wow Castle Nathria DPS Log Rankings and Analysis Week 3: Enhancement Exploits

[Starym 3,800]

 

This week in Castle Nathria is a little special, as we have a pretty big bug/exploit affecting the rankings, as Enhancement jumped to the top very recently using this technique. Luckily for everyone, it has been fixed already, so we can freely talk about it and will have our own Enh guide writer Wordup explain what's been happening. Windwalkers are also very high in the charts, and while there's no exploits there, there is a small bug/weird interaction happening which is helping them out, so we'll be checking that out as well.

Also, we'll be  swapping over to the "per second" aggregate numbers from now on in the charts, so you'll be seeing the actual DPS numbers as well. Let's start with the actual Mythic rankings, as enh and WW are dominating the field in the 95th percentile, as the top players always know all the tricky little things:

95th percentile Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

Now let's hang back here a bit, as the enhancement exploit was really only present here.

Enhancement Shaman by Wordup:

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Enhancement raced up the logs this week due to a "bug" that was originally reported to Blizzard on the 19th (though due to the holidays wasn't fixed quickly) that allowed you to get Windfury Weapon imbues on both weapons. When paired with the Doom Winds legendary this resulted in astronomical amounts of burst that some people made use of - so the high percentile parses are hugely skewing away from the norm because most aren't using it. In terms of raw numbers this was at a *minimum* a flat 20% increase if executed properly, with some fights going even higher, so it wasn't a small difference which the logs clearly show!

This has since been fixed with a fairly amusing trick - if you get it on both weapons then the imbue simply fails to proc, effectively killing your DPS output in the process, so expect them to settle back to their middle of the pack state this week.

Now let's move on to all percentiles, where the majority of players didn't even know about the exploit, and it really shows with Enh being back in the middle of the pack:

All percentiles Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

Windwalker Monk by Babylonius:

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Due to years of issues with Storm, Earth, and Fire, Blizzard has tried to provide fixes that occasionally result in weird interactions. One example of this is an interaction where using SEF to tag targets, while you also tag targets, can lead to having more stacks of Mark of the Crane than you have targets. It’s a very simple task to simply tag the same targets that your SEF clones do.

Additionally, targets that are tagged by SEF and who die with the debuff can continue to count toward your total stacks even after they are dead; which can lead to having more stacks than you have targets.

While neither of these are game-breakingly huge increases in damage, and certainly are not the sole reason that Windwalker is strong right now, it provided a small increase in damage and makes it less intensive to maintain stacks of MotC throughout a fight or dungeon.

Unholy DK by Abyssalwave:

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Unholy currently is not only in a great place when it comes to DPS but also utility. Many fights in Castle Nathria become easier thanks to utility abilities such as Death Grip, Abomination Limb, Anti-Magic Zone, and even Anti-Magic Shell.

Unholy Death Knights now also provide great execute damage making them even stronger in a progression setting thanks to Soul Reaper. The talent and mastery rework that Unholy had in the Shadowlands pre-patch was incredibly powerful and has given the spec fantastic synergy between its main abilities such as the reworked Unholy Blight and Dark Transformation. The rework for Army of the Damned also usually gives you 2 Army of the Deads in a fight while also being able to line up that Army of the Dead with most of your other cooldowns.

The fights that Unholy currently excels the most in are Shriekwing, Huntsman Altimor and Lady Inerva Darkvein in terms of DPS. In terms of utility the spec is strong on nearly every encounter. All of this makes Unholy Death Knight a fantastic class to go if you are going to start raiding in Castle Nathria.

And let's check in with Heroic one more time, since we still only have a 3 guilds that actually killed Denathrius on Mythic, and not a whole lot more with Stone Legion down either.

All percentiles Heroic data by Warcraft Logs.

A fairly turbulent week this time around! As always, if you want even more info on a spec, you can check out our class guides here.

[Dejo93 1,023]

Yay Enh isn't worthless anymore

[Kethcup 8]

2 minutes ago, Dejo93 said:

Yay Enh isn't worthless anymore

rip it's a bug that'll be fixed in two days, while boomkins keep their uncapped AOE and MM their 17k Aimed Shot crits