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 Feral Druid, Demonology Warlock, Frost Mage, Subtlety Rogue, and Outlaw Rogue.
Feral had a very uneventful tier, staying most of the season at the bottom quartile, never passing the middle of the pack. While Boomking hasn't had the most brilliant time in Manaforge, it still attracted more players than its furry counterpart, even if the performance delta between both specs wasn't that large.
After a strong display in Liberation of Undermine, Demonology didn't keep the tempo in Manaforge. While starting high in the first week, it soon fell into the bottom of the rankings, with many fights not favoring its turret-style play, which partially led to Destruction's ascension.
Frost Mage had its minutes of fame in Nerub-ar palace, when it ended the tier contenting for the top quartile. Starting with Liberation of Undermine and again in Manaforge, Frost hasn't found its footing, being behind both Fire and Arcane most weeks.
While Assassination has had decent results in Manaforge, the same cannot be said for Subtlety and Outlaw. Subtlety managed to stay around the middle of the rankings, where it remained the whole tier, which is, overall, a good result. Outlaw, on the other hand, had criminal results in Manaforge, being one of the specs with the most appearances on that dreaded 26th position.
We've invited our writers for the five specs to better contextualize their journeys, 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
1Elemental Shaman9801↑2
2Arcane Mage10857↓1
3Marksmanship Hunter1939↓1
4Assassination Rogue41630
5Beast Mastery Hunter16877↑1
6Frost Death Knight14218↑2
7Destruction Warlock145610
8Fury Warrior10861↑1
9Fire Mage1309↓4
10Balance Druid7145↑1
11Augmentation Evoker2162↑2
12Subtlety Rogue1916↓2
13Windwalker Monk3101↑1
14Unholy Death Knight1715↓2
15Shadow Priest5197↑1
16Devastation Evoker4441↓1
17Retribution Paladin11272↑2
18Feral Druid1629↓1
19Demonology Warlock1727↑1
20Havoc Demon Hunter10825↓2
21Affliction Warlock716↑2
22Survival Hunter623↓1
23Arms Warrior574↑1
24Enhancement Shaman998↓2
25Frost Mage33200
26Outlaw Rogue4860
Class Writer Commentary
To help us better understand the charts above, we invited our Class Writers for Feral Druid, Demonology Warlock, Frost Mage, Subtlety Rogue, and Outlaw Rogue to provide insights about the journey their specs had in Manaforge Omega.
Feral Druid
Guiltyas
Feral has spent most of the season in pretty much the same position on the performance metrics. It's had some small shifts (mostly down), but it's been pretty steady sailing. In isolation, Feral has solid, if not exceptional, single-target and great, if not best-in-class, AOE. Unfortunately, it has to pick between those two things. From a design perspective, choosing between AOE or Single Target is great design, it allows you to specialise in either option, and choices SHOULD have costs. The problem comes when not every spec is held to the same standard. While feral pays SIGNIFICANT single-target in order to maximise its AOE this isn't something all specs contend with.
Feral's AOE has other problems: in Mythic+, where packs live a bit longer, Feral has time to set up its AOE and send powerful CDs to blow up a pack. It also has the luxury of high target counts, allowing it to send its uncapped AOE damage that scales with target counts. More targets mean more Apex procs. In raids, however, adds and AOE in general tend to get absolutely vaporised or have a fairly small target count. Feral is paying very high single-target and then not really getting to leverage its tools.
The other problem is Feral's single-target. It's decent to good, upper quartile even! That doesn't really help, though, when it's the only thing you can actually do in raids. Being OK to good at single target, and bottom of the barrel in AOE just means you're a bad spec. There are no real design issues why this is the case; it's just a case of tuning. That's a lie, actually. There is a bit of a class design issue here. The majority of Feral's abilities are shared between Single Target and AOE. There's no convenient tuning levers that Blizzard can pull to boost up Feral's single-target without also buffing its already strong AOE in Mythic+.
This article could have really been written about any raid in the last three expansions or so, this has been a long running problem for Feral so it's been disappointing that at no point has this problem really been addressed, especially as there's been times where this wasn't a problem, the answer has been sitting right there in Legion class design this whole time, it's just a shame it's never been used since.
With Midnight coming it's maybe understandable that this particular tier didn't get any design changes to fix the issues and it remains to be seen if any of these issues will be solved in Midnight, in the current state of the design it doesn't really look like it! I look forward to writing more of these articles in the future, "Why is Feral underperforming in The Voidspire?"
Demonology Warlock
NotWarlock
Demonology throughout Manaforge Omega started out as a strong contender to be a mainstay spec for the raid, however over the weeks following the raids release Demonology has seen a drastic drop off in play and landing as a bottom 6 spec across everything in the game.
Early into the raid launch Demonology had some bugs in the sim which left the spec overvalued and saw play because of the sim numbers. As always, actual play and sims can, and often are, much different. That, in combination with a weak damage profile for the majority of encounters put players off from playing the spec in favour of the more well-rounded Destruction.
This predominately could have been overcome with some additional tuning but that simply would have just adjusted the numbers up in a non meaningful way as the spec just does not have the best toolkit for the job at hand. Class design is certainly a main factor, and is being addressed for Midnight to an extent, however this is not something that should have (or was) tackled for the final raid of The War Within.
Frost Mage
Dorovon
Throughout Manaforge Omega, Frost has been among the very worst performing specializations of damage statistics for every single boss. While Frost has some design issues in The War Within, this poor performance is primarily just because of tuning. Frost received an unnecessary nerf to its damage at the start of the season and started the season as a bottom performer because of it. Despite this, it was never buffed after that and has continued to sit among the worst specs week after week. While it is worth noting that the gap is small enough that Frost is viable, it's still a frustrating position for the specialization to be in.
On top of the clear tuning issues, Frost also simply lacks a relevant niche right now. This is particularly true when comparing it to the other Mage specializations, which are its main competition for raid slots thanks to Arcane Intellect. Historically, Frost has been good at 2-target damage with Splitting Ice, but recently it just doesn't stand out in those situations. Additionally, Frost is actually deceptively difficult to play right now due to its consistent high haste levels and the need to react to constant random procs. It's easy to cast suboptimal spells sometimes, resulting in a noticeable gap between Frost's theoretical performance and what has actually been happening in Manaforge Omega. Thankfully, Frost Mage is receiving a significant rework in Midnight that will hopefully remedy some of these design problems and make it easier to tune well.
Subtlety Rogue
Fuu1
Journey of Subtlety Rogue in Manaforge Omega
Subtlety Rogue had an interesting position in Manaforge Omega. The spec started generally underrated, but managed to leave a lasting impression due to its current design around burst damage. Rogues from famous guilds managed to top the damage meter on many of the difficult progress fights during the Race to World First, all while Subtlety remained in a boring "middle of the pack" position in the overall Warcraft Logs statistic.
The Statistics
I got surprised when creating the graph below by how consistent the position of Subtlety was. We can clearly see bigger fluctuation in the early weeks; this is a consequence of an incomplete statistic (Warcraft Logs requires 30 public logs of a fight for it to be included in the statistic) and early tuning changes, but we end up fairly constant around the 10th position after.
Rank based on 95 percentile WCL statistics. Lower is better.
Analysis
What was unique about this raid tier was not only a strong tier set, but the raid offered two extremely powerful trinkets with Unyielding Netherprism and Araz's Ritual Forge. Subtlety has perfect design to utialize them. The result is a strong burst damage for both single-target and AoE. Additionally, cooldown timing did line up well with vulnerability phases or add events, or could be adjusted nicely by the use of Blessing of Autumn.
Tuning was done to balance out the strength on key encounters, leading to weak output on sustained damage fights. The table below indicates roughly which fight was good or bad for Subtlety.
Strong Fights
Weak Fights
We got lucky here, because most of the fights the specialization is bad at are easy by either their position in the raid or boss design.
The curse of Design
Having a design that only works well on half of the fights in a raid is not always good. Tuning will generally not consider variations in strength based on environmental change, and other content types like Mythic+ can suffer from it. What this means in practice is that the overall strength highly depends on keeping the advantage on the good fights. The passive power gain from the raid buff, higher gear levels, and buffs to others did change timings on fights to be less ideal or made dealing with adds easier. This closed the gap on difficult encounters and gave competing specs the option to surpass. This lowering interest in the specialisation and, with that, the overall play rate.
Play rate in Percent relative to all damage dealer parses on Warcraft Logs.
I am still happy with the position of Subtlety in the raid. But it is, for now, the hardest to learn damage specialisation and requires good execution to get results. It does not help that the initial strength on progression usually falls off quickly. This wasn't as significant as in previous seasons, given how strong some raid items are, but it is still visible.
Closing word
Raiding as Subtlety was overall exciting in The War Within. The specialization always managed to become the go-to choice during early progression. This was sadly most of the time short-lived, so I am happy that we managed to stay relevant in the last raid of the expansion. With Midnight just around the corner, my wishes would be for the design and tuning team to rethink some of their decisions leading to the mentioned problem. It does not feel good to be punished for mistakes while still falling behind within a short time frame. However, the general streamlining of content and class design may have already resolved this issue.
Outlaw Rogue
JustGuy
Manaforged Omega has been the worst Outlaw Rogue tier of all time, struggling the entire tier to carve out a niche within the raid. A tier focused on burst damage in Single Target and AoE, alongside built-in downtime mechanics, puts Outlaw at a fundamental disadvantage over its peers. Outlaw's only strength right now is its damage cleave damage over extended periods of time, a strength that you can only flex on The Soul Hunters. Outside of that specific fight, on the more single-target, low-downtime focused fights like Fractillus or Loom'ithar, the spec is just plain undertuned.
Something important to keep in mind when tuning this game is that specs exist within the context of the raid encounters or the dungeon pool for the season. Many specs, such as Subtlety Rogue, can be mediocre in a contextless vacuum, but can flex their burst damage strengths on fights like Nexus-King Salhadaar and Dimensius, especially for Mythic Progression. Meanwhile, Outlaw gets the worst of both worlds. Being criminally undertuned, alongside encounters like Dimensius being a fight designed in a lab to be as terrible for Outlaw as possible is a recipe for disaster.
While the specs' strength of extended cleave is there, and the fear of another Outlaw Rogue takeover of the Mythic+ community is probably looming at the Blizzard balance team, the overall state of the spec has been disappointing. While I don't think the game should ever be directly balanced by "x spec is hard, therefore it should be OP," when a spec this mechanically demanding is this undertuned, it leaves people feeling: "What's the point?"
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 January 6th. 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.
