Formulation-vs-SimulationFormulation- The greatest strength of formulation lies in the fact that it is deterministic.
- No matter how many times you do the analysis, you always get the same answer.
- This determinism enables analysis of very small changes in the input model.
- This is exceptionally useful when comparing talents and/or gear.
Simulation- The greatest strength of simulation is its accuracy.
- Where formulation must reduce a complex interaction into abstractions representing (sometimes loosely) the original behaviour, simulation simply models the actual behaviour.
- However, simulation may return return different accurate results depending upon the number of misses, crits, procs, etc.
- When comparing two different simulations, one must iterate each simulation many MANY times in order to determine expected behaviour.
- Due to this variance, it can be costly (from a simulation runtime perspective) to measure the effect of small changes in gear.
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