Which class will be most needed in vanilla?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
41

Don’t forget Rogues. Rogues are so common that you’ll have a hard time finding a raid spot in quite a few guilds.

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42

In raids? Mostly likely warlocks since most people wont want to play a " support" class but given the size of the debuff slot most people will likely be taking 4.

43

Rogues, for sure.

44

Warrior tank, any kind of healer(druid the least imo), whatever is the highest sustained dps in the current raid tier for a majority of fights. Usually mage, fury, or rog.

45

Nahhh, Hpally is just behind priest.

This is more accurate

Prot Warr
Holy Priest
Hpally
RShaman
Mage
Rogue
Warlock
Rdruid
Hunter

Hunter and Warlock only matter for various pulls, 1 or 2 curses, and tranq shot. I’d actually take a spriest over a hunter when 16 debuffs go live.

46

Was resto druid really only more needed than a hunter?

47

Hunters were more of a PvP Class. You had Tranq Shot and decent CC as a Hunter, but it was much harder to not screw up as a Hunter than other Classes. RDruids could OT, DPS as needed, had Battle Rezzes and were not as easy to screw up.

48

It has been confirmed that Classic will have all 16 debuff slots at launch. This means a shadow priest in molten core and a bit more warlock damage early on. They may not be top dps, but I bet they fair much better early on this time around. But even if there was only 8 debuf slots, I think your foolish to only bring a single lock. What if your main lock gets sick, goes on vacation, or g-quits???

Cruse of recklessness is a larger raid dps gain in most situations than curse of elements anyway (with very little downside). If you are going to have 2 locks and a shadow priest, you might as well have a 3rd lock and have a curse of shadows up too.

If you want to play a warlock, I personally wouldn’t hesitate.

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49

I guarantee you that most players who choose paladin will vacate the class once they learn what playing a paladin used to mean. And I assure you that paladins will be high in demand as a result.

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50

Pink cloth hpala? whats not to like :smiley:

51

The only real reason to have a hunter in a raid was tranq shot, minus some trash pulls and bwl trash kiting. Druids on the other hand have innervate, best poison cleanse, decurse, brez, and they can drop mana pools preventing mana drain on various fights. They have weak single target heals and provide motw.

Hunter is a sub par dps, that has a way of clearing a enrage debuff, they can trap some mobs, they can kite on things like Razgore which is extremely helpful. They have some annoying animal that will magically pull trash even tho the hunter didn’t tell it to(he fat fingered pet attack). They do provide trueshot aura(but won’t cause red kitty spec), and they are much better than other physical damage at staying alive on rough fights.

At least hunters don’t cry as much as ret paladins tho.

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52

MC and BWL w/ 3 banishes can things a lot smoother. If one dies during a fight like vaelstraz the other can take over curse.

The 16 debuffs was spoken of at the panel, I am still in opinion that they might limit debuffs to 8 until 16 launched on whichever patch it was again. Been a while since I looked at patch time line but I will say that MC with 16 debuffs doesn’t feel very difficult.

53

I wouldn’t count on it, they’ve announced the content buckets - but have otherwise said they’re staying away from tuning with other systems.

I think that this can very well be thought of as launching with 16 slots until/unless they state otherwise.

54

For dungeons - tanks
For raids - healers and casters

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55

The one detail I was trying to highlight earlier was that the early pre-conceptions of the game had LONG-standing effects throughout the entirety of Vanilla WoW… and if anything, they lasted all the way into TBC For example, Warrior tanks were the ONLY raid tank until… Hyjal, when paladins and the then-new-fangled AoE tanking was handy?

Even with the upgrade to 16 debuff slots, that will place a damper on how many locks you can bring to a raid and pretty much outrules Affliction (and most DoTs, period) entirely. DoT-based specs are unlikely to gain much traction because of the limitations.

Which brings me back to a HUGE advantage for mages – their debuffs stack together no matter how many you bring. If you have 20 Fire Mages, you need only 2 debuff slots between the two of them: Ignite (including the infamous “rolling Ignite”) and Improved Scorch (provided you can convince at least one mage to keep 5 stacks of the debuff up for an extra +15% fire damage). For Frost, it was measly one debuff slot (maybe two if the target wasn’t immune to Frostbolt’s slowing effect); Winter’s Chill (?), the talent/debuff one which treated the target like they were “Frozen” so that you could benefit from the extra crit rate from the Shatter talent.

It doesn’t matter if you had one, two, or 38 mages (need at least the tank & healer)… just 2 debuff slots was all you needed. And the more, the merrier; ALL mages benefited from the few debuffs involved (and one lucky mage got MASSIVE DPS gains because it was going down as their DPS on Recount), giving the class stacking massive synergy.

That being said, we can probably try to count the “automatically taken” debuff slots:

  • 5 stacks of Sunder armor (it was reduced to 3 at some point, but I’m certain it’s after Vanilla WoW)
  • Taunt, for whenever tank swaps are actually involved; yes, it’s actually a debuff and not just a massive threat boost to the tank who uses it.
  • Thunderfury debuff, which slowed enemy attack speed. Likely not to be available right away, but you can almost guarantee it will be there eventually.
  • Deep Wounds (automatic debuff from Warriors, who need it for their crit-damage boosting Impale talent)
  • Curse of Elements
  • Ignite
  • Improved Scorch
  • Judgement of Wisdom (mana for your casters and hunters, Alliance Only)
  • Judgement of Light (healing for everyone, again Alliance Only)
  • Tranquilizing Shot (required for certain fights; Magmadar, the three black drake bosses in BWL… I think)

That’s a guaranteed 7-10 debuff slots already taken, AND assuming you’re stacking mages with only one Warlock. I can’t remember if Rogues had any “automatic debuffs” (maybe their poisons?), but you can see even 16 slots fill up VERY quickly.

If you want to add in Lock DPS, and assuming just a Shadowbolt-turret playstyle? Add in at least two more debuff slots taken:

  • Curse of Shadows (minimum 2 locks needed, other for curse of Elements)
  • Improved Shadowbolt

That puts us at 9-13 debuffs taken (added one more for a Rogue poison), without ANY manual DoTs or Shadow Priest debuffs.

Nevertheless, you do bring up a good point:
Warlocks just might be given a fair chance this time around.

The biggest issue with the class was that the were almost never given the chance to shine due to all the preconceptions around them and no one really knowing how to play them well (in fact, I expect that debate to continue after Classic launches).

It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

… and maybe I should answer the other guy…

I played throughout most of Vanilla as a Warlock, but like 95% of the game’s population at the time, wasn’t an active raider.

You, my good fellow, were a SPOILED warlock who was actually given the chance to do things. The vast majority of guilds wouldn’t have let you do what you did.

Again, I wasn’t a raider. I was the crazy guy who actually played Affliction and enjoyed it; spent more time trying to solo elite mobs in Darkwhisper Gorge and 5-man dungeons, got pretty good at it too.

… hopefully terrain-exploits make a comeback, it’ll be good to relive those days.

In retrospect, this is likely due to you being a raider again. While the stat inflation wasn’t quite as big a problem as it is now, the generally low player health kinda did allow for players with a lot of raid gear to one-shot the undergeared masses in PvP.

Lucky you.

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56

I was that AND a raider. I farmed up multiple Eye of Shadow for our priests in Darkwhisper Gorge solo, I used to solo parts of Dire Maul, I actually tanked a bunch of 5 mans because our raid tanks were too far above 5 mans. I also tanked Hakkar in ZG once because our off tank forgot to put his tanking gear on before pulling and went splat… that was fun for me and NOT fun for the healers. Oh, my favorite spec was the crappy 31/5/11+2 Dark Pact spec; screw SM/Ruin. I let my co-warlocks run that and I sat in the tank group with my Imp out.

Nah, Taunt didn’t need a dedicated debuff slot (it would overwrite something and never needed to really stick around for any duration) and any Rogue that didn’t just use Instant Poison would usually get a stern talking to. Judgements weren’t used a whole lot either, depending on the raid I guess. We used JoW often but not always and we almost never used JoL. They were far too much of a pain in the rear to keep up for a Paladin that was healing (so I was told anyways).

You were mostly looking at 3 Curses: Shadows, Elements, and Recklessness. Then Ignite, Imp. Scorch, Sunder (or Expose Armor if your rogues talented it and your warriors could deal with it), Shadow Weaving, Deep Wounds, Imp. Shadowbolt. That was mostly it; so about 9, 10 if you can get JoW to stick around. We usually ended up skipping Corruption on the warlocks but would still drop Agony or Doom most times since we easily had 6 slots to play with.

If I was spoiled it was because I was entertaining in /guild and on Vent, I put the time in to help people, I farmed with people, I farmed FOR people (notably healers and tanks), I ran multiple warlocks, in guild and out, through the epic mount quest line for free and was, apparently, a treat to be around (don’t tell my girlfriend).

But, that’s the joy of Vanilla; if you put in the extra effort then people will (usually) reciprocate in kind. @Matcauthon has made that point a few times regarding Ret paladins, and it’s true across the board. We had a full time (well, 98% of the time) Shadow Priest who we let DPS to his heart’s content… because he would grind out herbs for every other alchemist, pug Scholo to make flasks, etc. I got to raid in my Conflag PvP spec for awhile because we still managed to kill everything even though I was a garbage PvE spec. We had a Moonkin who would drop back and heal when needed and knew how to watch his mana , a PvP Arms warrior who DPS’d as such, etc. You don’t need 40 tryhards in Vanilla, you need maybe 10-15 and then another 25 people that don’t have their heads buried in their behinds and make good Vent chatter.

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57

Nicely done. Did you get give soloing Scholo a shot? That was an interesting one, even if it kinda boiled down to running laps around Gandling’s room for half of it.

As for tanking dungeons, was it by Voidwalker, Searing Pain spam, or just screw aggro madness and giggles?

… reminds me of the strange thing I did to get my Dreadsteed back in the day. Couldn’t find a “proper” tank, so a shaman in my guild tanked using Rockbiter weapon (back when it had a threat component) and a shield.

Interesting, I used something to that effect as well. May have gone for Demonic Domination (or whatever the fast summon spell was) instead of Shadowburn though.

I was thinking more in the context of that it would push something else off if the debuff slot wasn’t kept free, it did have a fairly short duration (somewhere between 5-10 seconds?).

Judgments were known to be a bit finicky, can’t recall exactly what point Blessings were at for what they’ve got planned for Classic. Was it class-wide buffs at that point or not? If pallies have to keep up Blessings with their original 5 minute durations for the whole raid, Judgment is kinda out of the question; the hassle of having one pally run into the raid, judge, and run back out would be troublesome… but having them stand closer to the boss (in a safe spot, if it existed) could solve that little issue.

… and I guess the question of whether or not mana was a bigger problem than threat could also be a factor there.

I’m surprised they allowed Recklessness. It did have a reduced armor component, so a DPS boost for your melee classes, but it also increased the enemy attack power. It was an trade-off, usually at the expense of the tank taking harder hits; I guess it depends on whether or not the healers (and tanks) could handle it.

As for me, I mostly just used the rank 1 version of the spell to prevent runners in dungeons and the Fear-CoR yo-yo trick.

Sunder was THE main threat ability for Warrior tanks (and actually did extra bonus threat at 5 stacks for some reason, if I recall correctly)… so I’m a bit surprised by this one. Don’t think they stacked (may have reduced armor more), but if it overwrote it, it could be something of an issue.

Threat being the big concern that it was back then, a threat loss would be a whole raid DPS loss.

A fair point, that probably gave you a fair bit of sway in the guild and they sound a fair bit more open-minded than many other guilds from that time.

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58

Much appreciated. :slight_smile:

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59

Depends on the drought.
Your server could have an audience of warriors that want to tank there fore you may want a druid instead or less warriors in your raid because you don’t want to compete against 25 warriors in a 40 man raid.

So which is the rarest is the most needed as there is a place for every class.

Every class you listed would be needed for healing spot or tank spot, there were many people who would refuse to play their class and throw an off heal everyone in a while so we could progress in a instance because healer left because he had a better deal.

Priest will be asked first and warriors will to fulfill those positions and shaman would be asked to heal or tank with hunters pet in the dungeon when we couldn’t get anyone.

Druids may be the most needed mark of nature is very useful or invertate.

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60

You all know you want our lay on hands. :wink: