Amirdrassil Weekly DPS Rankings – Dragonflight Season 3 Week 2

Currently, in Season 3 Havoc Demon Hunter has had an incredibly powerful showing across all content. The rework for Havoc came with removing or reducing many weak talent points and nodes in the talent tree, which has allowed for generally stronger talents to be taken in the tree. This has increased both the defensive and offensive power of Havoc, allowing it to stay alive in content more consistently while dealing incredibly high amounts of DPS.

For the offensive side, new talents have allowed powerful combinations such as A Fire Inside, Inertia and Ragefire to be taken in most talent setups allowing for easy access to extreme upfront AoE burst DPS. Fortunately, Havoc’s best single-target setup is only a single talent point swap away from being a true AoE setup; by swapping Furious Gaze to Ragefire while also being tuned in a way that allows it to still have a strong single-target damage profile despite the heavy amounts of AoE it has access to. When it comes to Heroic Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope in particular, it’s incredibly beneficial that the raid build is also a cleave build with a small Single Target loss to be taken for AoE as 6 of the 9 bosses come with some form of AoE. The majority of the time the bosses in Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope also do not punish movement allowing Inertia builds to be played with little downtime to cause DPS to be lost, unlike previous tiers.

As for defensive power, Havoc has kept the trademark sustain allowing it to leech itself to healthy hp consistently through , Charred Warblades, Charred Warblades, and multiple other sources. In the rework however, it has gained free access to Netherwalk which was difficult to take so far in Dragonflight, and Deflecting Dance a new talent that is similar to the old and removed Blade Dance dodge. There are also new minor passive survivability gains such as Scars of Suffering and Demon Hide. The high sustain mixed with good defensive tools has pushed Havoc to have better survival rates in raid encounters which helps to have statistically higher DPS.

All in all, the 10.2 Havoc Demon Hunter rework provided a lot of power (much of which was needed) allowing Havoc to have the tools to excel in most raiding scenarios. The heavy burst Havoc brings allows it to get a lot of AoE damage in on adds before other classes can while running builds that are still single-target oriented. This design is partially propped up by our current tier set, Demon Hunter Havoc 10.2 Class Set 2pc and Demon Hunter Havoc 10.2 Class Set 4pc causing our best talent setups to run cleave-only Throw Glaive talents in all scenarios such as Accelerated Blade, Furious Throws, Serrated Glaive, and Soulscar. Very little exists to call a weakness for Havoc considering all that was gained in the rework both defensively and offensively, especially considering the current tuning of the spec putting it in the most powerful of positions for this patch.

Beast Mastery Hunters have had a very solid performance in the first few weeks of raiding. A minor redesign of a few talents, a very solid tier set and the introduction of a proper cooldown in Call of the Wild has tremendously improved our performance compared to the previous tier. These changes have also made us a viable target for Power Infusion, which helps us look impressive on logs, although we’re not the top choice. Thanks to Bloody Frenzy, we have had a notably solid performance on burst AoE encounters such as Larodar, Keeper of the Flame and Tindral Sageswift, which suit us very well. While we’re mostly carried by our damage profile at the moment, Hunter’s Mark helps shore up our otherwise lacking raid utility.

On the topic of Augmentation Evokers, there have been and still are some flaws with how damage is being reattributed to the Evokers. For instance, the Kill Commands from our 4-set bonus Hunter Beast Mastery 10.2 Class Set 4pc does still not get properly re-attributed, and the re-attribution to Beast Cleave and Kill Cleave is also imperfect and can break for the remainder of a raid night or Mythic+ key if the Hunter pets ever die. This means that while Beast Mastery is likely a very strong spec at the moment, our damage is still slightly overestimated in logs. Beast Mastery Hunters also tend to have strong performances early on in tiers when people are still learning the encounters. We generally drop off a little when other classes get more comfortable with the raid.

Arcane is performing exceptionally well in Heroic right now; there are a few reasons why that people should consider before forming a reaction to this. Between a solid profile and very fast gearing benefits, Arcane is running out of the gate ahead of a lot of other specs. However for reasons we’ll review, I do think that this will be reigned in naturally without much, if any, tuning changes to fights or classes.

First, this raid’s design is extremely favorable for Arcane’s damage profile. There are multiple vulnerabilities or empowerment buffs which pair well with cooldowns like Arcane Surge and Touch of the Magi, especially important on Gnarlroot‘s Uprooted Agony and Smolderon‘s Ignited Essence. There are multiple bosses which have adds up for a short period that can either be leveraged for funnel utilizing Resonance, or just bursted down before others can, this is particularly important on every fight with adds in it. There are also a lot of downtimes, Fyrakk‘s phase transition despawning for seconds,Tindral Sageswift‘s flight intermissions, Council of Dreams‘s Polymorph Bomb forcing you to be a duck, and Gnarlroot‘s root burning intermission boss damage reduction to name a few. Arcane does a very efficient job leveraging these types of situations. And on fights where Arcane doesn’t really have an optimal toolkit, like Volcoross, the fight timings are so short that they basically mean Arcane gets one huge lusted cooldown usage followed by one lesser cooldown usage. In short a lot of the fight timings and styles are just right for Arcane to perform well on overall for many guilds at the moment.

Secondly, Arcane’s 2-set and 4-set bonuses from Wayward Chronomancer’s Clockwork are very potent, especially in cleave situations which, like we discussed above, is very prevalent this tier. They are potent enough to give Arcane an edge in gearing as the bonus contained quite a bit of the power Arcane was tuned around having this tier. I do expect this power disparity to level out a bit as people get optimal gearing and the other Mage specs to fair more evenly with each other (or even beat Arcane out in a few fights). Having an early boost in power relative to other options can often sway the decision making people make on spec choices early on.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, community perception. Arcane has been a top progression choice for the world first race and other Mage’s looking to push PvE and PvP content early in the tier for all three tiers in Dragonflight and two of the three of the raids in Shadowlands. When people see Imfiredup and Gingi run Arcane for every fight, they gravitate towards that judgment and the people who are left playing other specs are often the people who care less about optimization. For top tier players this choice weights a lot of things for early progression, and early jumps in power are definitely one of them. However, this choice may or may not be justified for each individual player who makes the decision to ‘pick a spec’ for a fight, but it’s how many people are measured on if they’re playing the ‘right spec’ or not.

Overall, Arcane is a solid spec with good tools for raiding, I don’t expect it to remain the top Mage spec on every boss; as of writing this, Frost is already showing promise on Larodar, Keeper of the Flame and Council of Dreams on Mythic difficulty. I think a lot of Mythic raiders also understand that Melee are very good this tier as well as other Ranged DPS that are perhaps doing better than Mages and I believe a lot of Fire and Frost mages will prove that their specs are viable or very valuable as the tier progresses.

Assassination Rogue is the spec of the tier right now, and everyone’s eyes are on it for it’s very high burst and strong versatility in the new Raid, but why is that and what makes it so strong? I’m going to try and run through some of the reasons why Assassination is such a strong spec right now and hopefully shed some light.

Big Burst

The first thing to understand is that Assassination currently is one of the biggest burst specs in the game currently. The entire combination revolves around multiple talents all coming together in a perfect storm. In terms of cooldowns, Assassination currently plays Kingsbane and Shadow Dance, alongside the main 2 minute cooldown Deathmark. Each of these then have their own interactions, which I will quickly outline:

• Deathmark is doubling poisons and bleeds, which when combined with Dragon-Tempered Blades gives an additional 2 poisons, Garrote and Rupture, all contributing to Lethal Dose. Doubled poisons also directly buffs Kingsbane
• Shadow Dance is a great pairing with Master Assassin and Improved Garrote on the spec tree, and Nightstalker is required to take Shadow Dance. Nightstalker snapshots its damage benefit onto any damage over time effect, which simplified means +10% damage during burst
• Kingsbane utilizes all of these, Lethal Dose, Improved Shiv, Dragon-Tempered Blades, all the duplication from Deathmark, the Critical Strike Chance from Master Assassin, Nightstalker, and also the Mastery buff from Thistle Tea on top of all of that

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of talents working together to make it all come together. But it goes even deeper than that. Because poison applications are a flat percent chance, simply generating more raw hits means more poisons to fuel Kingsbane. Slice and Dice happens to do that very well, and helps the spec benefit greatly from Windfury Totem, Bloodlust and Power Infusion.

The final piece of the puzzle is that this raid additionally also has a higher amount of increased damage windows than normal.

Big Burst Round 2

With the rework in 10.2, Assassination Rogues learned a new trick and now have Blade Flurry… I mean Caustic Spatter! Jokes aside, these talents actually do behave quite similarly, but the tooltip on Caustic Spatter can be a bit difficult to interpret on first glance. “45% of your Poison damage” can be reasonably interpreted as “45% of your Nature damage”. That means that it indeed works with Kingsbane, but also less intuitive things like the damage dealt to the main target through Poison Bomb and our 4 piece tier Envenomous Explosion, as well as Envenom. Although we don’t talent into these talents, It would also apply to Sepsis and Vicious Venoms.

Given the explanation of our strong single target burst earlier, Caustic Spatter simply allows that same burst to happen in AoE for very little downside aside from talenting into Caustic Spatter in the first place. As it happens, the raid is also full of situations that can take advantage of this:

It’s quite an extensive list of fights and in a lot of these situations, Kingsbane lines up quite well to take advantage of the AoE from Caustic Spatter. With how strong the burst is in single target, this then just adds another strong layer on top for those AoE situations. Assassination has long held a spot as a great single target spec, with the downside of being unable to AoE effectively. Now it has the tools to do both, and do it well.

The Uncomfortable Conversation

It’s that wonderful time of year where we get to talk about external buffs once again. Many people will already have their minds made up about how these affect or don’t affect balance, whether or not they should exist, their impact on the meta, on and on. I’m not looking to sway any opinions regarding them (and I most likely can’t if I tried), but not at least highlighting them would be a disservice.

I quickly want to cover Power Infusion. It’s very good on Assassination, and a lot of Assassination Rogues will be receiving Power Infusion in their raids. The benefit of this is around +5%, but the question of “should specs be balanced around getting Power Infusion?” is not something I’m trying to answer. We’ve seen that point re-hashed for many raids now, but it is part of the game. Not every rogue will be getting it, and trying to estimate its impact on a specs performance is a troublingly difficult problem. I personally find myself not particularly worried about the impact of Power Infusion on the statistics. I admit it exists, and it is non-zero, I’m just not really interested in arguing for or against the couple of percent that its adding to the balancing discussion.

The bigger issue in my opinion is Augmentation Evokers. Not the players, but the Log Issues that have burdened the spec. I want to shoutout the great work from the WarcraftLogs team to compile all known issues into one concise place. You will notice going down to the Rogue section that our old friend Caustic Spatter makes an appearance, as well as another talent we take in all content with Sanguine Blades. The old tier bonus that some are still using this early into the tier Poisoned Edges also does not re-attribute. On “normal” fights like heroic Igira the Cruel this can add up quickly to over 20% of the total damage done from the rogue. On a more “pad” heavy fight like Tindral Sageswift it can almost reach 30% in some cases. That’s a huge chunk of damage that is getting inflated and not attributed properly to the Augmentation Evoker, and it does not make balancing any easier as a result. Talents that aren’t reattributed, in this case Sanguine Blades and Caustic Spatter, are simply not as strong as logs would make them appear on first glance. This is less of an issue in single target where these aren’t as prevalent, but it is universal and muddying the waters on very targeted abilities.

Conclusions

None of this is to take away from the fact that Assassination Rogue is one of the strongest, arguably even the single strongest spec in the game right now. Highlighting why and trying to increase accuracy in our data as a community should always be a goal to strive towards, regardless of the state or balance of any single spec. I would hope that the issues around Augmentation Evokers are being looked into and fixes are considered a priority for the reasons of balancing, raid planning, and self-reflection on performance.

We’ve seen this play out before with Venthyr Balance Druid in 9.1, with Unholy Death Knight in 10.0 and 10.1, and now with Assassination Rogue in 10.2. Opinions on the matter are volatile and very mixed. These specs often have to contend with other external factors unrelated to their kit, such as cheesing raid mechanics, cooldown timings and fight lengths. Removing that niche from those specs can quickly remove them from the meta, but if they are meta and can abuse the fight design they very quickly become problematic.

Is it the raid fitting the spec really well? Is the spec just crazy overtuned? Can we use the raw power of copium to blame external buffs when we play badly? Is burst of this caliber simply too much for the current game state? There’s many moving parts in any conversation around balancing, especially when it comes to top meta specs. I don’t have the solutions to be fair, and the spec is looking insanely good. I’m eager to see what Blizzard decides to do tuning wise now that the race is over (and fixing Augmentation Evoker combat hooks please). Biya!