Class with highest 'APM'

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I was a newb/n00b in vanilla, so I only had rudimentary experience with two or three classes. I really enjoy specs with a busy rotation, and I know by and large vanilla was slower paced, but what specs would you say had the highest attacks-per-minute? Or for whatever other reason felt fast to play?

Edit to clarify - I mostly mean for dps. I fully intend to dabble in tanking or healing on my main or alts, but the fast pace is not so much a concern for me there.

Thanks!

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Um Druid moonfire spam? Not real useful but it’s fast

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I’m gonna go with warlock. They had multiple dots and curses to maintain then.

I’m going mage to AoE farm since that will be relevant again :sunglasses::snowflake:

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Fury warrior has the most intensive rotation and they output the most dps, highest APM for sure.

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he said highest dps …

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It’s probably a melee class like warrior or feral

At 60 you have to use your abilities in a thoughtful and strategic way, resource management is crucial, and you can make mistakes, or at least not do the best possible thing to maximize your dmg. And when you line things up correctly it is an absolute blast to unload your dmg with any class.

The ‘faster pace’ of modern wow is just spammy non-sense. When an ability lights up you press the button. It may not be the best thing to do, but its never a bad idea to press it. It’s much more interesting and rewarding imo to really understand your class and know how and when to best set up your full dmg potential.

So the slower pace of classic doesn’t mean borning, and the faster pace of modern doesn’t mean fun.

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Feral druid is highest APM by far. Every GCD is spent doing one or multiple actions. You spend a GCD either doing Shred, Ferocious Bite or switching out then back in Cat Form. The catch is that they’re fairly niche and won’t be close to the top of the meters outside of specific boss fights where they can get the most out of every GCD.

Fury warrior is a close second. Between Bloodthirst/Whirlwind/Execute and having to evaluate whether you want to Overpower for Flurry or using excess rage on Heroic Strike/Cleave, there’s a lot of actions and decisions to be done. Don’t forget to add in Hamstring on horde side to proc Windfury as well!

Hunters would be pretty high APM with the old pet AI. The one that sent the pet to a random place around the boss every time you sent it to attack, so you had to spam attack–>passive–>attack to reposition it so it wouldn’t eat the boss’ cleave/tail swipe. Since we had much smarter pet AI (and pathing AI for all mobs), I’ll assume it will stay the same. The rotation requires a lot of attention and timing but will also require a decent APM to get the most out of it. You do autoshots mainly, with Aimed Shot + Multi Shot every 10ish seconds. You always need to watch your pet, move out of the fire or stacking with the melees on the boss. There’s also the trinket swapping with Feign Death that you’ll need to use if you want to squeeze the most out of your poorly scaling in later tiers.

Rogue isn’t too high APM. Energy ticks every 3 seconds for 30 energy. You’re limited pretty hard by that and pretty high energy costs. You’ll spend a good chunk of your 5CP finishers on Slice and Dice if you’re sword spec, and practically all of them if you’re dagger spec, as using Backstab as a CP generator is more costly than Sinister Strike. You do get to go wild when Adrenaline Rush is up, as you regenerate energy twice as fast while it’s up.

Warlocks use no dots in PVE, unless they’re SM/Ruin, and that spec is only better than DS/Ruin on multi-target fights, which aren’t really common. Even then, the only dot actually used is Corruption. Immolate/Siphon Life are wastes of both a debuff slot and GCD. Damage curses don’t exist unless you’re the 4th warlock since your raid wants Curse of Elements/Shadows/Recklessness on the boss. The rotation is SB spam and Life Tap when low on mana.

Mage is mindnumbingly boring and low APM. Frostbolt spam. If fire-specced, replace Frostbolt with Fireball. Throw in Scorch every once in a while to keep Improved Scorch up and that’s your rotation. There’s also straight up downtime when you need to drop the ignite off the boss (the first mage to crit owns the debuff and other mages critting will add to that mage’s ignite).

The slowest possible spec is enhancement shaman. You afk-autoattack. You Stormstrike every 20s. You use shocks if you want to be oom in 30 seconds. Totem twisting is a thing but there’s no point in having an enhancement doing it when resto shamans can do it without being dead weights.

Elemental and Balance druid: think mage/locks except they go oom instantly and do nearly 50% of their DPS. Not even going to mention paladins because they’re a meme spec and I don’t have experience raiding on alliance.

Spriest is nothing to write home about. It’s mainly downranking Mind Flay and Mind Blast to manage your mana. Not too high or low on the APM scale, and pretty niche as well.

lol

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true i forgot feral druid, easily #1. sucks farming those gnomer maces too ;(

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Protection Warrior

Maintain shield block,
keep up Demo
maintain sunder debuff
revenge
shield slam
Heroic Strike/cleave extra rage (mostly spammed in raids)
spam sunder
spam battleshout on ae

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The warrior lover said they did the highest APM and highest dps not the OP.

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Today i learned about feral druid power shifting (thanks hamsterwheel and shedo). It didnt exist in vanilla. I mean it could have, but no one really did the dirty work on figuring it out. It seems incredibly complex and busy. Basically and if i can try and get my head around it without actually playing it, you wait for the energy tick, and just before (with wolfshead equipped) you shift in and out of cat form for a 20 tick boost. So instead of 20 ticks every 2 seconds, you have 40 ticks every 2 two seconds. This ups your output considerably. Its like a 100% haste buff making it incredibly viable. Also remember that ferocious bite does way more damage the more energy you have. Its clearly a bug, but also if you can do it well, an amazing avenue into end game pve. I mean not only are you incredibly high dps, you’ve also got utility out the whazoo. But its really going to take a certain micro managing mentality to do it effectively. If you want apm, this might be right up your street. Just look up feral druid power-shifting and see if it hits the spot.

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Power shifting wasn’t common in early Vanilla as the mana cost was too high for your mana pool. it wasn’t viable yet.

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As i say, id never do it. Its too complicated. Yet, he agrees with you, as he says in the clip, its a three minute cap. But he does address this, on alliance with judgement of wisdom (about 12 minutes in the clip) it’s potentially infinite. The key might be a wise GM ready to group people outside of the box. Honestly its so finickity i’d hate if it becomes a thing. If it does, im going hardcore resto :slight_smile: Its too much, man.

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its just a macro to switch its not that complicated, farming the Crowd Pummeler mace all the time is the part that really sucks. :smiley:

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Well now im convinced. Feral can die in a fire. If its a macro, then you do nothing, and it’s pretty much baseline. And if its baseline, then not having it in a sea of feral druids who have it, makes you garbage. Discard all my points. Roll something else. :slight_smile:

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I’m not sure hes using like a ‘1-button macro’ could be a separate macro to switch to human form and back to cat. Nevertheless those macros from vanilla won’t be possible in classic as we saw in the demo. They’re using the Legion macro system and functions.

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Feral has everything within gcd window. With power shifting you will need practice but its not for much pay out

Fury should have enough rage for every gcd.

Warlocks have one of the most rotation crucial rotations

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Lots of great information here, thank you! I have been working on a warlock and druid, I may drop the lock for a warrior and see if I can survive the lowbie warrior experience XD. Had no idea about the feral trick, that sounds like fun.

And I know modern wow is largely empty whack a mole, but what can I say, I like pressing lots of buttons.

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