Latest DPS chart outlines Dragonflight’s biggest balancing problem

Since launching on November 28, 2022, Dragonflight has, just like any World of Warcraft expansion, been all about DPS, healer, and tank tier lists as players try to minmax their teamcomps. But, now that season one is coming to a close, one of the final DPS charts we’ll see is showing exactly what’s wrong with Dragonflight‘s balancing. 

On April 24, one player shared a DPS chart on WoW’s subreddit based on Warcraft Logs. It reveals the true state of DPS classes in a raid environment and shows the biggest balancing problem Dragonflight has. At the very top are Unholy Death Knights who got lucky with hefty buffs on April 11 that increased the viability of Army of the Dead, Gargoyle Strike, and Clawing Shadows. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Windwalker Monks, barely able to tickle bosses.

Discussing this drastic discrepancy between these two specs, one WoW player nailed down the exact problem of Dragonflight balancing.

“I think the biggest problem is the balance between specs that can do both single target, cleave and AoE with one build. And then there are the specs that can only do one of those at a time at a slightly higher level. Windwalker might perform better in some rare niche cases but this raid does not really fit that niche well. Unholy is just stacked with a ton of really powerful CDs that fit any scenario and scaled the best with PI at the same time,” the WoW player explained.

So, while Beast Mastery Hunters have to drastically change their talent build from boss to boss, Unholy Death Knights can essentially use one and the same build for almost all encounters while still topping the DPS charts in single-target and AoE scenarios.

In Patch 10.1, coming out on May 2, Blizzard is shipping major changes to mechanics including combat, healing, and interrupt, but no trace of anything that would fix the problem of some specs having the luxury of single-target and AoE DPS in one build while others drastically lose DPS depending on their builds. Hopefully for players, this problem will soon raised health with and the discrepancy between spec DPS overall and on bosses won’t be that big.