The only assumption im making is that the top 0.1% of ferals isn’t an impressive rating. A rogue at 2.5k is guaranteed to not get the title, but feral… Maybe. For the time being, r.io doesn’t separate the druid dps specs to check. 1/1000 isn’t an especially high bar on some specs, that’s my point.
Edit: found the spec leader boards. 53k total ferals. So 53 titles. Number 53 is 2574.4 not particularly impressive. The first rogue above that score is 2575 at #1873. The cutoffs lists 2527 as 1% for NA horde. An order of magnitude worse that 0.1%
Also the idea that Feral is only competing for the “ST slot” against Rogue (wut?), and that Feral is an “unpopular” spec, but only after years of Ferals being ignored/made to switch to Boomkin or other specs in the face of overwhelming neglect.
Their best performing aspect is single-target, at which it’s not like they’re clearly the best at, and specifically have to choose to dumpster their aoe for. But that doesn’t mean they’re only competing for a “ST slot”. Plenty of specs bring competitive single target compared to Ferals, while also offering good aoe.
Shadow Priests and Fire Mages are also extremely popular specs with single target rivalling Feral, and Balance can do very competitive (within a couple of %) single target damage, which is kinda the problem. Ferals aren’t somehow competing against Rogues, Ferals are more often competing against Balance, especially so in a thread where people are routinely bringing up the idea of “class representation” with the implication that a person can simply switch to another spec of their class.
Of course it matters what the reason is. If you neglect a spec and make it perform badly over years, then set up a reward system where that spec is disadvantaged, then use the logic that the consequence of that initial neglect to justify/explain why it’s ok to disadvantage them, you’re actively making choices to make them less popular/desired all over again.
I’m ignoring the fact that group formation for competitive M+ groups doesn’t remotely work the way to pit Rogues and Ferals “for a niche” against each other because that’s a whole different topic.
That’s not how it works though.
If you’re contending that Feral is much worse than Rogue, and that the top Ferals playing at their skill cap are reaching 2574, and that Ferals playing at their skill cap are providing less benefit to the group to a Rogue, a Rogue switching to Feral and playing worse than them is obviously going to provide even less benefit, and not likely to be just be hitting 2574 (because now they’re handicapping their group), unless they’re being carried past 2574 by better performing party members who are offsetting that player’s diminished performance.
There are only 2 ways a Rogue just swapping to Feral would easily get the title given all other surrounding contentions:
they’re just straight up better at Feral than the top Ferals in the region already, or
their party memebers are just that much better than those of the top Ferals in the region
Either of which is a very interesting take for the top Ferals.
True. Something being your niche doesn’t mean you’re the favorite of said niche. If your niche at work is cook, you’re not automatically the best cook.
Pretty sure when I used class it was with classes that had a single dps spec.
P. S. Wouldn’t consider spriest to be popular. All specs have a dedicated and often vocal player base. Those players who won’t swap no matter what. This doesn’t mean they are popular.
It doesn’t. All that matters is that in its niche, it isn’t the best. In 5 man parties, you pick the best of the niche you’re after. Sub is good ST and funnel. Frost is currently good aoe and funnel. Monk is currently the best aoe.
I truly don’t care that blizz puts low effort into tuning any given spec. That they aren’t the best is enough.
But if you’re made to be worse at everything else as well, then you better be the best at your niche to claim it’s your identity*. That’s … kinda how balance (and niches in game design) works.
Even if I just hone in on what you’ve said (and not other people), I can’t see a single post where you’ve somehow restricted yourself to only speaking about classes with single specs. Hell, even your initial “For dps 8/12 classes are represented in the top 100 players…” post literally lumps in Druids, Shaman, Mages, Rogues, etc. all of whom have multiple dps specs, and several of whom have dps specs of different roles (e.g. Ele vs Enh, Balance vs Feral). Even in the exceptions you went into, two of them (Locks and Death Knight) have multiple dps specs.
Re: the PS: Shadow is, and has consistently been, one of the most popular specs in the game.
Even now, a search on something like https://wowanalytica.com/statistics shows it being up there with other popular specs like Ret Paladins, Havoc Demon Hunters, BM Hunters, etc. It’s only slightly outpaced by all Rogues specs combined. Fire Mages are also pretty high up there. That also tracks with my in-game experiences.
Now if you’d said Sub Rogues, Arcane Mages, or Survival Hunters, are unpopular specs, I probably wouldn’t be bothering to address this PS.
But we’re not talking about whether you care, or whether you want to invite people into your groups. We’re talking about how a reward system is designed, and who is worthy to earn rewards from it. How Blizzard treats those specs (and how Blizzard allocates rewards) is extremely relevant, whether you care or not isn’t.
SIde note here: If a spec is truly unpopular/niche, that means that any %-based system even if it’s spec-drilled-down will ensure that fewer people of that spec will earn it. After, numerically the top 0.1% of Ferals will be a smaller number than the top 0.1% of BM Hunters. That also means any person just randomly switching to a spec is trying to compete against the very best players of that spec for a very tiny number of slots where they will be rewarded. There’s pretty much no way to game that without straight up being better than those Ferals (or whatever spec) and out-performing them. That doesn’t apply in the same fashion to a spec that’s both popular and underperforming, but that comes with its own issues when trying to compete against a large populace of players who should be skilled, and have a large knowledge and support base to work off.
Also, relevant for whether they’ll use the same criteria next season, Feral is losing any semblance of “single-target niche” and their only shot at being competitive got gutted with the 4-set nerf.
*The whole idea niche specs and identities is itself a troll. If a niche spec comes even close to actually being good at their niche, they often get blasted down with the nerf bat. Most of the time, Blizzard often doesn’t create niches intentionally, they just come about because dead talents or bad tuning end up basically pigeonholing a spec into a position where they have one way to play because all alternatives end up sucking, and no one bothered to put in the effort to fix obvious and glaring issues. Or they intentionally want to dumpster a spec. We ARE talking about the same company that did “We’d rather you didn’t play Demonology” after all.
Alternatively, Blizzard accidentally creates content where one style gets to win out over everything else, like a suite of dungeons or encounters where cleave/AoE dominates on all the parts that matter.