Thundering Seasonal Affix Statistics: Quantifying Risk and Reward

wowhead.com:

This post was written by Dratnos and Krista, and features insight from Tobo and Roiben. Dratnos and Krista both have top 0.1% M+ titles and cast WoW PvE events, while Tobo and Roiben both compete in M+ events like the MDI and TGP. All four can be found creating content on Twitch, among other places! Thanks to Warcraft Logs for the data!

Thundering is the first (and potentially only!) Seasonal Affix of Dragonflight. If you want to know more about how it works, expand the details tab here: Every 65-70 seconds while in combat, Thundering applies either Mark of Wind or Mark of Lightning, which provide identical benefits of a 30% increase in damage and healing for 15 seconds. Players must come into contact with someone with the opposite mark to remove the debuff, or are otherwise inflicted with Primal Overload which is a 5 second damaging stun Though you receive a Damage and Healing buff while maintaining the affix, players must be cautious and consider tradeoffs and risk factors with different dungeon, key level, and affix combinations. For this post we used data to investigate some questions around the risk and reward of the thundering affix, such as “How much extra damage are players getting from Thundering?”, “How much time does a Thundering stun cost the run?”, and“Which specs benefit the most from Thundering?”

We used 30,000 Mythic Plus runs logged on Warcraft Logs that happened after the Thundering tank mark change on Jan 20th but before March 1st. We collected at least 100 runs for every key level between 10 (where Thundering begins) and 23. We also collected some logs from level 24-26 but due to limited logged runs there were less than 100 of each of these levels. We also made