Amirdrassil Weekly Damage Rankings - Dragonflight Season 3 Week 4

Today, we are looking at the DPS balance on Amirdrassil during the week of December 5th. For this analysis, we will use data provided by Warcraft Logs Raid statistics for Dragonflight Season 3.

The data for this article was taken from the Raid Statistics Page on Warcraft Logs for Mythic difficulty in the week of December 5th. 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 3, 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. We're including the chart showing all percentiles' results to paint a better picture for all specs.

Tier acquisition will skew how balance looks for the first weeks of Season 3.

Season 3 DPS Rankings - Mythic Amirdrassil Week of December 5th

Class Writer Commentary

• Marksmanship Hunter

In Mythic Amirdrassil, Marksmanship has seen powerful use on a few fights, namely the Council of Dreams and Larodar. As of writing this, Marksmanship actually occupies the #1 DPS Spot for Larodar!

Marksmanship's biggest strength is AoE damage, and especially the bursty kind. It is heavily target-capped, but that is actually fine for fights like Council (at most 3 targets), and Larodar (3 adds and a boss). With the help of Blessing of Autumn, 2-minute specs like Marksmanship can sync their cooldowns with Larodar's add spawns. Pair this with Marksmanship's incredible burst AoE, the Heavy Ammo talent, and maybe a touch of Power Infusion, and you can have some amazing performances on AoE-centered fights.

Due to AoE damage naturally being higher, though, this actually inflates Marksmanship's standings in the DPS Rankings somewhat. Marksmanship is the second-least popular spec in Mythic, and it is only represented in the logs of 6 bosses, many of which are AoE-centric where it performs very well. Swapping the Statistics over to single-target fights like Volcoross, Marksmanship is unfortunately one of the weakest specs in the game. It also suffers a large single-target DPS loss when going for its AoE talents.

Overall, Marksmanship is a bit of a one-trick pony. If a fight has low-target AoE, ideally in short bursts, it can be one of the best specs in the game for dealing with just that - but its single-target damage will suffer when chasing that AoE - and even in its pure single-target build, it has very poor single-target output. The capped nature of its AoE also makes it a dubious choice for heavily uncapped fights like Tindral.

Finally, a lot of its extraordinary performances, such as the ones on Larodar, are heavily relying on Power Infusion (for which Marksmanship is a good, but not best, target) and Blessing of Autumn.

• Balance Druid

Currently, Balance Druid is more or less fine in Mythic raid content. Their damage isn't spectacular and mostly gets carried by Council of Dreams on overall metrics.

Mark of the Wild is the primary reason that Druid is brought this tier, and being a DPS Druid Balance has an easier time slotting into a comp over other specs.

Lately, you've seen guilds prefer Feral over Balance for raid. This comes down to a couple factors like your inability to DPS Tindral roots effectively and melee requirements on both Fyrakk and Tindral Sageswift. Druid in general is very squishy versus raid damage profiles, and Balance is the weakest of the 4 specs. This requires them to be babysat more than other specs.

• Subtlety Rogue

In Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope, the Guardian of the Dream patch brought significant changes to the specialization and it is in one of the top positions on the Warcraft Logs statistic after the first tuning pass.

I was invited to write about the general strength of Subtlety and give perspective on why it performs so well, so let's get started!

Strengths of Subtlety

There are multiple reasons for the good performance. I will review what I think is important, and discuss each individually.

Why is Subtlety Rogue so good?

The Tier Set bonus is strong! Everyone who started raiding early on knew the feeling. Your officers set up a sheet and simulations to decide who to prioritize with tier-set. This time around, Subtlety stood at the top of the list. The two-set bonus alone was worth around as much as the complete Season 2 set. Both the two-set and the four-set bonus offer an impressive ~10% damage increase, which in turn also means not having the tier set is a big disadvantage. Tier-set acquisition is luckily fairly easy this tier.

Talent diversity, or the lack of it... Subtlety offers a lot of strong nodes, but only a few options to specialize. There is one big decision to either take Invigorating Shadowdust or not, the talent adds a lot of complexity to the spec but holds a lot of power. The remaining decisions are between lower impact nodes to emphasize cleave, AoE or single-target damage. This is not negative, it allows players to pick up more encounter-specific talents without big hits to single-target talents. Invigorating Shadowdust is a good example of a spell that can help with specific encounter mechanics like roots on Tindral Sageswift.

Encounter Design! Amirdrassil is very different from Aberrus and Vault in encounter design. It still offers a single target-oriented boss profile, but adds multiple fights with some form of vulnerability or damage-amplifying phases. Gnarlroot, Smolderon, and Tindral Sageswift are the three encounters that this applies to. Smolderon is the perfect fight for Subtlety rogues and is the one fight that brought attention to the spec. The Fight is special in that it has very unique fight timings. It has a vulnerability phase after around 1 minute into the fight which repeats around 1 minute and 30 seconds after. This timing is perfect for talent combinations with Invigorating Shadowdust. It brings the main burst cooldown Shadow Blades down to 1 minute 30 seconds, and the Without a Trace talent allows for the extra 30 seconds needed to hit the one-minute marker for the first intermission. Being the only spec in the game to be able to fully utilize the vulnerability gives it a unique position and makes it stand out.

Tuning and nerfs (but not for Subtlety) It is no secret that Assassination Rogue, Havoc Demon Hunter and Beast Mastery Hunters stood out in performance, but all 3 of them ended up being reduced in power level in tuning, balancing out the top of the statistic. Having strong baseline tuning and specific encounters tailored towards the strengths of the spec makes it stand out now.

Weaknesses of Subtlety

The elephant in the room. With all the positive things it might come as a surprise to see subtlety as one of the least played specs in the game. It is, as of writing this article, the 2nd least played specialization in Heroic, 4th least played in Mythic and only slightly ahead of the last place Affliction Warlock in Mythic+.

Why is nobody playing Subtlety? Subtlety is hard! It does not come as a surprise but learning Subtlety takes time. This is a result of complex talent options and gameplay elements that are not always intuitive. Invigorating Shadowdust, which is a key piece to subtleties strength, adds a completely new dynamic to cooldown management in addition to that. Tuning favoring Assassination further reduced reasons to invest time into this spec. Smolderon Mythic is for many Rogues now the introduction to Subtlety and hopefully can motivate more people to start playing it.

Cleave is still bad! Subtlety Rogue is known for weak low target cleave, what is new in 10.2 is that the spec fell off in AoE. This is a consequence of many small changes to and Bugfixes. Luckily there is only one encounter this matters with Council of Dreams and this fight is easy enough to have little impact on the viability of Subtelty.

Closing Thoughts