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
This week, we're taking a look at specs that have been in a poor position for the past few weeks: Outlaw, Frost Mage, and Feral.
All three specs have been overshadowed by other DPS specs in their classes, being the "outcast specs". Each of the specs has populations in the range of 15 to 25% of the most popular spec of their class.
Without any new tuning or changes, all changes in rankings for this week 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 Shaman277490
2Arcane Mage35396↑1
3Beast Mastery Hunter61995↑1
4Assassination Rogue9827↑1
5Marksmanship Hunter5873↓3
6Frost Death Knight50745↑1
7Destruction Warlock40768↑1
8Fury Warrior31146↑1
9Fire Mage2907↓3
10Subtlety Rogue6241↑1
11Windwalker Monk8632↓1
12Unholy Death Knight49730
13Augmentation Evoker49680
14Balance Druid195330
15Shadow Priest156300
16Devastation Evoker11202↑1
17Feral Druid5018↑1
18Retribution Paladin36774↓2
19Affliction Warlock1505↑2
20Havoc Demon Hunter335190
21Arms Warrior1349↑5
22Demonology Warlock5187↓3
23Enhancement Shaman2836↓1
24Survival Hunter1445↓1
25Frost Mage8411↓1
26Outlaw Rogue1534↓1
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Outlaw Rogue, Frost Mage, and Feral Druid to provide insights about their specs and explain their specs' poor performance in Manaforge Omega.
Outlaw Rogue
JustGuy
Outlaw Rogue faces a few critical issues when examining the current raid. Issue number 1 is just the raw tuning of the spec. The spec is currently undertuned. On the patchwork encounter of the tier Fractillus, Outlaw Rogue appears on the lower half of the overall when compared to most classes. While single-target patchwork isn't the only metric that matters, there really isn't a single encounter the spec excels at this tier outside of The Soul Hunters.
This leads to issue number 2, encounter design. While the spec is quite good at its niche of low target, extended cleave, there really aren't many of these fights this tier. Fights like Soulbinder Naazindhri, Forgeweaver Araz, Nexus-King Salhadaar, and Dimensius are all fights focused around damage amp phases, adds that spawn and die extremely quickly, or both, which is the specs most significant weakness. Another issue with the encounter design for the spec is the large amounts of downtime the fights have for a spec that is so heavily focused on using Underhanded Upper Hand to extend Adrenaline Rush uptime to 95%. Having to run to platforms and back to the boss on Nexus-King Salhadaar hurts a lot, and the massive flying sections on Dimensius that lead directly into adds that need to die quickly, and a damage amp on the boss is just horrible for the spec. I genuinely couldn't have made a fight worse for Outlaw pecifically than Dimensius if I tried.
Frost Mage
Dorovon
Despite some significant changes to the specialization throughout The War Within, Frost's core struggles have remained. In particular, Frost Mage really just doesn't have a niche that sets it apart from Arcane and Fire Mage. Its strength is presumably supposed to be 2-target cleave with Splitting Ice, but it doesn't really stand out there leaving it fully reliant on simply being tuned higher than the other specializations. Right now, it's clearly tuned lower than Arcane and Fire even on pure single target as we can see from fights like Fractillus. The gap is low enough that it is viable, but for competitive players there just isn't much reason to play it.
Part of the problem is also that this iteration of Frost Mage is surprisingly hard to play perfectly. The optimal rotation sounds simple enough when you read through it, but this is deceptive. When you take into account the high haste levels, reactive nature of playing around its random procs, and some of the unintuitive rotational decisions that are being made, it is actually quite easy to cast the wrong spell sometimes and this is only exacerbated by mechanics and movement requirements taking up focus and making it hard to cast Frostbolt and Glacial Spike when you need to.
Because of this, even if Frost is theoretically tuned at an acceptable level, it will usually lose more of its damage in practice than Arcane and Fire. This was made extremely clear at the release of Manaforge Omega when Frost's theoretical performance was the best of the three Mage specs, resulting in sentiment that it would be a very strong spec and high placings in community tier lists. Presumably due to this hype, it was slightly nerfed at the beginning of the season and has been a bottom performer in the raid since. Going forward into Midnight, hopefully the major Frost Mage rework will resolve these issues, especially because we can see that it's still pretty popular despite its poor performance.
Feral Druid
Guiltyas
Feral has spent pretty much the entirety of the season in the bottom quarter of the stats, which is a bit odd. It's a spec with decent single-target and AOE capabilities; after all, it's performing well in M+ at the moment. This isn't really a new position for Feral to be in, if you've played Feral across the last couple of expansions the reasons it's struggling in Manaforge: Omega will be pretty familiar to you.
Feral has, in isolation, pretty good single-target and pretty good AOE, but it struggles to do both. Feral's AOE is very strong, yes, but it's got a long setup, and outside of Feral's biggest CDs, it's not particularly bursty. Oftentimes in raid combat, particularly on fights like Forgeweaver Araz or Soulbinder Naazindhri, by the time you've prepared for AOE, the AOE's already over. Feral's AOE has another problem; the combination of Apex Predator and Rampant Ferocity means that Feral is very reliant on not just long living adds that let them set up, but also large numbers of adds to feed into Apex procs.
Not all of the bosses in Manaforge Omega are AOE bosses though the AOE bosses that are there, Salhadar, Soulbinder, and Forgeweaver do bump feral further down on the charts. Even if there were less AOE bosses or there were none Feral likely still wouldn't be very high on the charts. Frankly what should be Feral's ostensibly strong point, it's single target, just isn't that strong. Feral has decent single-target, but it's hardly exceptional in a tier with specs like Ele Shaman, either Hunter spec, or even Moonkin; Feral's single-target performance is just not that exceptional and nowhere near strong enough to address it's other problems.
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.
