Guide · Loot optimization

How to Run a Free Droptimizer in Your Browser

A droptimizer answers the question that decides your week: which boss drops your biggest upgrade? This one sims every relevant drop on your own CPU — free, instant, and without a premium subscription.

The idea is simple: take your exact character, generate a copy of it wearing each possible drop from the content you run, and simulate all of them. What you get back is a ranked list — every dungeon and raid item that could drop for you, ordered by how much DPS it would actually add. No tooltip-reading, no guessing whether 13 item levels beat a better stat spread.

Step by step

1. Get your profile in. Paste your /simc addon export, or use the Armory import with just region, realm and character name. New to this? Start with the getting-started guide.
2. Select the Droptimizer mode. It's the second mode card, next to the plain DPS sim.
3. Pick your content. Tick the dungeons you run and set your typical key level (drop item level scales from key 2 to 10), or tick raid wings and choose LFR / Normal / Heroic / Mythic difficulty.
4. Optional: upgrade tracks. "Use max upgraded ilvl" sims items at their fully upgraded track level (Veteran→250, Champion→263, Hero→276, Myth→289) instead of as they drop. "Mythic / Vault mode" treats M+ drops as Mythic-track vault items.
5. Hit Run. The sim runs multithreaded on your CPU. With many candidate items, Smart Sim automatically does a fast elimination pass first, then a precise pass on the survivors.

Reading the results

The summary table ranks each item by simulated DPS gain over your current setup, with the source boss and difficulty listed next to it. A few things to keep in mind:

• Small differences are noise. If two items are within the sim's target error of each other, treat them as equivalent — see what target error means.
• Trinkets and rings swing hardest. They compete against your worse-equipped slot of the pair, so a big lead there is usually real.
• Simming for Mythic+? Switch the fight style first so the ranking reflects dungeon combat — here's how to sim for Mythic+.

Why is this free when Raidbots Droptimizer isn't fully?

Raidbots runs your sim on their cloud servers, which cost money — so queue priority, higher iteration counts and some options sit behind Premium. Here the same SimulationCraft engine is compiled to WebAssembly and runs on your hardware, so there's nothing to meter: every option is available to everyone, and your profile never leaves the browser. The full comparison lives on the Raidbots alternative page.

Keep reading

• Great Vault picks — the same idea, applied to your weekly vault choices.
• Sim for Mythic+ — get rankings that match dungeon combat, not a training dummy.
• How to sim your character — the basics, from addon install to first result.