Choose Your Main in The War Within (Patch 11.0.5 / Season 1)

Hello everyone. This is a guide I planned to create long ago, specifically designed for Mythic+ players to be able to choose what to Main (or Alt) in each season before the season goes live. A lot of work went into creating this spreadsheet in preparation for Season 2 of The War Within, and I am excited to share my findings and help people choose the best main for them. Because this is the first time I am publicly sharing such a list (otherwise kept exclusively for my stream), it will be a DPS-only evaluation for the moment. This is done as a fun activity for my community and it often goes back and fourth with numerical values, given the arguments from the live chatter. Take this with a massive grain of salt when looking at the data.

So, without further ado, what do I consider when ranking specializations? How did I come to this conclusion? All of these questions are answered in the sections below.

Working on this Choose Your Main spreadsheet was a tremendous effort that included more than 500 hours of playtime/testing on all DPS specs across different key levels and different dungeons. Updated frequently, I concluded that there are several factors that people are most interested in when choosing their main:

• Each of the numerical values represents how each specialization is ranked against the rest of the specs. ST and AoE damage are the only 2 variables ranked between 1-10 since they are the driving factor and often the primary ones people are interested in.
• "Utility" is a vital part of every spec; some have more than others, hence the differences between 1 - the lowest rank and 5 - the highest. As an example, Shadow Priest utility includes Power Infusion, Power Word: Fortitude, Vampiric Embrace, Mind Soothe, Mass Dispel, dispelling Diseases, etc.
• "Survivability" is ranked between 1-5, which also includes personal defensives, immunities, and self-sustaining abilities (self-heals, Leech, etc).
• "Playstyle/Fun" is designed to showcase how "fun" each spec is while playing its rotation, its cool visual effects, animations, etc. This is highly subjective to evaluate, and keep in mind that this list is subjective first and foremost. However, I did create the evaluations with the feedback of hundreds of viewers on Twitch in mind.
• "Easy to Play" is the last factor; we often link this to the difficulty of the rotation based on your best-performing build. How difficult it is to min-max your spec is also included in this evaluation.

  The higher the score is, the easier the spec (generally a positive thing), and the lower the score is, the harder the spec is.

Please keep in mind that this page will regularly change throughout Season 2 of The War Within, should there be more changes. Nothing written here is a guarantee or promise. All opinions are subjective and should be taken with a grain of salt. I will update this spreadsheet on my stream if there are any more changes before being uploaded on the website.

As there are different types of players with various skill levels, they have different goals in this game. This is why we created 3 Filters, of which you can interact and structure the specs based on what your most important variables are: Only-Damage, Damage, Utility + Survivability and Overall score.

• The Only-Damage filter allows you to exclude every other variable and focus on the the raw power of the spec.
• The Damage, Utility and Survivability filter enables you to include the Utility part of each spec, as well as their defensive toolkit.
• At last, we have the Overall Score filter, allowing you to combine everything and compare each class with all of the variables in mind, including Playstyle-Fun and Easy to Play.

The numbers below are generated with a consideration of all specs having 4-piece set and using their best performing Mythic+ build.

LAST UPDATED - 25th of February