That’s part of the problem, you’re always going to be dealing with an imperfect data set. No matter how thorough your analysis you’re always going to end up having to be somewhat reliant on anecdotal evidence, especially when dealing with something like WoW where you can never get a truly perfect comparison.
Anyone looking to answer this question has to decide where they are willing to sacrifice. Are you looking for a 100% purely gaming rig or will you be using this for other things?
I moved, almost a year ago, from an Intel rig to an R5 3600/Nvidia build. At the same time setup my brother with a 9600k/Nvidia rig. While the 9600k was a better choice for gaming (my brother’s rig is 100% for one game), my rig is also being used for work - 3 monitors and many many many windows open. The trade off between a small loss in FPS for a significant bump in multi threaded performance made it an easy choice for me. If the FPS differences were as dramatic as they used to be I would have had a more difficult time deciding.
Again, accepting that we are always going to be dealing with an imperfect data set, and that this is a debate where you can almost always find someone out there who has posted something that ‘proves’ an opposing view objectively wrong (yeah, I’m trying to be a little ‘cute’ with that), the best advice I can give you is to look at raw data and apply that to your use case.
For instance (and yes I know this is as flawed a source as any other), compare the single threaded performance here:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
and the multi threaded performance here:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
Now, are you going to be playing in a “perfect world” environment? Just the game and nothing else running? And any benchmarks you are looking at - are they running WoW and only WoW? Does their environment match yours?
If you’re like me and have sometimes dozens of things open while you’re playing, you might do better overall with AMD. If you’re playing in a more ‘perfect’ environment then the difference with in game performance might be more pronounced and Intel might be better for you.
Either way, things are much tighter than they were in earlier generations - the gaps are not nearly as big.
TL/DR: I don’t have an answer, I just have more anecdotal information that suggests that your use case is more important than a benchmark that isn’t a perfect mirror for your environment.
I would wait for the next generation to come out to make a decision. If you don’t NEED it today, then wait.
