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.
That’s the thing right? If you look at old logs from the top speed clear guilds (Progress, APES, et al) they did bring classes like Hunters and Warlocks to Naxx. Maybe in small numbers but they brought them. Blizzard cannot balance the game for what the current meta and player choices are. Not saying you are suggesting they do, just that this would be an impossible job.
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.
My top concern here is that the “meme specs” are the PVP specs. What kind of monsters would be created to make them really good for sustained damage in raiding too?
Yeah you bring warlocks for utility (CoR, CoE, CoS, healthstones, summons, soulstones) and you often bring a hunter for pulling, its not because they’re doing more individual dps. Meme specs don’t have this level of utility.
Many of the meme specs aren’t even good in pvp. Holy/prot is the best paladin pvp spec, even for 1v1, ret is just a leveling spec, its a troll in every way at level 60. Balance is always garbage. Enhance is just for making youtube videos of you ganking people with lucky WF procs, its pretty bad against anyone that knows what they’re doing and in pve (I suppose you could say this about ret also, both are eyeroll when someone in your group/BG is doing it unless its your friend). Elemental and shadow priest are viable in pvp, particularly playing solo, but in organized groups healers are still better.
It’s ironic how you mention ‘close mindedness’ while talking about awful specs without ever considering pvp at all. You say that spriest is one of these awful specs yet neglect to mention that it’s S tier in pvp. Many of the meme specs are extremely powerful in pvp.
Retail-brain would buff all these meme specs for raiding without giving a single thought to how completely broken in would make them in pvp. Modern blizzard has done this exact thing 100’s of times now with disastrous consequences.
We had a guy lose us immortal twice in Wrath Naxx 25 by refusing to be cautious due to his parse obsession. He got 2 in the world on Thaddius during one of these runs (where someone else died stupidly) and thought that was a sign to only try to parse in these attempt runs from that then on out. He’d also complain about how going for immortal was a dumb goal, yet he saw his self-focused WCL obsession as somehow not a dumb goal. I still don’t know for 100% sure if his deaths there were an accident, subconsciously on purpose, or a middle finger to the raid team for trying for a goal he didn’t care about.
The meme guys are always selfish guys who want to “play their way” and get carried acting like clowns doing grey parse level damage while accusing everyone else of being “close-minded”. Nah bro, you’re just wasting people’s time on your pvp spec. It’s not like ret is some hyper APM high skill cap master build. You’re just standing there auto-attacking while doing 1/3 the dps of a warrior the whole fight.
Every class has a raiding spec, and those raiding specs are fine to bring to any content in Classic in the appropriate numbers. Players come up with these comps for their own reasons, Blizzard didn’t design the raids to bench 4 or 5 classes. That is a relatively new thing as players are primarily concerned with times and parses over ability to kill a boss which is no longer the point.
Whether or not these specs are “good for PVP” is not the debate. Those are the PVP/solo specs for those classes and as a rule they don’t bring the sustained damage needed. Don’t disagree about Balance but whatever, I don’t get it either.
For example Arms is the PVP spec for Warriors, but nobody wants an Arms Warrior in the raid because of the MS debuff and the much lower sustained damage and less TPS if tanking. It’s all the same deal really.
When I first started tanking back then 31/5/15 was the cookie cutter Warrior tank build. Looking back I think this had more to do with ability to PVP and solo than perform as a Tank. Then it was a Fury build with 440 defense and you only did deep Protection with Naxx gear. This stuff changes and will keep changing.
This sentence specifically is funny because your entire post consists of complete close-mindedness.
You enjoy not only living in a box but also enjoy telling everyone else they have to live in the box with you. The meta says to do it that way and why would anyone try anything else? Nope, THERE lS ONLY ONE WAY TO DO THlNGS, follow the line, never explore, the meta gods have it covered, so follow the script ONLY. Close your mind to everything else. Be one with the meta
Posts like this both make me realize why Retail players (who do have much harder content) make fun of Classic players and also makes me respect those who find their way to fit into a static raid group team and do their own creative thing even more.
Good luck, trying to explain that just because a spec is bad at raid doesn’t make it actually bad it painful. They are poisoned by the false idea that every spec can be wildly different and at the same time push the same raid DPS while brining different levels of utility and tool.
Its amusing because if these “buff me now” idiots got their way they would eventually get to asking for healers to also be doing comparable raid DPS.
This argument also dies when you remember Frost was the Mage raid spec for the first two raid tiers of Vanilla, on top of being arguably the most dominant PvP spec in the game.
Does that make Frost a memespec that shouldnt be allowed to raid? Or does that just mean Mages were far more powerful than some of the other classes?
You can clear everything in the game from Lucifron to Kel’thuzad with 1 warrior 4 priests 1 Druid 2 mages and 32 Ret Paladins or Enhancement Shaman if you want. The balance is that loose.
But people nowadays see anything that isnt “meta” as a waste of time. Literally minmaxing the fun from the game.
Correct its also painful being in a battleground and raid warrior #1290 shows up with dual wield fury doing nothing. I guess naxx tank prot can kinda run flags, maybe, but that’s also eyeroll compared to feral.
Sure, it’s that loose if you’re playing with players from Progress on their alts. It’s not if you’re playing with pug ret paladin #123123. And that’s 99% of the ret paladin players.
Wagies cant lose 30 extra seconds of their precious free time per raid, taking a ret is therefor unacceptable!
Insecure minmaxers cant have the boss die 2 seconds slower because their numbers on a meaningless website no normal person will ever care about arent as big.
Thats what it comes down to.
Well, i certainly enjoyed playing Classic with normal guilds and collecting all the DPS pieces as a ret first. Haha. And because i have foresight i even cloned my character, imagine that guys.
Minmaxers are insecure and want to pretend that this game has a difficulty, which it doesnt. Every raid in Classic is a joke and was cleared week 1 by casual guilds… with meme specs.
I see what you are going for here but isn’t that more to do with mob types?
Back when the game was an RPG and a fire mob isn’t hurt by fire damage. It makes perfect sense as does rock elementals and skeletal mobs being immune to bleeds.
Agree on the other part though about meta and min/maxing. Completely fine to do that but WoW players seem to misunderstand the point of those comps
I do think that people expecting to get invited is selfish. However if they do get invited anyway that’s the raid leaders call and they’ve gotten over a self-imposed barrier. it would have been far easier for them to follow everyone else - like sheep.
While playing ally we had people who were ranking trying to get on our premade teams and they refused to change from ret to holy, where they would have helped the team way more, so we declined them. It did look selfish that they refused to change their spec in PVP to help the team because they thought they were entitled to a spot based on their rank/RP. So I get your point in a way.
However, it is still close-minded to only follow one path, the meta path, and refuse to go off of it.
(On another note to all: My posts have been based on those playing the “meme” specs with a PVE focus and best for PVE gear, they are not an excuse for people who refuse to pay the 50g to swap specs for the raid. Also, I think that changes to specs from Blizzard can matter for PVP and that’s a concern of mine as well.)
I agree, it’s a case-by-case basis, but most cases it’s better not to allow it if you’re raid leader because it inevitably causes social problems. It’s not “being a sheep”, playing efficiently with a good build in a raid is just respecting other people’s time and reducing the likelihood of wipes. There’s exceptions of course, guilds have people they’ve been playing with for a while and everyone likes the person and is cool with them playing whatever. And those are usually people that otherwise pull their wait, using their dispels, bringing consumes, showing up on time always, etc.
I led a raid like that for a while, it was fine, for a while in MC - AQ. Then it stopped working in naxx and/or deep AQ40 where the tuning is tighter and you need people with consumes on their game if you want to finish it. People can say “classic is easy” but you aren’t going to complete things like sapphiron without people pulling their full weight and it just requires heavy consumes, heavy investment in FrR gear, etc. Some guilds just decide not to do that content, which is fine. But it usually ends up causing a rift and resentment between the people carrying who want to finish the content, and the people who are getting carried, and you start seeing attrition once you start wiping. I don’t know what the prices are now with the bots, but in original classic wow it was like 20-30g per pull on sapphiron in consumes, and if anyone quit the guild or stopped raiding it was hundreds of gold to gear another person in FrR gear. That builds resentment quickly if you’re wiping, and it’s late at night on the last few bosses, and its easy for people to point fingers at the memers. A lot of guilds build up multiple raid teams to avoid attrition, but not everyone wants to organize that, which is pretty much a full-time job to do it well.
If you have a well-established elite raid guild then yeah you can mess around and still do all the content easily. But there’s a lot of unspoken skill, preparation, and long-term personal trust in the players underlying that, it doesn’t work for ordinary or even above-average guilds that are more often a core of 10-20 people who know each other and 30-40 other people who they recruited but don’t actually know that well.
Most people want to play what’s “best”. There’s a reason for large groups of people changing what they play whenever a new flavor comes in. Obviously not with Era, but in general.
I actually don’t want to hate on those who like to play what is needed/wanted, that’s definitely the smartest idea. To pick the meta and play it well. However, I do respect those who want to play something else but also don’t act in an entitled way, once the entitlement is there I have less empathy.
This thread has made me think of my Classic guilds enhance shammy. He joined our guild early on, did all of what you mentioned, and even enjoyed parsing although yeah he wasn’t as good as the meta specs, but because he tried so hard his numbers were not actually all that bad.
He is also one of the nicest people I’ve met in my time playing WoW. Just the type of guy who would give you the shirt off his back.
My Classic guild had lists for AQ40 and for Naxx 40 where if you got the list/farmed it up prior to the raids releasing you got DKP (although we switched to LC in TBCC). I enjoyed farming this list personally, and I think people having what they needed for a few months, and only using the consumes in a smart way, really helped lessen any drama in our raid group. Again maybe not relevant to Era. I do agree though that there’s less wiggle room for messing around in AQ40 and especially when you get to Naxx.
This is a problem with running a raid team period. You always need to be in touch with the vibe of the team. Doing anything else leads to guild splits and dead raid teams. No matter how good your team is, and no matter the content, cliques of “better players” can form. Splits do happen more often when wipes start and people lose their consume gold though, absolutely.
Even without multiple groups running a guild/raid team well can absolutely be like a full-time job. There used to be this forum on here I loved where leaders would help each other out. There are still the spots in the server Discords but it’s not really the same.
In 2019 classic my raid team took a boomkin, 2 spriests, 2 enh and an ele sham from Luci to KT. A buddy of mine was Alliance and ran Ret, had 3 boomers 3 spriests and a Protadin tank. Luci to KT.
Every single one of them carried their weight just fine.
You wanna stack 25 warriors for your raid team? Go for it. Enjoy the loot drama.
Everyone else got the memo that Classic is so loosely tuned that it doesnt matter what you bring as long as they dont stand in the bad or forget to dispel/decurse.
Speedrunning is not the primary method of raiding. Neither is being a parse hoe.
They werent immune to Arcane. Just Fire. But mages raided as either AP/Frost using Frostbolt over AM or Evo/Frost. Getting 99% of the “pvp” talents in frost along the way.
“Raiding as PvP spec therefore bad” just didnt apply to Mages. Or Rogues considering combat swords is their #2 PvP spec and their best PvE spec.
You can clear every bit of PvE content this game has to offer with nothing but memespecs. I bet you could run a protadin, an entire raid of ret paladins and Boomkins with 1 priest and 1 mage for the buffs and clear Luci thru KT if you wanted. Same Hordeside with a Bear and a bunch of Shaman.
The issue is not and has never been “memespecs are bad”. The issue is “memespecs arent meta specs”. And some people playing this game seem hell bent on enslaving themselves to the meta to the point where they follow it like religious doctrine.
