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 Fury, Shadow, and Unholy.
Shadow had a strong start in Manaforge, boasting high ranks in the first week. However, as soon as players started to acquire their Season 3 sets, Shadow fell to the middle of the pack. Ever since week 4, Shadow remained in the dead center of the DPS rankings for the tier, without any major changes or tuning happening.
Fury Warrior started Manaforge Omega close to the bottom, similar to Arms. After the first few weeks, as players got their tier pieces, Fury skyrocketed all the way to the top quartile, reaching as high as the 5th spot. Even if Fury never broke into the "top group", it remained a strong pick for the whole tier.
Unholy stayed the whole tier behind Frost, usually with only 10% of its popularity. Frost's success for the whole Season left only a few players to try Unholy. Despite always being behind Frost, Unholy has circled around the middle of the pack for the whole raid tier, always between the 12th and 18th spot.
We've invited our writers for the three specs to contextualize their journeys better and you can read it 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
1Elemental Shaman194650
2Arcane Mage237020
3Marksmanship Hunter39890
4Assassination Rogue7358↑1
5Beast Mastery Hunter42997↓1
6Destruction Warlock293880
7Fire Mage21170
8Frost Death Knight339340
9Fury Warrior222340
10Augmentation Evoker3818↑1
11Subtlety Rogue4020↓1
12Windwalker Monk61810
13Balance Druid14660↑1
14Unholy Death Knight3373↓1
15Shadow Priest111650
16Devastation Evoker81700
17Affliction Warlock1161↑3
18Havoc Demon Hunter23468↑1
19Feral Druid3344↓2
20Retribution Paladin26498↓2
21Survival Hunter1025↑4
22Demonology Warlock3487↓1
23Enhancement Shaman1811↓1
24Arms Warrior11310
25Outlaw Rogue1144↓2
26Frost Mage63140
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Shadow Priest, Unholy Death Knight, and Fury Warrior to provide insights about the journey their specs had in Manaforge Omega.
Shadow Priest
EllipsisPriest
Shadow has had a pretty up and down raid tier in Manaforge, with some bosses where it excelled and others where it could barely get off the ground. This tier has also been unique in its relative weakness of priest healers, with Race to World First raid comps opting to field a single Shadow Priest for their Power Word: Fortitude instead of either Discipline or Holy. Usually priest healers are some of the strongest in the game, typically commanding 1-2 spots on any high end healing roster so to be brought specifically for a raid buff has been a welcome surprise. The spec also received a small set of changes going into Manaforge Omega that helped alleviate issues surrounding multi dotting, as well as a powerful set bonus for its Archon hero talent.
Besides needing to be brought as a raid buff, Shadow had several fights where it was able to leverage its spread target niche to great effect. The most prominent of these were Forgeweaver Araz and The Soul Hunters. On these fights Shadow's potent passive Psychic Link allowed them to hit every target in the encounter without losing any damage on their primary target. The additional charge of Shadow Crash added in 11.2, as well as its cooldown reduction from 20 to 15 seconds was especially valuable on Araz for dealing cleave damage to each set of Arcane Manifestation as they spawned more frequently in the fight's later phases.
Despite being strong on fights where sustained cleave was valuable, Shadow struggled a lot on fights that had high movement requirements and a need for Single Target burst damage. Fractillus was a very poor showing for Shadow with a combination of low single target and high demand for the ability to travel quickly to different areas of the room at a moment's notice. This lack of Single Target burst damage also meant Shadow lacked on the final two fights of the raid tier due to their enormous damage taken increases during burn phases and highly demanding movement mechanics. Shadow's utlilty has also gone largely under appreciated this tier with very little opportunity to use Mass Dispel or Leap of Faith, and Vampiric Embrace not providing enough reliable healing outside of cooldowns. The only reason to be there was the fortitude buff.
As tiers progress, Shadow typically falls further down in performance due to fights getting shorter and burst damage becoming more prominent and this one is no exception, though its performance is held up largely by Soul Hunters and Forgeweaver. Shadow has ended this tier in a middle ranking, towards the low end of the commonly played progression raid specs, roughly similar to where it started. Shadow continues to be a scalpel in that it's extremely effective at a few specific encounter types and extremely poor at others, what seems to decide its viability is where the spread cleave fights are in a raid tier compared to the movement heavy burst ones. This tier the harder, arguably more important bosses were focused on high mobility and high burst damage, meaning that after raid compositions became more flexible and people could get their Fortitude buff elsewhere, Shadow's representation began to dwindle.
Unholy Death Knight
Taeznak
Unholy was quite a strange specialization during Manaforge Omega. A lot of this can be attributed to the class design itself. With Unholy's major weakness in cleave scenarios, and a talent tree built to only allow AoE or Single Target, but never both, Unholy ended up just not built for this raid. While we had a few standout bosses for Single Target, like Fractilus and Loom'ithar, the majority of the raid just worked directly against Unholy's design. This left it performing in the lower middle of the pack through 11.2.
While there was some minor tuning to Unholy through the tier, none of it could really fix the design limitations holding it back for most of the encounters. If they tried to buff it to compete in cleave, its single-target potential would go through the roof, as our cleave and single-target abilities are very closely linked. This generally meant that there was just nothing that could realistically be done for Unholy to bring it up any higher than the middle of the pack.
In my honest opinion, it's fine to have a tier here and there where we just aren't the best. It's good to let other specializations have their time in the sun. However, I do hope that Blizzard learned a bit from Manaforge Omega when it comes to designing the majority of a raid around one general niche. The specializations that struggle in that scenario are just left out of the fun and may make players feel like they made the wrong choice for their favorite specialization.
Fury Warrior
Archimtiros
Fury tunnels very well on static encounters Loomi'thar, Fractillus, and even Phase 1 of Dimensius, but suffers greatly due to its lack of on demand burst, making it less suitable for the many increased damage phases found throughout Manaforge Omega. As a result, the specialization performs quite well when it has a chance to ramp up its damage on a single target over the course of several minutes, but phase transitions, target swapping, and downtime hold it back, while other classes burst cooldowns propel them ahead.
Though historically strong in raid AoE situations, several other classes have also risen to compete in that niche, leaving Fury still capable, though less likely to run the board. This capability is also reliant on Bladestorm, with very little direct rotational damage, which means losing single target while holding it for adds or simply not having very effective multitarget damage at all when the cooldown isn't available.
Despite this, Fury has had a relatively strong tier, being middle or upper middle of the pack on most encounters... though still falling short of top ranks on any particular boss. Interestingly, Fury didn't actually change much over the course of the season either, though its efficacy has dropped as fights have gotten shorter due to power inflation from the raid buff, various encounter nerfs, Turbo Boost, and Dinar.
The biggest improvement for Fury in raid content would be adding more value to its cooldowns, which have been become very lackluster compared to other class abilities. Avatar may have been a strong buff when first introduced fourteen years ago, but has since been power crept to the point where a 20% damage bonus is less than most minor procs. Although compensated with a high uptime, these low value cooldowns have made Fury's damage profile very flat, which performs well enough on high uptime encounters like Fractillus, but not conducive to encounters which increasingly feature damage amp phases, extensive target swapping, and downtime.
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 October 21st. 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.
