In response to your critique of shamans, I think you’ve got some skewed data that’s going to cause a bit of prejudice.
A lot of 2-hand WF shamans are actually hybrids, and only go into the enhance tree far enough to get the 2-hand talent, then fill out elemental. Because of this they will register as elemental spec on logs.
I’m just asking people not to judge a shaman based on them having a 2-hand wep equipped.
They aren’t, especially in the current speed kill meta of raids where they are actually superior.
The biggest complaint in Vanilla against Druid Tanks was the mana issue, and it wasn’t a clear cut matter either. Warriors could remove Critical Strikes entirely, usually shove Crushing Blows off the table for large portions of the fight, and generally had far more Avoidance compared to a Druid. All of this meant needing to heal the Warrior less often but when they DID take a hit, they needed to be more or less immediately pushed back to full because they lacked the substantially better EH of a Druid. The flip side was that Druids took steadier, lighter hits, even with Crit/Crush hits landing, so Healing could be done with efficient heals fairly steadily. Some Healers preferred one method over another, but it wasn’t really a noticeable difference until Late-AQ40 on a few bosses where Warriors could start bridging the EH gap.
Thing is we don’t have mana issues as a standard operating assumption in raids any longer. We kill bosses substantially faster, even for weaker/less stacked guilds, than we did in Vanilla simply because the “weaker” guilds are playing and speccing and gearing far better than the “good” guilds of the past. Being a mana sponge has little relevance when you don’t actually run OOM, which is basically where TBC and WotLK placed Healers and Tanks.
So that leaves only the matter of “Can a Tank survive long enough to get healed?” and “Can a Tank maximize TPS so as to not cap any DPS?” The answer to both of these is “yes” for a Druid, and the superiority for Druids lies in the TPS matter. Our Threat scales directly with damage with two huge modifiers: one of both of our abilities and one for being in Dire Bear Form. Warrior Threat primarily scales from Rage itself as all their abilities have static modifiers tacked onto them, and even Shield Slam is fairly limited based upon the ilvl of the shield used and Strength. And right now? You can look at loads of parses where every single kill there are 4-6 deaths at the end of almost all the fights with Rag because the Fury Warriors ripped aggro spamming Execute and simply couldn’t survive melees + fire DoT.
On top of that, Warriors currently drop a LOT of survivability to gear for +Hit/Crit and higher Strength totals, to the point of needing to opt out of Plate pieces if they want certain stats. On many of the above discussed parses, the “MT” is wearing a hodgepodge of Mail and even sometimes Leather pieces to get the job done and hold aggro. A Druid doing the same thing, to the point of focusing only on Hit cap and then Crit is still going to have a deeper EH pool than a Warrior doing so.
Which brings us to the final point: scaling with gear. A Druid that seeks to cap themselves out based on EH, Defense, and Dodge is going to gear something like this:
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/druid/night-elf/AjwRAUAFAB9QUFATAwIhUfBQAvABOMsCQqlDKh8CbAUx1QY4pgc5Lgg5MQlJDEozygNuC0m_DD3vDTaODi4jDzEHEAOv
–vs. a Druid gearing for Hit/Crit like this–
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/druid/night-elf/AjwRAUAFAB9QUFATAwIhUfBQAvABNFwCR-QDMn8FMdUGNooHSTAIMQkJMqYKNoULQqcMMyoNLicONo0PQs4QJOk
The former can still get growth through gear upgrades but they’re constantly playing around the AC cap with or without Inspiration procs included. The latter can just keep going for raw TPS stats and see a lot more direct upgrades in both TPS and EH all the way through to the end of AQ40, at which you can maintain high Crit, Hit cap, and AC cap.
There is absolutely no reason you cannot bring a Druid to Tank every single boss with the sole exception of Loatheb and not because a Druid can’t do it but because the boss is a cheesy and weird fight that favors high Avoidance and Block. But the flip side is that Druids are the premiere Tanks for Hateful Strikes on Patchwerk and Thaddius, hardly niche.
Read my post again.
Then read yours again.
Data has to be taken appropriately is clearly something I agree with.
Are you just arguing for the sake of it?
That things are dying so fast that the tank doesn’t matter isn’t an endorsement for druid tanks, it just means tanks in general are less important in the content available right now.
Not really, it means the function of a tank has altered, which means different qualities take priority.
Heres your post, so you can re-read it yourself.
Nobody blamed data for anything. Don’t strawman.
No matter the word gymnastics you try to use, this is bad “intel.” Someone took a very small sample and made a public announcement about it in an “evaluation.” Anybody with education on statistics and sampling know how silly the OP is.
Really, guy?
That… doesn’t undermine the point at all. If the current strategies de-emphasize Tank survivability, then the “Warriors are always superior” mantra doesn’t hold in the slightest, not that it was relevant even in longer fights until Naxx.
If the meta calls for more TPS and Healers aren’t struggling, Druids win hand over fist, which speaks directly to their viability.
Do you have any links to the spelladin build that you mentioned?
Ideally in a raid I would like to be a healer but contribute some damage via judgement(light/wisdom)/shock/HoW. Are you seeing any of this from Hpals, or are they strictly healing?
“disclaimer” I do not raid and probably never will. One thought though as a 15-year hunter. They are crowd control and good at it. They are not meant to top the dps meters.
Yep, sure is.
I see.
Essentially, you were ‘educated’ and are aware that insufficient data is… insufficient.
This is news to no one. Your input added nothing to the discussion. Which is a discussion about first findings. Which has value.
Also, please don’t be like all the forum gargoyles who throw out ‘strawman’ and other terms without understanding when to use them and/or lacking sufficient fundamental critical thinking skills to accurately read a post, or write one.
I only corrected you because you were jumping on this guy’s throat, and yet were flatly wrong.
Next time, just be aware that when adults are talking, you are out of your depth and hesitate before being rudely negative.
Honestly I’ve seen this on Priest, even with my 2.5 second casts. If I’m grouped with Pallies or even other Priests who love to Flash Heal spam (dunno why), then it’s hard to get a heal out. If there’s too many people taking damage then it’s nice because I actually have more targets to heal, or if there’s a longer, tougher fight then I’ll still have mana later to actually finish the fight. But I see people who are healing at 80-90% health and it drives me nuts. Unless they’re getting spanked and their HP is tanking so hard that you need to start casting early, there’s no need for that but because so many people have bad habits, I find myself not getting out as many heals because I’m willing to cast longer, more efficient heals and wait for people to take more damage before doing so.
If anyone has advice on how to deal with this behavior in raids (10-40), if it will change, or if I should just not worry, let me know. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always hated playing with other healers - there’s always a clash of some sort. So I’ll take any advice I can get on how to better deal with these situations, or if I need to worry at all even.
Oh lord… where do I begin…
Apparently it’s news to you. You’re the one who said
Knowing good and well that inadequate sampling is not valuable.
Did you really just use a strawman, get called on it then lecture people of not knowing what one is? Huh??
You didn’t correct anything. The OP took an inadequate sample for qualitative data and calls it an “evaluation” and you’re trying to white knight him for it then backpedal when it was pointed out how it was inadequate.
Oh, I see what you’re doing here. And I even took the bait… shame on me.
Theres nothing elitist about this post. In fact id venture to say elitism has no place in classic. I cleared mc! Golf clap.
I think someone in this thread was even talking about “meta”. Meta… for Classic… 
In my experience thus far, the boss fights are so quick that you can get away with a higher ranked or less efficient heal as opposed to your most efficient rank and still finish the fight with mana while getting meaningful healing out.
I would tell you that sometimes a mid ranked flash heal will be more effective than an efficiently ranked heal, as the fight is going to be under 2 minutes long.
The efficient healing style you are using will pay off more in future content where the scaling nerfs are not as severe.
In my case i went in thinking id be spamming rank 1 chain heal, and rank 5 healing wave and ive found i can finish boss encounters using max rank chain heal and a mix of rank 7/max rank healing wave and max rank LHW exclusively.
The fights are just too short.
Keep an eye for spelladin retribution, theres tons of videos of ppl pulling 300 to 400 dps in this spec, wich is very acceptable in phase 1.
Full Ret with str/ap gear is a dream, only works for pvp. But spelladin is pretty viable, even in blues. Theres videos about it on Judgement youtube channel.
TBC opened a lot of windows for DoT play, but alas, Warlocks’ best DPS spec was still just Shadow Bolt spam by T5.
I don’t think it was artificially. Back then, it was, supposedly, a hardware limitation, which is why it increased, and ultimately removed as the game got older.
I’m not an early judge at all. I’m judging a month after the game’s launch.
But to that point, exactly when would it be appropriate to judge? When is it acceptable to look at and logs and compare the specs?
By the way, I do have vanilla experience.
Clearly not.
They don’t bring anything unique. A Holy Paladin brings everything a Ret Does and actually performs their role not only really well, but the best.
Of course. People can play whatever they want. That doesn’t change the facts. Ret’s DPS is the worst of all the specs in the game, and we have the data to prove it now.
Considering we don’t have a lot of talent points and we do have to actually choose between Cat and Bear in our talents, I really don’t think this is the case.
For example, row 1, I’d never take Ferocity over Feral Aggression as a Cat, and inversely, I’d never take Feral Aggression over Ferocity as a Bear.
Feral Instinct, Thick Hide, Feline Swiftness, Blood Frenzy/Primal Fury, Improved Shred, Savage Fury…
I play bear because we need a tank, not because I want to play cat.
I’m sorry to hear. Hopefully Shaman on its own, regardless of spec, still provides you with the playstyle you enjoy.
Why do you think I can’t be enjoying a good role playing game while also focusing on efficient raid tactics?
Perhaps I’m roleplaying a strategist and selecting the people most suited to the task of raiding a dragon’s layer. You could call them raiders. They’d be led by a Raid Leader. They would hand-select the most suited for the task to enter dangerous places and minimize the loss of life.
On a serious note, people enjoy different parts of the game. WoW was always raid-centric. It just wasn’t homogenized and overbalanced in vanilla, is all.
What do you mean buh bye? I never said I was quitting. I love Classic! So happy to be playing it after the years of horrid gameplay in retail.
I’m not sure what you mean? That the post is stating the obvious? It wasn’t obvious until launch. That was the point of this post: to look back at the discussions prior to launch about specs and see how they all turned out in the real deal.
Cute, but it’s not anecdotal. It’s from WarcraftLogs, and it’s hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of parses.
Yeah, I hear this a lot. That is literally the point of a DPS spec, by the way: to deal damage.
Nothing you bring as Retribution is unique to Retribution, so all of the utility you think you bring is better when brought by a Holy Paladin, who happens to be the best healer.
A fair point. It’s a lot like Truefaith Vestments, or Wild Growth Spaulders. Items so exceedingly powerful, they’re never replaced, or won’t be replaced until AQ40/Naxx, at least.
My only point is that Druids get “stuck” in terms of their power for a long time, whereas Warriors don’t. Maybe the case is that they get “stuck” way ahead of Warriors, which might explain why they seem so good right now.
I’ll reserve my judgment on that for later phases.
A. or 2. Haha.
C (or 3). The spec just isn’t very good. Sorry, but I think of the hundreds of Feral Druids doing DPS, the best of them probably know how to play it correctly and are geared for it.
The Feral pre-raid BiS isn’t that hard to get.
But by all means, please reach level 60 and show us how it’s done. If there’s really no Ferals doing it right, I’d love to see them doing it right.
Then the future looks really bleak for Feral Druids, then.
This is what I stated numerous times prior to Classic’s launch.
At best, the excessive farming of MCPs and power shifting with Wolfshead will put you slightly behind the other DPS specs. The deck is just stacked against Feral, unfortunately.
Agreed. With how things look, people already killing bosses in under a minute, the fights are not going to be long enough for sustained DPS classes to really shine.
We’ll see what happens, though.
I know. I’m a filthy casual. 
Just fine. I get plenty of sleep.
Fewer pieces, sure, but it wasn’t entirely non-existent, as far as I know.
Well, all specs of all classes that are actually different.
No point commenting on Fire vs Frost, for example. I think we all know how that’d go in Molten Core.
Glad you found it helpful.
I understand the backlash. There’s a lot of people who feel the need to justify their spec to some random guy on the forums.
Don’t worry, Ret Paladins and Enhancement Shamans. You don’t need to convince me. I’m not your raid leader.
Well, for at least one of the classes, I have no choice. I can’t group with Shamans as Alliance.
For some others, there aren’t even logs for me to really base my judgment on. For the rest, I’ve had personal experience with them in raids and have logs to confirm what I observed.
It doesn’t always support my opinion, though.
I stated several times throughout my post that some of the results were contrary to my expectations.
And I certainly wasn’t combing through data to find things that support my opinion; I just made a prediction based on the knowledge of the game I have, and it proved to be mostly accurate.
Just because I said “Ret is bad for DPS” and Ret turns out to be bad for DPS doesn’t mean that I was specifically looking for data to prove that point.
I used the averages of all percentiles to account for all skill levels, RNG, etc.
Thus far, this doesn’t really seem to be the case, even though I would’ve previously agreed.
That said, there’s a few fights where I am not main tanking because Shield Wall is more useful.
The only reason I don’t have 3-4 level 60s at the moment is because I wanted to fully finish gearing this one first.
I don’t think being casual has anything to do with time spent playing, to be honest.
I’ve always considered someone to be “hardcore” when they take the game far more seriously. Playing more doesn’t mean you take it seriously, necessarily.
For example, I could casually waste 13 hours of my day just running around exploring, or I could min/max every step I take to maintain ultimate efficiency.
Honestly, the majority of my time played is me just standing around in stealth, occasionally moving my character to avoid being logged out.
A fraud? How so?
If by argue for the sake of arguing you mean having a discussion, sure.
That’s what the forums are for.
Careful. The literal troll is trying to convince you that I’m the troll.
I’m not sure what part of my post is really considered trolling.
I don’t really know, and regardless of whether it was or not, it didn’t pan out that way.
Even if you consider Enhancement to be a tank spec, it isn’t very good at that, either.
That’s mostly just because Windfury procs is basically equal to three auto attacks all at once, which is a lot of threat.
If I’m not mistaken, Shamans are dying because they attack too soon, proc immediately, maybe twice in a row, then die. It doesn’t matter how bad your DPS is. If you get “lucky” and crit or proc early on, you can pull aggro if you were attacking too soon.
Then please contribute to the sample size by uploading your raid logs to Classic WarcraftLogs.
You’ll probably need to be 60 and actually raiding first, though.
I believe you mean to say it paints an accurate picture for guidance, and you don’t like that it made your spec look ugly.
There’s over 20,000 parses for Fury, Rogue, Mage, Warlock, and 17,000 for Hunter, but only 300 for Ret.
Now I suspect your argument is that the reason the DPS for Ret looks bad is because so few people are playing it and pushing it to the limit. I sincerely doubt that is the case, but as time goes on, I’m welcome to come back and compare in another month or so.
Classic WarcraftLogs currently does not distinguish between the specs. The only way I was able to determine their spec is by browsing the logs individually and seeing their damage by ability.
For the vast majority of shamans, it was purely Auto Attack, Stormstrike, and various Shocks. I’m pretty sure that is not Elemental.
By contrast, the highest parsing Shaman was actually Elemental, using primarily Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning.
Actually, I think even if the priorities had not changed and survivability were a concern, Druid would still be winning out.
They simply take less damage per second and they’re easier to heal.
Afraid not. It’s a thread on the Classic forums long lost by now. I’m not aware what happened to the author.
He was absolutely certain Ret was going to be top-tier DPS with the new spelladin meta, and myself and others argued against him frequently.
Classic came around, and I’ve not seen him since.
I’d say Mage is better crowd control and better DPS.
You offer a unique form of crowd control as a Hunter, but until the Feign Death bugs are resolved, it’s unreliable. Frost Trap is nice, but not really necessary to any sort of raid mechanic as of yet.
If crowd control is the metric by which you judge a spec’s worth, Hunter is still pretty far down.
Druids have a tendency to do this because Paladins and Priests like to use bigger heals to keep people from dying in the next attack.
We’ll use Rank 3 and Rank 4 Healing Touch to top people off because it’s better than trying to cast a Rank 7 on someone and then having to cancel the cast because a Paladin healed it first.
Coordinate with your fellow healers.
If you have a healing officer, tell them to assign groups for each healer. They will prioritize that group, and only heal other groups when their group is safe.
If you don’t have a healing officer, get one or become one.
If you aren’t in a guild, get in one. If you are PUGing, stop it.
I concur, thus the quotation marks. Alas, some people will interpret my evaluation as elitist.
I’m not advocating for special treatment of any kind. I want equal treatment according to merit, and some classes objectively have less merit.
Yeah, this is what I was talking about earlier.
There’s some theoretical build being spread around that apparently brings Ret into the fold as a mid to upper tier DPS, but I’ve yet to actually see it in practice.
Surely by now some of the parse-monkey Retadins would’ve shown us the power of this build and uploaded their logs? Or maybe they have, and even with this build, they’re still bottom of the barrel.
Is it “acceptable?” Sure. Is it still the worst of all specs for Alliance? Yes. Does that mean Ret cannot raid? No.
I just wouldn’t bring a Ret over a better spec, is all.
This is the thread he was referring to:
Correct. Thank you.