ARBITER
←WED 26 AUG 2026 · 10:17 · KEY 151 OF 190→

Murder Row

+11
Timed · +14 bosses killed9 deathsXal'atath's Bargain: VoidboundTyrannicalFortified
Timer · The time allowed for the key. Beat it to upgrade the keystone.Kick · An interrupt that stops a cast.Personal · A defensive cooldown that only protects you.Cascade · Several deaths within seconds of each other.Leaked cast · An enemy cast that could have been interrupted and went off.Overcap · Resource generated while already full, so it was lost.Xal'atath's Bargain: Voidbound · A Voidbound Emissary joins pulls and empowers enemies.Tyrannical · Bosses have 25% more health and hit up to 15% harder.Fortified · Trash has 20% more health and hits up to 20% harder.

Timed by five minutes through nine deaths and a wipe that was not the party's to avoid - and this key rewrote four parts of the grader that were measuring the tool rather than the players.

The key timed: 27:29 against a par the log bounds to 32:34-43:26. Nine deaths, a wipe on Lithiel Cinderfury, and 3:16 of the 27:29 lost to pulls - 2:56 of it to that wipe.

WHOSE FAULT: not the party's, and this analysis previously said otherwise. The wipe at 22:07-22:19 happened because extra mobs were pulled that are not supposed to be pullable during that phase. The log agrees. Across 21:37-22:20 the damage came from five distinct sources at once - Wild Imp (976 damage events), Defiled Golem (305), Lithiel Cinderfury (102), Infernal (53) and Shivan Punisher (21). That is a boss plus a swarm plus two extra elites, and it killed five people in twelve seconds. An earlier version of this note made 'four of the five pressed no defensive' the headline correctable. It was the wrong reading: the pull was already lost, and a Shield Wall does not change that.

The defensive habit is still worth naming, but on the OTHER cluster. At 3:08-3:47 a Street Sneak pack killed three people in thirty-nine seconds - a survivable pull - and Arcane Mage and Unholy DK both died with nothing pressed while Heartstop Poison sat uncleansed for twenty seconds.

GRADES ON THIS KEY ARE NOT COMPARABLE TO ANYTHING GRADED BEFORE TODAY. Four model changes landed because of this run, three of them fixing things that were marking players down for the tool's blind spots. Last section.

Written by Claude (Opus 5) from the combat log and the archive. The numbers come from the log, and the text can be wrong.
BREAKDOWN FOR

Hyporock

Holy Paladin · Healer
HPS99.9K
DPS12.2K
Taken/s25.2K
Deaths1
iLvl307
The strongest part of your grade

Healed back 49% of what landed in the party's worst moments

Response scored 91. A solid, even key lands near 75.

Where the most points went

Healing: −14 points

Healed 70% of the damage that needed an outside heal.

Measured. Nobody has written advice for this key yet.
Last 8 keys in the archive

About your usual

Altar of Fangs +11: B 7878AoF+11Voidscar Arena +11: B+ 8383VA+11Murder Row +12: B 7676MR+12Temple of Sethraliss +12: C 6767ToS+12Altar of Fangs +11: F 4848AoF+11Altar of Fangs +11: B- 7373AoF+11Altar of Fangs +11: C- 6262AoF+11Murder Row +11: B- 7373MR+11

73 is right on your median of 73 over these 8 keys. Best: 83 on Voidscar Arena +11.

How the grade was built

◆ = 75, a solid key
Survival86−2.1
1 death
Starts at 100. Each death takes points off.
Healing5934%
Healed 70% of the damage that needed an outside heal
The share of the damage that needed an outside heal that you healed.
Response9125%
Healed back 49% of what landed in the party's worst moments
How much you healed back during the party's worst damage windows.
Mechanics100−0
No avoidable damage that others in your role dodged · compared with this party
Damage you took that players in your role avoided.
Interrupts—not scored
No interrupt on the bar.
Casts you stopped, against how many your kick allowed.
Dispels8116%
The party's number, not yours: the group removed 19 of the 21 one dispeller could reach, and you removed 17
Harmful effects removed, against what one dispeller could reach.
Activity7715%
Casting or attacking 91% of your time alive in combat
The share of your time alive in combat that you spent casting or attacking.
Utility7710%
36 uses, about 69 were available
How often you used your spec's utility buttons, like stuns and immunities.

% = its share of the grade. Survival and mechanics carry no share: they start at 100 and only take points off. "Not counted" parts are shown for context and do not move the grade.

Your death

bars = hits · line = your health · red = the killing blow
22:17 Defiled Slam336.7Kfrom Defiled Golem
Nothing pressed
took 2.05Min 12.5 shealed 1.19M (all their own)

The Run

The same for everyone in the group

The whole key, on the timer

a pull, brighter = more damage takendeath penaltya death, in class colour
timed 27:29
0:006:5213:4420:3627:28

Where the 27:29 went

fighting 21:46
Before the first pull0:02
Fighting21:46
Walking between pulls3:08
Running back after wipes1:48
Death penalty0:45

How it went

  1. 3:09Arcane Mage to Heartstop Poison from Street Sneak. No defensive pressed.
  2. 3:38CascadeProt Warrior and Unholy DK in 10 s, to Heartstop Poison and Melee. Prot Warrior went first. 1 of 2 with no defensive pressed.
  3. 22:07Full wipeArcane Mage, Shadow Priest, Hyporock, Prot Warrior and Unholy DK in 13 s, to Fel Beam, Defiled Slam and Defiled Detonation. Arcane Mage went first. 3 of 5 with no defensive pressed.
  4. 25:42Arcane Mage to Searing Fel Flame from Lithiel Cinderfury. Prismatic Barrier in the window.
  5. 26:53Timed with — to spare.

What to change, biggest first

  1. Arcane Mage: press Ice Block. Zero casts across three deaths, and the 3:08 one was on a survivable pull.
  2. Unholy DK: Anti-Magic Zone was never pressed. Not for the over-pull, but the 3:08 cluster and Xathuux both wanted it.
  3. Shadow Priest: Mass Dispel on the Heartstop Poisons - 20 seconds up and 4,080,270 damage, on a key where the healer could only reach 19 of 21.
  4. Group: the 32% interrupt figure is 139 leaked imp casts. On everything that was not the swarm you went 33 of 36. Do not chase that number.
  5. Arbiter: re-band `mechanics` - 25 of 30 player-keys now score 99+, so it no longer discriminates. Same remedy as mitigation and dispel needed before it.
  6. Arbiter: both healer bands are cut on 23 keys of one healer. Feed a second healer through before trusting throughput or response across players.

Kick board stops against expected

expected
Prot Warrior18 / 27
Shadow Priest32 / 14
Arcane Mage9 / 13
Unholy DK8 / 14

What the group left up

Casts that went off
Felfire Burst
139 of 174got through
Fel Rage
2 of 15got through
Scathing Review
1 of 4got through
Debuffs left up
Heartstop Poison
4.08M2 times, 20 s up
Could have been dispelled and was not.
Hit most of the party
Searing Fel Flame
10%of all damage taken
Hit 5 of 5. Everyone took it, so nobody is charged.
Defiled Slam
7%of all damage taken
Hit 5 of 5. Everyone took it, so nobody is charged.
Demonic Frenzy
4%of all damage taken
Hit 5 of 5. Everyone took it, so nobody is charged.
Chaotic Burst
4%of all damage taken
Hit 5 of 5. Everyone took it, so nobody is charged.

What Each of You Takes Away

One thing to keep, one to change
Prot WarriorProt WarriorC-60
KEEPCasting or attacking 98% of your time alive in combat
CHANGEInterrupts cost 12 points: 18 stops, 27 expected
Open the breakdown ↑
HyporockHoly PaladinB-73
KEEPHealed back 49% of what landed in the party's worst moments
CHANGEHealing cost 14 points: Healed 70% of the damage that needed an outside heal
Open the breakdown ↑
Shadow PriestShadow PriestB77
KEEP32 stops, 14 expected
CHANGEDamage cost 16 points: 166.8K DPS, 18% below the other damage dealers
Open the breakdown ↑
Arcane MageArcane MageB-72
KEEP219.8K DPS, 29% above the other damage dealers
CHANGESurvival cost 11 points: 3 deaths
Open the breakdown ↑
Unholy DKUnholy DKD+59
CHANGEDamage cost 12 points: 182.0K DPS, 7% below the other damage dealers
Open the breakdown ↑

Notes

Where the numbers need a second look

Where the 27:29 went

21:46 fighting (81%), 3:07 routing, 1:48 wipe recovery, 0:45 death penalty, 0:10 pull timer. Ten pulls, 158 enemies, 258,846,377 damage taken.

  Kystia Manaheart          2:03
  Zaen Bladesorrow          2:00
  Xathuux the Annihilator   2:02
  Lithiel Cinderfury        0:43   WIPE
  Lithiel Cinderfury        2:45   kill

Bosses took 46% of the damage and six of the nine deaths.

The group interrupt figure reads 32% and should not be read. 174 of the 210 'stoppable' casts in this key are Felfire Burst, cast 251 times by Wild Imps and Unleashed Imps - disposable adds a party AoEs rather than kicks. On everything else the group went 33 of 36: 92%. The three that leaked were two Fel Rages and one Scathing Review.

Dispels were 19 of the 21 one presser could reach. The two left up were Heartstop Poison, 20 seconds and 4,080,270 - the same debuff in the 3:08 cluster.

Prot Warrior - Prot Warrior, C (66), up from a D that was the tool's fault

WHAT WAS NOT YOURS

  • The D. Mitigation scored 12 on '10% uptime of the 18% this kit can hold'. That 18% was Shield Wall alone - 8.0s over a 43.4s recharge - because Shield Block and Ignore Pain were missing from the grader's defensive table entirely. Measured off the log you held Shield Block for 951.6s (59.0%) and Ignore Pain for 896.8s (55.6%). With both counted the axis reads 75: 86% uptime of the 100% the kit can hold, 88% of worst windows covered. The grade went D (53) to C (66).
  • Felfire Burst, 76 hits against a party median of 12.5, was your entire over-exposure line and is now excused. The imps name their target in the cast and they named you, because you are the tank. Mechanics 92 to 100.

WHAT YOU DID WELL

  • Activity 92 - 98% engaged while alive, highest in the party.
  • Rage: 108 wasted of 15,062 generated. 1%.
  • 24 interrupts by raw count, the most in the party, plus Disrupting Shout and Shockwave.
  • 86% mitigation uptime is a tank playing the spec properly, and nothing in the report said so until today.

WHAT TO CHANGE

1. Damage 44 - 105,083 dps, 55% of the party average - is now the softest number in your line, and at ilvl 294 in a party with a 312 mage some of that is gear.
2. Intimidating Shout is in your loadout and was never pressed. On a key with an imp swarm that is a real AoE stop.
3. Your first death at 3:38 took 3,403,043 over 7.5 seconds and you did press Shield Wall; the party put 1,783,722 into you and it was not enough. That one is the pack, not you.

Hyporock - Holy Paladin, A- (86)

WHAT WAS NOT YOURS

Cutpurse, and you were right to push back on it. 71 hits for 3,121,092 against a party median of 33.5 was your whole over-exposure line, and the tooltip settles it: Effect #1 is a Jump Charge with 100 yards of range - the mob travels to whoever it picked. The log agrees independently, because the cast names its victim: `Row Hooligan -> Prot Warrior`, then Unholy DK, then you twice. Where anybody stood is irrelevant. Mechanics 83 to 100, and a new rule now excuses any spell whose caster named the player.

That also retires the finding from the Altar of Fangs key that this was 'the second key running where the measurable thing about your positioning is melee range'. One of the two was never positioning.

WHAT YOU DID WELL

  • Dispels 19 of 21 reachable; utility 100 with 36 uses of the ~71 the kit offered - seven Blessings of Sacrifice, seven Aura Masteries, four Blessings of Protection, three Lay on Hands.
  • Response 85: you put back 49% of the 77,782,694 that landed in the party's worst windows, the highest of the twelve keys measured on the rebuilt axis.
  • Survival 86 on a key where the party died nine times.

WHAT TO CHANGE

1. Throughput 67 - you covered 70% of the 191,923,620 that needed an outside heal, where the scale wants about 82% for a 100. This is the axis with the most room in your line and the one worth watching.
2. You died at 22:17 having taken 2,054,129 over 12.5 seconds with nothing pressed. The pull was lost regardless, but Divine Shield was cast zero times all key and twelve and a half seconds is a long decline.
3. Holy Power: 100 wasted of 654 generated (15%).

Arcane Mage - Arcane Mage, B- (76)

WHAT YOU DID WELL

  • Damage 100: 219,848 dps, 124% of the median, at 45.8 casts a minute. Comfortably the best damage in the key.
  • Mechanics 100 - nothing avoidable, on both the old model and the new one.
  • 16 Counterspells, 37 Shimmers, 10 Alter Times.

WHAT TO CHANGE

1. Survival 39 is the worst score on the board: three deaths, more than anyone. 3:08 (1,813,244 over 2.2s, nothing pressed), 22:07 (1,052,215 over 6.9s, nothing pressed), 25:41 (1,455,675 over 10.3s, Prismatic Barrier pressed).
2. Ice Block was never pressed in the whole key. The 3:08 death is the one that matters - that pull was survivable and two other people died in the same thirty-nine seconds.
3. Mana floor 13%, the only player near the bottom.

Unholy DK - Unholy DK, C (66)

WHAT IS STILL CHARGED, AND WHY

Unholy DK is the only player left with over-exposure on this key: 2,010,849. Chaos Barrage, 19 hits against a party median of 9, is the real one - and note that Prot Warrior's 20 hits of the same spell WERE excused, because the casts named him and did not name you. That is the new rule working as intended: the mob picked the tank, and the damage you took from it was not aimed at you.

Murder in a Row, 16 hits for 841,180 and '(peers 0)', I checked by hand: nobody else took a single tick. That is the genuinely ambiguous case - a bleed on exactly one player reads identically whether a mob leapt on you or you stood somewhere alone. The axis attributes half rather than all for that reason. Unproven, not a finding.

WHAT YOU DID WELL

  • 21 interrupts off 27 Mind Freezes - a 78% hit rate on a 15-second cooldown, second only to the tank.
  • 182,009 dps, exactly on the median, at ilvl 300 - the lowest-geared damage dealer matching the middle.
  • 52.7 casts a minute, the highest in the key.
  • The only person in the wipe who pressed a defensive.

WHAT TO CHANGE

1. Anti-Magic Zone is in your loadout and was never pressed. It would not have saved the over-pull, but the 3:08 cluster and the Xathuux fight are both AMZ situations.
2. Runic Power: 483 wasted of 8,076 (6%), the highest waste fraction in the party.

Shadow Priest - Shadow Priest, B (79)

WHAT YOU DID WELL

  • Mechanics 100 and survival 86 - nothing avoidable, one death, in the wipe.
  • The '32 stops vs 14 expected' line is worth unpacking: only 8 are kicks. The other 24 are crowd control that stopped a cast, which the model counts and which is the correct answer to an imp swarm. 28 CC casts, five times anyone else.
  • 166,836 dps at ilvl 291 - the lowest item level in the party - plus 8,858 HPS of off-healing and 24 Power Infusions.

WHAT TO CHANGE

1. Desperate Prayer was never pressed, and you died at 22:12 having taken 825,978 over 6.0 seconds with 10,930 of healing received - effectively none. Again, that pull was lost anyway.
2. Mass Dispel is in your loadout and unused, on a key with two Heartstop Poisons up for 20 seconds and 4,080,270 damage. You are the second dispeller the healer did not have. (Purify Disease is probably vacuous - check the dungeon's dispel types before treating it as a finding.)
3. Your off-healing is now visible to the grader in a way it was not before: it used to sit in the HEALER's denominator, so every point you healed lowered Hyporock's throughput score.

What this key changed in the grader

Four changes, and three of them were the tool marking somebody down for its own gaps.

1. SHIELD BLOCK AND IGNORE PAIN WERE NOT IN THE DEFENSIVE TABLE. `achievable_uptime` iterates `PERSONAL_DEFENSIVES` for BOTH halves of its ratio, so a Protection Warrior was scored on Shield Wall alone. Every tank in the corpus before this key was a Blood DK or a Vengeance DH, whose main defensives were already listed - which is why two months of keys never exposed it. Prot Warrior: mitigation 12 to 75, D to C.

2. A CAST THAT NAMES ITS VICTIM IS NOT ABOUT POSITION. `forced_single_target` needs one victim and two casters; `forced_multi_target` needs simultaneous applications. Cutpurse has neither - it lands on one player per cast and spreads across all five. But the enemy names the player in the cast, and a ground effect names nobody, so the distinction is already in the log. Kept per (spell, victim) rather than per spell, so a nuke aimed at one player that splashes the people standing next to them still charges the bystanders.

   The cost is that the mechanics axis is now close to saturated: 25 of 30 player-keys on the 2026-08-25 night score 99 or better, against 19 before today. It is measuring something narrower and truer - ground effects, persistent areas, environmental hazards and melee, the things that log no player destination because there was nobody to name - but it needs re-banding before the number means much.

3. THE HEALER'S DENOMINATOR STILL COUNTED OTHER PEOPLE'S HEALING. `healing_need` subtracts self-healing, because that is health the healer did not have to restore. A Shadow Priest healing the TANK is the identical claim and stayed in for another two months. On this key the four non-healers put out about 24k HPS between them, so a healer who covered everything actually left to cover could not have scored above roughly 84%.

4. `RESPONSE` WAS AN EASINESS DETECTOR POINTED BACKWARDS. It divided the healer's output in the party's worst windows by the healer's OWN average output. Both ends move with the key: on a hard key the healer is near-saturated the whole time, the baseline rises, and the ratio compresses toward 1.0 however well they played.

   Across 23 healer-keys the old ratio ran r = -0.63 against the party's damage-per-second, -0.50 against key level, and -0.49 against the healer's own HPS - it went DOWN the more they healed - while managing r = -0.09 against deaths. An axis named for rising to emergencies had no measurable relationship with anybody dying, and it carried 17% of the grade. The RESPONSE_MIN_CONTRAST guard added last night was this same bug caught in its most extreme form.
   It now uses an absolute denominator: of the damage that landed in the party's worst windows, how much did this healer put back. Across two independent batches its correlation with difficulty is +0.07 and -0.03, against -0.25 and -0.30 for the old one, and it separates keys more sharply. Deliberately NOT claimed: that it predicts deaths better - it ran -0.42 on one batch and +0.92 on another, which at n=8 and n=4 means nothing.
   Both healer bands remain cut on ONE healer's range, 23 keys of Hyporock. That is the largest open weakness in the healer half of this model and no amount of internal consistency fixes it.