Curious what you all think is the most difficult class to play effectively at a high level, pve or pvp.
I recently played a prot warrior for the first time at a high level and was astonished at how much more complex that spec is than prot paladin.
Depends on your parameters. Some people think Outlaw Rogue is the hardest simply because it’s the highest APM in the game. I love high APM so imo it was super easy. For me I’d say ramping healer specs are the hardest to get maximum value out of. You’re not just doing your rotation, you also have to know ahead of time exactly when to begin your ramp to get maximum value based on individual timings of every boss in the dungeon or raid.
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In terms of healers, Rdruid and Disc priest
dps prob rogue
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Any spec whos rotation/prio cares about the encounter a lot.
Healers generally since its less scripted.
Any spec with a lot of simultaneous procs.
Any spec with a lot of hard casting.
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Outlaw
Ele has a lot of procs to manage and learn priority for.
Arcane got simplified a good amount this xpac, but it’s still very punishing if you don’t weave your CDs and charges properly.
DH can be hard because of how much their DPS relies on using movement abilities like felrush, which can be almost impossible to use on some encounters. Idk how demon hunters do the last boss of grim batol lol.
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Classes just aren’t very hard, a player skilled enough to worry about a “skill cap” probably isn’t too concerned about learning a dps rotation
Also class difficulty is subjective because people find different aspects of a class hard, then you need to factory in how well muscle memory and experience smooths it out and everything
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I know people will argue this one: Raid Augmentation Evokers.
Ill conced that in M+ its easier, but raid Aug is alot harder to fully maximize while also seeing the biggest jump in damge for skill capped damage vs casual damage.
Take every boss fight and chop it into 30second segments. Now look at each 30 second segment individually and predict which player will be doing top damage during each one of those windows. You want to be buffing the top players in each segment prior to then using cds or just as they are doing it. Looking at overall damage will not give you a propper breakdown on who to buff, and the new ability they added to see who is using cds is a noob trap and should not to be trusted.
Example:
Unholy dk does thier launch sequence and does massive damage. Outside of thier cds though, thier damage falls, so you may buff the DK for the first 30 seconds of the fight, but then rotate your buff to a different player who is using thier cds after.
Boomkins are a 3 minute class, they do the most danage during incarn window. This means that buffing them at the start of the fight, then not buffing them again till Ebon Might #7 of the fight.
You have to know not only how to play your class at skill cap, you have to know the timing and play style of your team mates and thier use of CDs to truely play at the highest level.
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Totemic Enhance Shaman /s
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I would say rogue. Combo point management with all the different spenders that scale takes a special kind of mind to keep track when also messing with stealth mechanics. I would need a mod that would yell at me because when combo points reach maximum. At least the druid gets a damage buff if you go over.
I still can’t bring myself to play Disc because I’m intimidated (or at least I don’t think I’ll have fun because it will be stressful), and for Resto Druid it did take me the longest to feel like I was doing a good job. Even still, I’m awful at doing DPS on my Druid in anything 10+ so even though I can heal well and stay alive it feels bad.
It is definitely the most challenging to spell lol
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So what? Troll.
Outlaw is definitely the hardest I’ve done so far. Holy crap the carpal tunnel.
Healing is eh. Hard but it has flow-management to it. The chaos is expected, almost predictable after a while. You just do the things you need to do to keep folks alive. Still harder than a good number of DPS that’s for sure.
Tanking is braindead. Disappointing.
i suspect that it is brewmaster monk.
sure there are super-intricate DPS specs, auggie is complicated since you are affecting other peoples’ game play, and disc priest and/or resto druid really require you to pre-plan.
however, I have a feeling the among the reasons blizz “does nothing” for brewmaster is that they are secretly OP but no one knows how to play them except Equinox and a very small handful of players.
Feral definitely feels like spinning plates every time I try it.
I believe the folks saying Outlaw but I’ve never played rogue at max level so I can’t corroborate.
Brew used to be quite complicated when you needed multiple brews to manage stagger, but now that all of it is passive except purifying it, it’s a lot more manageable. I think it’s the class fantasy itself that puts people off, it feels like no matter what they do to Monk it will always be the least played class. (Evoker is slightly lower but it’s catching up to Monk despite Monk being a decade older.)
In my experience
–rogue is difficult but doable, just really dependant on sticking to the rotation, and well, wanting to do that rotation. I’m not great at it, just ok. I like to play around with it every few weeks in assassin or subtley spec then leave it alone.
–I was terrible at fire mage. I did it right once in Torghast then tried it in Theater of Pain and forgot how to do anything. Retreated and did frost/arcane.
–I was terrible at affliction warlock.
Not saying these specs are insurmountable, obviously. Just that I tried them, it didn’t click, and went and did something else that felt more comfortable.
I’d say rogue (yes I’m biased). Once you learn each of the specs, you can pull off some pretty awesome stuff.
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Hands down, outlaw rogue is just hand-destroyingly complex to play.
I’ve heard a lot of people say feral druid, but then folks say arcane mage > almost any other dps spec in the game when it comes to skill.
In terms of DPS, I’d say Rogue.