almost every single melee spec (tanks not included) have high representation in arena, meanwhile only a handful of range specs seem to ever see play, and those that do usually out pace their respective others (example, fire and frost making arcane irrelevant + similar situation for demo locks)
the fact that stuff like rogues having all 3 specs be viable at the same point while things like demo, arcane, shadow priest, and ele barely see any play at all is insane to me
not sure if this is just due to WoW having like 900 melee specs compared to a handful of range, but the fact that they can’t seem to balance the few range dps specs we have to the point where they don’t override each other seems kinda lame imo
I feel like this is a result of the arms race between (mostly) mages and the melee classes/specs that has been going on since practically vanilla, and then the great prune of WoD and Legion. A lot of ranged specs lost their tools to deal with melee while a lot of melee specs kept their tools so they could actually play when near a mage.
Melee is just easier to play at a fundamental level when they can stop a caster every 15 seconds via an interrupt while a caster cant do the same to a melee. Melee also have all instant damage while some casters have to ramp up or cast for 2 whole seconds to get out similar damage.
It is. The damage nerfs and lack of good tier set and double leggos make spriest a support spec this season but last season it was absolutely insane with too much of everything.
Both arms and spriest got bad nerfs going into this season that didn’t fix the actual issues people had with them while also hurting their viability. It doesn’t change the toolkit for both specs is insane compared to other classes.
This is more applicable to modern day WoW, but I wouldn’t go as far to say this is how it has always been. I remember melee classes in Wrath-MoP requiring a lot more thought process to be able to deal with ranged classes that can kite efficiently. The usual exception was DK a lot of times because of their ranged slow.
Current melee design philosophy has been super lenient with respect to gap closures, slows, and speed buffs.
Roots and slows don’t really matter anymore
Melee have high dps uptime and self heals
Additionally most caster dmg shuts down outside of cds but melee doesn’t.
2 melees training down a cloth is a great deal more pressure then 1 free casting ranged with no cds while the other is shut down.
Fury can impending back any danger other melee heal and sustain similar. Outside of caster cds and an Affy warlock rotting them I don’t think they need much healer help till dampen
Funnily, they are very relevant when it comes to melee kiting other melee. For example, one of the reasons rogue counters dh so hard, especially in 2s, is dh doesn’t have a snare while rogue has passive uptime on theirs, so rogue gets infinite restealths
