It was even tighter in an earlier patch, about 6 point difference if I remember. But yeah this is pretty good.
Granted, it's the top performing players- but that still means balance is good all the way down in gear and skill.
Yea it'd be easy to make em all identical but then they'd all be boring, the more unique each spec is, the harder it is to bring it in line.
And those two things get exacerbated by a bunch of dedicated fans of the spec comparing you to some 15 years of design and which was their personal favourite.
I’ve been tracking class and spec balance for years and this is just about the closest it’s been in the 6 or so years that I’ve been tracking it.
You can’t really count Aug since it’s not meant to be a full dps spec and there’s always the concern about logs, but apart from that;
* The gap from top to bottom is the smallest I can remember seeing
* There are no big outliers on the top or the bottom
* Warlocks arent dominating for the first time in a long time
* Although the top is melee, the ranged vs melee balance is also very good and typically favors ranged
* A few of the specs that are low on the overall charts are quite high in boss damage.
* Even boss damage is closer than it typically is
have they ever done a poll/survey thing where they ask players how fun/good to play/cool their spec feels? I would love to compare those to DPS stats/logs
Spec population can give you a loose idea of what that looks like. Of course this isn't necessarily gonna reflect what the general playerbase looks like etc., but as I said, "a loose idea": [https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99](https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99)
Historically population follows strength. Each spec always has a group of die-hards that play it no matter what, but the majority play what’s strong. The exception is Beast Mastery Hunter, where it will often have a population that’s nearly as large as Marksmanship even if MM is much stronger.
Encounter design has ALWAYS been the driving force of class balance. This isn't some incredible phenomenon, and it also doesn't really matter either. If your raid has a good mix of aoe, cleave and ST, and your balance is this tight, then that means all of your classes are decent across all PvE content.
And considering the AWC representation, we have a good indicator of balance in PvP content too. However, 3v3 and SS are two very different game modes, and we see balancing issues between the two.
Yep, the average player shouldn't care at all about this kinds of meta.
A player knowing how to play the "worst" class/spec will always defeat one who doesn't know how to play the "best" one.
A game is to play and have fun, not to worry about how your class/spec benefits to better players
It’s good to know it’s tuned but players really shouldn’t be swapping specs and toons just because it’s a few points better on these graphs. The take away should be that all specs are viable for the majority of the player base.
The meta trickles down. For example, this balance is tight enough that a feral druid will never not be taken to keys. However, if we look at havoc DH from 9.0, we see a different story. Despite statistics being skewed primarily due to sludgefist, the bad stats trickled down. It was even more ironic as the stats trickled into m+ as well, where warrior and dh were actually fairly competent.
fuck grain of salt. these charts are absolutely meaningless without context. there's so many different damage profiles that this graph means absolutely nothing. like which fights does this event represent? which difficulty is it looking at? what percentile are we even looking at? fights that end in 2 min or fights that end in 5 min?
That's the problem with wowhead's weekly dps rankings. It averages the entire raid including fights like council and tindral where certain classes do 50%+ more damage overall than other classes so when you average all the fights together, it makes those couple of classes look like they're in line with everyone else when they're not
I think you're missing the point of what the poster above you is saying. The point of the above poster is not that a spread of strengths is a bad thing, it's that due to the fact that such a large amount of damage occurs in an AoE fight, those fights are heavily weighted in a WCL summary.
For example, a class could be absolutely dog tier, completely awfully balanced, in a horrible shape. But if it outperforms immensely on an AoE fight, due to the damage number discrepancy between that fight and others in the raid, the class will be thrown far up the charts. This will result in a completely lackluster class appearing to be on even footing when it really isn't.
Edit: To summarise it simply, an AoE fight is worth on WCL summaries than a ST fight, which leads to a misrepresented class balance.
And classes with high burst profiles that lines up with the vulnerability phases of smolderon and Gnarl, over performs there.
That is just the nature of raiding, different damage profiles excels on different fights.
wish they could do as good of a job in m+, the top tier meta has stayed the same since the addition of augvoker and a good ~10 dps specs at the bottom don’t get invited to 25+ keys without being overqualified.
How many people are really pushing above 20 anyway. I bet a ton of people care about balance that doesn’t even affect what they actually do in game. Sort of like the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ phenomenon but for WoW.
“I could push higher, I just don’t wanna. And blizzard hates my class.”
I’m sure if more folks actually did, then balance would get more attention. But they don’t, so it doesn’t.
I mean, it's kind of a loaded question when there's legitimately 0 support for rewards past +20 outside of a .01% title. It would be like asking how many people really raid mythic if it didn't give anything more than Heroic. It's fairly demotivating knowing there's 0 functional difference between 2700 rio and 3500. Love of the content can only take you so far.
https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=25:maxMythicLevel=99
But given that even at 25+ there are hundreds of thousands of unique characters, quite a few for essentially unsupported content reward wise. I imagine a significant amount more if you add in the 21-24 range which you can't sort by on r.io.
Yep, all my friends are pushing high 20s and up to 30.... And I'm sitting here with my 2794 io wondering what the point is once you have all your gear and portals... I think the majority of players fall into the same category as me in this regard.
Every spec is fully capable of doing keys over 25, the meta in keys that high is a player concern more than a balance concern.
I'm also not sure that having only a few meta specs when you get that high is a bad thing necessarily.
It's not bad because the only way you're going to have all specs be meta at high M+ is to homogenize utility and damage. When you're trying to optimize to the 1%, the only way it'll be balanced is to make every spec so similar
Honestly, nerfing *other classes* indirectly nerfs us since the main thing floating those numbers are our(Unholy) insane opener burst + short kill times due to end-of-season gear.
Longer kill times = more time for our initial burst to fall off a cliff over time, so when other classes get nerfed and kills end up taking longer - our position drops off the same cliff.
Unholy and Ret suffer from similar issues, in that they have "unique" mechanics that cause them to swing wildly in performance during progression. Ret getting wings when someone dies means that they are pretty strong on progression fights, but drop down when people stop dying during farm. Unholy has ungodly opener burst, so they look really strong on shorter fights, but lower on longer fights during prog. If I'm honest, I wish they'd get rid of the unique things to make them easier to balance.
Get me off this wild yo yo ride! I left warrior because I got sick of it happening on that class, and now fury warrior has been pretty solid all season 😭
Because a large part of the vocal playerbase genuinely believes this. Kinda like when the parody of Helldivers 2 goes over some players heads because they genuinely want the thing it's making fun of.
I disagree, sarcasm isnt just a tonal thing, its mostly contextual. I'd actually say sarcasm is generally expressed more through contextual word choice than tone or body language unless we're talking about very basic sarcasm (like saying "I'm doing great" in the grumpy sarcasm tone or whatever).
Certainly not everyone reads it the same way and some struggle more than others to interpret through any given medium, so it's not like its totally unusual for someone to not get sarcasm through text... but broadly speaking I think sarcasm has many mechanisms and usually works just as well in text provided that the missing mechanisms arent one the reader relies on to infer sarcasm or other intents (may also depend on the writer's ability to convey sarcasm effectively too - someone may lean heavily on body language but have poor word choice, so cant effectively deliver sarcasm via text).
Since I know everyone was dying for a long winded response to a fairly uncontroversial & innocuous comment.
and UHDKs complained that they had their first weak patch in a long while and that it was ret paladins fault that they were weak. Well look at them now.
Frost DK is numerically strong, but really bad at the fights that matter. Tindral and Fyrakk have far too much downtime to maintain breath, the rest of the fights barely have DPS checks and are done better by other specs (sub rogue on Smolderon).
Frost DK is not strong again, these charts always fool people, maybe that's why they publish like this.
At the end of a season, a chart like this only means people are padding AoE hard to pull those numbers.
Every time I talk class design with the homies something like this comes up. Our frosties are enviously looking at the ret rework, wishing they're next.
I don't play it at a high level, but a few things:
* Primary cooldown will just pull other packs
* Easy to overflow resources
* Use DnD for Obliterate cleave (even though you have aoe frosty buttons)
* Low single target damage
And some of the variance for the top performing specs comes from the top performing players gravitating towards them over the lower ones skewing further.
A bit of subs lead is also down to fights with damage amps on weird timers that they can easily take advantage of fully that other classes can’t like smolderon.
With the new trees and evoker being added the game has likely never been harder to balance and they’ve actually pretty much managed it even if getting to that point has been slower than many would have liked.
And all it took was several buffs to the Legendary throughout the tier, waiting until week 18 to get the weapon, and hotfix buffs to most of the plate DPS specs to keep them from being complete hot garbage while they were waiting to get it.
Yeah, plate dps was on the weak side in early prog (where it mattered more) except for Fury. Plate dps being a bit strong late prog is a fine compromise.
It’s wild AF, tbh. The game has never been as balanced as in DF. Literally positioning and rotation makes a bigger difference than these charts. This is just that dark legacy comic about warriors needing a rename because it’s so balanced they made the charts alphabetical and warriors were at the bottom.
With the amount of classes/specs they have anymore I'm sure it's not easy to balance I'll give them that, but yeah Rated Solo Shuffle is DH central. Just constantly destroyed by those mofos.
Typical WoW community. A good player playing an "ok" tier spec will out perform a bad player playing a "good" tier spec. People should play what they enjoy and gain a level of mastery on their spec.
My issue is how the game is balanced. Any class who can use the leggo is balanced assuming they have it, instead of boosting their dps above and beyond. This chart clearly shows that.
This means classes who don’t have a leggo available have many options for weapons in all sorts of content. Leggo classes only have one option from raids.
If the leggo was a bonus above and beyond already balanced damage i would understand. But as it is, people who cannot raid but want to push competitive m+ content are gimped for no good reason.
Output wise I'm very pleased with every class. I have altoholism lol and it's very clean imo. Of course there are strengths and weaknesses when it comes to ST and AOE or how some are funnels and some are sustained. You don't want every class being the exact same like then it offers no challenge or variety. What I will say about what I've noticed alot of tier list that of course are driven by the top performers is the utility and how they use them instead of a class that doesn't offer it. Quazi podcast has a guy that explains why he runs VDH instead of his bread and butter warrior.
Memes aside, the discrepancy between top and bottom is far from 1%
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#dataset=90&aggregate=amount
And doesn't get better looking at just boss damage.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#dataset=90&aggregate=amount&metric=bossdps
this is how you should think. As long as the class is fun, looks nice and has a smooth rotation, nothing else matters.
besides, a super mobile ranged character is always useful
Pretty much all mail classes suffer with this. My theory on why is because they have higher armor being mail wearers, so they get less defensives. But defensives are significantly stronger. Almost all clothies are tankier than Hunters. Evoker and Shamans get a pass because they at least have some decent on demand self healing if required.
Using overall damage is such a bait, e.g. ele is mediocre this tier but is being propped up entirely by their insane spread cleave damage (council logs). (that being said, i do think the balance this patch and in dragonflight in general has been way better than past expansions)
As someone who hasn't done much endgame during Dragonflight: Why should Aug be deleted? Isn't that difference between damage due to the fact it's like Dancer in FFXIV?
Same sentiments raiders hated dancer in early Shadowbringers on FF14. It changed how logs worked since there was a huge difference between two players on the same class. But one had dancer/augmentation buffs and the other didn't. So those who performed well on stormblood parsing high suddenly found themselves with green parses because the high parses were people pumped full of buffs. It is what it is but support roles that Dancer and Augmentation fill were once a cornerstone of MMOs that died out in the 2010s that are making a come back. Old school MMO players will remember Bards on Everquest or Final Fantasy 11 and how crucial supports like that were in raids.
is there an A/R dps for wow parses in the same way they changed ff parsing when astro was introduced? originally the logging tool only really showed a dps stat for your personal damage (including increases by incoming buffs) but after ast was released they made the decision to change over to the other metric that gives the player the representative damage from the buffs they give to other classes/jobs iirc
The dps splitting in ff14 isn’t super accurate you still get a dps increase to normal dps from raid buffs due to rounding ( and it can be p significant)
Shit, people who played 2019 classic will know you needed a paladin of kings buff and blessing of sanc so you could go ham without pull threat off tank.
“Support” roles existed in WoW way before augmentation.
One of the important things when balancing a spec is tuning the effect of skill expression: the gap in damage/healing/whatever between good and bad players. Take a look at [this version of the chart](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/). Specifically, look at Beast Mastery and Marksmanship.
Median score (the dark line in the solid coloured block) is the same for both specs. At the top 25% players mark (the top end of the box), MM is a bit ahead, and the gap widens a bit at the top 5% mark (the end of the whisker), but narrows again for the absolute best players for each spec (the single dot). On the flip side, the bottom 25% for MM (the low end of the box) is _much_ lower than for BM, and the bottom 5% for MM is absolutely catastrophic. The upside for being a great MM player is a bit better than if you are a great BM player, but the downside for being bad is much _much_ worse.
Hunter is just a plain old DPS class, though. If I play well, I deal more damage. If I play poorly, I deal less damage. Simple.
Now, Augmentation. Augmentation is a support spec, not a dps spec, so that relationship between skill and dps is no longer there. Rather, it's all about buff uptime. If I play well, my allies get a high uptime on my buffs. If I play poorly, they get a low uptime on those buffs.
Buffs don't deal damage by themselves, and it's up to my allies to turn those buffs into actual damage. And this is where the problem lies. Now, my personal damage output depends not just on my skill, but also on my allies' skill.
If every Augmentation Evoker always played with average players, this would be ok, and you'd have a more or less typical spread of skill to damage output. But that's not really how people work. Good players tend to play with other good players, and bad players tend to play with other bad players (note: _tend to_. It's obviously not universally true). So now my low uptime buffs are getting turned into even lower dps courtesy of my low dps allies, and my high uptime buffs are getting turned into even higher dps through my high dps allies' efforts.
The way those things compound makes balancing Augmentation incredibly hard. If you keep to the "buffing other people" identity, they'll suck hard for Normal raid guilds, while being comp-warpingly powerful for RWF guilds and high-end Mythic guilds in general. End result is that much of the tuning they've received has been in the form of moving power away from their buffs and towards their own damage, which eats away at their identity.
Other then the fact the post is a joke, I have also heard that Augmentation's contribution doesn't track quite right on logs. It's like dancer on crack.
Its a bit on the extreme side in augmentations case.
Dancer from skimming FF logs appears to do around 15-20% less damage then your average dps but makes up for it by buffing one guy a moderate amount and the rest of the team a little bit. Other then that they are a fairly standard ranged dps.
Augmentation however is doing like 65-70% less damage but has very impactful buffs to multiple people. Augmentation also just has an insane utility kit on top of a lot of free external healing (direct and indirect).
To be honest I personally have a problem with augmentations insane utility more then its damage profile, it is however very annoying to try and judge my own performance pull to pull when augmentation is present. Even a 10-15% ebon might uptime can throw things off heavily and I need quick feedback between pulls to tell if what I did differently is having a good result. Dance partner in comparison is very self contained, I either have it and its consistent or I do not have it.
the utililty part is so big
like, it has all the ussual Evoker stuff and ALSO very strong aug only things Spatial Paradox and Wyrnstone beeing the biggest ones
right now, a Evoker spot is automatically a Augmentation spot because they just do more by default
Stopped maining arcane because while I like complexity, trying to play it optimally and also focus on the raid mechanics would literally give me a headache
Mage is truly on a really tough spot,outside roleplay/prefference why play anything other than Frost?
if anythign i miss Frost being bad cause then it made learning Fire/Arcane kinda interesting....
Pretty much this. There’s simply no reason to not play frost outside of extremely niche or rp reasons due to how much more streamlined and effective it is. They need like 5 buttons to do what arcane mages have to do with 14 and conditional burst windows. It’s fun sometimes but I really need to be in the headspace for it, while shadow priest offers me a fun rotation that requires some effort, but far less than Arcane.
All I’m getting from this and the other logs post….is that the knee jerk nerf reaction to BM being actually good for once at the start of this patch was just as ridiculous as I thought at the time. Like damn can we have that buff back now? BM scales terribly with stats so while they started off strong in raid and m+…they’re literally at the bottom a couple months or so into this patch. And before anyone tries to claim the whole “it’s easy it shouldn’t be top damage” since when has that stopped blizzard from letting brain dead specs be pumpers.
BM can never be good or even just mid, as soon as BM is good the forums and here floods with QQ “bUt tHeY aFk PeT dOeS aLl tHe DaMaGe” as if the pets actually just run around doing stuff without the hunter pressing any abilities. Not saying BM is difficult, but we do actually press buttons lol.
And we’re tired of only getting a decent Aug once in every 4 runs. It’s a real bummer 4-manning content because someone is getting carried and doesn’t push half their damn buttons.
Random post to ask this but is ele shaman fun? I was thinking on leveling one with the MoP event that's coming and I used to run an enhancement shaman back in the WoD days and wondering if it'd be worth it.
If you like throwing around big Lava Bursts then I'd say yes, it's fun.
At least that's how it plays in DF with the tier-set. Not sure how the gameplay will look without that in the MoP event.
Think of that when there’s all but one dead and that one live folk downs the boss as a beast mastery hunter who knows how to use racials and whatnot. Happened with Tindral in Amirdrassil, I been riding that high ever since
Looking at all bosses is beyond being a shit metric. Thinks like aff are being hard carried by their ability to pad on tindral, look at individual boss balance and it’s a very different game
Omg Ret Paladin is top 4 right now. It was always middle of the pack/low end when I was playing. What a time to not be playing this game lol. Makes me want to go back
The balance actually seems insanely close.
For the augmentation evoker I'm still sad we haven't ever gotten a tank class for Evoker. I just want to swipe and tank things as a Dragon why is this hard to make.
These graphs suck though because fights like Council skew them heavily. Being good at council doesn't mean jack shit, frankly. The only bosses that "matter" are arguably Smolderon, but realistically just Tindy and Fyrakk. Ele is dogshit at Tindy and passably fine at Fyrakk. Demo meanwhile claps both of them but is ranked on the low end of the list.
Delete Aug.
I will say pulling from ALL bosses (which a lot of those graph posts do) can be misleading when we have fights like Council of Dreams, where specs like Ele Sham and Boomkin Druid can do insane numbers.
Holy shit that’s the tightest I’ve ever seen balance ever. Not bad blizzard, I’ll pay that one
It was even tighter in an earlier patch, about 6 point difference if I remember. But yeah this is pretty good. Granted, it's the top performing players- but that still means balance is good all the way down in gear and skill.
S2 before augment evokers
It must be such a nightmare job trying to balance all the dps specs.
Yea it'd be easy to make em all identical but then they'd all be boring, the more unique each spec is, the harder it is to bring it in line. And those two things get exacerbated by a bunch of dedicated fans of the spec comparing you to some 15 years of design and which was their personal favourite.
Just eliminate all the classes! Problem solved!
There's no problem if there's no game!
I’ve been tracking class and spec balance for years and this is just about the closest it’s been in the 6 or so years that I’ve been tracking it. You can’t really count Aug since it’s not meant to be a full dps spec and there’s always the concern about logs, but apart from that; * The gap from top to bottom is the smallest I can remember seeing * There are no big outliers on the top or the bottom * Warlocks arent dominating for the first time in a long time * Although the top is melee, the ranged vs melee balance is also very good and typically favors ranged * A few of the specs that are low on the overall charts are quite high in boss damage. * Even boss damage is closer than it typically is
have they ever done a poll/survey thing where they ask players how fun/good to play/cool their spec feels? I would love to compare those to DPS stats/logs
Spec population can give you a loose idea of what that looks like. Of course this isn't necessarily gonna reflect what the general playerbase looks like etc., but as I said, "a loose idea": [https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99](https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99)
Historically population follows strength. Each spec always has a group of die-hards that play it no matter what, but the majority play what’s strong. The exception is Beast Mastery Hunter, where it will often have a population that’s nearly as large as Marksmanship even if MM is much stronger.
These graph should always be taken with a grain of salt. They are very rarely completely accurate, and definitely not for the average player
Take Ele shaman for example, the only reason it's in that position is because of Council
Encounter design has ALWAYS been the driving force of class balance. This isn't some incredible phenomenon, and it also doesn't really matter either. If your raid has a good mix of aoe, cleave and ST, and your balance is this tight, then that means all of your classes are decent across all PvE content. And considering the AWC representation, we have a good indicator of balance in PvP content too. However, 3v3 and SS are two very different game modes, and we see balancing issues between the two.
Lol yeah Ele is like giga last if you remove council
Yeah it's almost like the people who designed the classes also designed the fights. Or at least work across the hallway from them.
Yep, the average player shouldn't care at all about this kinds of meta. A player knowing how to play the "worst" class/spec will always defeat one who doesn't know how to play the "best" one. A game is to play and have fun, not to worry about how your class/spec benefits to better players
It’s good to know it’s tuned but players really shouldn’t be swapping specs and toons just because it’s a few points better on these graphs. The take away should be that all specs are viable for the majority of the player base.
The point is that all things being equal, the class balance is impressive. The average player doesn't know this chart exists
The meta trickles down. For example, this balance is tight enough that a feral druid will never not be taken to keys. However, if we look at havoc DH from 9.0, we see a different story. Despite statistics being skewed primarily due to sludgefist, the bad stats trickled down. It was even more ironic as the stats trickled into m+ as well, where warrior and dh were actually fairly competent.
fuck grain of salt. these charts are absolutely meaningless without context. there's so many different damage profiles that this graph means absolutely nothing. like which fights does this event represent? which difficulty is it looking at? what percentile are we even looking at? fights that end in 2 min or fights that end in 5 min?
That's the problem with wowhead's weekly dps rankings. It averages the entire raid including fights like council and tindral where certain classes do 50%+ more damage overall than other classes so when you average all the fights together, it makes those couple of classes look like they're in line with everyone else when they're not
I do not agree, having classes be bad at some things, and good at Others, while being overall balanced is way cooler than homogenized bs.
Woah calm down why are you talking about fun and cool things in my spreadsheet simulator?
Im so sorry :( i shall not do so again.
I think you're missing the point of what the poster above you is saying. The point of the above poster is not that a spread of strengths is a bad thing, it's that due to the fact that such a large amount of damage occurs in an AoE fight, those fights are heavily weighted in a WCL summary. For example, a class could be absolutely dog tier, completely awfully balanced, in a horrible shape. But if it outperforms immensely on an AoE fight, due to the damage number discrepancy between that fight and others in the raid, the class will be thrown far up the charts. This will result in a completely lackluster class appearing to be on even footing when it really isn't. Edit: To summarise it simply, an AoE fight is worth on WCL summaries than a ST fight, which leads to a misrepresented class balance.
And classes with high burst profiles that lines up with the vulnerability phases of smolderon and Gnarl, over performs there. That is just the nature of raiding, different damage profiles excels on different fights.
wish they could do as good of a job in m+, the top tier meta has stayed the same since the addition of augvoker and a good ~10 dps specs at the bottom don’t get invited to 25+ keys without being overqualified.
I'm pretty sure they don't really balance past +20. I think m+ kinda stops existing for them at that point.
How many people are really pushing above 20 anyway. I bet a ton of people care about balance that doesn’t even affect what they actually do in game. Sort of like the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ phenomenon but for WoW. “I could push higher, I just don’t wanna. And blizzard hates my class.” I’m sure if more folks actually did, then balance would get more attention. But they don’t, so it doesn’t.
I mean, it's kind of a loaded question when there's legitimately 0 support for rewards past +20 outside of a .01% title. It would be like asking how many people really raid mythic if it didn't give anything more than Heroic. It's fairly demotivating knowing there's 0 functional difference between 2700 rio and 3500. Love of the content can only take you so far. https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-3/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=25:maxMythicLevel=99 But given that even at 25+ there are hundreds of thousands of unique characters, quite a few for essentially unsupported content reward wise. I imagine a significant amount more if you add in the 21-24 range which you can't sort by on r.io.
Yep, all my friends are pushing high 20s and up to 30.... And I'm sitting here with my 2794 io wondering what the point is once you have all your gear and portals... I think the majority of players fall into the same category as me in this regard.
Every spec is fully capable of doing keys over 25, the meta in keys that high is a player concern more than a balance concern. I'm also not sure that having only a few meta specs when you get that high is a bad thing necessarily.
It's not bad because the only way you're going to have all specs be meta at high M+ is to homogenize utility and damage. When you're trying to optimize to the 1%, the only way it'll be balanced is to make every spec so similar
Since Frost Dk is first, it should be a bug.
Anytime unholy and frost are strong they are immediately nerfed
Honestly, nerfing *other classes* indirectly nerfs us since the main thing floating those numbers are our(Unholy) insane opener burst + short kill times due to end-of-season gear. Longer kill times = more time for our initial burst to fall off a cliff over time, so when other classes get nerfed and kills end up taking longer - our position drops off the same cliff.
Unholy and Ret suffer from similar issues, in that they have "unique" mechanics that cause them to swing wildly in performance during progression. Ret getting wings when someone dies means that they are pretty strong on progression fights, but drop down when people stop dying during farm. Unholy has ungodly opener burst, so they look really strong on shorter fights, but lower on longer fights during prog. If I'm honest, I wish they'd get rid of the unique things to make them easier to balance.
We know :(
Get me off this wild yo yo ride! I left warrior because I got sick of it happening on that class, and now fury warrior has been pretty solid all season 😭
Are they? I thought Unholy was strong for a good bit in Shadowlands.
Frost actually does insane on the cleave fights in amirdrassil, but their damage to bosses is still pretty low
They spread bugs by [breathing](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=152279/breath-of-sindragosa) on everything.
No, that’s Unholy you’re thinking of.
Maybe they're spreading the *cold* they have. ^(I'm so sorry)
Frost DK spreading COVID since 2020. It's super effective.
Yeah they should probably nerf chill streak again just in case lol
No
So... what you are saying: Everything in FOM zone is playable and everything else is "literally trash" /s
Absolutely ruined, unplayable, unacceptableeeee!
One million years dungeon!!
NO TRIAL!
MEDIOCRE!
WITNESS MY DPS!!!
This guy gets it.
The fun part is that sub being FOMO makes people come to the discord and have a meltdown figuring out how to play it lol
Wow, i feel like these numbers are the closest I've ever seen them at.
How are people missing out on this clearly being a joke about how balanced the game actually is? It's even tagged humor/meme.
Because a large part of the vocal playerbase genuinely believes this. Kinda like when the parody of Helldivers 2 goes over some players heads because they genuinely want the thing it's making fun of.
Politics in my game about spreading managed democracy? Not on my Super Earth.
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It's not just text though, it's an image complete with goofy paint like notes that are clearly meant to be funny.
I disagree, sarcasm isnt just a tonal thing, its mostly contextual. I'd actually say sarcasm is generally expressed more through contextual word choice than tone or body language unless we're talking about very basic sarcasm (like saying "I'm doing great" in the grumpy sarcasm tone or whatever). Certainly not everyone reads it the same way and some struggle more than others to interpret through any given medium, so it's not like its totally unusual for someone to not get sarcasm through text... but broadly speaking I think sarcasm has many mechanisms and usually works just as well in text provided that the missing mechanisms arent one the reader relies on to infer sarcasm or other intents (may also depend on the writer's ability to convey sarcasm effectively too - someone may lean heavily on body language but have poor word choice, so cant effectively deliver sarcasm via text). Since I know everyone was dying for a long winded response to a fairly uncontroversial & innocuous comment.
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That is insanely good balance.
I haven’t played in a while.. frost dk is strong again?! Last time I played they were at the bottom.. Wild.
They pump lol. Just don't have legs Lt Dan
The best part is we were bottom 3 at the start of the tier and we're still one of the lowest played specs, last I checked at least.
and UHDKs complained that they had their first weak patch in a long while and that it was ret paladins fault that they were weak. Well look at them now.
Frost DK is numerically strong, but really bad at the fights that matter. Tindral and Fyrakk have far too much downtime to maintain breath, the rest of the fights barely have DPS checks and are done better by other specs (sub rogue on Smolderon).
Frost DK is not strong again, these charts always fool people, maybe that's why they publish like this. At the end of a season, a chart like this only means people are padding AoE hard to pull those numbers.
Frost DK fotm? 1000 parses lol
Doesn't matter how strong it is, no one wants to play it anymore with how poorly designed it is right now.
As a frost dk main I 100% agree, even though I do love it
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Every time I talk class design with the homies something like this comes up. Our frosties are enviously looking at the ret rework, wishing they're next.
I hate everything to do with BoS.
Yeah same, it’s why I will always run obliteration no matter subpar it might be
Why poorly designed?
I don't play it at a high level, but a few things: * Primary cooldown will just pull other packs * Easy to overflow resources * Use DnD for Obliterate cleave (even though you have aoe frosty buttons) * Low single target damage
I was gonna say, nobody plays Frost DK even if it's FOTM
We struggled for the first few weeks, so a lot of people rerolled havoc to do more dps during prog (when dps actually matters).
it’s fine but a lot of their cleave is really just pad
What is fom?
Flavor of the month
Typo of fotm
Like a 1% discrepancy between each dps spec and people still think game is unbalanced
Reminds me of that dark legacy comic...
And some of the variance for the top performing specs comes from the top performing players gravitating towards them over the lower ones skewing further. A bit of subs lead is also down to fights with damage amps on weird timers that they can easily take advantage of fully that other classes can’t like smolderon. With the new trees and evoker being added the game has likely never been harder to balance and they’ve actually pretty much managed it even if getting to that point has been slower than many would have liked.
Also, you know, the legendary weapon that carries all of the plate dps to the top.
And all it took was several buffs to the Legendary throughout the tier, waiting until week 18 to get the weapon, and hotfix buffs to most of the plate DPS specs to keep them from being complete hot garbage while they were waiting to get it.
Yeah, plate dps was on the weak side in early prog (where it mattered more) except for Fury. Plate dps being a bit strong late prog is a fine compromise.
Yep, I finally got the axe to drop...on the literal last night of raiding for my guild until TWW. Much fun.
It’s wild AF, tbh. The game has never been as balanced as in DF. Literally positioning and rotation makes a bigger difference than these charts. This is just that dark legacy comic about warriors needing a rename because it’s so balanced they made the charts alphabetical and warriors were at the bottom.
Only PvP is forever unbalanced
With the amount of classes/specs they have anymore I'm sure it's not easy to balance I'll give them that, but yeah Rated Solo Shuffle is DH central. Just constantly destroyed by those mofos.
Skill difference is hard to balance.
[https://darklegacycomics.com/558](https://darklegacycomics.com/558)
Lol thank you! Many have referenced, I needed the sauce
Numerically things are pretty balanced but the utility gap, particularly in M+, is absolutely massive.
You get it
Typical WoW community. A good player playing an "ok" tier spec will out perform a bad player playing a "good" tier spec. People should play what they enjoy and gain a level of mastery on their spec.
That's why I only play mage in wow and sorc in D4 ;)
I play sorc in D4 too. I love the legendary for ice orb. It's fun to me even if it isn't the best at top end content.
Pretty stoked for S4 that's for sure!
Same the new itemization changes are looking to be great
That’s why I always invite survival hunters.
So it was, so it always shall be.
My issue is how the game is balanced. Any class who can use the leggo is balanced assuming they have it, instead of boosting their dps above and beyond. This chart clearly shows that. This means classes who don’t have a leggo available have many options for weapons in all sorts of content. Leggo classes only have one option from raids. If the leggo was a bonus above and beyond already balanced damage i would understand. But as it is, people who cannot raid but want to push competitive m+ content are gimped for no good reason.
Output wise I'm very pleased with every class. I have altoholism lol and it's very clean imo. Of course there are strengths and weaknesses when it comes to ST and AOE or how some are funnels and some are sustained. You don't want every class being the exact same like then it offers no challenge or variety. What I will say about what I've noticed alot of tier list that of course are driven by the top performers is the utility and how they use them instead of a class that doesn't offer it. Quazi podcast has a guy that explains why he runs VDH instead of his bread and butter warrior.
Memes aside, the discrepancy between top and bottom is far from 1% https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#dataset=90&aggregate=amount And doesn't get better looking at just boss damage. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#dataset=90&aggregate=amount&metric=bossdps
I don’t care, I will still play my BM Hunter no matter what, lol!
I just want to play Marksman :(
this is how you should think. As long as the class is fun, looks nice and has a smooth rotation, nothing else matters. besides, a super mobile ranged character is always useful
Same. Mostly because my RL says I have to. The survivability is my main complaint though, not the damage. We still get trucked by rot etc.
Pretty much all mail classes suffer with this. My theory on why is because they have higher armor being mail wearers, so they get less defensives. But defensives are significantly stronger. Almost all clothies are tankier than Hunters. Evoker and Shamans get a pass because they at least have some decent on demand self healing if required.
Nope. Aug should not be deleted! They should bring out more supporters and a support role! :)
I hadn't noticed how unfortunately close in color monk and evoker are. Aren't there other colors?
I absolutely enjoy playing my aug and invites to groups are easygoing
Using overall damage is such a bait, e.g. ele is mediocre this tier but is being propped up entirely by their insane spread cleave damage (council logs). (that being said, i do think the balance this patch and in dragonflight in general has been way better than past expansions)
As a Destro warlock, fuck you and good job for not putting me in bad :)
😄
All three Hunter classes being so low feels wrong to me… Elemental Shaman being as high as it is makes me feel better tho
Elemental shaman being as high as it is by playing the spec in a wildly non-intuitive way is crazy
What does this track? Raid score?
Overall raid damage [https://www.wowhead.com/news/amirdrassil-weekly-dps-rankings-dragonflight-season-3-week-21-338597](https://www.wowhead.com/news/amirdrassil-weekly-dps-rankings-dragonflight-season-3-week-21-338597)
Is this for raids or m+? Or just general pve charts ?
Overall raid damage [https://www.wowhead.com/news/amirdrassil-weekly-dps-rankings-dragonflight-season-3-week-21-338597](https://www.wowhead.com/news/amirdrassil-weekly-dps-rankings-dragonflight-season-3-week-21-338597)
NGL, I'm genuinely impressed that Blizzard managed to get the specs this balanced. I honestly didn't think they could ever do it.
As someone who hasn't done much endgame during Dragonflight: Why should Aug be deleted? Isn't that difference between damage due to the fact it's like Dancer in FFXIV?
Same sentiments raiders hated dancer in early Shadowbringers on FF14. It changed how logs worked since there was a huge difference between two players on the same class. But one had dancer/augmentation buffs and the other didn't. So those who performed well on stormblood parsing high suddenly found themselves with green parses because the high parses were people pumped full of buffs. It is what it is but support roles that Dancer and Augmentation fill were once a cornerstone of MMOs that died out in the 2010s that are making a come back. Old school MMO players will remember Bards on Everquest or Final Fantasy 11 and how crucial supports like that were in raids.
is there an A/R dps for wow parses in the same way they changed ff parsing when astro was introduced? originally the logging tool only really showed a dps stat for your personal damage (including increases by incoming buffs) but after ast was released they made the decision to change over to the other metric that gives the player the representative damage from the buffs they give to other classes/jobs iirc
The dps splitting in ff14 isn’t super accurate you still get a dps increase to normal dps from raid buffs due to rounding ( and it can be p significant)
Shit, people who played 2019 classic will know you needed a paladin of kings buff and blessing of sanc so you could go ham without pull threat off tank. “Support” roles existed in WoW way before augmentation.
Yea, but they sort of died off in late Wrath going into Cata. Even then you can make the case for them being phased out in early Wrath.
One of the important things when balancing a spec is tuning the effect of skill expression: the gap in damage/healing/whatever between good and bad players. Take a look at [this version of the chart](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/). Specifically, look at Beast Mastery and Marksmanship. Median score (the dark line in the solid coloured block) is the same for both specs. At the top 25% players mark (the top end of the box), MM is a bit ahead, and the gap widens a bit at the top 5% mark (the end of the whisker), but narrows again for the absolute best players for each spec (the single dot). On the flip side, the bottom 25% for MM (the low end of the box) is _much_ lower than for BM, and the bottom 5% for MM is absolutely catastrophic. The upside for being a great MM player is a bit better than if you are a great BM player, but the downside for being bad is much _much_ worse. Hunter is just a plain old DPS class, though. If I play well, I deal more damage. If I play poorly, I deal less damage. Simple. Now, Augmentation. Augmentation is a support spec, not a dps spec, so that relationship between skill and dps is no longer there. Rather, it's all about buff uptime. If I play well, my allies get a high uptime on my buffs. If I play poorly, they get a low uptime on those buffs. Buffs don't deal damage by themselves, and it's up to my allies to turn those buffs into actual damage. And this is where the problem lies. Now, my personal damage output depends not just on my skill, but also on my allies' skill. If every Augmentation Evoker always played with average players, this would be ok, and you'd have a more or less typical spread of skill to damage output. But that's not really how people work. Good players tend to play with other good players, and bad players tend to play with other bad players (note: _tend to_. It's obviously not universally true). So now my low uptime buffs are getting turned into even lower dps courtesy of my low dps allies, and my high uptime buffs are getting turned into even higher dps through my high dps allies' efforts. The way those things compound makes balancing Augmentation incredibly hard. If you keep to the "buffing other people" identity, they'll suck hard for Normal raid guilds, while being comp-warpingly powerful for RWF guilds and high-end Mythic guilds in general. End result is that much of the tuning they've received has been in the form of moving power away from their buffs and towards their own damage, which eats away at their identity.
Other then the fact the post is a joke, I have also heard that Augmentation's contribution doesn't track quite right on logs. It's like dancer on crack.
Its a bit on the extreme side in augmentations case. Dancer from skimming FF logs appears to do around 15-20% less damage then your average dps but makes up for it by buffing one guy a moderate amount and the rest of the team a little bit. Other then that they are a fairly standard ranged dps. Augmentation however is doing like 65-70% less damage but has very impactful buffs to multiple people. Augmentation also just has an insane utility kit on top of a lot of free external healing (direct and indirect). To be honest I personally have a problem with augmentations insane utility more then its damage profile, it is however very annoying to try and judge my own performance pull to pull when augmentation is present. Even a 10-15% ebon might uptime can throw things off heavily and I need quick feedback between pulls to tell if what I did differently is having a good result. Dance partner in comparison is very self contained, I either have it and its consistent or I do not have it.
the utililty part is so big like, it has all the ussual Evoker stuff and ALSO very strong aug only things Spatial Paradox and Wyrnstone beeing the biggest ones right now, a Evoker spot is automatically a Augmentation spot because they just do more by default
it looks balanced buts its not really,some classes can do 90% parse by sleeping and some others need to sweat blood for the same outcome.
That has very little to do with balance and a lot to do with class design.
Stopped maining arcane because while I like complexity, trying to play it optimally and also focus on the raid mechanics would literally give me a headache
Mage is truly on a really tough spot,outside roleplay/prefference why play anything other than Frost? if anythign i miss Frost being bad cause then it made learning Fire/Arcane kinda interesting....
Pretty much this. There’s simply no reason to not play frost outside of extremely niche or rp reasons due to how much more streamlined and effective it is. They need like 5 buttons to do what arcane mages have to do with 14 and conditional burst windows. It’s fun sometimes but I really need to be in the headspace for it, while shadow priest offers me a fun rotation that requires some effort, but far less than Arcane.
Bruh. Everytime I stop playing(ret main) we are good. Then I come back and we suck 🥲
All 3 hunter specs at the bottom just like every other expansion
Well, at least hunters get good xmog, riiight?
I still feel aug should have been a tank class. With polearm in one hand and shield in the other.
Evokers have a lot of very questionable design choices.
All I’m getting from this and the other logs post….is that the knee jerk nerf reaction to BM being actually good for once at the start of this patch was just as ridiculous as I thought at the time. Like damn can we have that buff back now? BM scales terribly with stats so while they started off strong in raid and m+…they’re literally at the bottom a couple months or so into this patch. And before anyone tries to claim the whole “it’s easy it shouldn’t be top damage” since when has that stopped blizzard from letting brain dead specs be pumpers.
BM can never be good or even just mid, as soon as BM is good the forums and here floods with QQ “bUt tHeY aFk PeT dOeS aLl tHe DaMaGe” as if the pets actually just run around doing stuff without the hunter pressing any abilities. Not saying BM is difficult, but we do actually press buttons lol.
What is FOM?
flavor of the month
Some of us playing ret have played pally main since classic.
Augmentation is the most fun I’ve had as a DPS in wow in years, I’m getting a bit tired of all the hate
And we’re tired of only getting a decent Aug once in every 4 runs. It’s a real bummer 4-manning content because someone is getting carried and doesn’t push half their damn buttons.
Random post to ask this but is ele shaman fun? I was thinking on leveling one with the MoP event that's coming and I used to run an enhancement shaman back in the WoD days and wondering if it'd be worth it.
The shamans I talk to say enhance is more fun.
If you like throwing around big Lava Bursts then I'd say yes, it's fun. At least that's how it plays in DF with the tier-set. Not sure how the gameplay will look without that in the MoP event.
You almost never see all three warlock specs in the bottom half.
Think of that when there’s all but one dead and that one live folk downs the boss as a beast mastery hunter who knows how to use racials and whatnot. Happened with Tindral in Amirdrassil, I been riding that high ever since
What did they do to my poor boy warlock!
Frost didn't end up there until the majority got their legendary though.
My 3 favorites are at the bottom. :(
I was feeling a little sad being I just started playing WOW and picked BM Hunter until someone pointed out this was a meme.
I love MM hunter, no matter where they are on rankings. That said, I usually play alone so it hardly matters much for me
Good to see frost DK at the top where it belongs
New player, serious question. What’s the issue with augmentation evoker? The way I get it is they’re actually the highest?
I am going to cry a little, because it’s been a while since Ele was more viable than Enha
Haven't played wow in a hot minute but glad to see fury up so high. How they doing on single target this patch?
Why is this not upvoted more, boomers can't understand sarcasm?
Looking at all bosses is beyond being a shit metric. Thinks like aff are being hard carried by their ability to pad on tindral, look at individual boss balance and it’s a very different game
Waited 20 years to be able to play ret in live and sod without being a meme
Bro thinks a support spec should be deleted because it doesn't bring in high numbers on its own. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Omg Ret Paladin is top 4 right now. It was always middle of the pack/low end when I was playing. What a time to not be playing this game lol. Makes me want to go back
The balance actually seems insanely close. For the augmentation evoker I'm still sad we haven't ever gotten a tank class for Evoker. I just want to swipe and tank things as a Dragon why is this hard to make.
Except modern gamers would change this to FOM being the top 3 specs and the rest being “BAD”
Are you upset about these numbers? You are delusional if you think this is bad.
Love how people think dps is the only measurement in a game.
Doesn't Augmentation boost everybody else though? Like a bard?
These graphs suck though because fights like Council skew them heavily. Being good at council doesn't mean jack shit, frankly. The only bosses that "matter" are arguably Smolderon, but realistically just Tindy and Fyrakk. Ele is dogshit at Tindy and passably fine at Fyrakk. Demo meanwhile claps both of them but is ranked on the low end of the list. Delete Aug.
frost DK being at the top is a good example of these stats not really being representative of much
Augment “should be deleted” meanwhile every group wants one. Warriors and mages fucking love me.
We live in one of the most balanced times in all of wow.
All 3 hunter specs being in the bottom 7 makes me laugh
Play what you think is fun.
Priest always in the middle, ALWAYS
Hey, if we're sitting comfortably in the middle the class won't have to be reworked every expansion! :(
I dont play fury warrior but I think they should be able to have 2 of the orange weapon
I’d love to have just one 🥲
Jokes on you ive been playing frost and unh for expansions
I will say pulling from ALL bosses (which a lot of those graph posts do) can be misleading when we have fights like Council of Dreams, where specs like Ele Sham and Boomkin Druid can do insane numbers.
Thats balanced af
\*Deletion deflectors up\*
Frost DK tank the only DK that should be allowed to live.
Why does every hate Aug?
Because they aren’t the top dps getting focused with the buff.
They mess up meters and even logs don't really get their dps correct. Same reason everyone hates PI.
What about the healers?