Events
Break the Meta The War Within Season 1
To determine the eligible specs for this Break the Meta, we looked at the popularity of all specs sorted by role. We looked at various keystone level thresholds starting at +5, all the way to the highest keys being currently completed. Our goal is to determine what is the “meta” for the majority of players, which is always a complicated task.
After sorting the participation data by Class Frequency, we take the bottom 50% of specs for each role. This provides us with our baseline list of eligible Specs. From this point we make adjustments as needed to accommodate various considerations, but we believe this methodology provides the best representation of the classes and specs that are considered “off-meta” or lesser-used by the Community at-large. Please see note below for further details.
In order for a keystone to be considered BTM-Eligible, it must be completed in time and made up of ONLY the following eligible specs:
| DPS | Tanks | Healers |
|---|---|---|
 Affliction Warlock |  Blood Death Knight |  Holy Paladin |
 Arms Warrior |  Brewmaster Monk |  Holy Priest |
 Beast Mastery Hunter |  Guardian Druid |  Mistweaver Monk |
 Demonology Warlock |  Vengeance Demon Hunter |  Preservation Evoker |
 Devastation Evoker | ||
 Elemental Shaman | ||
 Feral Druid | ||
 Fire Mage | ||
 Outlaw Rogue | ||
 Shadow Priest | ||
 Subtlety Rogue | ||
 Survival Hunter | ||
 Unholy Death Knight | ||
 Windwalker Monk |
IMPORTANT NOTES ON SPEC CHOICES
TANKS
While at lower keystone level thresholds,
Blood Death Knight is significantly more popular, it falls off significantly at +12 and higher, as shown in the graph above. For this reason, we opted to include Blood despite it being in the top 50% of tanks by Class Frequency for keystones 11 and under. When we opt to include a “threshold” spec, we want to ensure it doesn’t create an unfair advantage on the Leaderboards, and we are confident that Blood being very off-meta at the highest keystones makes this the case.Normally we split the 6 tank specs 50/50, with 3 being eligible and 3 being ineligible. This Season, the tank meta is so heavily skewed towards
Protection Paladin and 
Protection Warrior that we thought it best to include the four other tank specs.HEALERS
This one is pretty clear-cut. In lower keystone levels,
Restoration Druids are sometimes lower in popularity than Holy Paladins, but as we get into the higher keys, this is no longer the case, but they are pretty close regardless. We opted to include Holy Paladins because we wanted to have at least one Paladin spec, which meant that Restoration Druids did not make the cut.We will also note that for the vast majority of the Season,
Restoration Druids were higher in popularity data than Mistweaver Monk, and it is only in the last week (roughly) where we’re seeing Monks overtake Druids in higher keys specifically. Our decisions tend to lean towards what has been the meta for a larger part of the Season, so this explains why Monk was kept eligible and Druid was not. The meta is constantly in flux, so we do our best!DPS
The DPS section is also very clear-cut based on the data, with the exception of the inclusion of
Elemental Shaman. As a rule in BTM events, we have always made sure to include at least one spec per class. This is done to ensure that nobody is barred from participating in the event, if they happen to only have one character and it just so happens to be one where every spec is considered “meta”. We faced this problem in Dragonflight Season 3, and luckily the class in question was 
Demon Hunter. This gave us the opportunity to create a separate event (Meta vs. Meta), but unfortunately the 
Shaman class is not as well suited for full-solo-class dungeons as their DH counterparts. For this reason, we have opted to include Elemental Shamans. We should also note that while Elemental is pretty high up in popularity, there was a massive spike during Week 6 of the Season, when the spec was ridiculously over-buffed. We took that data in mind when making this decision. Not to mention the fact that 
Restoration Shaman and 
Enhancement Shaman are just clearly too meta to be the choice for the class to be included.