So I wanted to know which classes require the most skill to excel at and which don’t. I figured if I went to warcraft logs to look at the damage rankings and compared good players to bad player averages I could get a good idea of what classes are easiest to hardest. Don’t think this is completely accurate because it doesn’t take into account the covenant choices, talents, soulbinds or conduits. But this is just for fun anyways.
I compared the rankings to Castle Nathria including all bosses with a gear score of 209-211. One chart had the 25th percentile ( if I understand this correctly, means the top performing 75% of the population ) and the other chart had the 95th percentile ( top 5% of all players for each class in that item level )
These are the results ranked from most improved to least improved ( which SHOULD mean hardest to easiest to master )
Anyways, some of these surprised me. Havoc especially, I raided on Havoc last expansion and the only difficult part was pressing the buttons fast enough after the haste buff from your azerite armor after casting Eye Beam.
Also side not, poor Arcane mages were last place on both charts. No matter how good you play the class, you are still going to do horribly.
Why would you say that? I described how I came up with this list. Anything other than some sort of data driven list would have to be subjective. This is the least subjective way I could think of to rank the classes.
Logs aren’t really a practical way to determine skill ceilings of any particular class because the people in the top % tend to raid in specific environments to begin with.
A decent player in a great guild will almost always parse higher than a decent player in a bad guild.
It’s hard to explain. The #1 shadow priest parsing strategy is to ignore as many mechanics as possible and have healers keep you alive.
This also depends on applications of the class. All I do is PvP, and I can confidently tell you that playing a Ret Paladin, Boomkin or Rogue right now requires only about 10 active brain cells
the funny thing about logs and such - lots of classes that appear to be “underpowered” are actually just balanced lol…a balanced class will never dominate every single piece of data like some are doing right now.
Yes, but what would that change between classes? That might have some bearing on individual performance, but these are class averages on a heroic raiding level. Why would one class be affected more than another because of the skill level of the guilds they raid with in general?
Feral Druid and Assassination Rogue are on the opposite sides of this list, so I am a bit skeptical.
Additionally, a big difference between the 25th % and the 95th % might not be due to the class being difficult, but perhaps because of some scaling issues with the class, or, if it’s like marksmanship, a bunch of people making Marksmen expecting it to be as easy as Beast Mastery.
It’s an interesting idea, but I think the best way to measure spec difficulty is just to ask people who’ve played a lot of specs.
This man is right.
Assassination, Frost, Fury, BM and Havoc are at the very bottom in difficulty.
Unholy is arguably the hardest mdps, Retribution ain’t even close in complexity.
Elemental Shaman is way harder than Boomie.
etc.
Also, it depends on the individual as well. I’ve been playing this warrior for a long time (turns 15 this May) and because my gameplay has been front and center focused on melee, I’m not a very good ranged player. So my idea of a skill cap when it comes with a range vs. melee is going to be entirely different than a person who has always played, say, a warlock.
True, but if I didn’t set any standard for gear score the results could be off due to item level scaling. So I had to pick an item level and didn’t want to go to high fearing that would leave out some of the lower skilled casual players.
Your error is that you have assumed that your methodology shows what you have decided it will show.
There is exactly zero evidence that the numbers you present have anything whatsoever to do with the difficulty of play. That’s an assumption that you have inside your head, and it’s based on faith, not observation nor any other form of anything that might be called science.
My dude, if you think Frost Mage is even remotely difficult, let alone the hardest spec in the game to learn by a country mile, I think your list is probably crap.
Skill is subjective. This list isn’t showing you what class has a harder time learning the rotation and executing it. It is showing you the best performance gains by the top players. This probably has a lot to do with how much research you do into optimizing your class. How much you sim and how much you really research rather than getting your talent choices and rotation from some web site.
It also doesn’t differentiate single target fights from aoe fights.