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
Looking at the underperforming specs this week, we have a trend at the very bottom. All seven of the lowest performers, Arms, Demonology, Enhancement, Outlaw, Survival, Frost Mage, all belong to classes that have other DPS spec options.
Survival is likely the best example of this; with only 1600 Survival Hunter parses recorded, it pales when compared to the 66 thousand Beast Mastery Hunter ones.
Overall, it was a very stable week. All movement in rankings is due to noise, with specs retaining the average performance from last week.
95th Percentile Statistics
Overall Damage
Damage to Bosses
Overall Statistics
Overall Damage
Damage to Bosses
PositionSpec and ClassPopulation SizeChange from
Pre-Turbo Boost
1Elemental Shaman302880
2Arcane Mage436720
3Marksmanship Hunter8292↑4
4Beast Mastery Hunter66267↓1
5Assassination Rogue111130
6Frost Death Knight56663↓2
7Fury Warrior34323↑1
8Destruction Warlock45938↑2
9Fire Mage3169↓3
10Subtlety Rogue8408↑1
11Windwalker Monk9995↓2
12Augmentation Evoker5432↑1
13Unholy Death Knight5814↓1
14Balance Druid21779↑1
15Shadow Priest18685↓1
16Retribution Paladin392710
17Devastation Evoker133360
18Havoc Demon Hunter38089↑1
19Feral Druid6165↓1
20Survival Hunter1672↑6
21Demonology Warlock6408↑3
22Affliction Warlock1781↑3
23Frost Mage9029↓2
24Enhancement Shaman3112↓2
25Outlaw Rogue1878↓5
26Arms Warrior1542↓3
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Enhancement Shaman, Affliction Warlock, and Survival Hunter to provide insights about their specs and explain their spec's poor performance in the ranks on Manaforge Omega.
Afflction Warlock
Kalamazi
Affliction Warlock started off the season looking to be one of the top specs in 11.2, but that's ONLY if you were not looking too closely. Affliction received numerous buffs to abilities such as Xavius' Gambit and Focused Malignancy, which increase the damage of Unstable Affliction. While this kind of tuning does often happen between Patches, our Tier Set from 11.1 (Liberation of Undermine) was not nerfed before Manaforge Omega went live. This tier set Warlock Affliction 11.1 Class Set 4pc gave us the ability to apply multiple Unstable Affliction effects, which had been buffed a very large amount, in the first week of 11.2 and Manaforge Omega. This led to Affliction seeming quite dominant on a handful of fights, especially The Soul Hunters.
Blizzard answered this by sadly aura nerfing Affliction by 5%, and not breaking/nerfing the tier set from 11.1. Even before the 5% nerf was applied to Affliction, it was not on the same overall power level as Destruction once you acquired your 11.2 Tier Set. While it does have some relevancy on a few fights with stacked cleave or burst windows, Destruction is simply the better option for its overall damage and profile. We had hoped for a reversion to the 5% nerf in 11.2.5, but that did not come to fruition. The better answer would have been to break interactions with the Liberation of Undermine bonus, but c'est la vie.
Survival Hunter
Doolb
Despite having a great offensive kit with flexible cooldowns and potent defensives, Survival Hunter once again finds itself towards the bottom of representation and output in recent Mythic statistics for the current raid, Manaforge Omega. Thankfully, there's no sort of grand conspiracy or detective work needed to see why—Survival has low output for a few very simple reasons. First and foremost, we somehow dodged tuning buffs many other underperforming specs received throughout the season. Compared to last season, we also became a much less appealing Power Infusion target, our tier set gains weren't particularly high, and both Marksmanship and Beast Mastery's shared hero tree, Dark Ranger, received an extremely powerful rework and continued buffs throughout the entire season, catapulting our sister specs into the spotlight.
The final nail in the coffin for Survival's poor performance and play count this season is the extreme melee hostility in Manaforge Omega, specifically in the harder encounters. Many of these fights benefit from having less melee, so it can be hard to justify bringing a Survival Hunter. While our cooldowns provide reasonable AoE and burst output, both damage styles pale in comparison to what Beast Mastery or Marksmanship is capable of, especially with damage amps and AoE windows being as prominent as they are. With the difference between Survival and its offspecs being so large that even the most dedicated Survival Hunters have gravitated to the stronger specs.
All in all, the simplest answer is the most correct one here. Survival is tuned low.
Enhancement Shaman
WordupEnhancement’s situation in Manaforge Omega boils down to a simple word: tuning. Mechanically, it’s fairly suited to most of the raid - low cooldown burst AoE for fights like Forgeweaver and Dimensius, and extremely powerful 2-minute cooldowns for both final encounter burn phases. The problem is that, even though those cooldowns can be explosive, the damage across the board just has weak numbers behind it. Pair that with a set bonus that amplifies RNG to the point where it’s an unavoidable reality of the spec and you end up with this situation.
While having a very strong set bonus that provides extra time inside Ascendance (alongside additional Tempest procs) is great in theory, having it be completely unpredictable is a problem when you compare it to the field of equally powerful sets. It also comes with the problem that any interesting gameplay it could add by holding these windows is impossible - you can’t simply go AFK when it’s on the cusp of proccing in the majority of situations. Unlike previous seasons as well, this is exacerbated by the fact that the flexible alternative in Totemic is tuned so poorly that it’s functionally unplayable in all situations, amplified by just how weak its set bonus is in comparison to Stormbringer.
When the spec seems intentionally tuned to be toward the bottom of the stack, and it’s spec competition had an enormous inflated tuning pass right before the patch launch, it’s no surprise the spec has seen a limited showing in the raid.
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.
