An open-source combat simulator for World of Warcraft. It models your character fighting a target thousands of times and reports the average result. Theorycrafters use it to write guides and top guilds use it to plan gear.

No. Add your character and Noxxic runs SimulationCraft for you. There is nothing to download or set up.

Every result is SimC’s output. Ranked results show their margin of error, the inputs are laid out in our methodology, and every report links its raw SimC files so you can check them yourself.

Noxxic has published class guides since February 2011 and SimC-based DPS rankings since 2012, before simulating became the standard way to optimize a character. Being early meant our results sometimes differed from what other guides were saying at the time, and different gets read as wrong. SimC is now the standard for top players and guides, and Noxxic runs it for your character in the cloud.

A sim and a log answer different questions. Logs show what players have already found works, so they follow trends rather than set them: by the time a change is common in logs, the players who found it have moved on. That’s why top players don’t wait for logs to stay ahead.

A sim can run a Fire Mage through thousands of builds, gear sets, gems, enchants and rotation choices, each over thousands of fights, with and without raid buffs, consumables or Bloodlust, and show which ones add the most DPS. On a target dummy, testing even a few of those takes hours, each result rests on a handful of pulls, and there’s no way to test what changes with raid buffs or extra targets.

So read a sim for how the DPS moves when something changes, more than for the exact number. A sim’s number is an average over thousands of fights; a log is one pull, often among the best. The fight, the gear and the player all differ too.

Sims have limits of their own. They are weaker at modeling individual boss fights, and only as good as the theorycrafting behind them. Each shows something the other can’t.

The guide sims one fixed Fire Mage profile. Your sim uses the gear and talents you have, so the best stats and build for you can differ.

No. SimulationCraft is set up for your character, and what it outputs is what you see.

Use Single Target for raid bosses and for comparing gear or stat weights, and Cleave for a council fight or a boss with an add. For Mythic+, use AoE for the pulls and Single Target for the bosses. For Delves and world content, use Solo.

Each mode is a stand-still fight against a set number of enemies, the kind of fight SimulationCraft supports for every spec. Single Target is free, and the others need Noxxic Premium Tier 2.

Yes, free. Pick the rotation style when you start a sim. Both follow fixed rules, so a sim of them sits closer to how you actually play than the Standard rotation, which assumes near-perfect execution few players manage. SimC supports both for every spec, though one spec’s support can briefly lag behind a game update.

Whenever your gear or talents change, and after each game patch or hotfix.