The latest World of Warcraft updates have brought more than a few changes to the massive title, with the recent World of Warcraft: Shadowlands prepatch in particular bringing a radical set of changes to the title.
One of the most prominent changes is undoubtedly the number crunch that the title has undergone. A level squish brought the level cap from 120 all the way down to 60, with 50 being the highest obtainable level until the expansion is released proper.
With that squish, practically the entire game had to be squished as well, knocking gearing and items down quite a few pegs. For scale, a character that was heavily geared for Mythic raiding at the end of Battle for Azeroth – around 480 item level – would be resting at around 140 now instead.
The level squish isn’t the only thing affecting numbers, though. The prepatch also removed the corruption mechanic from the game, which was a dominant source of power for the end of the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Many builds were fully based off of this system, so the removal of it caused a drastic change in power level.
With so many things changing, it makes sense that the DPS charts would see a bit of upheaval. Wowhead recently released a physical manifestation of exactly how hard things have changed though, and there’s been enough that some people are considering jumping ship to a different class.
The chart in the tweet embedded above shows some incredibly interesting changes, for better and for worse. Feral druid comes in at the bottom, which isn’t a massive surprise given that it already was one of the lower-half specs in most charts, depending on the metric used.
Havoc demon hunters have had their single target damage absolutely gutted, and have dropped heavily because of this. The same can be said for Arms warriors, which were regularly topping charts to now being one of the lowest.
Fury warriors are also in the bottom half, bringing warrior DPS to be one of the worst possible choices right now. Demonology warlocks were knocked down quite a distance by the loss of Corruptions as well, primarily due to losing out on haste stats.
Affliction warlocks, however, have had their benefit to scaling send them to second place. Shadow priests can say the same, and the azerite trait Spiteful Apparitions is heavily buffed with the scaling changes.
Overall, this is all somewhat unimportant in the long run. The prepatch is a time of transition, and these charts are going to see a massive amount of change once more once the expansion releases and prepatch ends. Still, it’s interesting to see just how drastically prepatch changed things for players for this span of time.
