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
Continuing our look back at Season 3, today we're talking about Augmentation Evoker, Affliction Warlock, Havoc Demon Hunter, and Fire Mage.
Augmentation is always spec in a weird situation. Due to its support nature, Augmentation can feel like a poor spec to the untrained eye, but overall, it had a decent tier in Manaforge. It might be just due to Devastation's poor overall results in the tier, but Augmentation keeps hovering just above its sister spec, despite only having below half its popularity.
In the other end of the spectrum, we have Affliction. While Affliction had a solid start, boasting rank 1 week 1, it dropped fast after that, as Warlocks started to run as Demonology and Destruction for most encounters. This kept Affliction in the bottom quartile of rankings for over half the Season so far, with a small population share.
In a similar boat, we have Havoc. Havoc hasn't broken above rank 14 since Week 3, being relegated to the third quartile ever since. Despite its reasonable population throughout the whole season, Havoc failed to climb the ranks.
Lastly, Fire Mage. Fire ended in a weird spot during Manaforge Omega. While having good standings in rankings, often in the top 10, Fire has been overshadowed by Arcane for the whole season, having only about a tenth of the population of the higher-performing spec. What is interesting is that, even while showing better results on paper, Frost remains more popular than Fire, with Frost having 2 to 3 times more parses each week for the last few weeks.
We've invited our writers for the four 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 Hunter27670
2Elemental Shaman133320
3Arcane Mage154570
4Assassination Rogue53480
5Beast Mastery Hunter265960
6Destruction Warlock19850↑1
7Fury Warrior15310↓1
8Frost Death Knight211070
9Fire Mage1456↑3
10Augmentation Evoker25420
11Balance Druid9835↑2
12Subtlety Rogue2651↓3
13Unholy Death Knight2295↓2
14Windwalker Monk42910
15Devastation Evoker5829↑1
16Shadow Priest6988↓1
17Affliction Warlock897↑3
18Havoc Demon Hunter15310↓1
19Retribution Paladin16722↓1
20Demonology Warlock2300↑1
21Feral Druid2231↓2
22Arms Warrior779↑1
23Survival Hunter623↓1
24Enhancement Shaman12230
25Frost Mage4241↑1
26Outlaw Rogue796↓1
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Augmentation Evoker, Affliction Warlock, Havoc Demon Hunter, and Fire Mage to provide insights about the journey their specs had in Manaforge Omega.
Augmentation Evoker
Jereico
Augmentation Evoker's performance in Manaforge Omega throughout Season 3 can be described as consistently middle of the pack, rounding out an otherwise veritable roller coaster of tuning seen earlier in the expansion. Interestingly, while the potential still exists for players to outperform through Ebon Might buff target selection, Mythic raid stats suggest a rather narrow skill gap for the spec in the current patch, a theme expected to continue with the changes coming to the spec in Midnight.
Blizzard seems to have largely achieved this tuning target by gradually shifting Augmentation's damage away from its buffs and into its direct damage. The spec continues to enjoy a rather simple moment-to-moment rotation as well as generally high uptime on Ebon Might when allowed to cast uninterrupted. In a raid also featuring several key moments to support allies with strong burst damage profiles during damage amps, Augmentation has landed in a rather comfortable and largely enjoyable spot overall.
As we reach the end of The War Within and head into Midnight, Augmentation remains a solid, consistent damage dealer in Mythic raiding. At the class level, Evoker also remains rather unique when it comes to its raid utility. Blessing of the Bronze as a raid buff is considered to be rather middling, but abilities like Source of Magic, Time Spiral, and Rescue remain especially valuable. While it remains to be seen how the changes in Midnight will be received, I sincerely believe that Blizzard has hit the mark when it comes to balance tuning for Augmentation, and I don't expect that to change in the foreseeable future.
Affliction Warlock
Kalamazi
Being an Affliction Warlock has been a roller coaster of emotions over the past few months. From being one of the strongest specs overall at the release of 11.2, it has certainly fallen from its week or two of grace, but why did it happen exactly?
At the start of Patch 11.2 and Manaforge Omega, Affliction Warlock was doing very well in both Mythic + and certain Raid encounters, but there was a large issue with just HOW it was doing so. It was not that Affliction's tuning was off, it was simply due to the fact that our 11.1 (Liberation of Undermine) Tier Set Warlock Affliction 11.1 Class Set 4pc was not nerfed before 11.2 dropped, and it interacted in a very strong manner with abilities that were buffed over 11.2 PTR.
In later PTR, we received a handful of buffs to Unstable Affliction, Xavius' Gambit & Focused Malignancy. These changed paired with our 11.1 Tier Set made Unstable Affliction hit incredibly hard, and was exceptionally powerful in cleave based settings. Encounters such as The Soul Hunters, Forgeweaver Araz and Mythic + in general were Afflictions playground, but the fear was that tuning would come to our 11.1 Tier Set, spelling disaster for Affliction. Sadly, that fear became a reality when tuning was pushed, but the nerfs were also to Affliction itself in the form of a 3% aura nerf, not just the tier set. Without the extreme amplification to Unstable Affliction from the tier set/proc rate and a 3% aura nerf, Affliction saw one of the strongest drop-offs we have seen in recent history, going from being a dominant force on a handful of encounters, to your 2nd or 3rd option spec wise.
While Affliction has begun to see a bit more representation towards the later half of 11.2 in raiding on fights such as The Soul Hunters, it still remains the "worse" option compared to Destruction nearly in every form. The 3% Aura nerf from week two of 11.2 was simply the wrong change to make. Affliction's 11.1 Tier Set Bonus should have been broken instead, leaving Afflictions core tuning alone for the remainder of 11.2, while breaking the excessive synergy between LoO Tier Set and 11.2 PTR changes. if that had been the case, I do feel that you would have seen more Affliction representation in early Mythic progression, but sadly that is not the world we live in. Affliction has remained in its -3% aura state for the lifespan of 11.2 and at this point, buffing it is a wash.
Thankfully, Affliction is looking much more exciting in Midnight. Our return to Unstable Affliction and Seed of Corruption as our main spenders has a large portion of the community excited to give the spec a try, and I echo that sentiment. While there might be a few small things that still need to be ironed out, I am much more excited for the future of Affliction in Midnight!
Havoc Demon Hunter
Shadarek
At the beginning of Manaforge Omega, Havoc Demon Hunter was in a powerful place. Entering the season a 5% aura buff was applied to Havoc, this put it in a powerful spot while also having 2 exceptionally powerful Tier Sets and playing both hero talents depending on what a boss needed. Due to being tuned strong coming into the season, many specs and classes got buffs continuously through the start of the season pushing many past Havoc which never sat in a position to be buffed.
Entering patch 11.2.5 however, Havoc ate a significant nerf that was not listed in patch notes. Cycle of Hatred was changed, prior to patch 11.2.5 you could stack it up to have a 20 second cooldown on Eye Beam for the entire boss pull. After the change, not only could you no longer pre-stack Cycle of Hatred, it also pulled off the initial starting stack placing your first Eye Beam on a 40 second cooldown instead of the 35 seconds it had been in 11.2. This nerf meant losing 30 seconds of Eye Beam cooldown compared to pre-stacking, and 15 seconds with a regular boss pull no stacking. This typically equated to 1.5 Eye Beams lost per fight which caused Havoc to drop rapidly towards the bottom of the statistics where it has landed with no additional class tuning.
Fire Mage
Preheat
Fire Mage's Manaforge Omega performance has been a bit mixed. It started weak and has climbed a bit thanks to buffs, but still has one of the smallest total parse count (amount of players logging) across all difficulties. Since Mage has an essential raid buff (Arcane Intellect) the performance of Fire is tied mostly to how it performs vs Arcane, the dominant Mage spec. For weeks it was only a high performer on The Soul Hunters due to the heavy cleave of the encounter. Fire was able to overtake Arcane on Plexus Sentinel and Loom'ithar after receiving buffs (and Arcane getting nerfed), but it still falls short for most of the raid. Its damage output on the hardest encounters (Dimensius and Nexus-King Salhadaar) is still mediocre at best even after the tuning and relaxation of encounter requirements via passive damage increases, changes to "push times" that guilds shoot for, and perception of "meta" specs being required as weeks go on.
Unfavorable tuning at the start of the raid really worked against Fire in a big way, and tuning came very slow. Fire still has one viable Hero talent with Sunfury, and the uptime requirements of the spec and reliance on always being in Combustion really hurt it on the later encounters. Encounter design can be brute forced by high tuning, but it takes the spec being genuinely overpowered. This is not to say that Fire is unviable in the raid, it is more of a missed opportunity for Fire due to its requirements to deal good damage. Overall, the issues Fire suffers from in this raid are ones that the Midnight design has already fixed. This is good news for Mages looking to sling Fire in the next expansion!
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 16th. 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.
