From the moment World of Warcraft Dragonflight started on November 28, 2022, this expansion has been known as one of the most versatile and class-balance friendly expansions among the players. Over time, the class diversity took a nosedive and now we’re back to square one—only a handful of specs having a blast while others sit in endless queues, hoping they’ll be one of the lucky ones.
Looking at class popularity across all Mythic+ runs at Raider.IO’s leaderboard from July 17, we can see that pretty much all specs are evenly distributed. Retribution Paladins and Shadow Priests are still the clear favorites with their pick rate being at least 4.8 percent.
But, when we dive a bit deeper into Mythic+ class popularity, 25+ keys to be perfectly exact, we can see that only specific specs are seeing success, namely Shadow Priests, Subtlety Rogues, Holy Paladins, Guardian Druids, and Vengeance Demon Hunters. On top of all of this, Augmentation Evokers are a must-have just because of their amazing buffing powers.
As a result of this, you’ll oftentimes witness, especially if you’re playing a non-meta class like Demonology Warlock, excruciatingly long queue times and more than dozens of rejections from PUG groups before one group decides to take you in. Although this has been the case in Patch 10.1, class balance changes that launched with Patch 10.1.5 have made certain specs even better while others got no love.
Related: All 3 mage specs in WoW are getting nerfed in the next weekly reset
At the beginning of Dragonflight, there were clear-cut specs that were simply better than others, especially Arcane Mages, but the situation has never been like this before. Blizzard Entertainment has been aggressively buffing and nerfing specs at the beginning of each season, making us believe you can bring almost any class to your Mythic+ runs and find success. This is, to an extent true, but only in lower-end Mythic+ dungeons which are far easier and simpler to time because mobs and bosses have less HP and deal significantly less damage.
Although I’m no expert, I’m still a Restoration Shaman who struggles to find a group when I don’t want to run my key and I’d say that the WoW balancing team needs to use Patch 10.1.7 as an opportunity to fix the current state of balance. We were on the right path with frequent hotfix changes, but then, Diablo 4 happened and we were left to fend off for ourselves. The next update is scheduled for fall 2023 and, hopefully, it will breathe new life into Mythic+ class balance.
