Tanks Are Back on Top - MoP Classic Phase 3 Throne of Thunder DPS Rankings

Posted 2025/12/17 at 12:25 PM by Passion

Warcraft Logs Throne of Thunder statisticsThrone of Thunder DPS Rankings in MoP Phase 3 - December 16th

Overall Damage

Damage to Bosses

Overall Damage

Damage to Bosses

Thoughts on Progression Brewmaster Monk
Throne of Thunder has historically been a strong tier for the entire Monk class, whether it was (at the time) the birth of "Jab-Jab-Uplift" for Mistweaver or (at the time) a new Mastery for Windwalker. Brewmaster, on the other hand, was merely content to stay powerful and not need to grow into any major changes of class design. This was reflected in Phase 3's tuning going into the tier, where it received no real adjustments compared to some other tanks that had to see nerfs or buffs to offset early scaling issues of the expansion. Overall, expectations for it were fairly high, including handling the bats of Tortos or laughing at Lei Shen's Decapitate for being an easily-Staggered Physical tankbuster. It was all but certain to be brought on most fights in high-end progression.

How has it played out? So far, these predictions have more or less turned out nicely. While their damage is on the lower side in Heroic logs, Brewmasters sit comfortably near the top in Normal, and they remain an incredibly popular choice for tanking. Likewise, as item levels increase things should get even easier as the extra Critical Strike results in near-100% uptime of Brewing: Elusive Brew. If anything, damage-minded players may need to slightly worry about rebalancing their secondary stats to account for Rune of Re-Origination procs. Otherwise, Throne of Thunder should be another raid of smooth sailing for Brew.
Rogue
The expectations were fairly accurate with the results; this was no surprise from multiple weeks of PTR testing. Rogues being untouched, combined with our role in Throne of Thunder, meant they were going to dominate the Boss Damage category. Combat was still our best choice for multi-target cleave encounters like Council of Elders and Horridon. Assassination and Subtlety unexpectedly dominated single-target encounters like Ra-den and Jin-rokh. Whether you were Assassination or Subtlety mattered very little, however, Subtlety ended up pulling ahead on most encounters.
Death Knight DPS
Both Frost and Unholy are in a weird spot going into T14. Personally I was expecting both to be somewhere in the middle of the pack, which also mostly stays true to the current rankings apart from a few outliers.

Both specs are very bursty in their playstyle - particularly Unholy benefits greatly from the %-based damage modifiers on bosses like Jin'rokh and Ji'kun, as it increases the damage of snapshotted diseases. Frost on the other hand can hold its own compared to other melee classes, but doesn't really bring much utility to the table. It does do quite well on the Council of Elders fight due to the constant cleave.

Both specs are generally just outperformed by Arms Warriors and Enhancement Shamans as they bring much more utility and comparable damage. The saving grace for DK DPS is mainly how Grasp of Gorefiend can trivialize the Ball Lightning mechanic on Lei'Shen which should result in 1-2 spots for DKs in ToT.
Blood Death Knight
Blood Death Knight has been in an awkward spot in Mists of Pandaria due to not having any defensive utility that scales with Attack Power. That was rectified in Phase 3 with Blood getting a 5% Attack Power modifier in addition to the already built in damage-taken modifier. Additionally, a bug was found that made Raise Dead not scale with Attack Power from Vengeance. This was rectified, and this in combination with the extremely powerful tier set bonuses for DPS Death Knights that Blood also can utilize, Blood DK should see very powerful throughput as the tier progresses.

These numbers are not necessarily reflected in the current data, as one of the consequences of the Death Strike buff was that Mastery gained a lot of value, but since Mastery offers zero offensive utility, this brought down our damage compared to the other tanks who don’t value zero-offense stats as much.

I expect Blood Death Knights to be one of the highest performers when it comes to single-target throughput in the coming weeks on encounters where Vengeance isn’t heavily cheesed.
Protection Warrior
Protection Warrior has, and will continue to have, a strong showing in the mid to high percentiles as they can quite easily play around Vengeance due to the powerful Attack Power scaling of Shield Barrier. Offensively, however, Protection Warrior doesn’t have the strongest Attack Power scaling, meaning that although it is easy to get and maintain high Vengeance, it doesn’t translate into as much damage as it does for a Protection Paladin, for example.

I expect the Protection Warrior to maintain the rank 1 to 3 spots among the tanks throughout all percentiles for a long period of time, but should, in theory, fall off slightly towards the later weeks.
Elemental Shaman
As expected, Elemental was not particularly high on the meters (other than on Durumu and his Ice Walls, that is!) on the first week of ToT but it had extremely high representation, only behind Survival Hunter on Heroic bosses, showcasing its great off-healing utility and ability to buff raid DPS with Stormlash to make up for lower personal damage numbers. Raw damage is not everything and the rest of the kit also matters a lot, making Elemental be a solid choice for Throne progression.
Enhancement Shaman
I expected Enhancement Shamans to perform quite well for progression, especially after Blizzard reverted the Elemental Shaman buffs. However, it did surprise me how well our utility can be utilized during this round of progression. Especially the combination of the Rushing Streams Talent and Glyph of Healing Stream Totem established itself as a very useful and strong combination early on.

I was skeptical at first about how well some fights play into the strengths of Enhancement, and there is for sure a large learning curve on some of them, but overall, a lot of fights center around shorter burst windows, which are a strong suit of the spec. There was one problem that Enhancement faced when it came to burst AoE and sustained 2-3 target AoE. Fire Nova requires more targets before it becomes efficient, and Chain Lightning is too weak as a Enhancement in these scenarios. A fair number of fights revolve right around those two things, and there is unfortunately very little we can do about that.

Thanks to all the other upsides, not to mention providing a Stormlash and good off-healing turns Enhancement into a master of progression.
I expect Enhancement to only get better later into the tier compared to other melee classes, but the strength of the caster meta gem will most likely turn this tier's endgame into another caster meta.
Disclaimers and SourceThrone of Thunder Statistics Page on Warcraft Logsincomplete picture of Mists of Pandaria balance

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

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

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

Statistics displayed below show data for 25-player heroic difficulty. For 10-player difficulty, please visit Warcraft Logs.

Mists of Pandaria Classic Class GuidesFor more information on Mists of Pandaria classes & specs, check out our Class Guides!

Comment by copege7LMAO do they just clip part of people's comments on a class and post it? Enhancement is sufffering. Who gives a *!@# about utility, when you can bring stronger classes with utility lmfao. !@#$ this game and those *!@#$% ass devs.Comment by YebbLMAO do they just clip part of people's comments on a class and post it? Enhancement is sufffering. Who gives a *!@# about utility, when you can bring stronger classes with utility lmfao. !@#$ this game and those *!@#$% ass devs.Comment by JahxdGotta say it seems like an issue that literally every class has a dps spec that is above all 3 hunter specsComment by KekPVClass balance is trash in this game. Time to leave.Comment by ArkisGotta say it seems like an issue that literally every class has a dps spec that is above all 3 hunter specsComment by ClasscMalcontentBring raid full of tanks and some healers. Win at MoP 'classic' 😆