Tier List Predictions for Phase 5 of Burning Crusade Classic

Sunwell Plateau will have a global release on May 12th at 3:00 p.m. PDT and NerdEgghead has prepared Tier List predictions for each class and spec, weighing each class on their strengths and weaknesses. If you are interested in your class and spec's Best in Slot gear, check out our Phase 5 BiS guides.

Disclaimers About This Tier List

Tier lists can be very controversial, as no one wants to see their favorite spec rank poorly and because no two raid teams are optimizing for exactly the same thing when it comes to their class composition. For this reason, it is simply impossible to come up with a truly universal class ranking that is applicable for all raiding environments, so this list is deliberately narrow in scope based on the following criteria:

Classes will be ranked assuming that the group is optimizing for total raid DPS, not just single target boss DPS. Trash fights a substantial fraction of time spent clearing a raid, so classes with strong AoE or cleave damage will rank much higher than those with exclusively single target strengths. Likewise, some raid debuffs like Improved Faerie Fire and Improved Expose Armor are disproportionately useful on boss mobs relative to trash, so they will be heavily down-weighted in this analysis since their impact on total raid clear time is discounted despite being excellent tools for boss parsing. When ranking the various buffs and debuffs brought by each class, this list will assume a balanced raid composition compromising two physical DPS groups and two caster groups. A balanced split like this has been the most common raid configuration in TBC Classic, but note that competitive speed-running comps may instead opt to go all-in on stacking just physical DPS or just caster Read more on wowhead.com