With Patch 4.0.6 now live for almost a week there is enough data starting to trickle through to take a look at and see just who benefited the most from the patchy goodness.

Now, leading up to the patch, there was a lot of doom and gloom, particularly in the Hunter community, where the Survival 'nerf' was like waiting for Armageddon. The sky was falling in. Any time I would say something like, "we'll just have to wait and see, it may not be as bad as it looks on paper", I'd get howled down. On paper the Survival 'nerfs' did look a little dramatic, I'll give you that. A significant damage reduction to our signature shot as well as a decrease to our Into the Wilderness passive bonus, down from 15% bonus agility to 10%, did not bode well. Reality is though, that these 'nerfs' haven't had the dramatic impact upon the Survival Hunters DPS numbers that a lot of people were expecting.

Taking a look at a couple of graphs from Stateofdps.com you can start to build a picture of what effect the patch has actually had. Keep in mind though that State Of DPS is only measuring the DPS for each class as compiled from the top 200 parses from World of Logs, so you can make the case that the data is not representative of what the average player is seeing, but then, in the absence of anything else, this is what we have to work with.

Interestingly, looking at the numbers (first chart is 10man normal, second 25man normal), even though a couple of classes/specs experienced 'nerfs' (eg. Survival Hunters and Unholy Death Knights), no class/spec has actually seen a decrease in their output. As you'd expect, as players gear up, and get used to the encounters, DPS as a whole is on the increase. Looking at the 10 man normal raid data, there are a couple of big Patch 4.0.6 beneficiaries.

The biggest mover is no doubt the Markmanship Hunter, and to be blunt, the buffs that the Marksmanship spec received where desperately needed. Prior to the patch, Hunters had one spec that so far out performed it's other two specs that players had no choice but to spec Survival if they wanted to maintain viability in raids. For a pure DPS class, that was horrible design in my opinion. Prior to the Patch both Marksmanship and Beast Mastery specc'd Hunters were performing so poorly that a couple of the tanking specs were putting out higher numbers. The way things are currently panning out, it appears as though Survival may edge out Marksmanship as the top Hunter spec in Heroic Dungeon gear levels, while in higher gear levels, and when you can get your hands on epic ranged weapons, Marksmanship might be the DPS spec of choice. In terms of the 25 man normal data, the same general trend applies, although Survival has been slowly overtaken by a handful of other classes at the top.

Another of the big movers is the Shadow Priest. Shadow Priests have gone from doing more than acceptable numbers to hitting the top of the charts. While they are sitting difference between Shadow Priests and second placed Survival Hunters is minimal in 10man, the gap widens in 25man, with Shadow Priests sitting out at the top. If the trend continues expect to see Shadow Priests on the receiving end of the nerf bat in the near future.

Finally Retribution Paladins and Balance Druids both received a nice little boost. For Retribution Paladins at least, a large cause for this boost would be the change to the way Mastery works, now a flat buff to holy damage rather than a proc based benefit.

Maybe it's just me, but personally I don't have a problem with hybrids sitting in the middle of the pack DPS wise. The beauty of playing a hybrid class is that you aren't locked into a specific role. If you get bored of healing, you can switch to DPS, or tanking, without having to re-roll and leave behind all the history and achievements you've built up over time. If your DPS gets nerfed to the ground then you always have the option of picking up a secondary role without having to consign your toon to the bench until the situation improves - which it almost always inevitably does.