Analysis of Shadowlands DPS in Mythic Sanctum of Domination - Week of July 27th

Posted 2021/08/05 at 11:27 AM by Anshlun

Warcraft Logs Mythic Sanctum of Domination statisticsDisclaimers and SourceSanctum of Domination Statistics Page on Warcraft Logs

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.

The balance between specs is very delicate and will likely change throughout Season 2, as player acquire more gear, different classes and specs tend to perform better with more secondaries.

DPS Rankings in Shadowlands Season 2 - Mythic Sanctum of Domination Week of July 27th

Position

Spec and Class

Population Size

Change from Heroic Last Week

Arms Warrior

6354

↑2

Feral Druid

665

↑2

Subtlety Rogue

2053

↓1

Assassination Rogue

4005

↓3

Windwalker Monk

2803

↑13

Affliction Warlock

235

↑14

Demonology Warlock

3195

↑1

Survival Hunter

↑12

Beast Mastery Hunter

3227

↑4

Havoc Demon Hunter

6334

↓4

Retribution Paladin

2322

Frost Death Knight

649

↑5

Balance Druid

10019

↓6

Marksmanship Hunter

6301

↓4

Elemental Shaman

2947

↓3

Unholy Death Knight

4487

↓2

Fire Mage

731

↑7

Shadow Priest

5742

↓9

Outlaw Rogue

486

Fury Warrior

1146

↑3

Arcane Mage

3172

↓16

Enhancement Shaman

1507

↓1

Destruction Warlock

6959

↓8

Frost Mage

6757

↓8

Spec Analysis for Week of July 27thArcane Mage
There are a few major drivers in the ranking difference between Heroic and Mythic for Arcane. First and foremost, the spec has some of its worst mythic fights (Eye of the Jailer and Soulrender Dormazain) in terms of overall damage in the early part of the raid. The hitboxes on both Eye of the Jailer and Soulrender Dormazain boss mobs are constructed in such a way that cleaving off the boss is very difficult or impossible for Arcane Barrage's short radius. This is not true for later encounter boss models. Arcane's damage profile benefits immensely from secondary targets that boost Arcane Barrage's damage via the talent Resonance. It is possible to cleave off of Soulrender Dormazain, but the mobs need to be stacked inside the boss' hitbox.

There are a handful of fight timings where DPS is held on mythic that are less than ideal for Arcane. Painsmith Raznal, Fatescribe Roh-Kalo, and Kel'Thuzad are all fights where DPS is held for significant periods (in some cases almost a full minute or more) While strategies that stop DPS are usually very good for Arcane, stops as long as these nullify that benefit as you're losing multiple uses of Arcane Power each encounter. It is worthwhile to note that these DPS stops often are intended to align cooldowns with tough aspects of the fight and Arcane excels at doing high burst damage at these points making Arcane still very good at useful damage at the cost of overall damage. As player power values increase and kills are more routine, many of these DPS stops may cease to be vital for success which likely will benefit Arcane for overall damage rankings.

Lastly, and probably less importantly, Arcane, like other burst specs, is extremely volatile in both your own variance and the effect practiced timings can have on your DPS. As this tier is a very low pull count tier in progression, the opportunities for practice and experimentation are minimal. Combine this with the very low sample set for logs on later bosses (as of writing this there are only 8 logged Arcane kills on Sylvanas) and it becomes apparent that the available data is in its infancy. Because of this and the other two factors above, I expect Arcane's performance to increase closer to what is seen in Heroic rankings over the coming weeks.
Shadow Priest

Ellipsispriest

As we move from looking at Heroic performance to Mythic in Sanctum of Domination, Shadow drops a whopping 9 places to be the worst class, and third worst spec for overall damage on logs. Does this make Shadow bad for Mythic raiding? It's a bit more complicated than that.

Before we talk about Shadow, it's important to address the data itself. Moving from Heroic to Mythic vastly reduces the number of parses for each boss, this is noticeable for the less played specs, and doubly noticeable for those specs on the later bosses which the majority of Mythic guilds have not reached yet. There are multiple specs on Painsmith Raznal and onwards in the single digits for recorded parses, so the performance of individuals massively skews those specs in statistics. As the majority of the fights Shadow performs poorly on overall are in the latter half of the raid, where data is less clear and available, we should take overall performance with a grain of salt.

Even with that, Shadow's performance drops sharply on encounters like Painsmith Raznal, Soulrender Dormazain, and Remnant of Ner'zhul. There's a few reasons for this, but the biggest one is adds. Shadow is very bad at dealing with adds, lacking any real baseline AoE tools, and having even its talented ones significantly outclassed by other ranged and melee specs alike. Mythic being significantly harder, and less prone to padding early on, means that most Shadows likely haven't had the chance to even try to deal AoE damage on a lot of these Mythic encounters. Instead opting to double down on the spec's strengths for the sake of progress by playing Twist of Fate. This can all be seen by looking at Shadow's boss damage performance, which is top 5 and consistent with Heroic.

The final factor, which is unique to Mythic encounters, is damage stops and the relevance of the final phase. It's rare that damage is valued equally across an entire Mythic encounter and there are even times when the best strategy is to deliberately lengthen a certain phase in order to have better mechanic overlaps or wait for important cooldowns to come back up. Because of this, it's really the final phase of the fight where boss damage is needed, and where Shadow has the opportunity to shine despite a poor (Or in the case of Mythic Sylvanas Windrunner, abysmal) overall performance.

To conclude, Shadow's poor showing in overall logs does not make it a bad spec for Mythic raiding, but it does show that it's a niche one hampered by a lack of baseline AoE rotation or way to deal damage to adds. It also shows how little bearing overall damage can have on the reality of Mythic progress, even when encounters are still relatively fresh. Affliction WarlockXyronicLiquidtwitch@LimitXyronicWatch live video from Xyronic on www.twitch.tv
Affliction has seen a surprising surge in ranking statistics on warcraftlogs for mythic in the past couple of weeks - putting it in the top 5-10 spots for 80th and up percentile rankings - let's take a look at some affliction warlock parses and breakdown what's happening here. Unfortunately for affliction warlock lovers, nothing much has changed in my hopes for affliction warlock viability in the raid - the aggregate percentile rankings on warcraftlogs are a combination of skewed averaging, taking specific fights where affliction actually shines (such as remnant and soulrender) and averages out to the terrible fights (everything else). On top of this, the low amount of available parses means that only a few great parses by good players are enough to be in that 90th percentile area. The reality of the situation is that even though it might look like affliction is one of the better specs for damage in the raid, it actually isn't that great.

Let's take for example, soulrender dormazain. In the top 15 parses, there are 5 affliction warlocks running the seed of corruption build to do massive damage to adds. However, if you take a look at boss damage, there isn't an affliction warlock in the top 100. In fact, you have to go all the way to rank 326 to find an affliction warlock doing boss damage on this fight. So while affliction may look great on the meters if you take on the role of a scuffed windwalker monk, you really aren't doing that much to actually kill the boss, unless your raid somehow has found itself with a comp that can't kill adds at all.

Windwalker MonkThis week, Windwalker saw a HUGE jump up in the charts on WarcraftLogs. For anyone who is familiar with the bosses in Sanctum of Domination, the answer is clear; Soulrender Dormazain, with an assist from Painsmith Raznal. Both fights cater to a Windwalker's damage toolkit as perfectly as fights like Guardian of the First Ones doesn't.

Looking at data from the last two weeks; Heroic logs show Windwalker is 3.28% below average in Overall Damage and 9.34% below average in Boss Damage based on data from the last two weeks. Mythic logs show Windwalker is 7.87% above average in Overall Damage and 11.37% below average on Boss damage. Its clear from this disparity in numbers that there's something significantly different between Heroic and Mythic and Boss damage and Overall damage, that has Windwalker dominate one, but fall significantly behind in the other. Even data from the first week of Mythic had Windwalker at 1.28% below average in Overall Damage and 2.19% below average in Boss Damage.

The answer to that is that on Soulrender Dormazain, the Mawsworn adds are much more frequent, a little more than every minute throughout the fight, and Painsmith Reznal adds a burst of adds after the intermission phase, roughly 3-minutes apart with current fight timings. These timings are perfect for Windwalkers, who are able to save and pool their resources and cooldowns for the adds to spawn in order to annihilate them. The tradeoff is that Windwalkers, who are already weak in single target, are cratered even further down the charts in that metric, because they're using their cooldowns for something other than boss damage.

Windwalker is not actually over 11% below average in Boss Damage, just like its not actually 7.87% above average in Overall Damage, its just that these two fights reward Windwalkers who focus on Mawsworn/Horror damage with unbelievable numbers, at the cost of Boss damage that Windwalkers already struggled in, so why not lean into your strengths and crush anyone else on your damage meter? Leave the Boss Damage to the specs that do better Boss Damage, which is just about all of them.

These two fights also heavily influence the narrative that Necrolord is a world above Kyrian and the other Covenants for Windwalkers. For Soulrender the adds are about 1-minute apart, so Necrolords can use their Covenant ability every wave, whereas Kyrians have to skip one. For Painsmith, the adds are roughly every 3-minutes, so Necrolords can use Bonedust Brew in between and still have it up for the end of the intermission, Kyrians have to save.

Realistically, these two Covenants are just about equal in circumstances that don't favor one or the other; Kyrian will do slightly between Boss and Single Target damage, Necrolords will do slightly between AOE and Add damage. However, because the timings of fights like Soulrender and Painsmith give a large lead to Necrolords, most of the best Windwalkers will switch to Necrolords for that edge, further exaggerating any difference between the two in the "big-picture" charts. There's a lot more to be said about this phenomenon, but that's a topic for another day.
For more information on specs in the Shadowlands Season 2, check out our Sanctum of Domination 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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Comment by SkyreiSurvival :OComment by nastywafflesxxxThose 79 SV hunters are pumpin'Comment by jpop2887Look at Frost DK leapfrogging Unholy, what a time to be alive!Comment by EllinovWe're finally getting recognition 😭 Survival gang rise upComment by jakedp1All 3 mage specs, that's gonna be one big yikeComment by FeralSynapseIt's funny what happens when the polearm bug gets fixed lol.Comment by YveltusYeah whoever wrote this wasn't thinking too straight. Most of the top guilds don't log publically, so you're missing most of the really good players in here. Not just that, it's set to 'all percentiles', which includes people who die 1 minute into a pull and naturally skews the statistics to be in favour of the less popular classes. If you set it to 95th percentile you'll get a significantly clearer picture of what class balance is like.Comment by Babaraketemage is fine kekwComment by MightylorddkThose brave 79 survivals!Comment by RoxloxLmao frost mage @ the bottom again while it is the most fun spec.
GJ Blizztivision.Comment by EllipsisPriestMinor addendum to my comments about Shadow. It's not the 3rd worst spec, it's the 6th. But it is still the worst class according to the overall logs. Not that it really matters because overall logs feel more detached from the reality of progress than they've ever been right now.Comment by EmillexShadow got is rebuild it needed but man It still needs so much more.Comment by ChimairaPlagueWhy is Affliction particularly good at Remnant? Because of Orb adds? They die so fast though.Comment by KhazzeronI don't understand all the people trying to hold onto MM, when BM is easily superior. It's like they enjoy self pain. If you want more dps, go BM.Comment by aski4777i don't understand how arms is allowed to be top tier pvp and top tier pve, like fury is garbage beyond beliefComment by Co1dNightI don't understand all the people trying to hold onto MM, when BM is easily superior. It's like they enjoy self pain. If you want more dps, go BM.Comment by IronymanSo the OP melee specs in PvP are top specs in the raid as well. Who would've thunk such a thing was possible from Blizzard? *clown*Comment by artenessePlease save my graphic designer soul and fix the colour of the words 'windwalker monk' in the first paragraph (currently displayed in Druid Orange) - thank you ! :DComment by jasuranWhy is Affliction particularly good at Remnant? Because of Orb adds? They die so fast though.Comment by Immortalzz#classbalance

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