Trying to decide what class to roll on fresh. Typically for vanilla I have played warrior but this time around I am probably only playing casual until TBC. I missed TBC classic but have heard warriors are pretty bad in TBC due to mechanics and just not being as good. Don’t want to bother leveling a warrior on fresh if I’m going to have to reroll come TBC.
Yes, I know I don’t have to play the meta, but I enjoy playing classes that perform well. Thoughts?
Awful, don’t even consider rolling a warrior for classic
How about rogue in TBC?
Warriors are broken since phase 2 in TBC, top damage since then until the end of the exp. Rogues are also very good, but not as good as warrior. Also lot of guild only run with 1 rogue, warriors could be at least 3
Lol maybe I need to do more research. My 1 minute search made it seem like warriors are dogs in TBC
Warrior is pretty good in TBC. There was a giant cope going into TBC classic that it was over for them, it was total nonsense. They, like most classes have bad boss fights and good boss fights in pretty much every raid.
For example:
Karazhan - favorable to ranged/casters. Something like Nightbane flies away, you just have downtime as melee.
High King Maulgar - total warrior cleave fight, they topped meters and logs
Kil’Jaden - it’s all warriors on top, however something like M’uru is all warlocks.
You can absolutely pump as a warrior and they top the meters on many fights in each phase. Rogues are okay, but most raids only bring one. I remember rogues being the least likely class to be invited to heroics. Overall people tried to make nothing but caster cleaves, but if you did take a melee rogue was the last.
u can check warcraft logs from TBC and check there
Far more classes are competent in TBC, so you will see a much larger mix because not everyone will be forced into playing a warrior if they want to do decent DPS. Warriors do remain near the top and are only really edged out by locks overall in Sunwell, but unlike in ERA, a better player in many other classes will be able to beat a poorly played warrior.
You can search Warcraft Logs for top Damage in Sunwell if you want to see the actual spread, but if you want to DPS as a warrior, you will likely be able to get a spot, but no you won’t see raids of 50% or more warriors after ERA.
A lot of earlier raids punish melee. Warrior still has the most potential when getting full bis but it’s a lot easier to stack hunters because they’re ranged, do good damage, and scale well.
I think TBC, overall, just isn’t particularly friendly to melee at all. I recall several mechanics and boss abilities that were just extremely punishing if you were unfortunate to find yourself on the receiving end. That said, it can be worked around easily with a little bit of situational awareness. Warriors did just fine as DPS. I want to say that there’s a point though that they don’t shine nearly as much as tanks compared to bears and paladins though.
Tried to do Kael’thas in a raid with 5 warriors and 3 rogues. Trust me, it was awful.
God that sounds awful. I bear tanked both TBC and TBC classic and they are practically immortal after a certain point so I may have never noticed and thus appreciated the struggles of others in melee. 5 warriors and 3 rogues just sounds incredibly crowded though. Particularly those fights where melee is having to spread out from one another (Gruul comes to mind though that really applies to the entire raid as well).
Yeah, we had a raid with 1 lock, 1 mage, 1 ele sham, and a few hunters. We had so much melee that I wanted to vomit. I played prot pal but it was only me and an hpal. Roster boss hurt.
Yeah I looked more into it on WCL, ill prob go warrior and maybe play arms early phases so at least I bring the debuff lol
Suffer as arms, go fury for warglaives.
You can make a Lionheart executioner and be the envy of all…:
its really just not a melee expansion, but rogues and warrior start being solid at the end when they get armor penatration. arms warriors provide an vey good debuff of 4% extra damage for whole raid. also arms warriors are very solid in pvp. rogues are gods in pvp
Warrior was in 2nd place for dps in the 99th percentile in BT and SWP phase, beaten only by BM hunter. They over performed all of TBC, they said they suck until SWP gear, they turned out great the entire time. Combat Rogue is 5th place dps in BT, 6th place in SWP out of 20, another good class/spec.
I’m pretty sure TBC warriors are a lot better off than Vanilla Boomkin, Ret Paladins, Shadow Priests, and DPS Shaman.
I realize the community is in for yet another iteration of lolmeta, but really can play whatever you like and find success. Can you have an entire raid full of memes? Mostly no. You can take one or two though.
We are talking 2026 kiddo…