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Methodology

How the numbers are produced, why each choice was made, and where the limits are.

Where the data comes from

Every number on this site comes from runs that players actually logged to Warcraft Logs. Nothing is simulated and nothing is estimated. The scraper pulls newly uploaded Mythic+ reports once per hour and stores each player's damage per dungeon run.

How a spec's number is calculated

Two values are shown per spec. Both are calculated the same way:

  1. For each dungeon separately, take the median of all that spec's runs.
  2. Average those per-dungeon values into one number.

The solid bar is that median, described on the site as the standard run. The faded bar is the same calculation applied to the top 5% of runs, which shows what the spec reaches when things go well.

Averaging per dungeon rather than pooling every run matters because dungeons are not equally popular. Without that step, a spec that happens to be played a lot in a high-damage dungeon would look stronger than it is.

"Same calculation" is meant literally: the top 5% is taken per dungeon too, then averaged. Every dungeon a spec was played in contributes its own best runs, so the faded bar can never come from a single dungeon. The best run of a dungeon always qualifies, which has a consequence worth knowing: where a spec has only a handful of runs in a dungeon, its "top 5%" there is that single best run. The run count next to each spec, and again inside the per-dungeon breakdown, shows when that is the case.

Key levels inside a bracket are pooled, and the best runs come almost entirely from the highest key in it, because more enemy health means more damage. Read the faded bar as what a spec does on the bracket's top key rather than as the best 5% of the lowest one.

Why median, and why top 5% instead of "top 200 runs"

The median is used because a plain average is dragged around by outliers, and a single broken parse can move it noticeably.

The top 5% is a proportion, not a fixed count, and that distinction is the important one. Specs differ enormously in how often they are played. In one week at +20-22 the run counts ranged from 27 to 19,709. A fixed cutoff such as "the best 200 runs" therefore means something completely different per spec:

SpecRuns that week"Top 500" would be
Unholy Death Knight18,811its best 3%
Feral Druid1,116its best 45%
Outlaw Rogue583its best 86%

The popular spec would be compared at its peak while the rare spec is compared at roughly its average. Measured proportionally instead, those three specs land within 1% of each other. A fixed count would have invented a gap that only reflects popularity.

Why healers and tanks are ranked by damage

Healers and tanks appear in a damage ranking on purpose. Their damage is surplus output: it is what they contribute once their actual job is handled. That makes it a reasonable comparison between specs of the same role.

Healing output is available as a separate toggle in the Healers tab, with the caveat below.

Healing (HPS) and why it needs a caveat

Healing per second is not a clean quality measure in Mythic+, because it is driven mostly by how much damage the group takes. A better group takes less damage, so its healer heals less and posts a lower HPS. High healing often means messier runs rather than a better healer.

It is shown because the throughput comparison between healer specs still carries signal across hundreds of runs, and because people asked for it. It is not shown as a quality ranking.

What a spec needs in order to appear

A spec needs at least 10 runs, spread across every dungeon of the season. There is no relaxed alternative. Full coverage is required because each dungeon counts equally in the average, so a spec that never ran the weakest dungeon would score higher for that reason alone. Earlier the site fell back to "5 runs across 3 dungeons" when few specs qualified, which put three-dungeon averages next to eight-dungeon averages and made the ranking measure coverage as much as performance.

The cost is visible right after the weekly reset: on Wednesday morning only a handful of specs qualify, and the list fills up over the following day or two. The top bracket stays shorter all week simply because very high keys are rare. The page says so when that happens rather than quietly lowering the bar.

If a spec is not listed, you can still see it: pick a single dungeon, and every spec with a logged run there appears, since comparability across dungeons is no longer at stake. Clicking it there opens its per-dungeon breakdown, and the dungeons it has not run are listed as "no runs" — which is exactly why it is absent from the overall ranking. Specs in the overall ranking never have such gaps, by definition.

The run count is printed next to every spec, and inside the per-dungeon breakdown for each dungeon, so the sample size behind any number is always visible.

What this site deliberately does not do

Known limitations

Season 2

Season 2 starts on 18 August (NA) and 19 August (EU). The site switches to the new season's dungeons at the EU reset. Weekly trend charts return then, because a fresh season gives a history that is consistent from week one. They are currently hidden: earlier changes to the collection method created an artificial drop in the charts that said more about the method than about the game.

Recent changes