Shadowlands DPS Rankings in Season 3 Week 4 - Double Legendary Parses

Live Publié 29/03/2022 à 03:31 par Anshlun

Warcraft Logs Heroic Sepulcher of the First Ones statisticsDisclaimers and SourceSepulcher of the First Ones Statistics Page on Warcraft Logsincomplete picture of season 3 balance, as both those factors will drastically change these numbers week by week

Specs that are considered underpowered are generally played less and tend to appear weaker than they actually are.

This happens as many performance-oriented players will tend to play the strongest spec or class, increasing even further the gap between top and bottom specs.

Position of specs for the 95th percentile might be skewed by alternative strategies and parse funneling. For that, we're including the chart showing the result for all percentiles to paint a better picture for all specs.

DPS Rankings in Season 3 - Heroic Sepulcher of the First Ones Week of March 22nd

Position

Spec and Class

Population Size

Change from
Single Legendary

Demonology Warlock

82813

Frost Death Knight

28417

↑2

Enhancement Shaman

52048

Balance Druid

83357

↓2

Survival Hunter

17880

↓3

Havoc Demon Hunter

77550

↑9

Subtlety Rogue

53163

↓2

Marksmanship Hunter

53574

↑1

Frost Mage

63543

↑3

Shadow Priest

35394

↑1

Fury Warrior

78506

↓3

Retribution Paladin

25590

↓2

Elemental Shaman

17966

↑6

Windwalker Monk

20849

Arms Warrior

27933

↓8

Assassination Rogue

10865

↓3

Arcane Mage

10431

↑1

Unholy Death Knight

17522

↑2

Feral Druid

9219

↑4

Affliction Warlock

4604

↓4

Outlaw Rogue

4015

↑1

Beast Mastery Hunter

75883

↓1

Fire Mage

34787

↓6

Destruction Warlock

12810

Class Writer CommentaryRetribution Paladin
Retribution has had a pretty medium start to this tier. For the first couple of weeks, Dessein divin was bugged to grant two empowered Holy power spenders per proc instead of one if you had the tier set bonus, which slightly inflated Ret's damage numbers higher than they should have been. Now that we've seen a week's worth of parses without that bug, Ret seems very middling - ok on everything, but not particularly good at any particular boss.

Ret's niche is burst damage, and there are a couple of places where it can shine here - for example, it does very high burst on Lihuvim during the Synthétiser phase, and it's also a good spec to send over to add platforms on Artificier Xy’mox. However, there's a lot of other melee specs that do basically the same thing, like Fury, Frost DK, or Survival, while also have better sustained damage, passive cleave, or other raid utility. Ret's tier set also doesn't help a whole lot with its burst either - it does help its sustained damage quite a bit, and while the Traînée de cendres resets are strong on AoE, their randomness means that you can't guarantee you'll actually get an AoE boost during add spawns every time. That said, there isn't anything Ret is really bad on this tier either - it does fine on either single target or AoE damage profiles, and will be competitive with most other specs except the top end outliers. Ret's second legendary doesn't change its relative position to other specs much either - Verdict final and Tempête du Porteur de Lumière are both good, but nothing better than what the average spec gained.

Although it would have been nice to see Ret get a buff along with other specs earlier last week, especially since there wasn't a single guild that used a Ret on any fight in the Race to World First, it's still decent enough as it is that you can justify bringing a Ret to pretty much any encounter and have it perform adequately.
Shadow Priest

Shadow Priest has plateaued out to a rather middling position in Heroic Sepulcher of the First Ones. The main reason for this is that, like in previous tiers, Shadow's major strength is its Single Target damage. We can see this on fights like Skolex, as well as just in the raid as a whole when we filter for boss damage specifically. However when we look at encounters like Anduin Wrynn with its large number of add waves, and even Prototype Pantheon with its 4 Target Cleave burn phase we see Shadow's performance drops off significantly. Shadow's lack of AoE cleave has been a problem in every tier this expansion, as a spec which had previously relied on Damage over Time effects to deal meaningful multi target damage the spec feels in limbo, without the necessarily baseline tools to compete once a fight contains adds or additional bosses. Shadow's Dots just don't cut it.

There was hope early on in testing that the new set bonus introduced in 9.2 would remedy the AoE issue, however after the 40% nerf it received, which was heavy handed when looking at the strength of other tier sets in both Single Target and AoE on live, it's not able to shore up the spec's major weakness.

The addition of Unité locks Shadow's covenant choice in raids down to Necrolord for all bosses except Mythic Dausegne. The Ordre exsangue legendary effect provided by unity for Necrolord was also significantly nerfed prior to release of the tier, resulting in a relatively small gain for the spec. This legendary also only provides Single Target damage, so it again has no ability to alleviate any of the problems the spec faces.

Looking forward into Mythic, and more difficult encounters such as Lihuvim, Anduin Wrynn, and Lords of Dread, cleave damage seems to be the name of the game in the latter half of the tier. So many of these fights also require large amounts of mobility, as well as a powerful personal survival cooldown to make good use out of Symbole d’espoir (Shadow has Prière du désespoir for this, not Dispersion). The lack of opportunity for and Saut de foi also doesn't play in Shadow's favour, as the spec's unique utility is often a key reason for bringing it.

The one saving grace for Shadow is the upcoming final boss of Sepulcher, Le Geôlier. Being a predominantly Single Target fight, with a very long execute phase to abuse both Tour du destin and Sceau de Wrynn déformé par l’âme, the spec looks likely to perform there. This could even be the case for Mythic, despite not appearing in the world first kill composition.
Elemental Shaman
With more people getting access to the 4 piece bonus of the tier set Flammecœur, Elemental Shaman is rising from the very bottom to the middle of the dps rankings in the 95th percentile for Heroic.
In the lower percentiles where more players do not have their tier sets yet, Elemental is still eclipsed by pretty much all other classes.

Looking over specific fights, our strenghts and weaknesses become very appearent.
While we cannot shine on any fights, we can find ourselves being competitive (in other words in the upper third of specs) on pure single target encounters like the Jailer and Skolex in the 95th percentile. This is helped by the very high mobility of the class working well with bosses that require high amounts of movements.
Our weaknesses, namely two target cleave and our lack of extended burst damage, become very clear on the rankings for Lords of Dread and Prototype Pantheon.

In what little data is available for Mythic right now, Elemental is still showing up in the upper third of the DPS ranking. This is likely caused by the low amount of Elemental Shamans running Mythic and a high concentration of tier pieces in that player pool. Our high mobility and low complexity is also working well with poorly optimized strats in the first few weeks.
The data is furthermore skewed positively for us, because the first two bosses, Guardian and Skolex, work well for our damage profile and Gardien des tempêtes timer.

The acquisition of double legendary did not particularly affect our position in the DPS rankings.
The unity effects for night fae and necrolord are both not particularly spec-defining and didn't alter our output relative to other specs.
Especially when running the 4 piece bonus, neither of the legendaries work particularly well with our kit and are more of a nice-to-have.

My prediction for the next week, with more people acquiring tier and the additional 5% buff, is that while our heroic standing will move from the lower middle to the upper middle overall. This does not account for the buffs to the various other specs that are currently also around that position.

Class Guides for Sepulcher of the First OnesFor more information on specs in Season, check out our Sepulcher of the First Ones Class Guides!

Blood DKFrost DKUnholy DK

Havoc DHVengeance DH

Balance DruidFeral DruidGuardian DruidRestoration Druid

Beast Mastery HunterMarksmanship HunterSurvival Hunter

Arcane MageFire MageFrost Mage

Brewmaster MonkMistweaver MonkWindwalker Monk

Holy PaladinProtection PaladinRetribution Paladin

Discipline PriestHoly PriestShadow Priest

Assassination RogueOutlaw RogueSubtlety Rogue

Elemental ShamanEnhancement ShamanRestoration Shaman

Affliction WarlockDemonology WarlockDestruction Warlock

Arms WarriorFury WarriorProtection Warrior

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