Which class will be most needed in vanilla?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
82

You are contradicting your self @ythisens. In Vanilla, Warriors were the only viable tanks, and yet you are saying “Tanks or healers” will be the most needed, but then say that Warriors are not needed. Are you saying that Paladin and Druids are going to be as viable tanks as Warriors were?

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83

Just came here to post the same as Thestevesbdk. Warriors were the only viable tanks. There were tanking talents available for Paladins and Druids, and some will argue about Shamans, but no class aside from Warrior truly got the job done.

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84

We have a Blizz source now, and it looks like a definite… Warriors and rogues won’t be most needed.

At least he isn’t posting personal player information, that’s a plus.

85

Can people not read? He’s saying not needed because there will be an abundance of people playing those classes.

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86

Not to mention, patch 1.9 killed any gearing chance for paladin tanks unless you ran in a T2 guild. It took me a long while to get back to where I could tank again.

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87

In vanilla druids were stuck in resto in order to raid, and even then it was mostly for innervate…

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88

Oh, I was well aware. Probably should have included a tongue in cheek emoji of some sort :stuck_out_tongue:.

I was just making fun of the fact that needing tanks inherently implies needing warriors - but that warriors won’t be needed because there will be so many. (The underlying, unstated factor is that a lot of those warriors will want to go melee damage role or will PvP - removing them from the tank pool even if warriors are the #1 tank.)

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89

Death Knights, Monks, and Demon Hunters. For some odd reason I get the feeling we will not be seeing any around.

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90

Physical Education - So people can learn how to MOVE OUT OF THE :anger: FIRE!

:cocktail:

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91

MC - DPS/HPS, watch threat, do stuff.
BWL - Tanks! Immune taunt bosses, swap threat, position dragons!
AQ40 - PE. Time to run! Between every trash pull and during every boss fight. Run run Rudolph.
Naxx - y u crai? Do stuff, tanks! meny tanks! LOTS OF PE.

92

You have melee and ranged and healers.

For melee, remember that group buffs affect your group, not the raid. Melee had very high reliance on group buffs. So for melee on horde, for instance, every melee wants to have a warrior and a shaman in the group, and really suffers if they don’t have it.

Melee is Warriors and Rogues. Both are competitive but rogues have the edge. Rogues require a warrior though, and warriors are also tanks.

Ranged is Mages, Warlocks and Hunters. Hunters are the weakest, not because they’re a particularly weak class, but because they have compositional requirements like rogues, but they don’t share the same totems. Hunters don’t benefit from windfury, but require battleshout and grace of air. They aren’t as strong as rogues, so it’s better to stack groups for rogues. You can maybe fit a few in the tank group. Warlocks are the strongest, but they are limited a bit because of debuff slots. They have no group comp requirements, so they can fit wherever, but you can only maybe fit 5 in a raid before debuff slots become an issue. Mages are the middle ground. They are about on par with a hunter, but unlike the hunter don’t need a spot with a warrior to do that. They are a bit weaker than a warlock, but the raid isn’t limited to the number of mages that can come.

Healers are priests. Priests are the best and strongest healers. A druid or two might be there in case there’s a need for a battle res or an innervate, plus healing. The paladin is there for devotion aura for the tank and blessings on everyone, plus healing. You want a shaman for each melee group, and then they are healing. Priests are the best healers, but also the most flexible in terms of what you can do with them. If you have too much healing, you can swap a priest for a mage, but you don’t necessarily want to drop your only paladin or druid, or pull a shaman out of a melee group. However, if you want more healing, you will want to drop a mage for a priest. Shadow can do fine damage, but debuff slots make it a problem.

So I would say if you want to be melee, be a warrior. They are necessary as tanks, they do high damage, they’re necessary in any melee group. It’s a lot better for the raid to have a melee group with 2 warriors because you have an extra warrior and are short a rogue than having no warriors. Rogues have a couple benefits over warriors, feint being big. DPS was often limited by threat, and since rogues can feint it meant that they could do damage while other classes had to hold back.

If you want to be ranged and you’re a great player and have a group who wants to play, be a warlock. Otherwise be a mage. If you like to collect loot be a hunter.

If you want to heal, be a priest. If you want to be used, be a shaman, paladin or druid.

Also remember that loot generally class based, and that it doesn’t care that you have 12 rogues in the raid. So your one or two hunters will get their set much faster than your 8th rogue or 6th mage.

Finally, people were generally terrible at the game back then. Now lots of people are going to be bad at it now because they will expect things to work like they do now, but players are generally a lot more sophisticated and aware and have more resources available to them now. For instance, most raiding players have seen, and many use worldoflogs. That sort of thing didn’t exist then. There were some offline tools to analyze the logfiles, and some ingame damage meters and threat meters that were somewhat accurate but not perfect. But only the neckbeardiest of neckbeards used those even in raid guilds that were doing naxxramas. Plus the format of the logs and the combat log tracking was less precise, so things like pet damage contribution was often ignored because the damage meter didn’t know that the pet belonged to someone. You could name a pet the same thing as a player and it would be impossible to tell who hit the monster for 100 points of melee damage. I know this because I was in a guild doing Naxxramas and we were bad. This was back in the days of people doing 5 man content with 20 people and thinking that it was intended. Hell, at first people were running strat with 40 person raids just because they could.

Players were slow, people turned with keyboard, clicked their abilities, and the concept of a DPS rotation was not really a thing, in fact it wasn’t really designed into the classes either. Like there was rudimentary idea of “Keep this dot up, prioritize the big ability over the small ability, spam this otherwise” but again classes were given abilities based on theme not balance.

If you want to, you can totally play any class in any role and do well. You can play a balance druid and dps relevant content. You will probably not be competitive, but you will be adequate if the raid plays well, even if they are not optimal. For nearly all content it was tuned VERY loose. There were a few encounters, especially the tail end of Naxx that were tight, but most content is trivial for skilled players playing sub-optimal classes or specs. Vanilla raiding is in many cases the equivalent of raid finder G’huun. Your group can be terribly geared, playing an underpowered spec, but as long as you run the orbs, heal the damage, and damage the boss, you will win. On the other hand, you can have a bunch of folks in 370+ gear who can’t figure out how to get the ball in the hole, who get MC’d by dark bargain and who have to take the dog out in the middle of the encounter and you’ll never get it done.

Vanilla raiding, in many of the raid guilds doing progression content was way more like the LFG example. We had so much time for drama in raids, or really stupid things, and terrible terrible play. Megalomaniacal raid leaders that really didn’t understand the encounters to start with. Think about the persistence of theories on the things that cause Onyxia to deep breath.

In many cases the challenges of Vanilla raiding were meeting the compositional requirements of the fight (Do you have tanks for 4hm, do you have priests for Razuvius, do you have frost damage for viscidus? ) Meeting the gear requirements for fights (do you have poison resist for Huhuran? Do you have fire resist for Ragnaros? Do you have onyxia scale cloak for ebonroc?) Recognizing how not to go overboard with those gear requirements (Are you doing half your normal damage because you wanted 5 more fire resist?)

Past that it was a matter of not pulling aggro from the tanks, and not standing in bad. And in Vanilla there was often a lot less bad to stand in for most of it. A heck of a lot of it was just hit the boss and take his health to 0. If it’s a dragon, stay away from it’s tail and its breath.

But while high DPS is nice, you could get away with unimpressive DPS most of the time. For a lot of the time, people didn’t even have damage meters.

Gear also didn’t matter near as much. The way that damage scales right now wasn’t a thing back then. You got your tier set for looks and prestige more than the stats, and some of the original itemization was, let’s just say, not optimal for a player’s typical raid role. Like paladins Lawbringer (lawlbringer) had Strength, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit, Healing and Mana Regen on it. Spirit regen was weak for paladins (and druids and shaman) for no particularly good reason, and items had a few stray points of strength for no particular reason. Most of the stats on that gear was useless, and dungeon cloth was commonly better, but you could certainly get things done wearing your banana suit.

93

I plan on rank 1 chain healing my way to the top

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94

I’d say Paladin, They made grate healers, had grate raid utility, and contrary to popular belief they could also tank fairly well too!

Past that pick a Prot War, Mage, or a holy Priest.

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That depends entirely on how many Paladins are rolled with the idea of post-3.0 Ret in mind. I don’t think nearly as many are going to hit 60, just as I don’t think nearly as many Warriors that are rolled will hit 60.

As for, “most needed” I’d say probably Warlock on the Alliance side… and for Horde, possibly specific classes where the player is good. Good Hunters for Tranq, for example.

Don’t underestimate how many of those Warriors/Rogues might not make it to endgame. Rogue isn’t as bad to level, but there are going to be a lot of Warriors that give up prior to 60. I played and loved Warrior myself, but will almost certainly not be playing one as I remember the leveling experience and what it was like at 60. Without the best gear and a dedicated healer (or someone to keep the other guy still), you just get kited.

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96

Prot Warr bar non.

Not for guilds, but for everyone else… so expect paid runs or “all BoE reserved” runs.

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97

Wow that joke is hard to get.

Most warriors wanted to be 2h superhero’s.

Despite the very large population of warriors, tanks made up the smallest spec by population, with healers being slightly more popular (probably due to bg’s), with both healers and tanks added together making up a rather tiny portion of the population and completely dwarfed by the massive amount of l33t D33PS in the game.

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98

Innervate was a talent for the first year of WoW. That’s it.

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If classic classes are like they were in vanilla, a lot of people in this thread are going to be disappointed. Anyone planning on rolling hybrid dps or a non-warrior tank is in for a big surprise.

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100

fixed that for ya

101

If you insist on having a prot warrior to tank your dungeon groups then you’ll only get what you deserve. Any reasonably competent warrior can tank every dungeon in a full DPS spec without challenging a similarly reasonably competent healer.

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