Major Talent Issues with The War Within Pre-Patch Sims
TL;DR: Pre-patch sims are extremely unreliable because of lots of small but breaking talent changes between retail and beta. This situation will not be resolved until The War Within launches in early access on August 22nd.
I don't recommend making any decisions that cost real resources (gold, crafting materials, etc) based on the results of pre-patch sims. Check with your usual non-sim resources (Wowhead, Icy Veins, class Discords, etc) for any non-free/important decisions during pre-patch.
The Details
Raidbots and SimulationCraft devs generally do not prioritize pre-patch or levelling sims because it's a short duration and generally doesn't really call for as much optimization. Instead, both are focused on max level characters and the raid release which in this case is Season 1 on Sept 10th.
For previous expansions, this hasn't been a major issue as pre-patch/levelling sims still largely worked even if they weren't totally optimal.
However, the new talent system introduced in Dragonflight introduces significant data versioning issues that make it prohibitive to support pre-patch this time around (side note - these technical issues affect Blizzard as well which is probably why some classes have been left with out-of-date talent trees during pre-patch).
At this time, almost all classes have some desync between live and beta talents. Some of these are obvious differences (Retribution Paladin, Enhancement Shaman) but others are much more subtle (nearly all other classes). At this time, only Druid, Mage, and Priest are fully synced between retail and beta.
These desynced talent trees result in the talent hashes only working for one version of the game so you can't use a live talent hash on the beta and vice versa. Because Raidbots and SimC are focused on Season 1, both are using beta data and most live talent hashes just do not work correctly.
Beta sims are still in-progress but are the "default" state for sims on the site right now. For more information on how your class/spec is progressing with sims, check #announcements in the Raidbots Discord for links to the status spreadsheet or to other resources that might have more info.
It's definitely a situation that sucks and I'm sorry that I can't provide a better experience at this time. I expect these issues will all be moot once early access launches and that sims will be back to being much reliable by the time Season 1 opens up!
If you are a Premium user and are unhappy with your paid subscription, contact [email protected]. Refunds are offered for 14 days after a payment. For older, multi-month plans, we can look into offering account credit for future renewals.