Thundering Statistics: Analyzing Risks and Rewards

Dratnos and Krista recently published an analysis of Thundering over at Wowhead, using the Warcraft Logs API to gather their data!

You can read through the entire post here!

Gathering Data

To get their data, they used the Warcraft Logs API (which you can learn more about here) to collect information from tens of thousands of keys logged to the site. One useful filter expression that you may find valuable for analysis of your own keys is the following:

IN RANGE FROM type = 'applydebuff' AND ability.id IN (396369, 396364) TO type = 'removedebuff' AND ability.id IN (396369, 396364) GROUP BY target ON source END

If you use this to filter the Damage Done tab, you’ll be able to see damage dealt while Thundering was active, which can used to compare with overall damage.

Findings

Here are some main findings from this Thundering research. Check out the Wowhead post for more analysis, including spec-specific breakdowns and expert opinions about the way the affix played out!

Rewards

Thundering offers a powerful 30% Damage increase that could have over 15% in-combat uptime throughout a dungeon run, which means that it could potentially offer 5% bonus damage overall-- and even more for players optimizing their cooldowns around it. In practice, however, Dratnos and Krista found that players averaged around 2% bonus damage from the affix, though that number did increase slightly at the higher key levels.

Players also were conservative with the affix, maintaining less than 10% uptime except in the highest level of keys, where again the level of optimization did increase.

Risks

The affix is not without its dangers, as if you fail to clear Thundering you get a nasty stun that deals a huge amount of damage. Dratnos and Krista found that, in their sample, the chance a player would die within 10 seconds of taking a Primal Overload stun started at around 20% at the +10 key level and increased to over 40% at +20!

Primal Overload stuns were very costly to the group’s chances of success, with each one costing about 5% of the dungeon’s timer.

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