Manaforge Omega Statistics Page
Manaforge Omega Raid Tier Lists
Looking for more insight into the raid balance? Check out our Tier Lists, which include more information besides pure throughput for Manaforge Omega.
DPS Tier List Healer Tier List Tank Tier List
The War Within Season 3 DPS Rankings
To start our look back into Season 3, we will be looking at Arcane and Retribution.
Arcane had a comfy run in Manaforge Omega, being in the first quartile of rankings for the whole tier. You could say that its only regret this tier was never able to reach the #1 spot, always filled by Elemental Shaman or Marksmanship Hunters.
In the other end of the spectrum, we have Retribution. After a great run in Liberation of Undermine, Manaforge had a rough start for rets. Starting the tier in the last spot, then briefly climbing all the way to the #7 spot, Paladins were hopeful to repeat their performance, but the gains were short-lived. Shortly after Ret dropped back to the lower quartile, where it struggled to get out of the whole tier, bouncing between the 15th and 20th position.
We've invited our writers for the two specs to contextualize their journeys better, and you can read them below, after the rankings.
For Rankings, without any new tuning or changes, all changes below are just noise changes, with specs that are close enough balance-wise, just swapping positions.
95th Percentile Statistics
Overall Damage
Damage to Bosses
Overall Statistics
Overall Damage
Damage to Bosses
PositionSpec and ClassPopulation SizeChange from
Last Week
1Marksmanship Hunter2885↑1
2Elemental Shaman15102↓1
3Arcane Mage180590
4Assassination Rogue61750
5Beast Mastery Hunter314590
6Fury Warrior17370↑2
7Destruction Warlock23460↓1
8Frost Death Knight24955↓1
9Subtlety Rogue3115↑5
10Augmentation Evoker31200
11Unholy Death Knight2616↑1
12Fire Mage1892↓3
13Balance Druid11083↓2
14Windwalker Monk4861↓1
15Shadow Priest80850
16Devastation Evoker67770
17Havoc Demon Hunter17742↑1
18Retribution Paladin19112↑2
19Feral Druid25960
20Affliction Warlock1036↑1
21Demonology Warlock2508↓4
22Survival Hunter7980
23Arms Warrior814↑1
24Enhancement Shaman1523↓1
25Outlaw Rogue894↑1
26Frost Mage4795↓1
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Arcane Mage and Retribution Paladin to provide insights about the journey their specs had in Manaforge Omega.
Arcane Mage
Porom
Arcane started off strong and is looking to finish strong in Manaforge Omega. Due to good spec design which leveraged big burst from Arcane Surge and heavy funnel from Resonance, Arcane was able to be a solid role-player on the fights that mattered most this season, Nexus-King Salhadaar and Dimensius. Both of these fights had critical timings that, due in large part to Shifting Power reducing our major cooldowns to 80 seconds, we were able to rise to the occasion on. I have spoken repeatedly about how good Arcane's damage profile is in The War Within for usefulness and we saw this on display in the last few seasons. Arcane even got hit with nerfs this season, taking a 3% hit a couple of months ago, but despite that Arcane continues to do well.
It cannot also be stated enough that a lot of Arcane's success this season was attributed to favorable tuning from the start. Most specs in WoW, despite how useful or not, tend to rely on tuning for relevance, with an occasional spurious factor, like cleave radi being bad due to boss hitboxes. A good damage profile can mitigate these factors to a degree, but ultimately if you aren't tuned well, it becomes an uphill battle very quickly. Arcane Mage is the perfect storm of a strong damage profile and solid tuning. Overall, the strengths of burst, funnel, and execute paired with cooldown flexibility have led to success for Arcane since the Dragonflight talent tree was introduced; however, with most of these being removed or severely weakened in Midnight, it is very likely that Arcane will depend much more on tuning in the future.
Retribution Paladin
Bolas
Retribution has settled into occupying its normal positioning in DPS rankings - solidly below average, but not bad enough to get meaningful buffs. Ret started out this tier underperforming significantly, due to poor management of the buffs/nerfs received at the beginning of the patch to Divine Hammer and a below average tier set bonus. It received some justified buffs shortly after the launch of the raid, but has sat relatively untouched since then, in solid mediocrity.
For the encounters in Manaforge Omega itself, many of the challenging encounters have important windows for increased damage, like Forgeweaver Araz, Nexus-King Salhadaar, and Dimensius. Ret's current design doesn't really have any options for optimizing damage for these windows. The spec has burst damage, but it's concentrated in only a couple of globals (Wake of Ashes and Hammer of Light) and its burst windows are strictly every 30s. This means that for Ret, although it can do solid consistent damage and has good options for AoE burst for regular add spawns, it really struggled to contribute on fights where the damage amps are a priority. This is entirely a design/tuning issue, since the options that it has for longer cooldowns are extremely undertuned.
Disclaimers and Source
The data for this article was taken from the Raid Statistics Page on Warcraft Logs for Mythic difficulty during the week of December 2nd. Overall, the numbers shown above represent data for the 95th percentile. For charts, we also included data for all percentiles and boss damage to better represent the current state of balance.
The data presented, however, isn't free of bias, as it is representative of the current meta of the game, which, in itself, is biased by community perception of specs.
This bias comes from players generally flocking to specs perceived as "better", be it either easier to play or dealing more damage, or a combination of both.
The other side of the coin is specs that are too hard to play or too weak will be underrepresented and appear lower than they actually are.
Competitive players will generally prefer specs perceived to do more damage, making the best specs appear higher than they actually are.
While not as prevalent in modern days, strategy differences and parse-funneling may impact rankings. Specs that excel in AoE, spread cleave, or burst windows will appear higher in the total charts.
