Topping meters IS fun.
If you roll a tank spec early and gear for it you shouldnt have a problem with finding a raid spot and with dual spec being a thing if you are a dps in a raid situation you will be able to gobble up the unwanted raid gear later. In all honesty if you are a class that can roll as a tank in Wrath, I would start collecting tank gear now so that you have it when dual spec comes out. More than likely the only dedicated tank in wrath will be the prot paladins, everyone else will be expected to have an dps off spec that they are geared for and can play at a raiding level.
This will almost certainly be the case. People get caught up in the “who is the best tank?” debate without recognizing that it’s really about “who is the worst dps?”. That is, your main tank is almost certainly going to be the spec that you need to stay in their tank spec for the purposes of the raid - and the only time you ever use the other tanks is when you need multiples or there are special boss mechanics trivialized by a specific tank.
The same is true on the healing end. Your healing team is a Discipline Priest, a Holy Paladin and a Resto Shaman. They will always be your healers. If you need more? Then you augment that crew with others. Why? Because you need those particular specs in your raid 100% of the time. The other healers just bring more healing.
90% of the pre-tbc information that was spread was absolutely correct if you were listening to any players who actually played pservers. Everyone knew bears were single target king in tbc just like everyone knew paladin tanks were necessary for aoe. Many tank warriors in higher end raiding guilds rerolled a bear prior to tbc launch because they knew way ahead of time what the meta would be.
The only things people really got wrong from what I’ve seen is ret and fury being slightly underestimated and warlock maybe being a little overestimated.
As far as I know WotLK is even more figured out with a better pserver scene and more theorycrafting done both by the pserver players and during retail WotLK as well.
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There were tweaks for Retribution that subtly changed their mechanics. However, probably the most glaring omission from private servers was the attitude towards Arcane Mage.
Going into WotLK, it appears the private servers use Cata-era rather than WotLK-era snapshotting - which could impact specs like Affliction and Shadow, depending on which way Blizzard jumps.
I’d argue that there are at least 5 specs (Enhancement, Feral, Retribution, Affliction, Shadow) where no one can reasonably make any claims about their Classic WotLK dps because there are simply too many unknowns at this point where private/original server mechanics may deviate from our expectations.
It’s also worth noting that the meta is very different on private and Classic servers. Classic servers tend to put significantly more emphasis on AE damage while private servers seem to be exclusively concerned with ST damage - so a tier list from a private server likely carries a bias that doesn’t match the biases of Classic players.
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All I know is that I went into tbc having never played it in retail or on pservers and yet pretty much everything worked out exactly how I thought it would excluding the ret underestimation.
Maybe it wasn’t as widespread, but from everything I was told I absolutely expected mages to be where they are. It was always a “mages are slightly worse than hunters or warlocks, unless fight lengths are short in which case they will smash everything once t5 comes”. Personally the only thing that would be a large deviation from my expectations would be in sunwell if arcane still crushes fire.
Its definitely possible that WotLK will be very different from what we expect, but if classic and tbc are any indications it likely won’t be. We have plenty of pserver data which admittedly may be flawed, but tbc and vanilla data were also likely flawed yet still probably 90% accurate as far as dps ranking goes. Meta will dictate the popularity of certain classes based on what people prefer, but it doesn’t change where the classes sit on dps lists.
Unfortunately almost every pirate server I’ve dinked around on or observed has been… interesting to say the least. BM Hunters doing insane damage because their pets are scaling in odd and incorrect methods. Prot Paladins competing on AoE DPS against actual DPS. Bosses inexplicably thrashing, parry-hasting, or doing their mechanics way too often (or not often enough).
Spreadsheet based tier lists are about all we have for accuracy.
Cata is when casters get really good. Wrath is all about the plate melee being great.
People are definitely sleeping on Blood DK dps.
toc forwards
from what i’ve heard dk’s are op in wrath
They’re not explicitly OP, but you can’t go wrong playing one of literally any spec. All the rotations are easy, they all bring sought after buffs/debuffs, and they fit in just about any comp.
I plan on running a Blood and Unholy dual spec for my DK. Probably Unholy for Tanking at the beginning simply because nothing in the entry tier actually hurts that much and the only Tank killer is pure magic (which Unholy excels at handling).
I remember SB spamming Warlocks being nuts in mid to late Wrath.
that depends…if we’re using last patch than yes…if its first patch than it’s destruction.
Don’t tell people to play cat druid in WotLK, that’s how people got carpal tunnel before 12 button mouses were a thing! Pulling half a million DPS on the trash before Plagueworks is hilarious, though.
Pretty balanced overall…
Blood dps is better than people generally think (it’s certainly viable) but it will be behind the other two specs by a decent amount. The big problem is that blood really doesn’t do anything better except the self healing aspect, which can make it petty forgiving.
Dk taking was mentioned above as well… (repeating guide info) The meta for that is technically a “blood” build, but it’s a very different build than most are probably expecting it to be, with points in all 3 trees, and you don’t spec into heart strike, because icy touch is your main attack (for threat generation) . It’s different enough from the other specs in talents and playstyle that it’s almost it’s own 4th, unofficial talent tree. DK tanks largely end up being the lowest damage dealers among tanks, and relatively poor aoe threat tanks, but are arguably the best single target tanks in the game with a great threat ceiling.
For leveling purposes, if you do dungeon spam, it might be a bit rough as a dk tank just because of their mechanics… Icy touch, into plague strike, into pestilence, into DND, into tap-blood boil is 5 globals before you really have substantial threat on more than 1 mob, and even that is going to time gate your next pull via DND cd, and tap is longer still.
This is where I think pirate servers have just gone off the rails if they have DKs blasting Icy Touch nonstop. You don’t need to be 100k threat over the next DPS and gimping your DPS output to prioritize Icy Touch as much as possible. It is just silly when Deathstrike and Heartstrike do excellent work all on their own, assuming you go deep Blood. Frost and Unholy can manage themselves just fine on the threat aspect as well, although they’re weaker on survivability in general.
What’s craziest about the Icy Touch “meta” is that it was a late-game change to DKs, who were holding threat just fine already before threat was amped up. Couple that with the biggest opening burst classes having rather absurd tools at their disposal to redirect, minimize, or outright drop threat, and I don’t get what the obsession is with having a theoretical sky-high threat ceiling that no one can conceivably reach before the boss is dead 3 times over.
5mans are the biggest chore for DKs out of any Tank, but they’re by no means bad at it. This is why Unholy was still used for Tanking since diseases are just that much nastier for AoE and simply chaining the last mob of a previous pull into the next one with a Pestilence to keep the train rolling of AoE proc diseases was plenty to maintain threat. Combined with Deathgrip and Dark Command (all from range, I cannot wait for all Tanks to have ranged Taunt), controlling a pack isn’t too bad.
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DKs are actually one of the least useful buff/debuff classes. Every buff/debuff they bring is already brought by someone else (more generally useful and/or in a better version) in your raid except for Ebon Plaguebringer (which is AE vs. ST for the other versions).
My suspicion is that what we’ll see in WotLK is a flood of players leveling their DK… only to discover that the demand for them in raids is relatively low.
Wotlk is the only expansion I had multiple toons raiding. Classes change throughout the game a great deal, and it’s not so bad getting Alts up. DK tanking was my favorite because they have a lot of control over their health pool, especially if you stack a bunch of mastery
Just play what you want. The games gonna get rolled over because everyone knows what to do and it won’t matter
Mastery = Cataclysm