wow Castle Nathria DPS Log Rankings and Analysis: 9.0.5 Week 1

[Starym 3,785]

 

We've finally made it to a full week of data for Castle Nathria in patch 9.0.5! While we've already taken a look at the numbers twice after the patch hit, both on day 1 and day 5, we now have the full set of data and our experts can weight in.

Our guide writers will be taking a look at the biggest winner and biggest loser of the patch changes, and if you've been following the last two visits we had to Nathria, you'll know exactly who those are! Elemental has continued its meteoric rise in the raid and has landed in 3rd place for the 95th percentile and 4th for all percentiles, as Windwalker remains down near the bottom after the bug fixes (but there may be some good news there yet), so we'll be talking about both of those today. The other piece of big movement is Frost DKs, as they climbed pretty damn high, coming in 7th place from their previous 15th-ish spot! Retribution seems to have settled in to the middle of the pack after a really strong initial showing, and Frost Mages bounced back to their now regular spot under Fire.

95th percentile Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

All percentiles Mythic data by Warcraft Logs.

Other than Survival Hunter all specs actually got plenty of play this past week compared to previous ones, with only the always bottom Hunter spec as well as Demonology and Arcane dipping below the (approximate) 3,000 logs required to be consistent data.

Elemental Shaman by Stormy

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The major buffs to Elemental's cleave and AoE have unsurprisingly resulted in the spec doing significantly better damage on several fights in Castle Nathria. While 9.0.5 was only a slight buff to Elemental's single-target damage, Earthquake being buffed by 70% and Chain Lightning by 35% resulted in a drastic DPS increase on fights with a lot of cleave and AoE damage, most notably Stone Legion Generals where Elemental is now one of the strongest specs damage-wise, and to a lesser extent on Lady Inerva Darkvein. While some people are calling Elemental "overbuffed", I would argue that the size of these buffs reveals more about the state of the spec pre-patch than anything else. Earthquake was very underpowered when considering its downsides as a spell, downsides compounded by the Echoes of Great Sundering legendary.

Now that Elemental's spenders deal adequate damage, the spec's overall viability has skyrocketed in every type of content. While Elemental remains in many people's minds a black sheep spec, in that it doesn't have some of the most powerful tools other staple specs have such as damage immunities, key raid buffs or powerful tools such as Warlocks' gateway, the 9.0.5. patch gives them enough DPS to be serious contenders in most fight types, with Elemental's single-target being already solid before the patch. If the next raid has key fights that are similar in the nature of the required DPS to SLG or Lady Inerva, I would expect Elemental Shamans to be highly desirable at any level of progression.

Windwalker Monk by Babylonius

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This past week with the release of the 9.0.5 patch, Windwalkers saw several bugs fixed that resulted in a loss of damage: Storm, Earth, and Fire spirits no longer continue to channel Fists of Fury when you clip it and Mark of the Crane now functions correctly. This resulted in a 1-2% loss of single target damage and a 5-8% loss of damage on AOE/cleave fights where Windwalkers had previously been dominant.

On Thursday there were several more bugs that were fixed that resulted in an increase in damage, Fists of Fury now correctly hits 6 targets instead of 5 and Dance of Chi-Ji now correctly increases Spinning Crane Kick damage by 200%. However, by then many raiders and guilds had already cleared or done most of their raiding, which meant that those bug fixes that increased damage won't have a big effect on the logs until after the next reset.

Overall, Windwalker lost a small amount of damage in single target and a moderate amount in AOE/Cleave fights. The loss of AoE damage is what has the biggest effect on the overall damage "ranking" on WCL simply due to the larger numbers and Windwalkers previously being one of the dominant specs. Windwalker should bounce back slightly next reset as people get more used to the changes in the playstyle and the beneficial bug fixes get a new reset to have more effect on the damage meters.

And here's a look at Heroic this week as well, where Assassination has burst through out of nowhere and is in 3rd place, from its almost dead last spot before the patch. Interestingly Frost DKs  didn't move up at all in Heroic, while Elemental moved up much less than in Mythic:

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

[Skayan 52]

19 hours ago, Starym said:

Our guide writers will be taking a look at the biggest winner and biggest loser of the patch changes

Still the biggest loser is survival hunter which is on the bottom since rework in Legion

[Shadehallow 8]

The biggest issue with srv right now is you need to use ALL of your talents to make the spec playable and none of it is actually increasing the specs performance. Would love to see the recommended baseline spec of 2 Kill Commands, 2 Wildfire Bombs, Kill Command increasing Raptor Strikes damage, Wildfire Infusion, and possibly the Hydra's Bite talent being baked into the kit and creating talents to just increase numbers to at least get the spec on life support instead of dead in the gutter.