Arcane and Elemental Turbo Busted – The War Within Season 3 DPS Rankings for Mythic Manaforge Omega Week 10

Porom

Hilariously, Arcane was nerfed 3% in the most recent tuning, however, despite this hit, Arcane has still continued to do very, very well in Manaforge Omega. While only being the top spec among high performers for one boss, Arcane is among the top performers for most fights, especially the last two where Arcane is one of the strongest specs for overall damage both in a mechanical sense (phase 2 for Nexus King and Dimensius, largely due to the strength of Resonance). But most importantly, there isn’t a single encounter where Arcane is below the average, ultimately when your strength is funnel, execute, and burst, it’s very easy to find solid footing in raid encounters.

Another major strength of Arcane this season, and in other seasons as well, has been the power of flexible cooldowns and of being one of the only specs in the game who can handle certain timings due to Shifting Power which puts our major cooldowns on an 80-second cadence. This really enables a lot of specifically good timings this season, for example, on Nexus King, you get a Arcane Surge twice in p1, then it lines up perfectly as the the raid moves to platforms, then again on the vulnerability, then execute on the main boss after.

These have been the root of Arcane’s success the last 2 expansions, dominating Manaforge Omega, Nerub-Ar Palace, Abberrus, and Vault of the Incarnates, and having a solid showing in both Amirdrassil and, after some tuning, Liberation of Undermine. However, it is worth calling out here that this is changing drastically in Midnight. Resonance is being nerfed substantially, Sunfury Execution is being reworked to no longer provide execute damage, and Arcane Bombardment, Siphon Storm, and Shifting Power are all 3 being removed. This leaves Arcane with a large deficit in burst and funnel and completely removes execute and it will be interesting to see if they can manage to maintain Arcane’s relevance without these niches that are what has been primarily responsible for it’s dominance. So while the getting is good now, there’s reason to believe this won’t maintain it’s trajectory going into the next expansion.

Whispyr

Assassination is one of the best specs in Manaforge Omega after the Turbo Boost patch, after a weak showing previously in the tier. This comes down to two core changes:

1. Bugfixing Fatebound Coin (Heads), resulting in a damage increase
2. Boss Kills times being faster than ever, with less add damage available to pad

The bugfix to the Heads coin is a simple 3-4% damage increase for Fatebound, which is the Hero Talent of choice in Raids. Previously, the Heads coin did not apply its initial damage increase effect, making the coin significantly weaker in practice.

Bosses dying faster is a bit more esoteric and indicates a greater shift amongst the Rogue specs. Subtlety’s main strength early in progression was a damage profile that leaned heavily into its burst, especially for AoE situations such as Forgeweaver Araz, Nexus King Salhadaar, and Dimensius. With these adds dying much faster, there is simply less AoE available, and Assassination’s stronger single-target is now having its time to shine.

HawkCorrigan

With 11.2.5. slowly settling down and being represented properly in logs, Elemental shakes out as the silent beneficiary of the changes of the patch.

If we try to look at the changes that Elemental itself received for the patch, we will be very quickly disappointed. There were no changes to the spec at all. The only notable thing here is the extra two upgrade levels for all items, which does benefit us quite a bit, with our good scaling with secondary stats, but not exceptionally so in comparison to other specs, and doesn’t really kick into effect yet with the crest cap still being in place.

So, what exactly is the reason for Elementals’ sudden rise to fame? It ends up not being the changes we got but the changes everyone else got: Frost Death Knight, Arcane Mage, and both Ranged Hunter specs got quite significant nerfs that allowed us to scooch past them and settle in comfortably ahead.

A few other things are also coming together to give Elemental a light edge over its competition: We can convert secondary and primary stats relatively well and benefit from being able to run a cantrip effect this tier in the form of the Voidglass Kris.

The last thing I could mention is that Elemental is a heavily burst-reliant spec since the rework. With fights becoming shorter, we end up with higher uptime on our cooldowns, which further pushes our DPS ahead. This is amplified by the amount of damage amps and “padding phases” in this raid, where either the boss is taking increased damage, or adds are spawning that we can farm some additional damage on.

All in all, Elemental seems to benefit from three main points: Reasonable Scaling, A damage profile that benefits shorter fights, and most of all, dodging the nerf hammer that hit everyone that most specs that were ahead of us.