So season 4 or Dragonflight Fated Season has been announced for April 24th. Obviously everyone wants to do something else instead until then.
Being a fated season, it is just the same raids all over again. With some new weekly quest to get a Spark for crafted gear (a redo of the season 1 one as far as I can tell), the m+ pool being what it should have been in season 1 (the 8 DF available-at-release dungeons) and a test run of the slimmed down dungeon difficulty/keystone scaling. And nothing else. For x amount of months. They skipped the raid affixes this time as far as I can see too.
I am not "hyped". While I want to do the DF dungeons more (especially the 4 that were in season 1 which was both short and I didn't bother trying to learn them properly) and the first raid, paying sub money to regrind the same gear in the same content but have to swap raid every week is kinda frustrating. We will if I manage to not be a dumb customer again.
The Parsing Finale
So luckily I had time (and interest) enough in playing I managed to get in a final raid on Esmënet so we could finally find out which of my characters is the best character. Serwaswathan was in the lead, but after looking at several 15k-25k Fyrakk parse improvements the time we killed it and multiple bad boss mechanic rngs. So this was the most exciting raid personally for me for the season... I even managed to dodge seed carriage on Fyrakk for equal terms despite two carriers being absent.
Without further ado...
The list:
*Esmënet wins Gnarlroot with ~18k dps.
*Serwaswathan wins Igira with ~1k dps.
*Serwaswathan wins Vocoross with ~1k dps.
*Serwaswathan wins Council of Dreams with ~45k dps.
*Serwaswathan wins Larodar with ~10k dps.
*Esmënet wins Nymue with ~3k dps.
*Esmënet wins Smolderon with ~28k dps.
*Esmënet wins Tindral with ~56k dps.
*Esmënet wins Fyrakk with ~1k dps.
Esmënet wins 5 bosses to 4!
(As an aside, Navarim wasn't close on any parse in the end)
What I picked up from this project
Besides the obvious statistical humbug when n = 1, there's some other stuff that is interesting here for someone that never looked at raid parses before last raid. (I had to look up BFA raids on my old hunter to compare the best % numbers once I started, however.) That stuff is:
*Some of the bosses are very obviously made to cater to some kind of dpser. On council, frost mage was really good (and elemental shaman) while for melee and BM hunter Smolderon was really good.
*Bosses like Gnarloot and Tindral the timing of things decide all the dps. Gnarloot end right after vulnerable phase and you have little competition for add cleave damage? Massive parse. Can you snipe the Tindral root cleave and dps the boss shield while others pick up the damage amps? Massive padding. As it were, Esmënet had better runs for both of those.
*Bosses with minor amount of adds like Igira, Larodar and Fyrakk favours the ones that can do great single target while having some aoe burst now and then in the same spec (like frost mage) while the ones that can't (like bm hunter) has to grind their teeth if it's a pull worth doing aoe on.
*Sheer luck plays a large part. I've had lots of pulls with massive increases in the bank on Nymue and Fyrakk, but then it's a wipe and the bad pulls has just been sitting there the entire raid tier. But sheer luck can be offset with increasing n. If I had raided on both characters all season, I am sure Serwa would have won this.
*Then there's obviously what the pure parse doesn't tell (taking away the luck bit, which obviously isn't factored in either) - Serwa brings Arcane Intellect and if you factor in the extra damage from the casters and healers (although that isn't much in our raid) it's not a stretch to say it would make Serwa win Nymue and Fyrakk if it was counted in. Esmënet was just another hunter in an ocean of hunters, and the raid would have Hunter's Mark whether or not I was there.
*At the end of the day though, this might be the most useless part of the game? DPS in reclears is nice because you can do it faster obviously, but if you take doing mechanics right (especially the ones doing chores like the watering on council or seeds on Fyrakk) and doing ok dps that's what gets progress and has a point. Not getting 480+ ilevel and being fully gemmed 2-3 months after first kill and know what to pad on.
I'll try to go back to not caring now.
m+ Score update
Esmënet managed to get a score bump with some lunch keys. The amount of wasted time on disbands has increased a lot over +20s, and most of it consists of tanks pulling stuff the group can't handle, swear at someone, do it again, leave when it didn't work out the second time either. People are so genuinly angry at this key level too. Right now I'm thinking whatever dungeon I end up getting the first +22 in wins the patch, and that's me done for the season.
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