BIG SURPRISES! Midnight DPS Tier List in Raids

[00:05] dethroned and new kings have been crowned in raid when it comes to DPS specs and it's about time to look because we've been through what? Five, six tuning phases by the time the season started up until this point and things

[00:17] have definitely shifted. There are at least two specs that I couldn't believe they were set up the way they were and I want to figure out if you know which ones those are. Almost all specs are really good like everybody has cleared

[00:30] specs that haven't and that's going to alter their position in the tier list, because if we look at just raw damage across the board, you might see a different situation than, you know, if individual bosses and that's also going

[00:44] instance, let's take a look at Affliction as an example. We're going to put Affliction into B tier and if you look at the overall damage throughout the entire raid, Affliction is below average. However, it does have a couple

[00:57] of bosses where it really shines, where it's like at the top five, top 10. I you know, a solitary boss. That's a very important boss. It has one of the best trinkets in the season right now as gaze and if you're going to do that boss with

[01:10] good and no Affliction is that definitely good and the buffs are like a depending on when you're watching this video. So, I'm assuming that we could probably see more with Affliction. We just don't have the data just quite yet.

[01:26] Arms Warrior has also been improving, of course, since the beginning of the season depending on how up-to-date you are with Arms and has received a bunch of buffs as well. Now, I want to put it in front of Affliction because overall

[01:39] damage across the board. I don't think it has any particular moments where it situational good moments. For instance, I'm thinking Soul of the Dark Cleave with the orbs, the dragon cleave in last phase, but you

[01:53] know, that's a lot of specs can also do that as well. Obviously, whenever from doing quite a bit of damage. Sweeping Strikes is just really, really, damage as well, as opposed to other specs that might have to ramp that up.

[02:08] specs that might have to ramp that up. One curious case is Assassination. Um statistically speaking, Rogues are ranked pretty highly based off of their tier. That was initially when I looked at this. But, Assassination is one of

[02:21] the specs that hasn't yet cleared in the logs at the very least Mythic Midnight call it. If you look at the rankings, a lot of the specs are doing decent Assassination as of recording this video there anyway. Maybe the Assassination

[02:36] Rogues are swapping to a different Rogue spec or maybe a different class. As it right now, but in the fights that Assassination has been present, it's been doing really well. So, I can only assume that when Mythic Luro is being

[02:49] figured out, maybe we'll see Assassination in that fight. So, I'm the season for sure, but the fact that it's still displayed and we haven't seen Initially, I had it in B tier. We're going to put it into C tier.

[03:02] Augmentation Evoker is very average across the board with one or two exceptions that we really need to point out. And that exception is Mythic Vanguard. The three balance where Augmentation just blasts the performance

[03:18] out of the park. This is not like necessarily an early boss. You can kind of consider this a mid-tier boss. Plus, Envoy's Spars is the second to last through Mythic Vanguard. And Mythic Vanguard has some best items for some of

[03:31] the specs. I would know because my Devourer has the sword there, the best haste mastery intellect sword in the game. So, you want that boss to be done. And it's a very difficult boss, especially for a lot of melee DPS specs.

[03:45] situations where there's a lot of restrictions as to what your group composition can be, those would in my eyes would rank even higher. Of course, because this is like one fight out of like eight or nine where augmentation is

[03:59] good. The rest of the fights it's it's okay. It's it's fine. Balance Druid is also around A tier, I feel like. It has a lot of fights where two where it's actually at the bottom in terms of like damage performance, but I

[04:13] think over the years balance has evolved to actually be a decent raid Druid is also doing really well in our mythic progression, so I mean, I can only put it right here. I don't I think that this is also slightly generous

[04:28] to have it right here. But with all this being said, the damage to bosses is It's just that its damage is just very flexible. Then you have a lot of fights where there's spread damage output, and Balance especially excels at that

[04:42] situation. Obviously, dragons is one example cuz they're just always split apart for I don't know, 80 70 80% of the time. You have adds in Chimeras, which eventually get stacked, but it depends. It's It's also a little bit

[04:55] chaotic since Eyes of the Vault, I don't get to fully do full AoE on all of the adds from zero to 100 all the time. As the tank starts to gather them up, I one, and there's other specs that go through that. Balance does not, so

[05:09] that's a really good thing to have in your raid. A surprise has been Arcane Mage. Consistently at the bottom of the rankings and the DPS meters from a lot of situations, Arcane actually shines

[05:22] really highly in Crown of the Cosmos. In the Aluriel fight, it's statistically speaking right now the best DPS spec. I think last time that we seen this Shadow Priest was there by a long shot, and Shadow Priest hasn't really been nerfed.

[05:36] buffed, either. And it's been just overtaking Shadow Priest. And this is interesting to see when people probably figured out how to apply Arcane to a difficult encounter, and we're seeing the results as of now. That's not enough

[05:49] to rank it any higher in our honest opinion. Overall, it's a pretty mid to to be really really honest, but the fact that it's king at a very pinnacle fight

[06:01] a bunch of tiers, cuz initially we probably would have put it into D tier if we were going to rank it based off of the majority of the raid bosses, right? With this one exception being the outlier.

[06:15] Beast mastery is also pretty mid. Again, you would look at beast mastery on a maybe a very underwhelming spec, but it does have, let's say, kind of like balance the flexibility of the spec, which is always inherent to beast

[06:28] rotation on the move, with there being a lot of movement on, I don't know, let's say Fasal Khadar. You want to be flexible with moving from one target to another, doing AoE on the little orbs, doing big single target on the big orbs,

[06:42] cleave. I feel like beast mastery does have the damage profile that's relatively flexible for those types of encounters, if you so play your beast of the way, there's not much to say about beast mastery. To be fair, with

[06:56] simplified that it doesn't really have any outstanding niches outside of its flexibility, so we cannot really look at it from any other point of view. There's from. Demonology, a former king, kind of still

[07:10] retains its king spot, the first S tier spec of today. It's just been very targets with with the nerfs that we've been having in the last month, but that still wasn't enough to knock it out of the

[07:23] park, considering that all raid fights this season have some form of AoE. Now, there are particular phases of particular raid fights where it's pure single target damage. Not sure demonology can keep up, but it banks up

[07:37] so much damage overall that it just makes up for it. This is one of those a really good rate here spec and I guess it deserves its S-tier place.

[07:49] Destruction overall is actually decently high in the raid in terms of pure raw damage output. Again, we have a lot of situational bosses and niche cases where destruction will shine and some one some that it will not shine in. One such

[08:04] example is mythic dragons where we can take a closer look where in any other point in time in WoW's history, uh mythic dragons would have probably seen course, that's not the case this season and this is why we're kind of putting it

[08:18] into B-tier. If as a destruction warlock you cannot out DPS everybody on dragons to target well of course you have some ads, but you know >> [gasps] >> If you cannot make that happen, it's

[08:33] be fair, it's very hard to compete with devourer and we're going to get to that in a second since a lot of the devourer damage is it's a lot of ads. I want to say pad, but I'll take the P out just as a courtesy for you guys for the

[08:47] hard to compete with overall, but the profile is still there. Of course, it's still, but it's good that even in some of the niches you are at least above above average. Fire mage on the other hand hasn't seen

[09:04] a good day in almost two expansions. I have a secret project on the side where I play fire mage because I know for a fact I don't really that the devs are looking to rework this because if they don't, this is the biggest joke in the

[09:18] C-tier. It's not the end of the world. Fire mage does have its moments of shining in the raid. It's kind of like beast mastery in a sense where you can profile. You don't have control over it

[09:32] going to play pyroblast into ignite spread. I would be surprised if flame strike of any sorts would be really good in raid. Might maybe in burst of AoE. Maybe Chimeras could probably see that place

[09:45] the strength of fire mage is being able to convert pure burst single target damage into cleave, which is what this raid also does really well and what a well. But still, even with that being said, I feel like fire mage has just

[10:00] been put to the side for too many patches in a row. But that leaves space for frost mage to shine and we love it when an underdog spotlight, which is basically this season's of S-tier. You'll see the rest

[10:16] of them are coming soon. And this is frost mage. I absolutely love the fact that frost mage is so good on so many fights. It is incredible to see the split cleave, which it was once, let's say, destruction territory. Actually

[10:30] would think that splitting ice, at least I would think that splitting ice would be the main reason why frost mage is so good, but it's just pure shatter damage, which of course now shows up separately. It might have been if this was, let's

[10:44] Dragonflight, it might have been still splitting ice because back then shatter was just an empowerment of your spells, not a separate damage event that you now can see in your damage meters. But now you can see it in the damage meters and

[10:56] it does a lot of damage. And it is cool because it is the crux of the frost mage rework. And frost mage has kind of been really good on the trading damage in the sims on raid bosses for quite a while and it's finally nice to see it at the

[11:09] top once again. Marksmanship is more or less the definition of a mid spec. I want to put it a little bit lower than B-tier, but I just honestly can't. The only real fight where it's decently good, where it

[11:22] might, you know, shine a little bit is in Imperator, which is the first boss this season, the easiest boss so far. So it's It's really impressive that it's doing really well there. I mean, it's good. I mean, you

[11:34] probably want to be good on one fight at the very least, but every other fight it's either mid or below average. Now, normally B and C tier are mid and below average is about D. However, it's still doing really well. I think it's also

[11:46] clearing Midnight Falls at the moment, which is why I will put it a little bit of ahead of assassination since they're both kind of a little bit of a mid mid spec. And it's kind of weird to think of what you're supposed to expect from

[12:00] Marksmanship considering that they've been a little bit of a wacky situation. They've recently recovered a bunch of spells with an explosive shot. I I'm not Marksmanship considering statistically speaking Beast Mastery and Survival are

[12:14] are a lot of other better range DPS specs, period. It's a weird state to be necessarily recoverable. We might just see Marksmanship be this way until the end of the season. Outlaw Rogue is one of the better Rogue

[12:28] specs out there, and ooh, that's not Outlaw Rogue. This is Outlaw Rogue. And it's also a spec that has cleared Mythic Midnight Falls on on Lura as opposed to fights where it's actually really good across the board. Nothing necessarily

[12:43] that shines out of the ordinary. Rogue is more or less of a mid class with the odd exception of certain fights where it's above average, and I think that deserves to put Outlaw into A tier. You do need Rogues this season, and I'm

[12:56] pretty sure that Subtlety is a little bit worse and has fights where it's actually really close to the bottom. So, that kind of makes considering that it's kind of the only Rogue spec that is consistently good

[13:09] across the board, which is why we elected to put it into A tier. A surprise that we kind of slightly called at the beginning of the season, and it just keeps up improve keeps on improving is Survival being an S tier

[13:22] spec. Who would have thought that to happen? When was the last time? Never. Never, actually. It had never happened before and bonsai for survival hunter. before and bonsai for survival hunter. This is a really unusual raid DPS

[13:35] ranking because we don't really see these current issue specs in issue this this season and about balance being all over the place with specs. And [laughter] maybe they're just the regular S and A

[13:48] currently anymore cuz obviously we're seeing specs like survival actually do And to those people I say, "How about you look at the overall damage output in the entire raid and see that survival, as of this week, or at least as of

[14:03] recording this video, is number one. Take that." Devastation started really strong this season and has dipped quite a bit with a bunch of nerfs that it had. I think it was they were really, really early into

[14:16] the season. I don't even remember exactly what they were, but it was, I exactly what they were, but it was, I think, broken, man. And we now see it in a B tier, below augmentations, since it doesn't have the shining spotlight that

[14:29] augmentation has. And devastation's damage profile is actually really decent. If all else would be equal, if the tuning would be nice, scale commander can offer you really nice spread, not spread, but stacked cleave,

[14:41] rather, with your disintegrate being mass disintegrate and all of that. While decent burst and probably high consistent damage with you consistently eating up those fire breath ticks. When it comes to the damage, it's still a

[14:55] relatively short range DPS specs. It's not that bad since most fights, at least have done some of them as well on our end, kind of wants range DPS to be relatively closer to a boss, maybe outside Vanguard, where you want range

[15:11] DPS to be in certain positions to kind of bait Chaplin to come and do her shield. And I don't know if that affects fire breath that badly, but I mean, at the end of the day, it still beats you, so it's still average, slightly above

[15:23] average, slightly below average. It's average. A former king, still kind of like a king, but now it's not a solitary king. As with wow things, he's now part of a council of S tiers. Devour Demon Hunter,

[15:37] my main, and a spec that's been really turning heads in raids across the board. Now, I do want to mention this that Devour does have a lot of damage output. However, a lot of that damage comes with adds and AoE damage burst, because if

[15:51] you look at damage done to bosses, I'm pretty sure Devour is either last or close to being last in terms of damage done to individual bosses. It is insane. However, if you look at fights like Kamers, where it's still Devour's best

[16:04] damage source, where you 100% have meta for every ad phase. That is just really good. That just funnels into that damage. And I mentioned back I I I don't know at which class we're talking about, but when it comes to dragons, the top

[16:18] Devours are just out DPSing everybody by a long shot, because 30, 40, 50, 60, 70% of their damage is fully goes on void orbs. At least the Devours that are parsing the highest, and the Devours are probably having their entire raid raid

[16:32] team just ignore the ads, so that they can just do incredible void orb damage. say it's not funny, but it is a little bit funny. Now, I don't want to say that Devour's damage is pads. Pretty much all ads this tier are very important to take

[16:47] down, and usually that's not an issue, because everybody just has so much inherent AoE that ads naturally die really quickly. This tier, however, we do have timings and phases that are revolving around ads dying faster or

[17:01] slower. So, specs like Devour probably have a more inherent value baked into away and make ads just like an afterthought, then I think Devour probably drop about two tiers. Elemental across the board has been

[17:15] output, especially if you look at the Archon rankings that just averages out the DPS output of all of the specs and then just ranks the specs accordingly. least as of recording this video. However, if you look at Midnight Falls

[17:30] and Lorna, you'll see Elemental very high in the damage output, especially if you rank it by, you know, the top parsers. It is close to being like that alone might warrant its place into A tier, although I don't really want to

[17:44] of one really good fight. Even though it's the most important fight of the it's the most important fight of the season, and because it's so below mid across the board, I think being good at Midnight Falls

[17:56] where I want to put it. It's not a bad spec, of course. You do want your Elemental Shamans. It's statistically better than Enhancement. And speaking of, we're going to put

[18:08] exactly where in B tier. Don't Don't look at the order of the order in B tier. Normally, we use the order to also showcase the value of it, but there's so hard to pinpoint exactly the exact value between each one, like how good they

[18:22] are. They're just above average here. Enhancement actually is not doing as well as Elemental, and in a bunch of fights, it's actually below average. However, it does have some shining moments. Two of the fights in particular

[18:34] where Enhancement seems to be good is Imperator Averzain, Averzian, whatever, which is the first fight of the raid. And again, it's not a fight that will influence its place in too much, but Dragons is actually doing surprisingly

[18:46] well. It's way above average, especially for a melee spec, and that's great to see since those are also a very crucial fight. I was going to say bosses. I guess those are bosses. Those are not fights, singular, plural, whatever,

[18:58] And Dragons are, you know, where you drop your stairen, stairen is the trinket that a lot of the casters really, really, really, really want. So, it's a fight that you want to absolutely blast out of the park. But, there are a

[19:12] lot of other fights where it's usually a little bit average. Although it feels of other fights. So, this is where we can put it. I don't think it's A tier material just yet considering that on Mythic Laura, it's pretty close to the

[19:25] bottom, but at least it has cleared Mythic Laura, which is why it is at for the very least above assassination. A bottom tier spec though is feral, and we don't see feral actually shine in one particular season. Maybe it's going to

[19:40] be next season, but as it stands right now, it's just overall meh. Overall across the raid, it's the lowest damage dealing spec in the entire game, and on Kumerus also kind of like a crucial boss, it's also fairly low as well. So,

[19:55] it has one too many faults there. But even with that being said, I cannot considering that it's clearing a lot of the Mythic bosses, and on a bunch of and balance is currently A tier. So, it's kind of like a back and forth on a

[20:10] lot of these fights. Maybe this is one of the best raid tiers because it puts out so many niche situations where a lot of specs can have at least one moment where they shine, and that kind of keeps them from from reaching F tier. Did I

[20:24] spoil the rest of the video? Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but this is something that I did not suspect. I was going to say that me the most, but I guess I kind of gave it away at this point. Dude, what is

[20:39] think there's a lot to say about Frost Death Knight. Currently, I think it's the holder of the most amount of boss damage across the board by a long margin, and it's been starting to do really high damage on a lot of fights.

[20:53] [ __ ] yay for Frost DK. And the buffs that it's been receiving that we have covered by the way have been so tiny. I don't know what's going on, but I mean, last year as well. So, I guess now we're just seeing where its rightful place is

[21:07] supposed to be. Is it ahead or behind on Holly? We'll see. where it has a couple of issues where it's doing really well. I think it's the proud owner of the lowest boss damage in the entire raid tier. Uh I'm pretty

[21:23] where it's actually really good. I'm I think on Chimaeras it's doing really well. Actually no. No, on Chimaeras it's pretty poop. I think Dragons is its only really good fight and even there it kind of loses to Arms. I think Fury doesn't

[21:37] deserve A tier. We have changed our mind. We have bumped Fury back into B tier. This is terrible. To be fair, Fury has received some weird tuning this season and I I feel like its kit just doesn't match the raid tier. If

[21:51] anything, this kind of contradicts what I just said like two specs ago where To be fair, it does have one fight where it's good, but it's consistently way more worse than a lot of other specs. At least it's not C tier. It has a lot of

[22:04] fights where it's mid um mid or rather, you know, average across the board. So, I guess that maybe keeps it into B tier. Havoc has lost the spotlight hard to Devourer and it's kind of a shame because the reward that we received in

[22:19] Midnight is actually really fun with double blade dance from your eye beam channels, the big eye beam channels from your the hunt. It's actually really fun. It does have above average, let's say, performance,

[22:33] but it doesn't really shine anywhere else. Now, I'm not sure if that's out there are just playing Devourer period and you don't funnel a lot of demon hunter skill into Havoc cuz you just take it into Devourer. So, maybe

[22:46] over the course of the entire season and all of the raid fights is just okay. sometimes a little bit worse than okay. So, I guess that's just what B tier means. Ret paladin doesn't fail to surprise

[23:00] that it's not as bad of a spec as people make it mean it sometimes. We at the very least and it's not the god tier spec that people also claim it to be. stories that any spec in the game has had considering that up until

[23:14] doing serious for quite a while. Up until Dragonflight Ret has been abysmal. And ever since it's been reworked, it's either been S tier, A reworked, it's either been S tier, A tier, or at the very worst B tier. So at

[23:28] average, which is a very good situation to be in and I think if all specs could learn something from Ret Paladin is be good. Be a little bit better than good and that's that's okay, which is great to see. Um

[23:43] I love the fantasy of Ret Paladin. I remember the days when Ret Paladins were struggling and they were using bubble to be able to do damage while their wings were up. I remember those days cuz Marcelian was playing Ret Paladin and it

[23:55] was always hilarious seeing him struggle to deal damage because every mechanic killed Ret's damage. Now we're just seeing what, let's say, a good spec design can accomplish. I believe uh formally we've had Shadow

[24:08] Priest into S tier, but now it's just A tier um as it was dethroned from Chronocosmos by Arcane, it kind of lost a little bit of juice from it and we haven't seen it do a lot of stuff. I think it all they also got nerfed,

[24:22] little bit of the damage to Psychic Link a little bit. They they Shadow that I don't know exactly what it's supposed to be. To be fair, it's above average. It is a Priest. You are likely going to still run some

[24:36] getting Shadow Priests as well, you do have multiple sources of PI and PI works for a lot of cool classes and that's that's really great. Subtlety will get a B tier and not A tier because of a couple of reasons.

[24:50] bosses, which I didn't mention this earlier, it's actually below Assassination. However, it did clear Midnight Falls and it is one of the better rogues on Crown of Cosmos as well. But overall, past that is just

[25:03] below average across the board. So, that kind of keeps it a little bit of a float that it has a couple of really important bosses where it's doing decently well. I still believe that Outlaw, statistically speaking, is a better rogue spec. But

[25:16] shines really well. In normal situations, since I've also that with the rework of subtlety, we will still see that. It does does have burst. It has really good burst. But it even lost the the position of king of

[25:31] even close. And another king that kind of has been dethroned is unholy by frost. Can you imagine that? If you look at Voracious, for instance, you will see that unholy

[25:45] is actually doing really well with frost all together. But outside of that, it's think the single target hits that it received about two or three weeks ago really took their toll. And I think it was also AoE hits, to be fair.

[26:00] And it definitely has seen unholy struggle a little bit when it comes to damage in raids. Actually, scratch that. Upon checking the data once again, its damage to bosses is actually really high. It is really high really high

[26:13] damage to bosses. And having a lot of damage to bosses is really good. But it pretty low. >> [music] average. It's consistently above average, which is why we see it into A

[26:27] >> [music] >> I don't know if necessarily it's better than arms, but it did lose a lot of its spots to to frost on a lot of the important fights, even Mythic Aura, Midnight Falls. It's still below below

[26:42] frost considerably. It's great great that it has boss damage. Maybe that's lot of the fights are just taking adds into consideration, is are we ranking specs based based off of boss damage? It's a very good spec

[26:55] nonetheless. So, keep playing Unholy, you kings. And lastly, we're going to we're going to take this guy.

[27:08] tier. I don't know what's going on with Windwalker because I've opened up the logs, the data, the boss fights, the damage, I'll put in the averages, and Windwalker's just very high. So, what's it currently third in terms of damage

[27:23] across the board? It's third on Mythic Loa. It's It's second or third on a lot of the end game bosses across the board. This is statistically a really good spec. This is better than the Varo. I would say. I think if If all else is

[27:39] equal, I would rather have a Windwalker in my raid than a Varo because it's just consistently, at least for play by the best players in the world, above above almost everybody else. It's not king in any particular fight, but it's not below

[27:55] third, fourth, maybe at worst fifth DPS in any important parts of the raid. And maybe this is the actual good spec that you want this season that just doesn't really seem to have a bad day. I mean, it had plenty going up until it got

[28:09] buffed, and I don't know if the rework to Zenith giving it Zenith stomp cuz I buffed. Quite decent buffs, but I feel like that's the biggest thing that happened, and maybe that's what propelled it to be

[28:22] the king of the season right now in terms of the raids of DPS. Is this going to keep on keeping on? We'll have to see if we ever come back to this cuz uh we do have another raid coming in 1207, so [music] we will have to look at the that

[28:34] oh again. And until that happens, do you know why the Varo is so high? Are you not doing damage with your the Varo? Well, that means you have to look at our video where all, go explaining as to how

[28:47] I learned to do damage with Devour and what it takes to actually do damage with in terms of performance in the hands of a lot of other people. So, maybe you can like, "Oh my god, man. I just cannot out DPS this guy."