I’ve never used SimulationCraft, mainly because I was okay eyeballing it for most of my warlock’s life and I started using Rawr once my druid started raiding. But then some Windows XP update broke my .NET and Rawr won’t work. I’m going to try out SimulationCraft and see what this is about.

First, these 7.9k are an average over many thousand simulations. You might be higher or lower depending on crit luck.

Then, if you run 10 mans you will never have a perfect raid. You will always miss some buffs which affect the dps.

Your DPS also depends on the other people in your raid. Simulationcraft assumes a 5 minute boss fight. Of which you spend 40 seconds with heroism. That’s 40 seconds out of 300 seconds. That’s 13%. If your raid mates do less damage the fight will take longer than 5 minutes and you will spend less time under heroism. Therefore you’ll do less dps. And so on.

There should be options in the GUI to deselect raid buffs if you don’t have them.

If you like, you can create a /combatlog during your next raid and load it on one of the various web sites. Then, try to compare the output of Simulationcraft and your log. I’ve noticed that the dps of Simulationcraft is always higher then what you reach but the break down of which spell did how many percent of your damage is correct.

What would you do if you’re ridiculously over hit cap? I went ahead and respecced to reduce pushback, since you can’t really plop those points anywhere else as the early part of the tree requires it. I’m trying to offload hit in favor of other stats, but it just seems so easy to come by right now.

That, and good trinkets are few and far between. I picked up the T9 hit trinket just because I had tons of triumph emblems and was sick of running with the ilvl 200 and 213 stuff (as I see you’re dealing with as well). What’s up with no trinket love? In any case, I’m sitting on that hit trinket, hoping that I can get rid of hit elsewhere to take advantage of my situation.