Edgy/Raffy's Catus Thread (Not 6.0 Ready Yet)

[Alpheus]

After encountering how annoying it is to upgrade from a Normal to Heroic item for the same slot using Catus, I've made two changes:

1. "Compare to" now forces differences for gems/enchants/reforges when the containing item has changed.

2. Since the most common use for Catus right now is 1:1:1 reforging, I've simplified the output process. There is now a clearly labeled "Export Reforgerade" button and beside it, a new "Shopping List" button:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... ngList.png

Sweet! Love it

[Redpaws]

Okay I can't figure out why Catus is saying I can get Mastery Proc but Haste or Crit is always a higher stat everytime I change Enchant/Reforge...Anything I'm doing wrong?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/i ... s/advanced

[Xig]

Okay I can't figure out why Catus is saying I can get Mastery Proc but Haste or Crit is always a higher stat everytime I change Enchant/Reforge...Anything I'm doing wrong?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/i ... s/advanced

Looking at your Armory your Mastery rating is 4480, Crit is 5063, and Haste is 5207. RoRo will proc crit every time with that setup. Mastery MUST be your highest stat pre-buffed. Also your stats aren't even close to 1:1:1. I'm guessing your not using Catus correctly.

[Kroníc]

Catus may be running correctly. You probably reforged properly but didn't change your enchants/gems to match the results. Do that and it should proc mastery.

[ShmooDude]

Catus may be running correctly. You probably reforged properly but didn't change your enchants/gems to match the results. Do that and it should proc mastery.

Yeah, I'll often forget I have the "change enchants" boxes checked and then be off by line one thing which causes a different proc.

[Redpaws]

Edit: I fixed it thank you

[raffy]

Shopping List feature should help you (in next Catus update). I understand the "Compare to Armory" feature is confusing, it's a bit more information than necessary.

I updated Zephyrus to v16. Minor changes include "Shopping List" and behind-the-scenes API changes.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... ngList.png

If I can get my shit together, Catus will go to v14 today as well.

[Leafkiller]

@Raffy

I was thinking about Jeshu's comments in http://fluiddruid.net/forum/viewtopic.p ... 575#p18073

As an aside, I don't think priorities work well for classes using cast-time spells, but it might be something worth looking into classes for instant-cast spells such as for melee classes. The way the engine works, it'll pick a higher priority node if it occurs less than 0.75 of a GCD ahead of a node that's available now. This might be another way to express "use these CPs to refresh Rip", although the way it's currently done meshes better with cross-translation to a SimC action list.

It might be possible to build a better Ovale script using priorities, but it is difficult to test that in simc. I think it would be pretty straightforward for you to implement an Ovale script evaluator in Catus though, which would allow the script writers to tune Ovale scripts more accurately, and compare the theoretical output with the simc output.

There are 5 levels of priorities in Ovale, and it would be interesting to see if a more accurate (and potentially simpler) script could be built be assigning different actions to priority buckets. Right now we are relying on the order of the script as the only form of prioritization and there are some difficult edge cases that complicate the script.

There is no rule that that states the best possible Ovale script will be an exact mirror of the simc script. In Cata, we primarily worked in Mew and that is where most rotation optimizations were developed. Eventually, the Mew script was translated and became the default simc script. Mew was simply easier to work with due to language flexibility.

[raffy]

At a glance, the biggest issue with the Ovale script is that a huge chunk of it is explicit Feral logic that is already built into Catus. My other concern is that the script is significantly longer, making quick changes more difficult. For example, I've been experimenting lately with the Cleave and Multistrike trinkets using the latest simc script (which require multiple targets to evaluate) and I've had to create various single-target + AoE script hybrids to get desired functionality.

I know my Catus simc-support is lacking (I'm not even exposing the script to the user at the moment) but this is mostly because I'm hesitant to add more features before getting stuck with a specific implementation. I want Catus to be the "friendly face" of Feral, where you can figure out what gear/upgrades/gems/enchants/buffs is best under various scenarios, and all the simulation stuff happens behind the scenes using the latest models. I'd like to offer a simple list of combat scenarios in Catus (with limited public settings) instead of full combat interface. A handful of encounter types, with a few options each, plus all of the existing profile options creates an enormous configuration space.

I know for sure that I want to get away from single-target analysis. Part of that is coming up with useful toy encounters. Part of that is figuring out what results should be extracted from each encounter. Part of this is breaking up the action list into components that can be shared. Part of that is encoding the concept of "encounter time" and "phase #" into the script. I worry that if I continue down the road with simple single-target or AoE scenarios, I'm going to lose interest and get bored.

I don't use Catus from the Catus interface (since I can just write custom code to do whatever I need it to do) but this obviously doesn't work for anyone else. I need some help designing a framework for simulating more complex/useful things. This includes, how do you specify/setup an encounter efficiently? Timers? Events? Triggers? How do you monitor various things? How do you specify actions for each target? How do you avoid spewing talent-specific logic all over the place? Does every encounter need DoC/noDoC? Where can you insert various options? 1, 2, ..5 targets? When is the encounter over? What about the other DPS in the raid? Can we do this in 20-30 lines of code? All of this stuff together is too complicated, so I'm looking for some kind of compromise.

Imagine a magical Feral API already exists, how do we make use of it?
What kind of framework could you design around it?

[Oblivion]

Minimize cost seems to have broken, giving you any of the options from the same strength proc without taking cost into account whatsoever (if you hit minimize cost several times, it just shuffles through all the options that give the same proc, including my current - I usually wouldn't hit the button more then once, but as the first result gave me +1 haste -1 crit, I figured something is wrong and tried). This is on Obblivion - Sylvanas EU and I just tried for "shits and giggles", I haven't actually changed gear since last optimization. I also tried Loowie on Sylvanas EU and it even shows an option for him that has 0 stat changes, but lots of reforge/ench/gem changes.

[raffy]

I haven't released a Catus update in a long time, what version are you using?

Hum, I see (for both v13 and my latest version): your reforge isn't stable. Let me look into this.

It's really strange: there's no randomness in the algorithm.

OK, I've fixed this, thanks for pointing this out. Catus's "Find Minimize" was mistakingly removing duplicate solutions, which only keeps the first solution found. The reforger is multi-threaded, so randomly, one of the inefficient solutions (that can produce the same overall stats) would be discovered first, and the better solution was ignored. Zephyrus however has it correct.

If adventurous, you can download a fixed version here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... stBeta.zip

[Oblivion]

No problem. I did happen to feel adventurous and got the linked beta version and everything is (not that I actually tested anything besides what I posted about) working great, thanks for the quick fix

Edit: This forum doesn't like me using smilies colon(, as I got the "This message was flagged as spam and has been denied." message if I tried to put a colonP after "about" and colon) at the end of the post

[Andanas]

Hey Raffy, thanks again for the work you do for this community.

I downloaded the catus beta linked a couple posts ago, and I'm stuck in an endless loop that I can't seem to get out of, save for restarting my PC, which I'm going to do once I post this. The message I am getting is "Invalid Suffix for Tidesplitter boots". Clicking OK or closing the window repeats the message again. Do that a few times, and you get a dialog box "Custom Item Level". Any recent ilvl number I enter sends me back to the original message, and it just repeats over and over. I can't even seem to get out of it via task manager.

This has NOT been an issue in the current version, 13. http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/d ... s/advanced

[raffy]

Thanks, I fixed the issue. You can re-download that link from above. There's probably other stuff broken too. I'm still in the middle of changing lots of stuff.

[raffy]

I had created this a few days ago for someone:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... inkets.png
(just single target analysis right now)

I have some AoE analysis too (Tortos-style and Cleave-style) but I didn't make a chart yet.

As Stenhaldi said, http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9422972516#8, it is currently worth it to cancel auto-attacks when using the Reverse Renataki (4) trinket. Additionally, I experimented with the decay proc not triggering from auto-attacks, and it causes the trinket to be our #1 best trinket by a huge margin -- like 40% ahead of the CDR trinket (to the point where CDR+Reverse might of been better than Rune+Reverse.)

[timoseewho]

Hello, first off, great tool, thanks for the hard work you've put into making this (been using it since I was lucky enough to get origination)! Just last night I started getting an error saying 'None of the hit/exp solutions met your criteria. Try increasing the overflow or reducing the gaps.'. Well, coincidentally this was also after getting a few upgrades, etc etc. I'm Timochi on Magtheridon, can you please see what I'm doing wrong? I'm sort of a noob when it comes to troubleshooting this><.

[Andanas]

Nevermind, I was way off.

[raffy]

Hello, first off, great tool, thanks for the hard work you've put into making this (been using it since I was lucky enough to get origination)! Just last night I started getting an error saying 'None of the hit/exp solutions met your criteria. Try increasing the overflow or reducing the gaps.'. Well, coincidentally this was also after getting a few upgrades, etc etc. I'm Timochi on Magtheridon, can you please see what I'm doing wrong? I'm sort of a noob when it comes to troubleshooting this><.

When enchants/gems are off, it's difficult to get a good reforge (if you've never reforged 1:1:1 before).

The only problem with your settings is that the Overflow is too tight. An overflow of "50" tells Zephyrus to look for solutions like "5050:5000:5000".

If you ever get the overflow/gap warning (I understand it's kind of greek), change the Overflow to a huge number, like 1000. That warning is trying to indicate that it can find Hit/Exp solutions, but none of them fall within "X+50:X:X".

If you ever get the other warning (no Hit/Exp solutions), change the Range to a huge number, like 1000.

Overflow and Range are kind of legacy settings from when the reforging process was slow and inefficient. They do not impact the quality of the results, they only effect the speed of the search. They're somewhat necessary when all of the reforging features are enabled (enchants + gems make the solution space zillions of times larger) but when you're just using reforges, both settings could be 1000+ w/o slowing it down.

With no gems/enchants, default settings + overflow(1000) => "Hit: 3021, Expertise: 2551, Mastery: 6611, Haste: 5568, Crit: 5161"

[timoseewho]

@Andanas/raffy, thanks for the help, I'll have a look at it when I get home!

[raffy]

Set Bonus Override: automatically finds all set bonuses on gear included in Gear.txt, and lets you toggle any of them individually.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/298 ... onuses.png
I think I'm going to pursue this approach for more features, adding a toggle between "theoretical/experimental" mode and imported armory "real" mode.

Added "Autofill" button to apply all suggested enchants, trinkets, meta gem, and profession-specific stuff, etc... it still needs to inject JC gems (somehow). So if you screw around with gear, you can just hit this button and hit 1:1:1 reforge, and you're good to go.

Added JC gems and Synapse Springs to gear audit warning.

[aggixx]

Does your code for Assurance of Consequence (the CDR trinket) reduce the cooldown on Berserk or not? Because your trinket text when you have it equipped states it does but the most recent PTR build is still only TF.

[Stenhaldi]

It's currently affecting berserk on PTR.

[aggixx]

Hmm, interesting... Well I stand corrected then

[aggixx]

Hey Raffy, could you please add Exp/Secondary gems as options for orange gems? I suspect any profile where pure yellow gems are superior to pure reds it will also be the case for Exp over Agi, this means the "Use Secondaries" option should also probably default to Exp over Agi, although feel free to toy around with it yourself before making that call.

Oh also, when I use the "Use Secondaries" option for the RoRo reforger it's changing my green gems to purple, here's the profile:

Spoiler: show

-99182 >mh :95346 :76659 # Head: [553] Headpiece of the Haunted Forest
-103749 >mh # Neck: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 1 Loot 1 - Agi DPS Necklace
-103913 >tc :76699 :76699 "Greater Tiger Claw Inscription" # Shoulder: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 8 Loot 1 - Leather Agi Shoulders
-102248 >mh :76667 "Superior Critical Strike" # Back: [600] Fen-Yu, Fury of Xuen
-99180 >ch :76667 :76671 :76671 # Chest: [553] Raiment of the Haunted Forest
-103910 >me "Greater Agility" # Wrist: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 12 Loot 1 - Leather Agi Bracer
-99181 >ch :76671 :76671 "Synapse Springs" "Super Expertise"# Hands: [553] Grips of the Haunted Forest
-103928 :76667 :76699 :76699 Socket # Waist: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 14 Loot 1 - Leather Agi Belt
-99183 >te :76699 :76699 # Legs: [553] Legguards of the Haunted Forest
-103779 >tc :76643 "Blurred Speed" # Feet: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 10 Loot 1 - Leather Agi Boot
-103844 >mh :76671 # Finger 1: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 13 Loot 1 - Agi DPS Ring
-103843 :76671 # Finger 2: [553] 5.4 Raid - Normal - Siege of Orgrimmar - Boss 9 Loot 1 - Agi DPS Ring
-102312 # Trinket 1: [553] 5.4 Mastery (5)
96918 +8 # Trinket 2: [549] Rune of Re-Origination

[raffy]

OK, fixed. Check Latest Beta.

I had both gem types in there, but the stat weights were balanced (2:1) so I could choose either one. I made 2 agility slightly less than 1 secondary (1.8:1) and also encouraged it to use greens instead of purples (my mistake). Purple gems are still in there, but green will be preferred.

Oops, I forgot to add the green gems :p