Who here raids with a “meme spec”?

[Fatprincess-rattlegore]

Again, it doesn’t matter. If you clear the content it doesn’t matter what you bring unless you want to tryhard by speed clearing so you can brag about it. Nobody is saying bring an entire raid of meme specs. In a 40-person raid a handful of people playing “suboptimal” specs isn’t going to hurt anything to any significant amount, and it’s being a jerk to insinuate that those people are doing a disservice to their guild and friends by not eating up the meta.

I am going to bring my mage to your MC run and chain cast fireballs. As long as the content is cleared who cares right?

[Fatprincess-rattlegore]

To add to this, balance also has higher faerie fire up time due to spell hit.

Feral can wear spell-hit pieces, though. Even doing so nets higher DPS than being Balance.

Balance is only better if you are too lazy or aren’t good enough to do it as Feral.

A big issue, besides the obvious of stigma and ignorance more generally, is that people can’t easily quantify things beyond “dps” “hps,” “uptime,” “mitigation,” etc and Vanilla is not the utility iteration of this game.

That’s all you really need to determine what is best, though.

The uptime on Faerie Fire should be the same, as Balance gains no talents to improve spell Hit and Feral can wear the same pieces. From there, a Feral’s DPS is higher, even while wearing spell hit gear, and their mitigation will be higher due to wearing leather instead of cloth.

I didn’t say you dont have fun, I said I am fine with letting THEM have fun. Key difference that obviously seems to go over your head.

My mistake. I thought you were insinuating that they were having fun because they weren’t min/maxing, as in min/maxing does not permit fun at the same time.

But I know that is a PERSONAL choice and have zero desire to attempt to push that on anyone else, or say they are wrong for seeing value in the things that I dont see value in (try saying a “meme” brings ANYTHING of value without a min-maxxer going “Well acktusaly it is less than bringing a pure dps class”)

I don’t force it on anyone else, either, but there are

We only assume ill intent if you talk down other people while you do it. “But its just facts hur dur dur” Doesn’t make someone any less of a jerk for saying it when its unnecessary.

Posting on these forums is entirely unnecessary, yet we do. If pointing out the truth makes me a jerk, so be it. I’m not really interested in playing the nice guy to protect the feelings of Ret Paladins who can’t handle the truth.

Some people, myself included, would play Ret “for the meme” and would acknowledge its inferiority, but enjoy it nonetheless. Well, maybe not so with Ret because of how boring it is in vanilla.

We can’t?

Yes, I’m sure about that.

HoTs push off world buffs. I’m clearly talking about high end raiding, not your average casual Friday night Trade chat PUG.

No offense, but i “high end” would be the last thing I would call someone raiding MC and BWL with so many buffs they hit the limit.

I would call that “cheese”

The problem with druid HoT’s is that they don’t stack, and cannot be applied over other HoT’s… not because neckbeards gotta parse 100% to feel like a man and their buffs get pushed off.

[Nobleshield-westfall]

You do know only Geddon and Rag are actually immune to fire, right?

[Fatprincess-rattlegore]

pretty sure that was my point…

[Relodis-dathremar (Relodis)]

I have a Moonkin on both factions on my server. I don’t regret it one bit. I am invested into the spec and class, I adore it. I also have a max Ret.

Care factor zero when it comes to other people’s opinions.

Also: Meme Specs: Relax, it's not your decision. Let it go 🥳

[Rorlt-benediction]

Again, it doesn’t matter. If you clear the content it doesn’t matter what you bring unless you want to tryhard by speed clearing so you can brag about it. Nobody is saying bring an entire raid of meme specs. In a 40-person raid a handful of people playing “suboptimal” specs isn’t going to hurt anything to any significant amount, and it’s being a jerk to insinuate that those people are doing a disservice to their guild and friends by not eating up the meta.

I am going to bring my mage to your MC run and chain cast fireballs. As long as the content is cleared who cares right?

People don’t like you do they? I imagine the vast majority of people actually enjoy raiding with others and it has little do with how big the numbers they see on the screen, lol.

[Indomitable-mankrik]

You can carry meme specs through all content in the game, but the raid will be more time efficient with min maxing.

[Ohshiftson-benediction]

No offense, but i “high end” would be the last thing I would call someone raiding MC and BWL with so many buffs they hit the limit.

I call it high end because they’re first guilds to clear the content, they clear it the fastest, and they take the least damage and have the fewest deaths.

The problem with druid HoT’s is that they don’t stack, and cannot be applied over other HoT’s… not because neckbeards gotta parse 100% to feel like a man and their buffs get pushed off.

I mean… that’s why you don’t stack more than one or two druids even in a casual guild, but in high end guilds, the buff cap is why you don’t use HoTs at all.

[Wunce-stalagg]

Id like more raids to include meme specs like arms warriors in their groups. It sucks to be shunned for having subpar DPS like a lot of other hybrid dps specs. Mortal strike taking up a debuff slot shouldn’t exclude arms warriors from raiding BWL. If you can’t bring down Firemaw because of one debuff slot then the raid needs to consider bringing in better equipped tanks and healers.

[Twangslump-old-blanchy]

Man how role playing games have changed. Dungeons and dragons having to roll on char stats. Having to work to find solutions to problems for overcoming the odds with the had you where dealt. What a sad state of affairs for actual intellectual gameplay. Now its all cookie cutter min max. Whats the point?

[Wunce-stalagg]

Man how role playing games have changed. Dungeons and dragons having to roll on char stats. Having to work to find solutions to problems for overcoming the odds with the had you where dealt. What a sad state of affairs for actual intellectual gameplay. Now its all cookie cutter min max. Whats the point?

If you wanted anything different then you should get a time machine when the game was new and nobody knew what they were doing. Now the game is farmed/optimized to get loot to players in the most efficient way possible thanks to private server metas and wow head BIS lists. Or keep twinking because that’s more fun than max lvl pvp.

[Twangslump-old-blanchy]

Yep, its just sad that’s all. I miss those days of innocence. The game is much more fun if you do not play the cookie cutter. I do not see how these guys can just keep doing the same build over and over ad nausea, it makes me think we are not evolving, but devolving.

[Nobleshield-westfall]

Because we are. The Uber min-maxing competitive mindset has ruined so many games by devolving everything to “X is the best everyone do it. Y is terrible never do it”

[Quilly-incendius]

Here are my guild’s BWL logs from last week:

classic.warcraftlogs. com/reports/VtzmHyxD7qQ3bahr

The debate on meme specs seems to follow the assumption that you can not have raid team performance while having sub-optimal specs in on the team. I reject that assumption based off these logs I posted - Overall we cleared BWL in 1 hours and 10 minutes- which puts us in the 95th percentile bracket for speed. You can have performance and allow for some off-meta choices, but the prerequisite for that is to have both a team that is fun to play with and good enough to make it work.

If you look at our Overall damage, we got some sweaty min-max’ing parsers (there’s a lot of orange and pink on that rankings tab)

On our roster there is:

-A ret pally who has Hand of Rag, onslaught Girdle, band of applied force and who got our first BRE from MC like week 1
-A spelladin who we let go spelladin to compete with ret pally for the lulz, he got funneled pally t2 gear this night
-a kitty dps who we let go feral because healing most of BWL with more than 8 healers is actually boring.
-a bear tank who tanked vael and is the favored target of our healers because we like the pointless parsing numbers and its really hard to over heal with a fat max ranked greater heal when your tank has 8k hp
-a sPriest, who has Claw of Chrom, ToEP, Firemaw’s Clutch and a Band of Dark Dominion

To further add to the apparent toxicity of our guild, We Loot Council everything. And our Loot Council is actually just a Loot Dictator (our raid lead).

So, Meme Specs + 1-man Loot Council + Parse Culture + Try Hard Sweaty Clear times? If you only read forums, you would think we’re the worse guild ever.
But
What you don’t see from logs is how much fun we have together. Our raid team is awesome and the 40 people we have in wouldn’t want to play this game any other way. We do more than just raid together - catch us on Kracken Friday where we drink ourselves stupid, do 5 man dungeon races, help farm Truestrikes for the alts, go pug stomping in WSG or debate philosophy late into the morning (Seriously, some of the most fun you can have online). Just about every night, you are going to find someone on doing something because we love this game. That is why we can have those players play what they want to, because we have simple fun doing so and we have the performance to allow it.

Incidentally, < House > on Incendian is always recruiting both for the raid team and just to have more people to enjoy this game with: You can find our post here: <House> | Horde | Loot Council | KROMCRUSH | TBC Recruiting

[Hareem-incendius]

i dont understand why you feel the need to call shadow weaving a “monstrosity” build…and most the fights in naxx meet the conditions you just laid out for a spriest to do poorly.

Multi target fights: Faerlina, Noth, Gothik, 4H
Long fights: Patchwerk, Loatheb, 4H, Sapphiron, KT

[Gythriel-windseeker]

The problem with druid HoT’s is that they don’t stack, and cannot be applied over other HoT’s… not because neckbeards gotta parse 100% to feel like a man and their buffs get pushed off.

Dont use the HOT much anyways, its kind of situational.
I can jack way more HP into you, non stop, for a very long duration of time, with out needing mana, than i can accomplish with the 2 HOT’s, which leaves more mana for dispelling debuffs, innervating someone, debuffing target when required, emergency battle rez etc.

1 HOT is simply too little to be of any real use in a raid, and the other is just not very efficient in HP per mana per time to me.
It’s ok for 5 man content, still not super efficient.

[Argorwal-ysera (Argorwal)]

This reads like a “meme specs are fun in moderation” post.

Which some people are fine with, and this is how it was in vanilla and shouldn’t be changed.

I’m curious if at some point other dps classes/specs were given the “it’s ok to have a few to carry but not too many” treatment if they would still feel that’s it’s fine.

[Wolfmane-bloodsail-buccaneers]

When I raided, I had some folks that took me along as feral. I schooled the healers on decursing and that’s how I kept my place.

[Fayld-westfall]

I raided 8/21/22 (hemo/prep combat daggers) forever. I only recently changed to traditional combat simply because I wanted to change it up a bit. Will probably go back in a week or two :).

As for my guild, 7/8 BWL Day 1. 8/8 Day 2. We now have 2 separate raids with BWL on farm. And yeah, I raided BWL with 8/21/22 as well

Edit: I am fortunate in that my guild is actually fairly casual for a progression oriented guild. That said, if I didn’t play the spec well and my DPS wasn’t up to snuff, I would have swapped specs a long time ago. Not saying I am ever going to parse consistent 90s running it, but in my guild I don’t have to.

Edit 2: For those wondering (because I am sure someone will), this is an ambush / backstab build. Hemo is used as part of the opening rotation to build combo points early to push into a 2-3 point slice and dice and even that depends on whether tea is on cooldown at the time, prep is on cooldown (allowing for an earlier vanish to ambush), etc.

Edit 3: I also raided 11 / 27 / 13 for a while. Also an ambush / backstab spec. Less fun than the prep build, but nice to have less equipment reliance on +daggers too

[Tooty-grobbulus]

switched recently to 15/31/5 and its mind numbingly boring… the CP generation is so slow

SF or anything w/ prep is massively more fun