Is it true there are only 4 classes that get to DPS?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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When the debuff limit increased, we were so lacking in dots I was allowed to cast serpent sting… lol! My damage really went it, but it was a sad sight for a top guild on the server…

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They’re not ignorant. That’s why they think so little of those specs.

Grats? I should hope so, considering they’re an off-tank with a sword and shield and not an actual damage dealer at that point.

You also take more damage as a tank than any fury OT.

You get 20% more Intellect. Calm down. Your mana pool isn’t that much better, and your HPM is far worse because you won’t have mana reduction or healing increase talents.

Also, I find it really funny that your argument is that as feral you can just gear as a healer and do what a healer does. I understand you’re making a point about your versatility, but it just makes me laugh.

“I play feral so I have more mana when I inevitably end up healing most fights anyway!” LOL

And your DTPS dwarfs a prot warrior. Your extra TPS means very little in 1.12 when Prot Warriors already generate more than enough threat to hold aggro, especially as Alliance.

A valid reason to be feral, yes. One for you.

Yeah, but your cat DPS is far less than another class’s DPS would be.

Mostly true. It’s more that the versatility you bring is not worth it. Why bring someone who can do 50% of any given role at a time when you could bring someone who just does 100% of that role.

If you do half the damage of another DPS, why would they bring you as DPS? If you do half the healing of another healer, why would they bring you as a healer?

You can do both, sure, but only one at a time. Most groups are just going to look for someone who fills the role they need. “LF DPS” does not mean “LF DPS who can also heal or dispel as needed, and even OT some fights.”

You’d think there’d be more druids in high end guilds if that were the case. Flexibility doesn’t kill bosses.

Very true. Just don’t expect people to invite you. PUGs and lower end guilds probably depend even more on people playing “the right class” to make up for their shortcomings.

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44

A good warlock should be fighting for the top 5 on most fights as soon as you get your hands on Bloodvine.

0 hit baked into talents for destruction spells and very little in the way of hit gear gimps lock dps so hard. As soon as you can get 9%-12% hit you have the potential for greatness…and death by over agro.

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this topic has turned into a debate between the elitist face rollers and the skillful players. i think its great.
these are the same people that method represents lol. the broken armor, one shot crowd that has no idea how to play. the psever crowd that thinks they have it all figured out and then moans when they realize they actually dont.
never touched a psever in my life but ill be that hunter who is still standing and tanks the boss alone, while everyone else stood in bad. :+1:

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46

Some semi-hardcore guilds will allow hybrid spec DPS classes on farmed content, but you are basically a second class citizen.

  • You will never be priority for a raid spot, in fact you will likely never get invited to raid progression nights.

  • If a non hybrid needs the same gear as you, they will likely get it over you unless the guild uses DKP, in which case you wouldn’t have been invited to enough raids to accumulate the DKP to win.

  • You will need to farm the gear of your classes main spec as well. If you’re a ret pally, enhance/ele shaman, feral/chicken druid you will 100% be asked to swap into healing gear at some point.

  • You will have to try 3x as hard as anyone else to be taken seriously. This means consuming, knowing your class/spec in and out, and going completely tryhard the entire raid, even when everyone else is being lazy.

It doesn’t sound like fun to me, but there will most certainly be guilds out there that allow them. If you care about gear, being a part of the fun progression nights, or being top of the meters, stay far away from playing a hybrid.

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47

You make some valid counter points to that poster, but where you’re wrong is the “why bring versatility when you can bring a pure?” Not exact wording, but I get your point.

My guild in Vanilla had 5 of what we called utility slots. We were a high end progression guild on our server.

In the utility slots we had:
Prot/holy Pally
Feral Druid
Ret Pally
Shadow priest
BM hunter

They weren’t tipping meters, but made a HUGE difference in several fights. Our GM also liked not having to get to a boss and swapping a bunch of raiders.

The prot Pally and feral Druid were a god send on the 4 horsemen and fights with addons (like major domo). We weren’t trying to steal other guilds tanks to do the encounter like some guilds.

The Ret Pally was never superb on DPS, but he was a wrecking ball in Naxx. No joke, it’s because he didn’t try to gear like a warrior, that’s the key. Kind of like cat Druids trying to gear like a rogue are stupid and gimping their own DPS.

The BM hunter actually tanked Garr adds, because we only had 2 locks lol.

These things are unorthodox yes… but they worked for us. These things kept us at 3rd on a fast progressing server. People couldn’t even figure out how our weird, unoptimized raid comp was working. It’s because our GM was able to think outside the box, and he did things that didn’t fit the strategies being put out by the world first guilds. But it worked for us, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more guilds carrying a feral tank, a prot Pally, or other weird specs in the 5-7 player range…

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48

Warrior
Rogue
Hunter - tranq shot duty, as well as wingclip spam for nightfall
Mage
Warlock
Shaman - enhance for nightfall and imp melee totems, elemental with later gear
Druid - feral if min maxing power shifting with proper gear and MCP and consumes
Paladin - ret for nightfall or with spell damage gear meta using MCP and consumes
Priest - shadow for some can be viable once a certain spell dmg is reached

Don’t listen to many of those that THINK they know how to min max properly. Many people are going off of false information and/or strictly using private server data which was very wrong in many cases.

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49

Fury warriors have the best potential DPS, and also the greatest chance of dying from pulling aggro, especially until your tanks get some gear. They have zero ability to drop aggro, so they get smoked unless they play careful. Playing careful means hindering your DPS - so again, their potential DPS was second to none, but they didn’t top charts until later on in raiding.

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50

Not true at all. You can play whatever class you want. Dps is not a big deal in vanilla. Maybe a 1 percent guild wont let a pally in or a druid. But any normal guild will still be able to clear raids with a pally or druid its not retail every class in vanilla is good in its own way pick what you want unless your going for that world first 1 percent guild.

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Only if you’re in a min-max meta baby guild trying to get world first in which world first already happend a decade+ ago.

If you’re in a chill guild you can play whatever you want

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52

I think you meant adds?

Okay, but you could easily just assign a Fury Warrior to each add. All they have to do is slap on a shield and one-hander, go into Defensive stance, and they’re already better tanks.

If you have a Feral Druid, and I could understand having one, they could take an add.

But a Prot Paladin? What good would they be in a fight like that over another Fury Warrior?

As for Four Horsemen, my understanding (having never done it personally in vanilla) is that you needed 8 Warrior tanks specifically with 4/9 T3 because the taunt swaps were really important and could cause a wipe if resisted.

Do you have any proof of this? Obviously a Ret Paladin would do more DPS in Naxx, but by “wrecking ball” do you actually mean “still about 70-80% of another class’s DPS?”

You say he was never superb on DPS. So why bring him?

I’m going to guess this was before the debuff limit was raised and you had no reason to bring more than two Warlocks?

At least in Classic, we’re starting with 16 debuffs, so you should probably have at least 3 Warlocks, anyway, especially on Garr.

And again… why would your BM Hunter tank an add and not just one of your Fury Warriors with a shield?

Even if you min-max on those niche classes, you’re still underperforming compared to a pure DPS who doesn’t min-max.

The strategies you describe were developed on private servers, though.

I think you have things all mixed up.

Firstly, of course a guild will be able to clear rads with a Paladin or Druid. Paladins and Druids can heal. If you meant Ret and Balance/Feral, you’d still be correct… because the other classes are there to pick up the slack.

There’s thousands of people who will tell you that maybe 15 people carried the other 25 in their 40 man raids. If you have 40 people who actually try and do well, they could be any class, really (except on a few fights where some classes are actually needed), but most groups won’t have 40 people like that.

Think about how good at the game the average player is. Half of players are worse than that. Now imagine them playing a “meme spec.”

Secondly, retail is the version of WoW where every class is viable. “Bring the player, not the class” was not a design philosophy in vanilla; it is in BfA.

Hahaha. Min-max baby guild. I love how scornful you and others tend to be towards high end guilds.

Also, world first hasn’t happened yet, because Classic isn’t out. Classic will undeniably be different than vanilla for numerous reasons, such that the world first in vanilla and world first in Classic will be quite different things.

You can play whatever you want regardless of the kind of guild you’re in. Just don’t expect to be invited to groups as often or be very successful if you play a spec that objectively, comparatively under-performs.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling people to prepare for reality. Right or wrong, good or bad, people will see “Balance Druid LFG” and choose not to invite them because they’re Balance. It’s doing a huge disservice to people telling them that everything will be hunky dory no matter what spec they play.

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53

Auto correct FTW!!!

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No, we literally couldn’t find decent ones. They were unicorns on our server on Alliance.

55

Fair enough.

56

Hunters are fine, but you only need a couple of them. It is not one of the classes you would stack. Their DPS is okay until late content where they are at the bottom of the pure DPS classes.

There is room to bring 1 of each of the “sub optimal” specs and they can provide buffs to your better DPS so it is worth it. Enhance/Elemental toss em in a melee DPS group with Windfury Totem. Feral Cat toss em in a group with melee DPS. OOMkin toss em in a caster group. Shadow Priest toss em in a group with Wortucks. Ret Paladin toss em in a group for the aura. Etc.

Yes, the super try hard raids these spots will be super hard to earn and you will be sat for any fight where it doesn’t directly benefit the raid. You could probably get a spot if you are a R14 or something and bring amazing gear. I can’t think of a worse way to play the game than be in one of these groups, but if that is your jam good luck to you.

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57

I seriously doubt all the phases for Classic will even be released by Aug 2020. If you do one every few months at most, it will be 2022 before the first ultra hardcore guilds make full Naxx clear.

58

Some classes are kinda cookie cutter into 1 spec, but you can play whatever you want. For example, Boomkin/Ret Pally? You didn’t see many of them because pallys were generally holy and druids were resto, but you could absolutely play them, just maybe not at bleeding edge content because there were better choices. Honestly unless you legitimately think you are gonna be in the top 2%, don’t worry about it and just have fun, there’ll be very little content that you’re barred from.

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59

Lol there were Ret Paladins in Naxx.

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60

Lol I’m sure there were a ton of pallys in Naxx, but I mean that goes hand in hand with what I was saying; He can play whatever he wants and for the most part he’ll get to see any content that he really wants to.

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Fun>Optimal just saying

But yeah, vanilla already happened and classic is just an attempt to recreate this as close as technically/administratively possible.

If you enjoy min-maxing go right ahead, don’t see the fun though in being told what to spec and even have your talents arranged so you’re “not holding others back.”

“We are not machines, and if we behave like them then what is the point in winning?” :wink:

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