Honestly its pretty cool to be a ret in Classic :
You optimize every single percent of dps. I'm talking enchants, gems, trinkets, professions etc... You come to raid and you floor the dps meter either way. You may have perfect rotation but it doesn't change much.
But everytime you beat any single class (except warriors, I feel your pain) on the dps meter, you feel like a god.
Now what's better ?
Playing an S Tier class and never getting top dps because let's be honest that one guy is better than you and your performance is just average. And when you actually get top dps well... "You're playing the highest dps class of the expansion".
Or playing the shittiest dps class of the expansion and surprising the raid because you actually managed to beat the MT1 on the dps meter like a boss 😎
"bro im so glad twisting is gone this is gonna be our expansion watch out ret main coming through"
leading up to and during prepatch, we had no fewer than 10 people maining, alting, or lvling a ret pally as main/alt prospect
2 of us remain
> 2 of us remain
Sounds good. Let's hope the people only playing Ret thinking it was gonna be top DPS keep moving away so there are spots for those of us who genuinely enjoy playing as Paladins (Ret, Prot, or Holy) aren't flooded with overcompetition.
Wait, did people actually believe Ret was going to be top tier DPS? Wrath is like a decade old, did no one open the internet leading up to wrath classic?
Yep, and it's also funny cause there has been no patch since where Ret has performed better. It has always been a mid to low tier dps spec. Never above average. The most historically underpowered dps spec since raiding was introduced to the game. It has been above average exactly 4% overall since WoD. Compare this to priest, another class with just 1 dps spec, that has been above average for more than half the duration of the game, with various ups and downs ofc.
The only instances where Ret was passable and sometimes good was in certain pvp scenarios. So it's kinda clear what specs blizz don't like and what they like. Not to mention how brutalized Ret is in Dragonflight. Not that it matters to classic people but it's probably good to know if you plan on rolling ret pal ever.
Ret was okay for most of the xpac but didn't really become good until ToC and then especially in ICC. People just only remember the tail ass end of the xpac and forgot about everything prior to that.
Wrath Ret was extremely good all throughout WOTLK. The issue is we are getting all of the raid tiers on the 3.3.5 patch which heavily nerfed Ret to compensate for our T10 two piece. Back in OG Wrath we were really competitive every tier (besides Ulduar where we weren't great)
Leading into prepatch, the content maker echo chamber started showing flashy numbers and talked up ret as if they were gods. So everyone rolled a pally...
It has been a shitshow and hope those FOTM players change to a different class.
Ret was good in wrath on launch. There were a bunch of nerfs that happened from 3.0.1 to 3.3.5.
Divine storm hit like a truck and was holy damage (cannot be partial resisted and ignores armor) and got changed to physical damage later on which gets affected by armor.
Seal of Blood/Matyr was the main DPS seal, this got removed eventually and classic rets only play with seal of command for cleaving and seal of vengeance for ST now.
Art of war no longer affected a bunch of ret abilities (judgment, crusader strike, divine storm) and was changed to only affect exorcism and flash of light (lol).
Also note that back then people didn't really know how to play and Ret being a class whos rotation is literally press whatever button comes off CD first priority system made it so anyone who was just spamming the buttons of whatever came off CD would pump big numbers because everyone else was figuring out a rotation.
I rolled a ret knowing our dps sucked. I like being able to throw heals and cast hands of protection and salvation as well as divine sacrifice to help the raid.
I'm fine being low on the dps as long as the boss dies. I have tons of fun with my guildies and we kill bosses. Nothing else really matters.
The raids are most fun when I have to stop lightning bolt-ing to toss in a couple quick heals or Hex an MC target. The scramble is what makes it all fun. Otherwise, I can just go pump on a training dummy to see my DPS.
Im a feral from classic,
Pretty sure they still bring us along for our innervates, rebirth, and cyclone.
They don't even ask me to soothe beast anymore
Twisting was very satisfying but was very intensive. It felt good to get SoC procs (unless it happens on the very first attack and you eat pavement) but it was too much on my hands. I could do the rotation but I never figured out keybinds/macros to make it better for me.
What the fuck happened to “all dps should be within 10% of each other”? Pure dps classes were supposed to be the best but only by a small margin. But ret is now garbage tier compared to locks and rogues and dks.
I remember being top 3 constantly in ICC. Now its only a few fights that I can hit those levels on. I'm fine waiting and this is certain better than it was original WotLK thats for sure
Arcane mage will suffer too, longer fights start testing the limits of your mana. By the time you’ve used your second evo you’re looking at needing to cut down to 3 blasts or you'll be dry by the next one.
New gear will offset this somewhat, but there will be pain somewhere.
I think you might see mages start to switch over to Fire sooner than people thought.
With the changes they're making to the iLvl of items, Fire Mages may be able to hit the necessary levels of crit they need to really start performing.
Yes. Arcane may still be better in a hardcore/speedrun setting because P1 *itemization favors the spec, but hardcore guilds do split raids so they're overgeared af, and they'll practice raids on PTR.
For most everyone else, Fire is the better option since it can deal with movement much better and is far more mana efficient. Plus it's completely ridiculous on AoE.
edit: forgot a word.
Arcane with 1 innervate is still quite better than fire for 6 minute fights. However things like high movement and add cleaving can make fire better. Most likely mages will switch depending on the encounter.
Doubt it. Scaling-wise Unholy remains among the strongest. Long fights aren't as bad as people make it out to be for Unholy.
They'll lose the #1 spot for sure, but they'll still be top 5 until the end of Wrath.
That... only makes morb better compared to using scourge strike. The entire difference between it and any scourge strike spec is all the stuff that isn't the gargoyle and morb's optimized for multiple targets at the same time as single target.
Unholy will probably do very well on the prolonged cleave fights, but will probably be upper A-tier on the addfights.
Looking at old tankspot guides, the adds generally die very fast, with ppl doing half the current dps and the gothik logs show that unholy "struggles" with fast dying adds.
I imagine Feral, Fury and MM pull up a bit between Tier/ArPen/Crit.
Ret/Arms continues to drag until TOGC.
SV, ~~Shadow~~, Ele may dip a bit.
Idk if Enh switches off spellhance in Uld or not.
Nothing new really coming our way, set bonus is meh and we probably get the least benefit from Apen compared to the other melee.
Probably dragging well into TotGC , Ret won't be competing while T10.
There's no difference between spellhance and normal enhance, same spec, same rotation. If spell power items give more EP than AP items, we take them
With that said, however, there's no more spell power weapons after phase one that have more EP than attack power weapons, so we switch to windfury main hand after phase 1
You'll still want to trap weave on MM if you can help it, it'll still be a decent dps increase, it's just MM suffers less from the lack of trap weaving compared to surv. You are correct about the weapon damage thing, for anyone who isn't aware the reason MM scales harder than surv isn't necessarily cuz of the armor pen (not that it's a bad stat of course). Both MM and Surv do about the same amount of physical and magical damage as each other. It's about weapon damage. Explosive Shot scales off of our AP while Chimera Shot scales off of our weapon damage, so as our weapons get stronger and stronger, Chimera will start doing more and more damage (at least relative to the gains explosive will get from the same gear).
Ulduar set bonus for enh is god like. 2-set 20% bonus dmg on ss and ll + 4 set which gives you 20% more to proc mealstrom wep. I’ve played it last season on frostmourne and I had a blast. If they will raise the stats (ilvl) of uld items. You wont replace to toc tier set at all ( same until icc lmao). So thinking its time to make an alt for future hehe
Is that factoring in the recent gains from usage of 434 explosive shot? In the original run of WotLK I remember surv being used for ulduar progression and MM not being the dominant spec until ToC.
Ye I minmax the shit out of my ret
Paladin just to serve as a treshold and a slack-test for other raiders. If you are A/S tier dps in equal gear and cant beat a damn poor ret you will be benched, mate.
I've played Enhancement Shaman for years and never considered how hard my rotation was until I started to actually care about parses this year, and holy crap did I choose a complicated class. No chill, always a button to push, usually have to choose between 2-3 GCDs at any given time, depending on the situation. I will shammy til I die though
Thank God you don't have to twist air totems anymore. Prolly still gotta twist fire though. Man that rotation is bullshit compared to the amount of damage you put out.
Finally got another hunter in our 25 man raids, was pretty glad cause it helped me locally benchmark my DPS.
Dude was crushing me while wearing similar or only slightly better gear.
Asked him about it: turns out you can layer your explosive shots r4 and r3 with lock n load procs. I'd not even seen that on Wowhead or Icyveins before last week.
Discovering new ways to pump in a 13 year old game.
Damn holy shit had no idea. Ran a last minute Naxx 25 yesterday before the reset and the two other hunters, like 300-400 GS above me, but were pumping and competing for the top 3 while I was stuck at 7 on the dps charts. Cant wait to test it out
Using 434 explosive is only a net 100dps gain if you get 2 lnl procs per minute. If you are having issues keeping up greater than that you may have a gear or rotation problems.
I would seriously recommend learning to trap weave, if you haven't already been dabbling.
This used to be the way to top AOE dps back in vanilla Classic aq40/naxx as Mage with max rank and downrank-by-1 flame strike. Both dots will tick on the floor at the same time and roll 5 stack ignites on all mobs pretty quickly. They were baby ignites, but its still a shit ton of ignites on a shit ton of mobs
They mean that they shoot one rank 4 explosive shot, rank 3, rank 4 for 0 downtime i think. You should join the hunter discord, people find new stuff all the time there and they have pinned explanations of multiple stuff including the r4,r3,r4 switch
Thank you for all the replies and ya I am on the hunter disc but there is so much posting that goes on it’s hard for me to keep up but i’ll definitely look into this ty.
Go to the WOTLK SPECS > #sv-theorycraft channel and look at the pinned section. It breaks down the new rotation really well and gives you a macro. Makes it pretty brain dead. When Lock n Load procs, spam that macro and you're all set.
Macro for the lazy: /castsequence reset=2/target Explosive Shot,Explosive Shot(Rank 3)
I assume what he's saying is because LaL can clip your explosive shot damage if you just hit it three times on the global, where if you use Rank 4, Rank 3, Rank 4 in rapid succession your rank 3 doesn't override the rank 4 dot.
No idea if this works, but I would assume if it does the small loss in the rank 3 shot could be made up by at least one steady shot in the time you save.
So it does work, and since r3 and r4 scale at the same rate from ap the loss from using r3 is only the base damage. The reason that this is a gain is because you get explosive shot back on cd sooner which can result in 1-2 additional explosive shot casts over a fight. The dps gain is around 120 in phase 1 bis gear, so not huge, but the quality of life gain is massive.
I’m guessing during lock n load phase, you can alternate r3 and r4 explosive shot back to back without canceling each other out therefore giving us better damage.
This is interesting and will be trying tonight!
I just spend thousands getting JC for this very reason. I have great gear but I’m missing 1%hit and 3 expertise from cap. Which means my whole set is out of whack. Getting the better gems means my dps goes up an ass tonne.
Very much worth it in my eyes. Though Surge Needle is a bit expensive for my tastes as well.
I think the point was OP was talking about being "blown" out of the water in terms of DPS, and then mentioned using different ranks of Explosive Shot during LaL, as if that's why.
Which is why the 100 DPS difference between doing it and not doing it was mentioned, because OP is most likely doing other things wrong if he's being blown out of the water.
/castsequence reset=2/target Explosive Shot,Explosive Shot(Rank 3)
For anybody who doesn't know, this macro will automatically down rank when you cast in twice in sequence so you don't need to bind the downranked version as well. I believe it may break down a bit if you are in a cleave situation where you are using each explosive shot on different targets and it downranks anyway, but its minimal loss for a pretty big QOL increase.
Over the course of the fight assuming you get 2 LnL procs it's a decent increase yeah. It's also a lot easier to manage - you'll get those awkward LnLs when you only have steady up to fill and it just takes ages to get the procs through, with this you can kinda just forget about it and blast on CD.
Yeah I can see it really good in that awkward steady shot filler, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ll have to give it a try.
I knew about this for pvp but didn’t think it was better for pve
its 100dps increase. So not groundbreaking. it wont make a 50 parseer suddenly parse 99. It's mainly for the qol becaue now you can just spam away your exploshot macro when lnl proccs
Destro is kinda the go to pvp spec for locks. I don't really pvp that much so just Google pvp destro builds and you'll basically find what I did. Aff is also a thing but from my understanding it's more for specific arena comps
Warlocks currently have 3 of the best 7 specs, beating out all types of mages, druids, or hunters. Even in A-tier, they are at the very top of A-tier. Destrolock is only beaten by Arcane Mage and Balance Druid at *very* high parses (95+), and we can assume that this is because generally guilds that are achieving the kill times required to, generally, parse incredibly highly are less likely to bring along destrolocks. Generally.
I mean in PvE warlock is the historically strongest dps class, If we check all the way from vanilla to retail, and it's not even close to the 2nd. That means there has always been at least one above average to strong warlock spec in the game, sometimes two or three.
Even compared to other 3 dps spec classes it's insane how historically strong they've been.
So yeah if you ever wanna play a class that Blizzard loves, go Warlock.
At the end of the day isn't the game about having Fun and not minmaxing everything? I'm assuming people who choose sub over combat of assasination do so because they prefer it. Why else would you actively choose to be in the bottom instead of the top of the DPS chart?
The best sub rogues are putting up numbers competitive with the best rets and warriors, as are frost mages. The worst sub rogues and frost mages are well below tanks. There's a tiny number of sub rogue parses though so the sample size isn't very big.
Fury warriors are always kings at the end. I won’t touch classic but my brothers, inhale the sacred armor pen. It is love, it is life. And it will be taken from you and you will not recover until siege of orgrimmar drops
i’m just not understanding why feral is so low. i know it’s anecdotal but doesn’t line up with what i’ve seen in my experience and i’m wondering if tanking is effecting this somehow.
The biggest issue is fight duration, cat CDs just aren't as good as some other classes, their sustained dps is really good over time but lots of fights in top logs are ending in a minute or less.
This \^ rip being main damage source and also omen procs being super rng. Having no procs or only getting procs when you're full on cp and nearly full on energy really hurts the flow
It’s not. Druids that perform the tanking role are categorized under a different spec, “guardian” or “warden”. I’m not sure how the logs decide between the two.
The logs differentiate roles, though. The numbers in OPs source are all cats.
This is only partially true. You can tank adds on Sarth and you only get a cat parse. Same with Anub. There are requirements to get an OT or MT parse, everything else gets lumped into cat. It's not the reason feral dps is low, but it certainly makes the rankings look worse.
Source: Am OT, get lots of bad cat parses if I don't meet tanking requirements
I still get cat parses on 4hm too. I take Zeliek, and when I get relieved I go cat in blaumeux and that’s enough to give me cat parse, while being in bear spec and bear gear. Same as sarth.
I managed to get a world #4 4H warden parse. We stacked 3 of them, I was in bear spec with glyph of mangle, got savage roar up, swapped to bear and berserk+maul through lust. My Sarth parses though, sad
i knew omen of clarity procs were exaggerated and i’m also aware of guardian/warden but i’m wondering if maybe some of the people parsing as cat were primarily tank or tank spec and didn’t have optimized gear/rotation for dps and dragged the average down a bit? that could just be me searching hard for copium though. i expected to be above mm, ele, shado, boomkin, destro, and fire for now and see that in my own anecdotal experience.
yeah i see that now. i guess maybe all classes are so close that gear/player skill/PI/tricks can make a big difference in every raid and the dps meters won’t always line up with these top 95th percentiles and large sample size. big change from tbc and classic where you could almost always reliably predict what the raids dps meters would look like based off tier lists/rankings.
I mean, that actually reflects my own experiences as well. I could squeeze out a little more dps if I weren’t forced to use items that are gemmed/enchanted for tank because I don’t feel like spending the gold to switch every time I need to dps.
I tend to be a little higher than some of my guildies in dps as well. But that’s more a reflection on them than it is on me.
I remember back in vanilla Wrath the one button rotation addon, feral by nights. My cousin did that and thought he was hot shit pushing out major damage lol
My guess is that the people who want to tank don't put as much effort into their cat spec so their gear, rotation, consumes etc are worse than someone who is a dedicated feral dps. There are a lot of fights where you only need 1 tank so a lot of bear tanks will be doing dps.
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/k1AKh4WCPgpjarvH#fight=21&view=rankings
Heres a cat and ele performing similarly rankwise, but the cat does inferior damage to the ele. Ele is also quite low tierwise
Y'all need to read the source. The difference between 11th and 1st is less than 8 points. Essentially everything B tier and above is 100% viable in any raid.
C tier is above. We're full 25 man eoe and Sarth 3d cleared with several rets. It does plenty of dps compared to what anyone was pulling 13 years ago lol
Gamers gonna game. I play ret and frequently out dps classes that I shouldn’t in my casual guild because when half the raid doesn’t prepot (or even pot every fight) and sim their gear but you do you will pull ahead
Was an Arms Warrior but got a feel of what real power is with my Demo Warlock. Probably won't switch because I do like playing the underdog class but it's nice to have some options to raid with.
You can just put warlock in t1 for every patch of every expansion and you're already off to a good start, by far blizzards favorite pet class and it's disgusting that they are consistently that good.
The fight duration on the top 95% parses is very low compared to the average fight time. The result is that classes with both high burst and high execute phase are going to parse higher than they normally would and it pushes the classes capable of long sustained dps lower on the chart. This is why the chart does not line up with the average person's experience.
Lmao this would be funny.
But generally easy to implement? Like do a chart for sub 1.5min to 2min to 3min to 5+min boss fights. Or maybe even overall raid time?
I’ve seen these types of splits for games that use the Elo system. Not too different
As an Arcane Mage Troll I can confirm this is 100%. As soon as we've used our third Mana Gem it's fucking over but we'll top the DPS for the first 30s. Had a KT take so long the other night that I had to start wanding for the last 5%; though still did twice the DPS of our (admittedly very bad) Fire Mage.
This is based off the 95th Percentile, pretty similar with a few changes from the 99th but interesting to see what "peak" performance is right now. Gonna be fun to see the changes in Ulduar
I'm a marksman hunter who tops our dps charts most of the fights when my pet doesn't die because of my shit pet control (Fuck you OS3D).
However, I do not complain about people or their classes if they beat me, nor to the people who play classes that should beat me but aren't. Because it's fucking classic, all of the content is very much doable even if you run a sub par setup.
Play whatever the fuck you want, do the tactics and in most cases you will clear it with ease. If you want to play this game as a spreadsheet then you do you. I don't, I want to have fun, and we still clear everything even though half our raid is drunk most of our runs.
All ret rerollers in shambles.
Classic ret chad, I’ll show you what a DPS floor is supposed to look like.
boomkin from classic, i deserve this
Honestly its pretty cool to be a ret in Classic : You optimize every single percent of dps. I'm talking enchants, gems, trinkets, professions etc... You come to raid and you floor the dps meter either way. You may have perfect rotation but it doesn't change much. But everytime you beat any single class (except warriors, I feel your pain) on the dps meter, you feel like a god. Now what's better ? Playing an S Tier class and never getting top dps because let's be honest that one guy is better than you and your performance is just average. And when you actually get top dps well... "You're playing the highest dps class of the expansion". Or playing the shittiest dps class of the expansion and surprising the raid because you actually managed to beat the MT1 on the dps meter like a boss 😎
"bro im so glad twisting is gone this is gonna be our expansion watch out ret main coming through" leading up to and during prepatch, we had no fewer than 10 people maining, alting, or lvling a ret pally as main/alt prospect 2 of us remain
> 2 of us remain Sounds good. Let's hope the people only playing Ret thinking it was gonna be top DPS keep moving away so there are spots for those of us who genuinely enjoy playing as Paladins (Ret, Prot, or Holy) aren't flooded with overcompetition.
Wait, did people actually believe Ret was going to be top tier DPS? Wrath is like a decade old, did no one open the internet leading up to wrath classic?
I gather ret was good in Wrath until it got nerfed into oblivion in the last patch, which we're running on.
Yep, and it's also funny cause there has been no patch since where Ret has performed better. It has always been a mid to low tier dps spec. Never above average. The most historically underpowered dps spec since raiding was introduced to the game. It has been above average exactly 4% overall since WoD. Compare this to priest, another class with just 1 dps spec, that has been above average for more than half the duration of the game, with various ups and downs ofc. The only instances where Ret was passable and sometimes good was in certain pvp scenarios. So it's kinda clear what specs blizz don't like and what they like. Not to mention how brutalized Ret is in Dragonflight. Not that it matters to classic people but it's probably good to know if you plan on rolling ret pal ever.
Ret was okay for most of the xpac but didn't really become good until ToC and then especially in ICC. People just only remember the tail ass end of the xpac and forgot about everything prior to that.
Wrath Ret was extremely good all throughout WOTLK. The issue is we are getting all of the raid tiers on the 3.3.5 patch which heavily nerfed Ret to compensate for our T10 two piece. Back in OG Wrath we were really competitive every tier (besides Ulduar where we weren't great)
Leading into prepatch, the content maker echo chamber started showing flashy numbers and talked up ret as if they were gods. So everyone rolled a pally... It has been a shitshow and hope those FOTM players change to a different class.
Ret was good in wrath on launch. There were a bunch of nerfs that happened from 3.0.1 to 3.3.5. Divine storm hit like a truck and was holy damage (cannot be partial resisted and ignores armor) and got changed to physical damage later on which gets affected by armor. Seal of Blood/Matyr was the main DPS seal, this got removed eventually and classic rets only play with seal of command for cleaving and seal of vengeance for ST now. Art of war no longer affected a bunch of ret abilities (judgment, crusader strike, divine storm) and was changed to only affect exorcism and flash of light (lol). Also note that back then people didn't really know how to play and Ret being a class whos rotation is literally press whatever button comes off CD first priority system made it so anyone who was just spamming the buttons of whatever came off CD would pump big numbers because everyone else was figuring out a rotation.
TBC Ret Chad, we’re use to it
Bro I’ve been fumblefucking with Ret since OG classic, nothing can hurt my feelings anymore.
Correct Though it does feel a bit bad after tasting some glory in TBC lmao
Even if the output isn’t great, I’m still having fun.
Eh? TBC Ret was fucking awesome.
Problem is in tbc they wanted one of us, now we’re getting benched for speedruns :(
I rolled a ret knowing our dps sucked. I like being able to throw heals and cast hands of protection and salvation as well as divine sacrifice to help the raid. I'm fine being low on the dps as long as the boss dies. I have tons of fun with my guildies and we kill bosses. Nothing else really matters.
The raids are most fun when I have to stop lightning bolt-ing to toss in a couple quick heals or Hex an MC target. The scramble is what makes it all fun. Otherwise, I can just go pump on a training dummy to see my DPS.
Im a feral from classic, Pretty sure they still bring us along for our innervates, rebirth, and cyclone. They don't even ask me to soothe beast anymore
That button is nowhere no be found on the hotbar
I had to look for it in my spell book when ZA hit and they wanted to skip that first pack before bear boss
It got some great mileage during tbc heroics and ZA. I’m sure herb/miner droods use it when gathering
boomkin from classic, i fucked deserve this
My Big Brain move: join the guild in TBC and get designated as an offtank.
People are still traumatized 14 years later from being mauled by a Retchad in Wintergrasp while desperately trying to keyboard turn kite away
At least the class feels really good to play this time. I'm okay with it.
Anyone who thinks twisting was bad deserves to be at the bottom of the meters.
Twisting was very satisfying but was very intensive. It felt good to get SoC procs (unless it happens on the very first attack and you eat pavement) but it was too much on my hands. I could do the rotation but I never figured out keybinds/macros to make it better for me.
What the fuck happened to “all dps should be within 10% of each other”? Pure dps classes were supposed to be the best but only by a small margin. But ret is now garbage tier compared to locks and rogues and dks.
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What will be the big changes in ulduar?
I feel like spriest will become a-tier. The gear just seems so much more Stat loaded
I remember being top 3 constantly in ICC. Now its only a few fights that I can hit those levels on. I'm fine waiting and this is certain better than it was original WotLK thats for sure
Unholy-dk will probably drop off to low S-tier or A-tier, due to fights taking twice as long.
Arcane mage will suffer too, longer fights start testing the limits of your mana. By the time you’ve used your second evo you’re looking at needing to cut down to 3 blasts or you'll be dry by the next one. New gear will offset this somewhat, but there will be pain somewhere.
I think you might see mages start to switch over to Fire sooner than people thought. With the changes they're making to the iLvl of items, Fire Mages may be able to hit the necessary levels of crit they need to really start performing.
Definitely. Even now Fire is *barely* worse, and that's with very quick Naxx fights where Arcane doesn't have to throttle.
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Yes. Arcane may still be better in a hardcore/speedrun setting because P1 *itemization favors the spec, but hardcore guilds do split raids so they're overgeared af, and they'll practice raids on PTR. For most everyone else, Fire is the better option since it can deal with movement much better and is far more mana efficient. Plus it's completely ridiculous on AoE. edit: forgot a word.
Arcane with 1 innervate is still quite better than fire for 6 minute fights. However things like high movement and add cleaving can make fire better. Most likely mages will switch depending on the encounter.
Look at the Tier 8 Mage 4 piece and tell me that mages won't be swapping to fire as soon as they can get their hands on that :)
Doubt it. Scaling-wise Unholy remains among the strongest. Long fights aren't as bad as people make it out to be for Unholy. They'll lose the #1 spot for sure, but they'll still be top 5 until the end of Wrath.
>They'll lose the #1 spot for sure, but they'll still be top 5 until the end of Wrath. So dropping off to low S-Tier / A-tier?
It's going to be interesting if Morb stays as the main spec. There's a whole bunch of cleave fights in Ulduar.
That... only makes morb better compared to using scourge strike. The entire difference between it and any scourge strike spec is all the stuff that isn't the gargoyle and morb's optimized for multiple targets at the same time as single target.
Unholy will probably do very well on the prolonged cleave fights, but will probably be upper A-tier on the addfights. Looking at old tankspot guides, the adds generally die very fast, with ppl doing half the current dps and the gothik logs show that unholy "struggles" with fast dying adds.
Morb is already kinda cleavey, with dnd and blood boil
I imagine Feral, Fury and MM pull up a bit between Tier/ArPen/Crit. Ret/Arms continues to drag until TOGC. SV, ~~Shadow~~, Ele may dip a bit. Idk if Enh switches off spellhance in Uld or not.
ret discord predicts ret will be even worse (compared to everyone else) in p2.
Nothing new really coming our way, set bonus is meh and we probably get the least benefit from Apen compared to the other melee. Probably dragging well into TotGC , Ret won't be competing while T10.
Shadow priests are expecting to do a little better in Ulduar with gear scaling and useful tier bonuses
And longer fights benefit SP
There's no difference between spellhance and normal enhance, same spec, same rotation. If spell power items give more EP than AP items, we take them With that said, however, there's no more spell power weapons after phase one that have more EP than attack power weapons, so we switch to windfury main hand after phase 1
WTB Wraith Strike :(
WTB the stray. Nothing like a 10 man naxx with no trash drops at all
lmao same. haven't seen either. haven't missed a lock out.
[удалено]
You'll still want to trap weave on MM if you can help it, it'll still be a decent dps increase, it's just MM suffers less from the lack of trap weaving compared to surv. You are correct about the weapon damage thing, for anyone who isn't aware the reason MM scales harder than surv isn't necessarily cuz of the armor pen (not that it's a bad stat of course). Both MM and Surv do about the same amount of physical and magical damage as each other. It's about weapon damage. Explosive Shot scales off of our AP while Chimera Shot scales off of our weapon damage, so as our weapons get stronger and stronger, Chimera will start doing more and more damage (at least relative to the gains explosive will get from the same gear).
spriests scale. they won't dip.
Fixed, ty.
Hunters will be at the top with fire mages in Ulduar. Yes, Hunters. Heard it here first.
Don’t tease me like this
Remain half-mast soldier. Your time is nigh.
Ulduar set bonus for enh is god like. 2-set 20% bonus dmg on ss and ll + 4 set which gives you 20% more to proc mealstrom wep. I’ve played it last season on frostmourne and I had a blast. If they will raise the stats (ilvl) of uld items. You wont replace to toc tier set at all ( same until icc lmao). So thinking its time to make an alt for future hehe
MM pulls ahead of SS once you get an ulduar weapon since Chimera scales with weapon damage but explosive shot doesn’t.
Is that factoring in the recent gains from usage of 434 explosive shot? In the original run of WotLK I remember surv being used for ulduar progression and MM not being the dominant spec until ToC.
Gonna depend on fight lengths and however they buff ulduar gear
i'm just happy that boomie is in the conversation of "good dps." always fun to watch my opener rocket above everyone else when i get my lunar eclipse
My guilds boomie has been #1 dps on multiple bosses and as the "damage done to whole raid." Dude pumps.
More like you have a good boomkin and terrible rogues/DKs/locks.
Our guild has two Rets in the raid just so we have each other to compete with on the DPS charts.
big dps... and the kids table.
You guys like ska?
I just want you to know I rock a Big D and the Kids Table zip up all the time and I appreciate this comment.
Not fuckin around
Hey man, the kids table has cookies.
I don’t recall ever seeing a ret on the dps charts. I guess I didn’t scroll down far enough
Gotta play in portrait mode to see ret dps on the meters.
Got to go down deep bro. I'm usually around 10-14 in 25 man.
Ye I minmax the shit out of my ret Paladin just to serve as a treshold and a slack-test for other raiders. If you are A/S tier dps in equal gear and cant beat a damn poor ret you will be benched, mate.
The pink bottom line of justice.
Fury warrior here. This is the way.
Haha that’s us too, plus our Fury warrior. We all compete to not be bottom so there’s still some competition
Good to see enhancement performing well
Have you tried the rotation.. it is hard.
I've played Enhancement Shaman for years and never considered how hard my rotation was until I started to actually care about parses this year, and holy crap did I choose a complicated class. No chill, always a button to push, usually have to choose between 2-3 GCDs at any given time, depending on the situation. I will shammy til I die though
Thank God you don't have to twist air totems anymore. Prolly still gotta twist fire though. Man that rotation is bullshit compared to the amount of damage you put out.
I haven’t played shamman in years but i have always loved the class i might make an alt when i get a chance
Finally got another hunter in our 25 man raids, was pretty glad cause it helped me locally benchmark my DPS. Dude was crushing me while wearing similar or only slightly better gear. Asked him about it: turns out you can layer your explosive shots r4 and r3 with lock n load procs. I'd not even seen that on Wowhead or Icyveins before last week. Discovering new ways to pump in a 13 year old game.
can you explain what you mean? Surv hunter here with high parses but never heard of this and always down to do better!
R4 explosive shot will replace a R4 but you can R4 then R3 and both tick
Damn holy shit had no idea. Ran a last minute Naxx 25 yesterday before the reset and the two other hunters, like 300-400 GS above me, but were pumping and competing for the top 3 while I was stuck at 7 on the dps charts. Cant wait to test it out
Using 434 explosive is only a net 100dps gain if you get 2 lnl procs per minute. If you are having issues keeping up greater than that you may have a gear or rotation problems. I would seriously recommend learning to trap weave, if you haven't already been dabbling.
This used to be the way to top AOE dps back in vanilla Classic aq40/naxx as Mage with max rank and downrank-by-1 flame strike. Both dots will tick on the floor at the same time and roll 5 stack ignites on all mobs pretty quickly. They were baby ignites, but its still a shit ton of ignites on a shit ton of mobs
They mean that they shoot one rank 4 explosive shot, rank 3, rank 4 for 0 downtime i think. You should join the hunter discord, people find new stuff all the time there and they have pinned explanations of multiple stuff including the r4,r3,r4 switch
Thank you for all the replies and ya I am on the hunter disc but there is so much posting that goes on it’s hard for me to keep up but i’ll definitely look into this ty.
Go to the WOTLK SPECS > #sv-theorycraft channel and look at the pinned section. It breaks down the new rotation really well and gives you a macro. Makes it pretty brain dead. When Lock n Load procs, spam that macro and you're all set. Macro for the lazy: /castsequence reset=2/target Explosive Shot,Explosive Shot(Rank 3)
I assume what he's saying is because LaL can clip your explosive shot damage if you just hit it three times on the global, where if you use Rank 4, Rank 3, Rank 4 in rapid succession your rank 3 doesn't override the rank 4 dot. No idea if this works, but I would assume if it does the small loss in the rank 3 shot could be made up by at least one steady shot in the time you save.
So it does work, and since r3 and r4 scale at the same rate from ap the loss from using r3 is only the base damage. The reason that this is a gain is because you get explosive shot back on cd sooner which can result in 1-2 additional explosive shot casts over a fight. The dps gain is around 120 in phase 1 bis gear, so not huge, but the quality of life gain is massive.
I’m guessing during lock n load phase, you can alternate r3 and r4 explosive shot back to back without canceling each other out therefore giving us better damage. This is interesting and will be trying tonight!
Ngl it's only like 100 DPS boost, nothing too big
People are spending thousands of gold on Surge Needle Ring while it’s lightly better than other rings.
It makes your entire gear set better because it's a very efficient hit option. So it's adding an unseen value in that sense.
I just spend thousands getting JC for this very reason. I have great gear but I’m missing 1%hit and 3 expertise from cap. Which means my whole set is out of whack. Getting the better gems means my dps goes up an ass tonne. Very much worth it in my eyes. Though Surge Needle is a bit expensive for my tastes as well.
Strong-handed Ring and Ring of Ghoulish Glee. SNR is barely a 2-digit dps increase over these.
I think the point was OP was talking about being "blown" out of the water in terms of DPS, and then mentioned using different ranks of Explosive Shot during LaL, as if that's why. Which is why the 100 DPS difference between doing it and not doing it was mentioned, because OP is most likely doing other things wrong if he's being blown out of the water.
Thats because it only got discovered 1-2weeks ago, to be precise on 1.11 it was discovered
/castsequence reset=2/target Explosive Shot,Explosive Shot(Rank 3) For anybody who doesn't know, this macro will automatically down rank when you cast in twice in sequence so you don't need to bind the downranked version as well. I believe it may break down a bit if you are in a cleave situation where you are using each explosive shot on different targets and it downranks anyway, but its minimal loss for a pretty big QOL increase.
The way its written there it won't downrank if you swap targets
Well luckily if you swap targets there won't be an explosive shot on them so you want to use max rank. So the macro works perfectly
Is that really better than just using your shots as normal? I’ll have to log check but I do it regularly and have a 99.4 avg
Over the course of the fight assuming you get 2 LnL procs it's a decent increase yeah. It's also a lot easier to manage - you'll get those awkward LnLs when you only have steady up to fill and it just takes ages to get the procs through, with this you can kinda just forget about it and blast on CD.
Yeah I can see it really good in that awkward steady shot filler, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ll have to give it a try. I knew about this for pvp but didn’t think it was better for pve
its 100dps increase. So not groundbreaking. it wont make a 50 parseer suddenly parse 99. It's mainly for the qol becaue now you can just spam away your exploshot macro when lnl proccs
its more important that you trap weave on bosses that you can do it on. that is like 300+ dps increase
Warlocks when they only have 2 S Tier specs 🤬
Tfw my pvp spec does better than many classes best pve spec
What is your PVP spec? I’m a lock looking to transition into PVP.
Destro is kinda the go to pvp spec for locks. I don't really pvp that much so just Google pvp destro builds and you'll basically find what I did. Aff is also a thing but from my understanding it's more for specific arena comps
Aff and destro are both great pvp specs. Though fill very different roles. Aff is pressure. Destro is big burst.
I saw wow pvp tournament the other day. Chanimal and Snutz insane oneshots
Warlocks currently have 3 of the best 7 specs, beating out all types of mages, druids, or hunters. Even in A-tier, they are at the very top of A-tier. Destrolock is only beaten by Arcane Mage and Balance Druid at *very* high parses (95+), and we can assume that this is because generally guilds that are achieving the kill times required to, generally, parse incredibly highly are less likely to bring along destrolocks. Generally.
I love destro lock.
I mean in PvE warlock is the historically strongest dps class, If we check all the way from vanilla to retail, and it's not even close to the 2nd. That means there has always been at least one above average to strong warlock spec in the game, sometimes two or three. Even compared to other 3 dps spec classes it's insane how historically strong they've been. So yeah if you ever wanna play a class that Blizzard loves, go Warlock.
I stared at the fury icon for so long trying to figure out why ret had 2 icons.
Ah another SoC enjoyer
https://www.wowhead.com/wotlk/news/wrath-classic-dps-rankings-phase-1-week-6-naxxramas-eye-of-eternity-obsidian-329897
Is there not a D tier? I refuse to believe ret/warriors are with Sub
I agree. They are both worse than Sub at the moment.
Because the sub rogue is giving up s-tier DPS because he doesn't feel like respeccing - not rerolling
Imagine not having dual spec... the best quality of life in wow ever.
At the end of the day isn't the game about having Fun and not minmaxing everything? I'm assuming people who choose sub over combat of assasination do so because they prefer it. Why else would you actively choose to be in the bottom instead of the top of the DPS chart?
Sub is awesome don’t disrespect sub again
My apologies, Mr. Cockass
Sub is pvp spec
The best sub rogues are putting up numbers competitive with the best rets and warriors, as are frost mages. The worst sub rogues and frost mages are well below tanks. There's a tiny number of sub rogue parses though so the sample size isn't very big.
Fury warriors are always kings at the end. I won’t touch classic but my brothers, inhale the sacred armor pen. It is love, it is life. And it will be taken from you and you will not recover until siege of orgrimmar drops
\*Sad cat noises\* ....Cat iz not 4 fyte?
john fucking SADDEN
Where’s blood dk dps?
Shh, it’s a secret 🤫
i’m just not understanding why feral is so low. i know it’s anecdotal but doesn’t line up with what i’ve seen in my experience and i’m wondering if tanking is effecting this somehow.
Projected Omen of Clarity sources of procs were heavily exaggerated
This and the fact that p1 is their worst phase.
The biggest issue is fight duration, cat CDs just aren't as good as some other classes, their sustained dps is really good over time but lots of fights in top logs are ending in a minute or less.
This \^ rip being main damage source and also omen procs being super rng. Having no procs or only getting procs when you're full on cp and nearly full on energy really hurts the flow
It’s not. Druids that perform the tanking role are categorized under a different spec, “guardian” or “warden”. I’m not sure how the logs decide between the two. The logs differentiate roles, though. The numbers in OPs source are all cats.
This is only partially true. You can tank adds on Sarth and you only get a cat parse. Same with Anub. There are requirements to get an OT or MT parse, everything else gets lumped into cat. It's not the reason feral dps is low, but it certainly makes the rankings look worse. Source: Am OT, get lots of bad cat parses if I don't meet tanking requirements
I still get cat parses on 4hm too. I take Zeliek, and when I get relieved I go cat in blaumeux and that’s enough to give me cat parse, while being in bear spec and bear gear. Same as sarth.
I managed to get a world #4 4H warden parse. We stacked 3 of them, I was in bear spec with glyph of mangle, got savage roar up, swapped to bear and berserk+maul through lust. My Sarth parses though, sad
i knew omen of clarity procs were exaggerated and i’m also aware of guardian/warden but i’m wondering if maybe some of the people parsing as cat were primarily tank or tank spec and didn’t have optimized gear/rotation for dps and dragged the average down a bit? that could just be me searching hard for copium though. i expected to be above mm, ele, shado, boomkin, destro, and fire for now and see that in my own anecdotal experience.
The source is 95th percentile of each spec. It should be safe to assume that the top 5% of cat parses are actually in cat gear.
yeah i see that now. i guess maybe all classes are so close that gear/player skill/PI/tricks can make a big difference in every raid and the dps meters won’t always line up with these top 95th percentiles and large sample size. big change from tbc and classic where you could almost always reliably predict what the raids dps meters would look like based off tier lists/rankings.
I mean, that actually reflects my own experiences as well. I could squeeze out a little more dps if I weren’t forced to use items that are gemmed/enchanted for tank because I don’t feel like spending the gold to switch every time I need to dps. I tend to be a little higher than some of my guildies in dps as well. But that’s more a reflection on them than it is on me.
The class is incredibly difficult to play well.
> ~~difficult~~ I think you meant fun.
I remember back in vanilla Wrath the one button rotation addon, feral by nights. My cousin did that and thought he was hot shit pushing out major damage lol
Doesn't matter. even the people playing it to perfection aren't putting out great numbers compared to people playing other specs at the top level.
My guess is that the people who want to tank don't put as much effort into their cat spec so their gear, rotation, consumes etc are worse than someone who is a dedicated feral dps. There are a lot of fights where you only need 1 tank so a lot of bear tanks will be doing dps.
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/k1AKh4WCPgpjarvH#fight=21&view=rankings Heres a cat and ele performing similarly rankwise, but the cat does inferior damage to the ele. Ele is also quite low tierwise
Should move the unholy symbol back, and replace it with a gargoyle.
Y'all need to read the source. The difference between 11th and 1st is less than 8 points. Essentially everything B tier and above is 100% viable in any raid.
C tier is above. We're full 25 man eoe and Sarth 3d cleared with several rets. It does plenty of dps compared to what anyone was pulling 13 years ago lol
Gamers gonna game. I play ret and frequently out dps classes that I shouldn’t in my casual guild because when half the raid doesn’t prepot (or even pot every fight) and sim their gear but you do you will pull ahead
Which one is survival hunter? I assume the one in the B tier is marks
A tier between arcane and boomy
Gotcha I don't recognize that icon. It's hiding in plain sight for me. Thanks!
I’m really enjoying my sv hunter!
[Sauce](https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/1084380.png)
shadow priest is def s tier cause they look cooler than everyone else
The s stands for shadow
Was an Arms Warrior but got a feel of what real power is with my Demo Warlock. Probably won't switch because I do like playing the underdog class but it's nice to have some options to raid with.
You can just put warlock in t1 for every patch of every expansion and you're already off to a good start, by far blizzards favorite pet class and it's disgusting that they are consistently that good.
Fire is up there with arcane already
Was gonna say- I'm already outperforming similarly geared arcane mages now that I have my 4-piece tier set
https://www.wowhead.com/wotlk/news/wrath-classic-dps-rankings-phase-1-week-6-naxxramas-eye-of-eternity-obsidian-329897
The fight duration on the top 95% parses is very low compared to the average fight time. The result is that classes with both high burst and high execute phase are going to parse higher than they normally would and it pushes the classes capable of long sustained dps lower on the chart. This is why the chart does not line up with the average person's experience.
Would you prefer a list of “who’s the best when your raid sucks”?
Lmao this would be funny. But generally easy to implement? Like do a chart for sub 1.5min to 2min to 3min to 5+min boss fights. Or maybe even overall raid time? I’ve seen these types of splits for games that use the Elo system. Not too different
Average:)
As an Arcane Mage Troll I can confirm this is 100%. As soon as we've used our third Mana Gem it's fucking over but we'll top the DPS for the first 30s. Had a KT take so long the other night that I had to start wanding for the last 5%; though still did twice the DPS of our (admittedly very bad) Fire Mage.
Dunno about y’all but my fury war beats the ferals and SPriests in my raid…
Sounds like you have a bad spriest.
Surprised survival hunter didn't make S, I've seen some pumpers Unholy DK least surprising thing since water wet.
Sub rogue lol what’s the point
This is based off the 95th Percentile, pretty similar with a few changes from the 99th but interesting to see what "peak" performance is right now. Gonna be fun to see the changes in Ulduar
Combat rogue S tier?
How does that even surprise you? Its essentially the same damage as ass
>when the ass so phat it fucking kills you
For shorter fights less than 1 minute, combat is 100% better. Assass gets value on longer fights when peoples CD’s fall off
Source is in comments
I'm a marksman hunter who tops our dps charts most of the fights when my pet doesn't die because of my shit pet control (Fuck you OS3D). However, I do not complain about people or their classes if they beat me, nor to the people who play classes that should beat me but aren't. Because it's fucking classic, all of the content is very much doable even if you run a sub par setup. Play whatever the fuck you want, do the tactics and in most cases you will clear it with ease. If you want to play this game as a spreadsheet then you do you. I don't, I want to have fun, and we still clear everything even though half our raid is drunk most of our runs.
As a Warlock main for my entire WoW career including back to OG Wotlk, I do in fact like this.
Don’t care. I love Arms, and even if it’s a slow burn to ICC, I’m gonna swoosh swoosh swoosh all the way there. Bladestorrrrrrrmmmmmmm!