not the same. Rets get a lot of utility that makes them desirable. Also the S+ tier of their other specs means raids constantly want paladins.
Warriors have the weakest tanking spec so if fury doesnt bring damage, they are useless for raid. Warrior is the only class that actually should have been buffed according to blizzards own criteria of “not being raid viable as a class.” Rets and Ferals both bring very strong utility, and both have enough strong spec options that they are always used. Most raids want at least 1 balance, resto druid is meh but they have good utility and their healing profile got better in ulduar, and all specs of druid have very good utility. Paladin has S+ tank and S+ healer, and great utility as ret. Warriors has a F- tier arms spec, a C tier Fury spec, and a last place tank spec, and almost no raid utility.
Warrior was the least desirable of the druid/paladin/warrior buff question combo for raid and is the only one of the 3 not buffed yet.
They never gave you a definition. They gave you balancing choices that made their definition clear though. And warriors in vanilla were treated like pure dps because for all intents and purposes they are. You get 1 or 2 tanks in a 40 man raid. Only one class had a real tank spec. Their design intent was a couple people have tanking gear and everyone else is damage.
The hybrids were the priests, druids, paladins, etc. The classes they gave mana, healing, and a lot of utility to. The classes that can heal themselves in PVP and buff the raid group, etc. Warriors has none of the healing, utility, etc of these other classes. Also, when they are not tanking, they have no utility or windfall from their tank spec that matters. A ret paladin by contrast can still heal. A feral can still battle rez, etc.
Warriors in wotlk are worse than hybrids, have all of the hybrid “tax” on them, but none of the actual perks of being a hybrid.
My ele shaman by contrast IS a hybrid. A very strong one at that. Their goal in wotlk and later expansions was to reduce the “tax” and make other balancing adjustment to non hybrids to help them compete with hybrids in other areas of the game (like death strike to self heal, etc) but the ability to heal allies is the strongest hybrid ability of them all.
Look at how broken preg paladins are in PVP. Top tier dmg and burst, super tanky, and can heal self and allies around 60% capacity of a normal holy paladin lol.
I need to DSac like, once in a night and spec out of it.
And I’m the source of some damage when my mages don’t want to be arcane…
No class brings enough utility to be far below the pack in DPS. You can always get it elsewhere if needed. There are very few things that are actually unique to a spec that makes them valuable enough to excuse being terrible in the role.
No, ghostcrawler was 100% clear on what they defined a hybrid as, and how they did not use utility amounts as part of the calculation to determine how much damage a class should bring.
The mantra of the expansion was literally “bring the player, not the class.” The meta players were always going to ignore it and kin/max anything they could, but the majority don’t have much, if anything to gain from trying to class stack. You get every utility you need in your raid with very few raid slots.
You just don’t like the WotLK era definition of a hybrid.
This post says it well. I was all for Rets to get a buff because having it near the bottom makes Paladins on DPS spec worthless. Not only does that prevent a lot of Ret paladins from raiding, but it diminishes the hybrid nature of Prot and Holy since they didn’t have a viable DPS spec to flex to when encounters called for less tanks/healers.
Warriors and Priest are in a similar situation now. Spriest may not be feeling it now, but during ToGC they’ll see the limits of their specs scaling while the rest of the pack makes off with those higher stat totals. Warriors may be feeling it a bit more now since they don’t have an S tier spec they can utilize to help in other aspects.
The problem isn’t also that Warriors are last, it’s that they’re last by a noticeable amount. A DPS spec has to be bottom, no doubt, but it should be PvP based specs and/or 2nd or 3rd DPS talent options. Having a PvE oriented DPS spec perform 20-30% lower than other classes is how we get situations like this.
But as I say this, the warrior in our 25man raid was dominating the meters last night. Having 2 252s and a plethora of other items makes the carry aspect of a fury start to shine.
paladins get multiple great abilities, hand of sac, D sac, cleanse, debuffs and buffs, etc that are all highly desirable. Are you in a guild that clears all hardmodes every week? If you undervalue ret utility you might not be.
ghostcrawler joined blizzard in 2008? how is that relevant to my post above? lol. Also he is known to say crackpot stuff. Even at Riot he comes out and talks about a class and cant even name its resource properly like with Mordekaiser.
Yes, in WOTLK they tried to reduce the hybrid tax a lot to “bring the player” and as such non-hybrids got a lot more tools to help them compete in a world where hybrids did more damage. This was not the case in classic, or in TBC.
The hybrid tax still persisted into wrath. It had so to some degree. If a feral can bring battle rezes and innervate, and both bleed and damage buffs for physical, and OT on the fly, why would you ever bring a warrior that does less damage? They 100% used buffs and utility to balance this. Look at the WoWhead buff tool for raid building. Blizzard 100% gave utility to certain classes to encourage raids to take them for raid composition. 1) make sure a 10 man can bring most or all buffs (still not always easy) and 2) make sure in a 25 man that every class has some representation and purpose to have at least 1 in the raid.
You have literally no idea what you are talking about.
We do get those, and yes, they are sometimes highly desirable.
But let’s be real, you have a holy paladin in your raid (possibly a second, and probably a prot pal), and how often do you need an extra DSac from a ret that had to give up damage to even spec into it?
Even Algalon’s black hole explosions can be fully covered by the cooldowns of 2 holy pals because they can bring aura mastery and DSac simultaneously.
After 1 buff, the rest of them can be obtained from other specs.
Ret utility is best in 10m, where there’s least likely to be that kind of overlap, but even there prot/holy are meta.
I don’t undervalue Ret’s utility. The problem with it always was that you get that utility out of better specs, so when the damage isn’t competitive it doesn’t matter that it has it.
You have ALL of the paladin utility you could ever need before you’d consider adding a ret to your team. Having extra DSacs doesn’t significantly improve your success rates because they don’t stack, and there’s a finite number of major raid damage bursts that make the button worth pushing.
It’s a good button to have for progression, but none of the fights benefit much from the defensive cooldown coverage beyond your prot and holy paladins, which is why ret is not particularly well represented among the DPS specs in speed clears.
Is it bad? Of course not. Is it some kind of magical ticket to a raid everyone wants regardless of how much damage rets do? No…
He was a large part of making the balancing decisions that the current devs are currently copying for the most part. (The Feral buffs was a mistake)
And all of that is currently successfully accomplished, with the differences between the specs’ DPS output tiny relative to the last two classic expansions.
There are limits to how poorly you can perform at a role to still be brought for a redundant but stackable utility. Ret was below that threshold pre-buff.
Fury never has been this phase, and it’s only going to get better for them.
ret and feral were desirable to have at least one of, and ret did have two S+ tier specs to play if it came to that. I know a lot of guilds take ret because of its utility. Arcane mage is surpassed by fire now. They have another blessing. Sac and D sac are extremely strong. They auto apply the demo shout debuff. They generally get one of the judgments of light or mana so the H pal doesnt have to run into melee.
Rets have always been more desirable than fury while being at the same damage profile as fury. Fury has none of that utility. They basically just have commanding shout, of which an imp can cover with most of the same value. They have 5% crit but a feral has that, while ALSO having the bleed debuff, while also being able to b rez and innervate.
Both feral and ret were more desirable than warriors before those specs got buffed. Now they are both a lot more desirable. Ret’s dmg buff was a lot more reasonable than ferals but due to the utility, theyre just better than warrior. They do the same poo damage as warrior but are actually useful to the raid.
This is a myth. They scale in parallel with other classes. On the nerfed ArPen patch they dont scale exceptionally well. The gap they had in phase 1 persists pretty much all game. Its just that as overall damage goes up, that represents a smaller % of the overall damage.
Assassination rogues got more dps than warriors in Ulduar. Warriors scale middle/upper of the scaling pack, which means that the massive gulf between them and the top will never be closed.
The only good thing youll see out of warriors is persistent cleave fights like Obsidian Sanctum. In future phases, theyll do okay on this fights but thats about it.
Not by enough to offset the loss of a pre-buff ret.
The first 2, sure… Beyond that drops off harshly in practice.
After kings, you can get any of the remaining from better specs, including warriors. You only need 1 paladin for blessings. The rest are just alternate sources of things.
Untrue, fury was FAR more desired than ret prior to the buffs, and still is. Over 50% more fury warriors had Algalon kills and Yogg 0 kills than rets before the ret buff. Fury is still more utilized.
Yes, that’s why sims have them in the top 3rd even without Shadowmourne by ICC BiS. They move up the ladder on the power of myths.
They don’t need to be the absolute best dps to be good. And it looks like they’ll be beating assassination in the long run
Even without Shadowmourne, the warrior values are in the top third.
And how are the Sims broken? They’ve been fairly good about modeling current DPS. There’s no reason to expect them to all just fall apart because the stats go up.
The warriors are all hoping that the Sims are wrong because it destroys their argument that they will be more than fine.
Although blizz has access to all of this gear on their end, so they can pretty easily verify it when deciding on if to buff fury or not.
Yep. I’ve been trying to replicate those sims and haven’t been able to. The highest Warrior sims I seem to be able to get are around 15800. So, I’d be super keen to see what models and settings they’re using.
you can go look at phase 1 logs, sim it, then phase 2 logs, sim it, and get an idea of the relationship between where it will be in the future
then do for a different class and compare
warriors will be around the middle instead of the bottom when youre in full ICC bis minus the rare shadowmourne that most people will not get. Youll be middle upper with it.
Not the best arc for a class that brings much less utility than other classes and doesnt have an S+ alternative spec to pick from.
Any phase 2 sim I’ve seen has lined up pretty well with how warriors are currently doing. I haven’t seen any putting out grossly inflated numbers that people on WCL aren’t matching.