Blood DK
Holy Priest
Assassination rogue
Arcane mage
Arms warrior
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Arcane would likely be in the meta convo if it wasn’t for frost and fire existing, tbh. They crank.
Good on them for doing what they did though. It’d be fun to look through their logs.
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What is this exodia comp?
Yeah, them and holy aren’t bad at all, just the worst spec of their class and wanted every class to be able to participate.
Blood/arms/assassination however, and no Aug, during the hardest affix rotation week is pretty impressive. And it’s not like they spend months practicing and gearing these non-meta specs.
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No. the people who chase it do more dmg.
Correction. The people who chase it and think you have to do more damage
Before Aug was introduced, all specs were within 10% of each other. Some of the best balance the game had seen. Other than Aug I’d say the game balance was in a good state. You’ll always have mathematical optimal strategies that will be used so long as the titles are reserved for the top .1% which seems to be what the entire game is based around now.
But while it’s frustrating as someone who mains a spec that is essentially never meta for live keys, the reason the meta dominates even below title range is because it is simply the path that provides the highest likelihood of success. Most people in these conversations wind up barking up the wrong tree. It’s not that the meta specs squeeze an extra tiny amount of performance that won’t matter with good play in a +20, it’s that the extra performance creates a higher margin for error for things to go wrong and still achieve the group’s goals.
People like to pretend like having a group play better is just as easy as bringing in a meta spec; in a premade group it might be but when in a PUG there’s no reason to bring the non meta spec if a comparably geared and accomplished meta spec is available. If both play at the same skill level, the meta spec will perform better and thus give you a larger margin of error. Why would you want to bring an off-meta spec that can commit 5 errors before you miss the timer when a meta spec gives you up to 7 errors and still be able to time?
Pretty much the only time this doesn’t hold true down the skill ladder is when a spec in the top end meta is too complicated for most players to figure out how to play even decently or requires some extreme coordination in specific ways that most groups cannot or will not perform to make work. For instance, the top end meta healer in SL season 1 was Venthyr Holy Paladin. However, since this was only the best option if you pulled around exact timings when Ashen Hallow would enable massive and dangerous pulls that would otherwise wipe the group, and no PUG could hope to pull this off, we saw a decent amount of shamans and druids as well one tier below the absolute top of the rankings.