It’s time for our first proper look at the raid, and oh boy is it ever… specific. Most of the first week saw an extremely hard raid as even the top guilds faced a wall, even in Heroic! Many nerfs later, we’re still looking at difficult encounters, but there’s plenty of players going for it now at least. There are some patterns emerging, certainly, with Arcane and Arms doing extremely well. And with this week’s class tuning only buffing and not nerfing, they’re likely to stay on top for a while.
Do keep in mind these are still very early logs and don’t represent what the season might be like. Many players don’t have their set bonuses yet and the class tuning is still coming every week, including today!
Note: We are using normalized scores instead of raw DPS for the Warcraft Logs rankings. Normalized scores take into account the outlier boss fights where certain specs could stack massive DPS (due to the nature of the fight, whether it’s AoE spam or something else), which would then affect their overall score for the whole raid.
Note 2: Warcraft Logs bundled the Lair boss, Nymrissa Wavecaller, from the Tidebound Grotto into the Venomous Abyss rankings, which means the logs from here affect the overall rankings you can see below.
Heroic Venomous Abyss
We’re starting with the player numbers, and it’s looking a lot better than at the end of the season, as you’d expect, by about 5-6 times. Again, these are the Heroic stats, with the Mythic looking extremely barren, even for this very early part of the season.
We have a very nice array of diversity in the top 10, with no class repeating itself. Arcane is dominating by a large margin, which makes sense since it’s doing very well in the damage department as well. Arms’ popularity also seems to be performance-based, as it’s doing very well in the charts below. Unholy, on the other hand, is doing quite poorly in the damage department, but is still sitting in 3rd. Aside from the top two, the rest of the specs are pretty close together, all the way up until 10th place, where Shadow sees a large drop from Devourer’s 9th. Fire is the weirdest one here, as it’s at the very bottom, but is performing the best in the overall percentiles, so those few Fire Mages are doing really well.
Overall Damage 95th Percentile
Things are looking a little different here than we saw on day 1, but one constant is the absolute domination of Arcane. Arms moves all the way up into 2nd, with a whole lot of execute going on in the encounters. Marksmanship rises up a ton as well, claiming 3rd, while Devastation is still hanging in there two spots behind it, its resurgence holding strong. While Rogues fall a little compared to day 1, they’re still the only class to have two specs in the top 10. Subtlety gains one spot, but Outlaw drops out of the top 10, ten spots into 12th. Assassination makes it all better, though, rising from outside the top 10 and grabbing 6th. Fire closes out the top 10, with the few Mages playing it performing quite solidly.
Overall Damage All Percentiles
The top two remain the same here, with Arcane losing a bit of its huge lead from the top percentiles. Subtlety is ahead of Marksmanship, and Assassination is sandwiching the Hunter between two Rogues. Elemental and Shadow are in the bottom half of the top 10, but that’s still some good performance overall. Enhancement makes its way into 10th, making it two Rogues and two Shamans in the top 10.
The bottom 3 is the same as the top percentiles, with Frost DK, Augmentation, and Affliction languishing down there. Affliction and Frost are getting some buffs in this week’s tuning, but Aug is going to be sitting there for at least a while longer, after having dominated the end of the last season.
Damage to Bosses
The top 10 from the overall rankings is just slightly shuffled in the top 7 here, with Arms coming up on top and Assassination doing a lot better. Outlaw is a big outlier and moves up a lot, but it’s Unholy that makes the biggest splash, as it’s always been very strong in single target.
Individual Bosses
Nymrissa Wavecaller (Tidebound Grotto Lair)
Nymrissa is listed as belonging to the Venomous Abyss on WCLogs.
Vashnik the Malignant
Sszorak
The Twin Fangs
The Coiled Altar
Ula’tek
Ula’tek still has a relatively low number of logs, as he was an extremely difficult boss for a long time (even the top guilds had trouble killing it). Post-nerfs, it’s still very challenging, so it’ll take a while to get the same number of players killing it as Heroic bosses we’ve seen in the past
A Peek at Mythic
If you ever needed a poster reason for bringing back Heroic week with new patches, these numbers are it. As we can see an extremely low number of players dared venture into Mythic and managed to get any kills. The bosses were (and a lot still are) very hard, even post-many-nerfs, so players are just opting not to venture in at all. This may be the lowest week 1 Mythic participation we’ve seen basically ever, with 354 players being the top spec, which is still Arcane, and only three Frost and three Affliction players got anything done in the raid!
Overall Damage, All Percentiles
With the extremely low numbers above, the ones below aren’t exactly very relevant. Most of the logs below are also from the top guilds’ Mythic split raids, where they play with many helpers to gear up their main characters, so they’re certainly skewed and will be changing over the next week(s).
And, as always, you can check out our tier lists, our raid guides, and our class guides, updated with the latest changes! And for even more stats, head on over to Warcraft Logs.
