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 Survival Hunter, Enhancement Shaman, Frost Death Knight, and Windwalker Monk.
Frost Death Knight flirted with the top position of the rankings for the first few weeks of the Season; however, it quickly fell into the middle of the pack position around the Turbo Boost week. Since then, Frost has stayed comfortably together with the middle-of-the-pack group, often leading the pack there.
2025 has started looking like the year of the spear, with Survival having a good performance at the latter part of Liberation of Undermine. However, Manaforge hasn't been kind to melee Hunters, with Survival being both underrepresented and in the lower quartile of the rankings.
Windwalker spent the start of the season fluctuating around the middle of the pack, which later consolidated into staying in the middle-of-the-pack group, without any escapades, neither to the top nor to the bottom of the charts.
Enhancement has had a rough year. Legacy of Undermine had it in the lower spots outside of the first few weeks of the raid, and Manaforge was no different. With Elemental shining this tier, Enhancement quickly had its participation shrinking as weeks went by, without much to show, rarely passing the #20 position in the charts.
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
1Arcane Mage95190
2Marksmanship Hunter1737↑1
3Elemental Shaman8359↓1
4Assassination Rogue34930
5Fire Mage9670
6Beast Mastery Hunter160890
7Destruction Warlock127800
8Frost Death Knight13479↑1
9Fury Warrior10395↓1
10Subtlety Rogue1331↑1
11Balance Druid6048↑2
12Unholy Death Knight1432↑3
13Augmentation Evoker1527↓1
14Windwalker Monk2565↓4
15Devastation Evoker3384↓1
16Shadow Priest44120
17Feral Druid1254↑3
18Havoc Demon Hunter9431↓1
19Retribution Paladin109260
20Demonology Warlock1560↑2
21Survival Hunter494↑2
22Enhancement Shaman749↑3
23Affliction Warlock507↓5
24Arms Warrior514↓3
25Frost Mage3133↓1
26Outlaw Rogue5060
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers forSurvival Hunter, Enhancement Shaman, Frost Death Knight, and Windwalker Monk to provide insights about the journey their specs had in Manaforge Omega.
Frost Death Knight
Khazakdk
Manaforge Omega treated Frost well throughout the tier. As is often the case with newly reworked specs, its tuning kept it high in the rankings and popularity charts. Frost offered some of the best melee dps throughput in the game at the start of the tier, warranting a slight nerf that brought it down from being a serious outlier. As we go deep into the post Turbo Boost farm period, Frost is slowly but gradually declining in the rankings, but this is expected. Frost's premier strength in raid comes from its ability to cleave adds without losing boss damage. When adds melt in raids decked out in full BiS, Frost loses some of its damage potential to specs with higher burst potential or higher sustained single-target throughput.
Frost's gradual decline also reflects its lack of skill ceiling compared to other specs. The 11.2 rework ushered in the simplified spec design we will see across the board in Midnight. Frost lost most of the nuance to its gameplay, now having fewer buttons to press and streamlined cooldowns. The simplified gameplay makes it much easier to make the most of what Frost has to offer, and leaves little opportunity to find optimizations that make a difference on a per-fight basis. While other specs might use the farm period to find ways to squeeze every bit of burst during lust, Frost players are still doing the same things they were doing on prog. The most complex challenge for Frost players now is to figure out when to use cooldowns if they are not holding damage on Dimensius.
The lack of talent diversity for Frost this season stands out as a genuine issue in an otherwise fantastic tier for Frost players. We played the same talent build the entire tier, including the same hero talents. The tree is set up to offer a full single-target build, but the throughput difference is slight and requires us to decimate our cleave potential. Most players who tried the build immediately disliked it because of the way Icy Onslaught could leave them unable to cast Frost Strike at times. Even today, the top 10 rankings for bosses like Fractillus and Plexus Sentinel are a mix of the two builds because the supposed single-target build does not offer a compelling advantage. Frost might have finally played Rider of the Apocalypse as a serious pick in Manaforge Omega as it looked strong on the PTR. Unfortunately, Death Knight Rider of the Apocalypse 11.2 Class Set 4pc broke when it hit live servers and stopped buffing the player's Obliterate casts. This bug was never fixed, and so Deathbringer dominated in Manaforge Omega, as it has for the entire expansion.
Windwalker Monk
Babylonius
Windwalker Monks, throughout most of Manaforge Omega have been the definition of "average" or "mediocre". However, after the strength during Liberation of Undermine, just being "OK" or "good", doesn't have the same positive vibe that it would have had a few years ago when Windwalker struggled to even reach "average".
Leading Into Manaforge Omega
Early Liberation of Undermine saw Windwalkers very involved in Race to World First and regularly showing at the top of the meters. However, a 2-4% nerf in March (that was certainly unnecessary in hindsight) started Windwalker on a path downward for the rest of Season 2. By the time Season 2 ended, Windwalker had fallen from one of the best Melee specs to one of the worst. Realistically, this was a combination of the nerf and the adds that Windwalker was so good at padding on with Slicing Winds and Crackling Jade Lightning now getting blown up by other specs, leaving fewer scraps to zap. Windwalker was still statistically "fine enough", but had fallen from 2-3% above the average in March to 3-4% below the average by August. This also marked the lowest Windwalker had been at the end of a patch or season, statistically, since the dark days of Nyalotha's corruption-fueled chaos.
Thankfully, by the time that Windwalker was "below average" most people playing at a level where things like that matter, were already done with their progression. The gap between specs has continued to be closer than most of the past decade. Still, many people noticed the fall off in just a short period of time.
New Raid, Same Problems
Manaforge Omega saw the welcome sight of more Windwalker representation in the Race to World First. This was primarily due to Windwalker being the "best" of the three Monk specs rather than the "best" melee option to bring, but sometimes we have to take what we can get. Dimensius seemed perfectly set-up for the huge burst that Windwalker could bring as Conduit of the Celestials, even if no other boss saw Windwalker swap away from Shado-pan. Unfortunately, the Windwalker community, who had gotten a taste of being "strong" in Raids that has so rarely happened over the last decade or more, had to watch as Windwalker continued to struggle with its oldest foes, single target damage, adds dying before we can blow them up, and keeping up with other specs as a season goes on.
Forgeweaver Araz was a fight that Windwalker could excel at, with frequent add spawns that had to die quickly, but it was nerfed rather significantly and add management became a thing of the past as other specs could do more damage more quickly than a Windwalker who had to hope for Dance of Chi-Ji or Last Emperor's Capacitor stacks at the right time or could cleave damage to far away targets. Fractillus was another purely single target fight that Windwalker struggles with, even if our exceptional mobility and plentiful defensives meant that we could handle the mechanics better than most. Soul Hunters was a fight that Windwalker was able to stay relatively strong due to the consistent 3-target cleave that Windwalker could manage well. Still, Windwalker started as one of the best melee and is ending in the middle of the pack. The penultimate boss of Nexus-King Salhadaar had Windwalker in an unfortunate middle-ground where the largest damage increasing phase benefitted Conduit of the Celestials, the cleave and adds on the platforms benefitted Shado-pan, and the timings of the fight for most people's progression necessitated swapping to a 90-second cooldown profile that Windwalker can handle, but not as well as others that are designed for it.
Finally, Dimensius is a very odd kind of fight where Windwalker was perfectly positioned to absolutely blast with full Conduit of the Celestials cooldowns twice during the first phase, on each platform, and during the burn phase at the start of Phase 3. This led to a rare situation where Windwalker was brought for what it could do in single-target and not in AOE, despite its AOE being objectively stronger. This also led to Windwalkers being more valuable than the numbers show, since damage at the right time while progression Dimensius is more important than total damage.
Overall, Windwalker found itself in an unfortunate grey area of not being strong enough in single target to be desired for Raids, not strong enough in AOE for Mythic+, yet apparently too strong at either to merit getting buffed. The spec was generally very fun in all content, but after feeling like you found an oasis of fun and power in Liberation of Undermine, after a ludicrously long time without one or both, its hard to enjoy immediately falling back down to "mediocre". Spec balance in Raids continues to be very good, but it would be nice to be higher on the colored bars more than once every other expansion, or even two seasons back to back.
Enhancement Shaman
Wordup
Looking back on the Enhancement experience during Manaforge, it's not a particularly memorable one. Admittedly, we've had a hot streak of excellent tiers over the last few years when it comes to raids, but it had a lot of pain points throughout that stopped it from ever getting off the ground. Arguably the worst of these was the narrowing of our damage profile flexibility - mostly done through very unbalanced Hero Talent Tier Sets. When you pair the bad tuning of Totemic going into the tier with an equally bad set bonus, it effectively locked us into Stormbringer the whole way down (and an extremely RNG interation to boot).
Since we had a narrowing of that profile then, it didn't help that what we were good at - 2 minute single target burst - wasn't uniquely useful if it was all you could bring to difficult encounters. Given we couldn't adjust around bosses that required you to tackle multiple requirements (like we could in Liberation of Undermine or Nerub'ar Palace), it meant that more flexible specs (that also happened to be tuned much stronger) had a clear reason to slot into coveted melee spots. Pile on the fact that Elemental finally had a chance to shine for the first time in a while, and you have all the ingredients necessary to push us to the bottom of the charts, both in terms of performance and popularity.
With the tuning being so poor at the release of the raid setting off a lot of alarm bells, it's quite surprising then that it saw no follow up tuning or attention as the tier progressed. It's clear now in hindsight that most of the effort was going into the significant redesign for Midnight, but it meant that we started weak, and only got weaker as the tier dragged on. While conceptually Hero Talent based Tier Sets are a great idea, they were both extreme misses in our case - with Stormbringer having design flaws and Totemic being numerically terrible. This sadly ends The War Within on a sour note, considering our design was generally good throughout, so hopefully we can course correct next expansion.
Survival Hunter
Doolb
While we're looking back towards the most recent raid, we'd like to highlight Survival Hunter's performance throughout the raid. Unfortunately, this is a song and dance you've seen before. Survival started out fairly average with 11.2 with the damage and utility provided throughout the raid, with there being both better and worse specs to bring. However, everything changed early into the tier when our sister spec Beast Mastery got significantly buffed.
These changes made it so Beast Mastery utterly eclipsed us as DPS as they had far stronger output on top of being a fully mobile ranged DPS spec. To really drive this home, Survival somehow managed to avoid any sort of compensatory tuning almost the entire tier. As always, Survival is extremely vulnerable and reliant on tuning. We couldn't recover from both of these back-to-back and even Survival diehards turned away from the spec, especially on Dimensius.
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 30th. 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.
