In my experience if you really want to be the meme spec guy, and live out that vision you may have in your head of being a full bis enhance shaman,boomkin or whatever then the best way to accomplish that honestly is to just play the meta spec and pick up all the meme spec pieces you need as you go, eventually you’re gonna have the gear and people will be ok with bringing you as a meme spec because you’re actually well geared for it.
The people that try to go straight fresh 60 as a meme spec like enhancment shaman usually get hardstuck in the lower raid tiers or take FOREVER to gear because they struggle to find groups, meanwhile the person that plays resto gets into every raid and quickly ends up swimming in gear for their meme spec
It all stems from a deep seated insecurity, and from the fact that people are wagies who choose to work under inhumane conditions so they need to save every minute of free time they can.
Pushing logs or times on an easy 20 year old game with no mechanics is really just that, deep rooted insecurity.
Thankfully on Classic i had normal guilds and got my ret paladin geared immediately no problem. Still cleared all the laughable content right away.
Elemental = Arms, subtlety, frost, etc. It’s a PvP build.
Enhancement actually has a unique niche (provide stronger totems to a melee group while also buffing the casters through Nightfall)… it’s just rarely ever seen on Era because of the 16 slot debuff limit. Nightfall has an opportunity cost on Era, but it didn’t in SoM.
in a way meme play requires you be carried, and no one wants to carry.
meme specs are not entirely meme, they just do not serve much use in raid, they are best used to level or solo certain content or PvP
If raid teams start employing larger and larger numbers of “meme” specs, then a larger number of players will end up being carries and the minority will be those actually doing the work.
Because of how raid clears work, more individual DPS cuts kill times and in turn the parses go up the more the overall individual parse goes up, making the kill times super short. Adding meme specs slows kills, in turn parses, and increases the chance to wipe.
I mean I explained all of this in my other posts and I still stand by it all. If the raid leaders don’t want the hassle then fine. Many agree with you but it still sounds like people can find a place if they want shrug.
I personally don’t play meme specs. I do tend to gravitate to playing unpopular for raiding classes but I don’t tend to expect those to be invited either. I also have no interest in raiding in Era at this time, or at all actually, probably until the next season of Classic.
I do find it interesting that people are so hard-set in their routine, only interested in the boring script, and then obsess over their WCL numbers after. These are the types of people who eat the same stuff every day. They have no interest in variety whatsoever. Oh and then they feel the need to tell others what to do, whereas I am here in the thread saying the raid leaders can do what they want.
The best part about this version of the game is the PVP where in BG teams bringing the right comp still matters but you need to be intelligent, think, and be adaptable to do a good job. That IMO is WAY more fun.
The real meme is making a raid comp comprised of ~70% Warriors, rogues, and mages and expecting it to stay together when half the loot gets D/E’d and every usable item is contested by 10 people.
Adding meme specs slows kills, in turn parses, and increases the chance to wipe.
The marginally increased kill time caused by bringing a handful of “meme specs” is probably mitigated by having less warriors riding high on threat that hit a windfury proc and make the dragon breathe on you.
This is why I will be watching hardcore raiding thoroughly despite thinking the mode is dumb. You know for sure the parselords will be in there and get killed.
I like ret.
I have fun playing ret.
But playing holy to raid requires far less consumables, far less time spending for world buffs and honestly far less attention.
I dont raid with my meme spec because its simple far easier to raid with the no meme spec lol.
The issue of meme specs is that the game doesnt officially supprots them, makeing it hard for you and your teammates to go on with it.
Because playing bad specs that do poorly feel bad to play, no matter how hard or easy the content you’re playing is. Spriest ooming in 15 seconds, forcing you to be a wanding auto attack turret is not good gameplay, plus your spriest very mildly buffing your ~2 warlocks is probably a raid dps loss anyway, given how 1 warlock does a quarter of the overall damage of 1 fury, why not just drop the spriest and take a fury, which is actually useful to the team and fun to play? Meleeing as an elemental shaman because you also oom after 20 seconds, only to regen to cast a lightning bolt every 5 or 10 seconds after that isn’t fun either. Both of those are examples of useless specs to the raid team, and are replaceable with a mage, rogue, or warrior. And its well within blizzard’s power to alleviate these issues.
It’s not hard to arrive at this conclusion, basic logic and just anyone who’s being honest about what they’ve seen while playing Classic 2019 or SoM leads you here. Close mindedness makes you defend these awful specs still, even after 3 different official blizzard releases of Vanilla and all the evidence in the world that these specs suck and no one plays them. People blaming the meta gamers and neck beards are no better than Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the clouds. It’s inevitable that the player base would find a meta in an 18 year old, hugely popular, largely unchanged online game. Pretending we don’t know the meta will not make these specs successful ever, that only worked in 2004 to 2006 when we legitimately didn’t know the meta. They weren’t played in Classic, and not even in SoM after the debuff cap was effectively removed and WB’s, which scaled best on warrior/rogue, were removed. There’s a reason the average number of unique warrior player parses in SoM Naxx40 were 31,000 per week, and enhance shamans had around ~110 unique player parses weekly. Balance had ~130, Ret had under 200.
Kevin Jordan, who designed classes in vanilla, said himself they had many specs they just didn’t have the manpower to get to balancing, so they made sure all these classes had 1 spec that worked well for raiding, such has holy pally, resto druid (for the most part, Feral cat/bear was okayish), holy priest, resto shaman. If they want to keep vanilla going, and want it to be more successful than SoM, they need mix things up, including buffing the bad specs that serve little to no function other than gear sinks to take loot from good specs, while getting close to no use out of said loot. Just how big Classic 2019 was, and then how randomly the playerbase made HC blow up, it shows the potential of vanilla. Vanilla should be built on.
Also, 2h fury isn’t that bad of a playstyle. Their dmg is decent, they don’t oom ever obviously, there’s no downranking to keep their uptime up, they scaled off WBs very well ofc, they won’t swipe any of the the contested 1 handers… Saying that you played 2h fury doesn’t really work as some sort of qualifying statement to then conclude that all the junk specs like shadow, enh, ele, ret, protpal, or balance are actually great, fun to play, and are absolute assets to raids.
This cant be futher from the truth. Ele shamans were doing speedruns without stopping to drink and without going oom before the stuff is dead, while pulling their weight dpswise
