Learn from Logs: Picking the Top Talents
Class Guides are great, but logs can be even better in some areas. Guides are a prediction of what will be best for each class, whereas logs tell you exactly what worked. I plan to write a few posts about using logs to improve your play. Today, we’ll look at selecting the right talents for your class and spec based on logs. Warcraftlogs has a great rankings feature that lets you examine at a glance what talents the highest ranking players in your class are using. Click on the menu button to the top left, and click on rankings next to the current raid. Select the boss, difficulty, and class you are interested in. As an example, here are the top performances for Balance Druids on Heroic Nythendra. At the top, the site lists the top talents and trinkets for that boss. Along the side, you can see if any players near the top diverted from these talents or trinkets. For Balance druids, literally everyone in the top 100 uses Starlord, Incarnation, Blessing of the Ancients, and Nature’s Balance. Even, as an observer who knows nothing about the class, you can guess that those talents are the top DPS talents for Nythendra. If a Balance druid isn’t using those talents on the fight in your raid, you might wonder why. Another “top talent” is Guardian Affinity. Unlike the four mentioned above, however, many druids in the top 100 are using another choice - Restoration Affinity. This suggests that there isn’t a clear consensus between the two talents for top DPS or utility. Try looking at the top talents for each fight for your spec - hopefully you aren’t surprised by what you find.
Comments:
wrathsome - Oct 2, 2016
This is cool. Yes, I was surprised that there is some consensus but not for all. I also see different results for different bosses and I wonder if that suggests that players are changing Talents for each fight. I’m not entirely clear on “top healer ranking” therein wondering if this is the highest overall healing-per-second. Kind of like when you look at DPS charts via Recount (or Details) in the LFR and see a super high number and realize that the player was spamming the boss and ignoring the adds – naturally you’d not see this in a heroic raid fight. Healers can pad meters too but that is another topic, I think! Very cool, thanks for the explanation – I spent quite some time mulling over those charts!