Dragonflight Season 1 DPS Rankings Week 18 – Season 1 Tuning Changes

Mythic Vault of the Incarnates Statistics Page

Disclaimers and Source

The data for this article was taken from the Raid Statistics Page on Warcraft Logs for Mythic difficulty in the week of April 11th. We will be looking at data for the 95th percentile, plus showing the overall results to paint a better picture.
The idea of this article is to give a perspective of the current state of class balance for Dragonflight Season 1, meaning this is an incomplete picture of balance.

We say perspective, as there are inherent biases in looking at the data this way.

• 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. For that, we’re including the chart showing all percentiles’ results to paint a better picture for all specs.

Dragonflight Season 1 DPS Rankings – Mythic Vault of the Incarnates During the Week of April 11th

95th Percentile Statistics

Overall Statistics

Unholy Death Knight Tuning Context

Unholy DKs received significant tuning changes this week. To help contextualize this changes, our Unholy DK writer Bicepspump has provided an explanation of the changes that happened during the previous weekly reset.

Everything but the final point is straightforward. We got significant buffs to our damage outside the 3 minute burst windows by buffing Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows as well as the damage coming from Dark Transformation and Apocalypse. To be honest, our burst also increased since the buff to Apocalypse also increases the value of our Army of the Dead so we did see damage increases across the board.

More interestingly, what might seem like a flat change to Summon Gargoyle was actually a buff overall. Doing simple math on the buff, the cast time increased by 25% and the damage was adjusted to compensate. This would’ve made no different if it wasn’t for the fact that Summon Gargoyle is bugged. The pet we summon has issues casting at low cast times. Essentially, the cast times scales nicely down to 1 second. At this point however, Gargoyle starts to stutter, not being able to reduce its effective cast time any further. At 0.75 seconds cast time the pet is suddenly able to fit in another cast, effectively increasing its number of casts by 50%.

In practice, this creates break points in our haste value. As we reach above said breakpoint, the number of casts that out pet is able to send off significantly increases instantaneously. The changes that came this reset matters since they move these breakpoints to much higher values (166% to 233%). This allows our Gargoyle to scale much further with haste, increasing its overall output. In reality, the number of maximum casts that Gargoyle could send didn’t change with the buffs (with sufficient levels of haste) but the damage increased by 25%. So in certain instances, this was actually a 25% buff to its damage! This is quite noticeable as Unholy Death Knights with sufficient haste and Power Infusion can now hit Gargoyles that are above 3 Million in overall damage (used to be 2.4M max or so)!

It does create certain problems as well. If you’re not a Troll that has access to Berserking, you’re looking at 31% baseline Haste to be able to reach the 233% breakpoint. In the next patch, the loss of the random haste proc from our tier set means the required base haste is pushed even further, making it almost mandatory to run Troll to ever reach it. Taeznak has been busy making sure the simulation does reflect this behavior so you can trust whatever they say at least!’

Overall very happy with the buffs and love to see Unholy pumping at the top of the meters. My only hope is that they adress the issue with Algeth’ar Puzzle Box going away next season so that we don’t end up dropping straight back down in the next patch as it’s inevitably nerfed.

Class Guides for Patch 10.0.7

For more information on every spec during the Dragonflight Season 1 and Patch 10.0.7, check out our Class Guides!