouldn’t need me to hold your hand to walk you through it.

When you’re done, you should have a Windows PowerShell entry in your Start Menu. Open it up, and you’ll get a window that … looks a hell of a lot like a DOS prompt. In fact, a lot of your familiar DOS commands (like ‘dir’, ‘rename’, etc.) will still work just fine.

What you’ll want to do, in order to run the scripts I’ve got linked later on in this post, is enable your PowerShell installation to run scripts you’ve written yourself without a question, but not those you download from the internet unless they’re from a trusted signer. To do that, at the prompt, type:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

… and press enter. Voila! You’ll actually see… absolutely no feedback. Whoops. That’s intentional. But if you want to make sure it worked, you can type:

Get-ExecutionPolicy

And after you press enter, it will return what the execution policy for your system is. If you see “RemoteSigned", you’re good to go.

Getting and Running the Scripts

First things first, download this zipfile: TSFArchiverScripts.zip. Inside you should see two files, ArchiveCombatLogs.ps1 and ArchiveScreenshots.ps1. Take these out of the zipfile, then open each of these up using your text editor of choice; by default, if you have nothing else, you use Notepad. (I prefer Notepad++. But to be honest, text editors are kind of like religions: everyone has one they like, no one can explain to you why they like the one they like, and if they do try and explain it, the reasons why are totally alien to you.)

At the top of ArchiveCombatLogs.ps1, you’ll see this line:

$default = "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Logs\WoWCombatLog.txt"

Change that to the actual location of your WoW combat log – it may be at C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WoWCombatLog.txt, for example. Be sure and leave the double quotes intact!

Meanwhile, in ArchiveScreenshots.ps1, you’ll see this line:

$default = "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Screenshots"

Again, change this to your actual screenshots directory – it may be C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Screenshots. When you change this one, leave the double quotes intact and do not put a slash after Screenshots!

Save each of these, then close them. That’s all the editing you should have to do. Move them to somewhere that doesn’t have spaces in the name, just to be safe – like C:\Scripts or something like that. (Mine are stored in C:\Users\Public\ .) PowerShell can be as picky about paths with spaces in them as DOS ever was.

Running These Scripts Manually

Now, it’s easy enough to run the scripts manually, assuming you still have your PowerShell script open. In fact, you may want to do just that to give it a shot! For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume you installed them at C:\Scripts like I suggested; if not, replace that with whatever you did use. In your PowerShell window, type each of the following lines, hitting enter after each one:

cd C:\Scripts

.\ArchiveCombatLogs.ps1

.\ArchiveScreenshots.ps1

That’s it! If all went well, you probably … actually didn’t see anything. Maybe some feedback from the screenshots script, but probably not. (You definitely saw feedback in BRIGHT RED from either one if you didn’t have a Screenshots directory or a combat log; if you feel you should, double-check your changes to the scripts from the steps above.)

What actually happened is that your combat log was renamed according to the last time it was written in – so if it had last been written to at 2pm, April 13th, 2009, it will be listed now as 04132009_140000_WoWCombatLog.txt (the date, followed by the hours, minutes, and seconds, followed by – duh – WoWCombatLog.txt.) If your system displays the dates in another format, this may break, but I believe PowerShell is fairly uniform.

As your your screenshots, you should now find subfolders in your Screenshots directory. Let’s say you have screenshots from April 12th, 13th, and 14th. Inside your Screenshots folder, you will now find a 2009 folder, which contains an 04 folder, which in turns contains folders named ‘12′, ‘13′, and ‘14′. And inside those? Your screenshots! Huzzah! (Again, foreign date formats may break this. If so, let me know and I’ll work on an internationalized version of this.)

Scheduling Your Tasks

Now, obviously running these manually all the time would be kind of a pain in the ass. That’s why we’re going to automate it! Automation is beauty, folks. It’s why we like addons like Outfitter. In Windows XP, click Start, then go to Programs or All Programs (depending on whether you’re using the Classic or Damn Fancy start menu), then to Accessories, then System Tools, then Scheduled Tasks. Microsoft has fairly clear directions on how to do this.

Double-click “Add Scheduled Task,” then use the wizard to create a new task. Here’s the relevant portion: when you get to the part where you have to pick a program to schedule, choose “Windows PowerShell” from the list and click next. Choose when you want to run it (it’s entirely up to you – I have it run while I’m not home). When you get to the part where you put in a username and password, you’ll want to put in the username of someone who can make changes to the folders and such where WoW is located. 99% of the time, this will be your own user account; on the off chance you’re not running as an administrator user, put an administrator user’s credentials in here.

On the last screen, check the box that says “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish.” Then… click Finish. This will pop up a dialog box with the PowerShell job’s info. What you’ll want to do is append the path to your script after the path to PowerShell, like so (here’s a picture, in case that was gibberish):

Save it by hitting OK, and you’re finished! Do the same steps, only replace “ArchiveCombatLogs.ps1″ with “ArchiveScreenshots.ps1″.

In Vista, you’ll want to open up the Task Scheduler by going to the Control Panel, clicking Administrative Tools, and then opening Task Scheduler. On the right side, look for “Create Basic Task” and click it. Enter whatever name you like (I suggest something snappy, like “Archive Combat Logs”), give it a description if you really want to, and hit Next.

Again, just like in XP, choose when you want it to run on the next screen, then hit next again. When you get to the “Action” portion, you can choose from one of three options: we want “Start a program,” so choose that (by default, it should be selected) and hit Next.

In the box for “Program/script,” click Browse and look for the path to PowerShell.exe. Now, below that, add the script’s name in quotes that you wish to run – like “C:\Scripts\ArchiveCombatLogs.ps1″. Here’s mine, for example:

Click next, make sure everything on the next screen looks fine, and click Finish. And that’s it! Enjoy your newly automated organized lifestyle.

Now if we could just get one of those Mac users to figure out how to do this with Automator for us… and those Linux people to whip us up a shell script… we’d have everybody covered. (Hint, hint.)

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Archiving your combat log and screenshots (for Windows)

One caveat, apparently Drak’tharon Keep is very buggy about granting kill credits for Tharon’ja – if you’re dead or in skeleton form, you won’t get the credit (and often won’t get the achievement). I guess I got lucky. Anyway, here’s my Pugchecker page. Kind of cool!

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Pugchecker: because the numbers don’t lie (except for DTK)