But why?

I’ve made some statements about spec strengths in the figure descriptions, but there’s a lot more going on than you can derive from these simple figures. Firstly, crowd control and damage diversity is completely ignored. When forming a Mythic+ team, there’s a bit more to consider than “bring the specs with the highest number of battle resurrections” — this is a factor, yes, but crafting a composition so that each spec fills the gap in team mates’ weaknesses is another important consideration. Crowd control diversity can dictate a spec’s choice over another’s; diminishing returns on CC duration can leave you wanting disorients, fears, horrifies, silences, and stuns.

Balancing massive area of effect and single target DPS can have an impact, too. It can be better to take one person with huge AoE capabilities and another with huge ST capabilities than it is to take two specs who are average at both.

Survivability is also a major contributor (perhaps the biggest) to composition selection, since at Keystone level 17 and beyond many mechanics will one-shot specialisations with weaker damage reduction cooldowns. One particular mechanic that comes to mind is General Xakal’s (The Arcway) Wicked Slam — at level 17, and with the tyrannical affix, this will one-shot any non-tank spec that doesn’t have a physical damage reduction cooldown active. Some specs with weaker CDs may have to resort to using tank trinkets and two defensive legendaries to survive it (per my interview with Sadozai on Storm Earth & Lava).

There are a few proposed solutions to this survivability issue, from bringing weaker specs up to reducing Mythic+ damage scaling. I don’t believe a solution is practical before 8.0, but I hope there’s a serious rework of DPS utility to balance things out come the next expansion.

I hope this was an informative read. Looking forward to the finals!