wow Castle Nathria DPS Log Rankings and Analysis Week 6 - Post Class Tuning

[Starym 3,800]

 

We can finally check out the results of the most recent class tuning pass that buffed several under-performing specs as a full reset has gone by for both US and EU servers! We've already had our class guide writers talk about the Fury and Assassination buffs last week, so today we'll be focusing on the Frost Mage ones, as well as taking a detailed look at Shadow Priests, who haven't been mentioned much since their dominance in the pre-patch. Here's a reminder of the actual tuning that happened last week:

Class Tuning for January 11th

Classes

• Death Knight
  • Blood
    • [With regional restarts] Bone Shield grants armor equal to 70% of Strength (was 50%).
  • Frost
    • [With regional restarts] All damage is increased by an additional 2% while a two-handed weapon is equipped.
• Mage
  • Frost
    • [With regional restarts] All damage abilities increased by 9%.
• Monk
  • Brewmaster
    • [With regional restarts] All damage is increased by an additional 2% while a two-handed weapon is equipped.
  • Windwalker
    • [With regional restarts] All damage is increased by an additional 2% while a two-handed weapon is equipped.
• Rogue
  • Asssassination
    • [With regional restarts] All damage abilities increased by 8%.
• Warrior
  • Fury
    • [With regional restarts] All damage abilities increased by 8%, except for Bladestorm and Dragon Roar.
    • [With regional restarts] Meat Cleaver talent now increases Whirlwind’s damage by 25% (was 30%).

Looking at the 95th percentile you can really see the buffs to Fury and Frost, as they moved up a lot, while Assassination... well not so much, but that's due to the truly insanely low number of logs registered for the Rogue spec, with only 233 people playing it, so that particular stat doesn't really mean anything. The only spec with fewer logs is Survival Hunter, coming in at 101, with Demonology, Frost DKs and Arcane also being under 1,000.

95th percentile Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

All percentiles look a little different for our buffed specs, as the larger playerbase didn't quite use Frost as well/much as the top players:

All percentiles Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

Here's what our own Frost Mage guide writer had to say about the tuning pass.

Frost Mage by Kuni:

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Frost got just a little more than the prior nerf which came in at +8.6% reverted - it's a start. While still out of the reach of Fire, the spec is now low-mid pack. It will likely see some use as people experiment with it, especially on farm. Any fight that can abuse Frost's ridiculous AoE capability with Glacial Fragments might see a spike in usage. It should also be noted that Night Fae, which most Arcane/Fire Mages are running, is completely useless to Frost, to the point of Shifting Power isn't even used on single target. This is going to make Frost look further behind than it actually is, simply because Venthyr is not a great Arcane/Fire pick.

As before, Glacial Fragments remains a problematic legendary. It definitely feels like there is too much power behind it on AoE, to the point of spamming unbuffed Ice Lances on 3 targets. However, a (deserved) nerf to it would necessitate a hefty buff to Frost's base toolkit to compensate.

And here a very in-depth analysis of the state of Shadow Priests in Nathria.

Shadow Priest by Publik:

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Since the release of Mythic Castle Nathria we have seen a few class changes come and go, but for the most part Shadow Priest has been left untouched, acquiring lackluster borrowed power that leaves them in the upper mid pack of DPS for the raid. Shadow historically has been the mutli-dot spec that has specific niches on a few fights, but this time around they have shifted much more into a jack of all trades master of none role. This is typically a great quality to have in a raid spec, making them fluid for lots of different bosses, and I don’t think Castle Nathria is any exception. The issue when looking at logs this tier is that specs that get good value from their borrowed power (legendary effects, Covenant abilities, Conduits, etc) will naturally start outscaling the Shadow Priest. This explains the slight downward trend in performance we see when compared to the early weeks of Mythic Progression.

Digging a bit deeper, Shadow Priests have some of the best single target damage in the game, rivaling the top specs like Affliction Warlock and Elemental Shaman on almost every single target boss. However, when it comes to more hectic fights that have a mix of different mechanics, most Shadow Priests end up taking the conservative boss damage focused builds to help kill bosses rather than take the more “pad” talents that are frankly better for other classes to handle naturally. Sun King’s Salvation is easily the best example of this, where you see Shadow Priests basically at the bottom of the percentile chart. While Shadow can perform well on this boss, it is definitely not the strong suit of the class. Myself and many other Shadow Priests were also likely asked to flex as a Holy Priest on this encounter for progression to help kill the boss faster. You can see from this week's snapshot only ⅓ of the amount of people that killed Hungering Destroyer killed Mythic Sun King as a Shadow Priest.

Another contributing factor to Shadow Priests performance is a quite nasty bug that I recently fixed in SimC. This bug caused Mastery to sim lower than expected, leading to some less than optimal stats on Shadow Priests that followed this example. Now that this has been corrected we can clearly see another competing build for Shadow Priests that utilizes Haste/Mastery and Talbadar's Stratagem instead of the typical Haste/Critical Strike Eternal Call to the Void builds we saw many priests using. The difference in these builds is actually quite small in the grand scheme of things (1-1.5%) but nonetheless will further solidify Shadow Priests in the upper mid pack of DPS specs. Nothing special, but still a great DPS to play in Castle Nathria. This build was already being used by a chunk of the player base and you can see both builds competing across almost every fight. In my analysis I think either one can make sense depending on what you are doing, and lots of players will like being able to choose between consistent yet unforgiving damage with Talbadar’s Stratagem or inconsistent but forgiving gameplay with Eternal Call to the Void’s RPPM based proc. 

Bugs aside, many Shadow Priests find themselves in the situation of running with the Twins of the Sun Priestess legendary. This legendary is a very strong raid-DPS increase, and depending on your group and what you are looking for will typically be the best choice for a Raid legendary on any fight with DPS checks. Many Shadow players are using this legendary especially after the first few bosses where getting that extra DPS on another raider (especially ones that really like haste) can help you easily phase through bosses faster than you would if you were using a Shadow specific legendary instead. The trouble with this in terms of log rankings is that this is not a DPS increase for the Shadow Priest specifically, so the player we are giving Power Infusion to gets the increase while we maintain our existing DPS. In the world of parsing and rankings you will see top logs littered with extra Power Infusions, making the Shadow Priest look a bit worse than you would expect. This problem mainly stems from our legendaries being less impactful than giving someone else Power Infusion, further contributing to our borrowed power and scaling issues.

And finally, let's take a peak into Heroic as well, for a much larger number of logs:

All percentiles Heroic data by Warcraft Logs.

As always, if you want even more info on a spec, you can check out our class guides here.

[Vince 14]

Man, Destruction feels really bad that low. 

[Unholyknight 9]

Even with 9% buff, Frost mage is still only in the middle. Now you see how bad it was before the buff.

[CTEKK 12]

My heroic raid consists mainly of boomy druid twinks now. Sad that they simply don't care. 

Edited January 21, 2021 by CTEKK