A sim’s DPS is an average over thousands of fights, each played the same way against the same target. Your DPS in-game comes from one pull, on your own gear, with your group’s buffs, the boss’s mechanics and how the pull went for you. To match the sim’s number, you’d have to recreate its exact fight and play it the way the sim does, thousands of times over.

So read a sim for how the DPS moves when something changes, more than for the number itself. Every option a sim compares runs the same fight, so the gap between them is the part worth acting on. Where two results sit inside the margin of error, treat them as a tie.

That’s what a sim is for. It can try thousands of builds, gear sets and rotation choices, each over thousands of fights, and show which add the most DPS. On a target dummy, testing even a few takes hours, and each result rests on a handful of pulls.

Every number here is SimulationCraft’s output. It’s the open-source combat simulator theorycrafters use to write guides and top guilds use to plan gear. Noxxic didn’t write it and doesn’t modify it.

The MID2_Death_Knight_Unholy_San'layn profile ran against Cleave at 288 item level on SimulationCraft commit 710c2408bf, for release 121-506.