Current sims and testing from whats been found on PTR is showing Feral as the #1 class and ret not far behind it, doing more dps than a full BiS shadowmourne fury warrior. (edit: Ret about 450 dps ahead of Warrior, see the note at the bottom)
Considering that ferals have things like battle rez and innervate, and that rets can have a lot of buffs (like crit, haste) via talents, blessings, cleanse, salv, freedom, D sac, mana regen, and more, with the addition that they can use defensives with no drawbacks (unlike shield wall, also zerker stance adding damage taken…) it doesnt really make sense that they do so much damage. Warriors have significantly less utility. Should they really be doing less dps than a Ret if they both have shadowmourne? Tiny Abomination + the ret set bonuses are propelling them to the top, which is probably why they werent so great in phase 2. A 10% dps boost was unwarranted.
Kris Zierhut said at the start of WotLK that buffs were for an underrepresented class. Paladins are overrepresented and ret was always taken. Warriors as a class were taken to raid as 0 or 1. Saw world first guilds running no warriors, or WF Ulduar guild beefbar that runs 1 prot war and 0 dps warriors. Yet warrior didnt get a dps buff… the fix to shattering throw only made it so the ability was no longer a catastrophic dps loss. But it still resets and SYNCs your swings. The class is already behind ret on a few fights and they get only better and have a bigger gap over warrior in ICC based on the new sims with the documented effects of Tiny Abomination in a Jar.
Making Wotlk into Aggrend’s private server didn’t really pan out great. Should either revert the #somearbitrarychanges or at least do some internal math so that the high utility specs dont end up dps ahead of low utility specs/classes like warrior.
Wanted to clarify for the people claiming its “50 more dps as ret.” The sheet/sim going around that people are citing specifically uses an Overpower spec that almost no one in the top 100 uses and has Troll racial in order to boost the warrior sim 400 dps. Load that profile and change the race to any non-troll race and use the normal fury spec that all the top warrior’s use and Ret BiS w/ Smourne is about 450 more dps than Warrior BiS with Smourne.
Looks like the “252 kings” and “warriors scale hard” never really panned out.
52 Likes
Even if they removed the ret changes, they’d be above warriors.
Paladin gets the most value from smourne. They’re 300 dps above fury smourne value due to interactions
6 Likes
I think the problem with this request is that it is quite obvious that the developers actively PLAY Paladins and Druids and have a vested interest in keeping those classes on top. In order for your request to have any meaning for them, they would have to really care about ALL the classes and as has been demonstrated, they just really don’t.
Maybe once everyone changes to Paladin, Druid, and Death Knight they MIGHT care? Maybe? I still kind of doubt it but it would take either something so extraordinary to happen or the developers would actually have to play and care about other classes before this request would have any interest for them.
Thanks.
10 Likes
Could be worse, could be retail ret
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Isn’t retail Ret near the bottom on raid dps?
Simple test for blizzard should be that if you can fill a raid roster with a single class and complete the raid, that class might not need buffs.
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The class was, which is why we got the dumb blue post saying “just reroll!”
Ret was horribly underrepresented in Ulduar to start because of the low damage the spec did, as none of the utility it brought needed a ret, and guilds already had enough holy/prot paladins to cover all of their DSac needs.
Ret was NOT always taken. Don’t try to rewrite history. Fury warriors had almost a 60% advantage over representation compared to ret on early Algalon kills.
Warriors as a class were basically universally represented. The majority of them were fury. A spec that was almost guaranteed a raid spot because of the easy source of armor debuff, and added health to the raid, which makes a huge difference when content is tuned to nearly 1 shot players if they aren’t at full health.
The gap isn’t big, honestly the sims have the specs pretty much tied in full BiS single target, and warrior cleave is DEFINITELY better than Ret’s.
Yay, so rets can be set to arbitrarily need to get a legendary and a specific (bugged but accurate to wrath) trinket to match warrior performance without shadowmourne! That sounds balanced! (No, it really doesn’t)
Warriors are still a top tier DPS according to sims in full BiS. It doesn’t hurt you that rets are also one. It’s not like rets are leaving warrior in their dust on sims.
I mean, only 2 classes could even try that (druid and paladin). Balancing the game to ensure that at least one role a class can pick is bad is just stupid. But don’t worry, a full paladin raid can’t meet DPS checks for hard modes, as they lack a ton of support they need externally, so a full pally raid fails your challenge.
7 Likes
Why is it okay for Fwarr to be ahead, but not Ret?
If you don’t like your class, then reroll.
If you like your class, then who even cares?
I’m playing the worst healer class in the game. I love it. I also went the entire Ulduar phase with bugged Tier8, losing like 10% of my healing power in the form of insta heal tick.
5 Likes
So thats why they wont buff hunters 
1 Like
And why is it okay for the 2 buffed classes to be top dps now, quite the coincidence, huh. Especially since your argument could have been applied to druid or paladin, they were fine. If you like paladin or druid, ret or feral, “then who even cares?”
I think the only reason some ret players scoff about utility is because they never cared about the raid or using their buttons, they just want to top meters - those buttons may as well not exist, so why keep bringing them up. Obviously good rets will use their toolkit, but trying to be reasonable with people who never cared about balance is a fool’s game.
4 Likes
Let’s get real here, you’re just mad you are not topping single target fight meters anymore. It’s not about utility or whatever.
19 Likes
Ret is pretty much equal with fury warriors in sims right now and during icc.
Which was their stated goal with the ret buff, to bring ret up to where warriors were and have them scale together.
In full iCC bis they are laughably close to each other in damage, doesn’t get more balanced than that when 2 hybrid classes like ret and fury are compared to each other.
“In our design, having two healing trees (priest) or half a tanking tree (druid) or three dps trees (DK) does not put these classes in different categories of hybridness. A hybrid is a hybrid.”
Why do all these posts sound like kids whining about not having the coolest toy anymore? Nothing but whining because your position relative to other classes has changed.
If you haven’t been nerfed then your just jealous and whiney.
17 Likes
it always comes off to me whenever i see posts about warriors being “bad” or ret pallies being “too good” as someone complaining they won’t get first dibs on the shiny new toy (shadowmourne) and will actually have to wait.
2 Likes
The fact Aggrend play’s ret is certainly icing on the cake of the silliness that is Feral and Ret being the top 2 melee specs in ICC 
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This is if the Ret also has Shadowmourne.
At full bis Ret is simming 50 dps ahead of Fury. Fifty.
That is 0.3% more than Fury.
I can’t believe you’re actually serious about this.
5 Likes
I’ll care less about being close in dps to the most popular class in the game when you give us 30min buffs, can use all abilities in any stance, reduce the length of our cds, give our oh-so-amazing just as good (since it’s obviously brought as much or more than) hybrid tank spec a cheat death and the ability to clear all debuffs off of ourselves, make my debuffs passively applied, give me massive strength raidwide defensives, strong healing support and dispels, yadda yadda.
4 Likes
And thus we come to the flaw in the idea of hybrid classes - people think they should be a jack of all trades, master of none
Just because a class gives a 30 minute buff doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to the raid’s damage. Raiding is a team effort, if everyone is contributing a sufficient amount and the boss dies then who cares if someone is doing 0.3% more dps than you?
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I’ll care about this at all when you show me posts from you advocating changing Classic Warrior both Fury and Prot.
I’ll care about this when you show posts of you advocating giving TBC Prot Pallies even a single defensive CD. (Not even counting the disaster that was Vanilla Classic Prot Paladin)
It’s clear a class being overpowered is only an issue to you when it isn’t your class.
5 Likes
