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Phase 1 WotLK Classic Warcraft Logs Analysis
Wrath
Geposted
17.01.2023 um 20:35
von
Simonize
With
Ulduar releasing on January 19th at 3 PM PST
, we can look back at class performance in the first phase of raiding in Wrath of the Lich King Classic - Naxxramas, Sartharion, and Malygos. When it comes to boss damage, there is no doubt that Phase 1 of Wrath of the Lich King Classic has been the age of the Unholy Death Knight. The
Gargoyle beschwören
is immensely powerful and players have mastered the techniques to get the absolute most damage out of this ability possible. Both Warlocks and Rogues are top contenders as well with each class having two strong talent specializations to choose from.
For this analysis we have used data from
Warcraft Logs Statistics
pages for Naxxramas, Sartharion, & Malygos, accessed on 1/5/2023. We are interested in the maximum potential of each class, so we are looking at the 95th percentile of representatives of each class, or the top 5%. 19 out of 20 players will not produce this much raw damage output, but usually the relative power level of the classes does not shift very much when moving down to players closer to median performance.
Warcraft Logs Naxxramas, Sartharion, & Malygos Statistics Page
Naxxramas, Sartharion, & Malygos Boss DPS Rankings
Naxxramas, Sartharion, & Malygos Boss Damage
It is clear from the data that the top competitive classes are the Death Knights, Rogues, and Warlocks in Phase 1. While the Death Knights have only one top specialization with Unholy, both the Rogues and the Warlocks each have two different specializations that are competitive at a top level. We'll talk about each of those in a little more detail.
Death Knights
The Unholy Death Knight is inherently a cooldown based class that relies heavily on the power of
Gargoyle beschwören
for the bulk of its damage output. This spell "snapshots" or "checks" the players attack power and melee haste at the time the Gargoyle is summoned and then uses those values to determine the attack speed and damage of the Gargoyle's main attack for its entire 30 second duration - without updating them again if the player's attack power or haste changes. A good Unholy Death Knight knows how to stack a large amount of temporary buffs all at once and bring that Gargoyle out during the second or two where all their buffs are active.
On longer boss encounters the impact of the massive burst damage is less significant and the dominance of the Gargoyle begins to wane. There are two particular encounters in Naxxramas that massively disadvantage Unholy Death Knights which are Thaddius and Loatheb. Both of these encounters are generally longer encounters and offer special buffs to players that massively increase their damage output. Neither of the buffs in these encounters increase the player's attack power or haste so these buffs do not benefit or transfer to a Gargoyle. This drags down the average for the Unholy Death Knights compared to a more "standard" boss like Patchwerk or Gluth where their dominance is much more obvious.
On January 6th Blizzard announced their intention to make an adjustment to the
Gargoyle beschwören
spell in an effort to reduce its power which you can read about
here
. At the time of writing this article, Blizzard is uncertain how they will adjust this spell but it is clear that they believe Unholy Death Knights need a reduction in power.
Warlocks
For Warlocks the two competitive specializations are Demonology and Affliction and each specializations has different strengths. Demonology has an edge when it comes to overall boss and trash damage, with 75 of the top 100 overall damage performances for Warlocks being from Demonology Warlocks. The power of the
Teufelswache beschwören
's
Spalten
and the
Metamorphose
's
Feuerbrandaura
play a large part in the strength of Demonology for overall boss and trash damage in a raid, giving them many tools to deal damage to large groups of enemies.
Affliction has a slight advantage when it comes to pure boss damage with a small 1.9% lead over Demonology at the 95th percentile. Similar to the Unholy Death Knight, Affliction Warlocks will try to "snapshot" a
Verderbnis
with many buffs active at the time of casting it and use their
Immerwährende Gebrechen
talent to refresh and preserve that very powerful instance of Corruption for the entire fight. Something that separates Affliction warlocks from other classes and specializations is the absurd power boost they get when their target is low health thanks to
Umarmung des Todes
and
Seelendieb
. Affliction warlock has arguably the strongest "execute phase" DPS of any class in the game.
Rogues
The Rogues have two very good talent choices as well with both Assassination and Combat being competitive choices for the class. Unlike the Warlocks with a nearly 50/50 split between Demonology and Affliction players, Warcraft Logs has recorded approximately nine times as many Assassination players as Combat players - 2,238,473 Assassination uploads to only 250,160 Combat uploads. With such alarming differences, you might assume that Combat is obviously a weaker talent specialization but those same logs show an advantage of only 0.8% for Assassination over Combat. Both talent specializations are capable of putting out far more damage than the majority of other classes and specializations in the game.
The popularity of Assassination is due in part to the simplicity of performing well with that specialization. The rotation is remarkably simple and there are no complicated snapshots, convoluted mechanics, or precise cooldown timings that need to be mastered in order to perform well. A simple rotation allows you to focus more attention on making sure you are doing fight mechanics properly which is especially relevant when learning or progressing on new encounters.
Combat on the other hand is a more tricky specialization to perform well with. It involves three very powerful cooldowns
Klingenwirbel
,
Adrenalinrausch
, and
Mordlust
and juggling two or three different buffs and debuffs while managing random resource generation. Due to the amazingly powerful Blade Flurry, Combat excels in situations where they can deal damage to multiple targets at once. Generally speaking Combat is equally powerful to Assassination but more difficult to execute to its full potential.
Top Ranked Performances
Another way to compare damage is to look at the single best performances of anyone of the entire tier rather than percentile rankings. This is a very skewed representation showing teams and players that go above and beyond to maximize boss damage and sometimes designing strategies specifically around the ranking system itself. It is a fun look at some of the most absurd things players can come up with.
Many top individual performances come from
this log
, aptly titled "The Final CN DK Carnival: 终局之战 " (translated: "End Game") by the Chinese horde guild <无上清凉> (translated: "Supremely Cool") on the 震地者 server. This log is truly absurd, going absolutely bare minimum on tanking, healing, and buff/debuff support roles to fit in 15 Unholy Death Knights.
<无上清凉>'s Patchwerk DPS Log
This results in a 31 second kill of Anub'rekhan as their fastest boss kill with essentially zero healers - just four
Lichtblitz
cast by a Retribution Paladin. Their kill of Patchwerk is the fastest in the world at the time of writing with a 1 minute 13 second kill time, 4 seconds ahead of second place at 1 minute 17 seconds. This kill has all 15 Unholys over 10,000 DPS, 9 of them over 11,000 DPS, and the top two pushing past the 12,000 DPS mark.
Faction Balance
There is a particular issue of faction imbalance in Phase 1 of Wrath of the Lich King. It is plain as day that the troll racial
Berserker
and orc racial
Kochendes Blut
are simply stronger than the alternatives offered by Alliance races for damage output. We can use some data from Warcraft Logs to help understand really how big the gap is between the power of Horde vs Alliance. This is visible clearly in boss damage rankings where we see the highest rated Alliance player for boss damage is ranked 210th and only 66 Alliance players in the top 1000 players for boss damage. For Naxxramas speedruns, you have 17 of the fastest 50 recorded runs being Alliance runs and the rest being Horde.
Some people would argue that "everyone knows Horde are better, so the better players switched to Horde". This is certainly true that some players would do this which diminishes the pool of skilled players competing as Alliance. That certainly factors in, but I do not believe that alone explains this disparity of performance. Please let us know in the comments what you think about the faction balance in Wrath of the Lich King Classic!
Speed Clears of Naxxramas
The current world record for a full clear of Naxxramas stands at 39 minutes and 38 seconds at the time of writing. This record is held by the unstoppable guild <none of the above> from Gehennas (EU). Close on their tails is <Progress> of Firemaw (EU) with a 39 minute and 49 second clear. Aside from those two, eleven other guilds have managed a sub-45 minute clear of Naxxramas.
Speedrunning is a very different way of pushing the limits of this game compared to focusing on boss damage. In speedrunning your damage to trash mobs is just as relevant as your damage to bosses. Your skill and coordination as a team are tested in efficiently routing the dungeon and efficiently gathering the mobs that need to be killed. A nonlinear raid like Naxxramas offers a lot of room for new and different strategies when it comes to speed running.
One of the biggest innovations has to do with one of the most boring bosses in the raid - Gothik the Harvester. When you engage this boss, you have to fight waves of trash mobs for about 4 minutes. For a well organized raid, this is a complete snooze where many players would be idle. The innovation here comes in two parts - pulling enemies beyond Gothik into his room and fighting them during the encounter, and also running past enemies before Gothik and dragging them into the encounter as well.
The top level speed running teams don't stop at just pulling trash mobs into the Gothik encounter. The top teams actually drag the first boss of the wing, Instructor Razuvious, into Gothik and kill him during the 4 minute trash waves part of Gothik the Harvester. With this strategy, the team makes full use of the time they are locked into fighting waves of trash during Gothik. If you would like to see this and many other amazing strategies, you can see this great video from Holypalaswez of <none of the above> in a 39:47 run:
<none of the above>'s 39:47 clear of Naxxramas, Holypalaswez POV
Looking Forward to Ulduar
Ulduar is a drastically different raid than Naxxramas and it will likely shake up the raiding scene. With the proposed nerfs to Unholy Death Knights combined with generally longer fight durations, they'll certainly be much less prevalent. Both Warlocks and Rogues are expected to remain as top competitive damage dealers in Ulduar. New fight mechanics like the strong preference for caster DPS on Hodir could bring some of the under utilized caster classes to greater prominence. Massively buffed items may see powerful scaling classes like Warriors rising in the ranks - but will they rise enough to compete with the current top performers? Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments! I'm very excited to see how Ulduar shakes things up in the raiding scene.
About the Author
Simonize
is a long-time Rogue player from original Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King. Primarily focused on PvE, he is the author of rogue gear comparison spreadsheets for Classic Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King. If you enjoy Simonize's work, you can join his
Discord
or follow him on
Twitch
and
Youtube
.
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