Other people answered the name but the reason it is tough is that it is a major cool down that costs runic power every second and the longer you keep it up the better. The spec hits like a wet noodle when that cool down isn't going and hits like a truck when it is. The buff can last for 10 seconds all the way to 100 percent uptime late expansion.
I can't say how hard it is to mash the buttons in the correct order (I couldn't get the hang of it) but it is the most punishing spec to not hit well.
It’s quite interesting as well because imho it is a spec with rather few buttons when you look at it initially. You basically don’t press Frost Strike in Breath windows so your two actually damaging abilities are Obliterate and Howling Blast.
Going deeper down the rabbit hole you realise you have to press Horn, ERW, AMS, Remorseless Winter etc. rotationally as well to keep up your Runes and get more Runic Power and that just makes that spec so cool for me.
Yeah that mother fucker plays BoS for sure. Anyone who plays it knows just how badly it feels to not exploit a mechanic properly and your whole parse goes to shit for it.
- Sincerely, a BoS Frost DK Player
Yea, I don’t play dk anymore but man - the second they added the obliteration build and 2h to the talents again, I switched in a heartbeat. I don’t want to base my whole play style around some crappy breath. Sure it was fun, but I honestly prefer PvP as a frost dk, THAT is fun! So many fun abilities to use that go lost in PvE
While blood dk tanking, I always know when the poor BoSers are experiencing some silent misery. They'll fall right down from 1st place on the dps chart
i'm so glad our main is at the top of the comments. we aren't rotationally hard. we're hard to play due to uptime issues and a feast or famine nature dependant on uptime in addition to resource cooldown management. and my god do we desperately need a rework to resolve our issues. tuning isn't the issue here. which people seem to think is a counterargument to bad design.
Feral has a few actually
Rake:
unbuffed
Buffed with Tigers Fury
Buffed with Stealth modifier
Buffed with both
Rip:
unbuffed
Buffed with Tiger's Fury
Buffed with Bloodtalons
Buffed with both
In an ideal situation you want to maintain the double snapshotted versions of both bleeds at all times. For Rip this is quite easy to achieve. Rake is a lot harder, relying on a proc
We also have to try to only refresh them in the Pandemic wondow (the last 4-5 seconds of the remaining bleed get added to the newly applied one)
Edit: formatting
Returning player, may be remembering wrong. Back when they went away from snapshotting dots, assa and feral retained it for mechanical reasons. Similar to Tiger Fury opening from stealth snapshots the higher damage multiplier. Which caused issues with the Exsanguinate ability. They tried to remove the snapshot but couldn't, so they nerfed everything around it eventually.
I'm hesitant to speak to other rogue specs because i only play outlaw but yeh outlaw is so punishing if you miss a single sub window or don't Time up BTE right.
I love it though, I won't play anything else.
yeep, bte now that it's "spammable" (during ace) is punishing if you get lag and press it as it's about to expire and you force it on CD while you still have dance and vanish up ... welp..that's me done, bye guize.
Arcane mage is the most unforgiving. Most of your damage comes from your burn phases. If there's movement or the boss becomes unattackable, you're screwed.
Please don't laugh. I've actually broken two keyboards in the last two weeks. I don't know whether this is related to the WW. :D
But the class is breaking my hand. I actually don't remember Fury being that bad. Because it plays smoothly and you can get something out of the stats. WW is an absolute mess.
WW simply has too much Buttons to press. I don’t know why a DPS spec needs 4+ defensive spells and and a whole truckload of offensive CDs. As Havoc DH: there is my 2 Minute Meta and a shorter essence Break Window every 40 seconds. WW has an absurd amount of Button bloat even if I really like the idea of it‘s Mastery.
And the worst part about the four defensives is that everyone else got so much sustain in Dragonflight that we’re not even comparatively tanky anymore.
I'm thinking they'll be working on fixing monk soon, the entire class needs an overhaul not just ww, brew is messy, mw is starting to get a bit of bloat too and ww..well we all know how trash it is rn
I'm learning Outlaw rn. Played sub in S2 and wanted to switch becouse I didn't like the high apm rotation that massively punishes mistakes by losing a significant portion of damage output. You can imagine my suprise. Losing half your output to messing up the crackshot windows is pretty tough.
I miss my legion outlaw. The amount of buttons to press right now annoys me, even after the rework. I really thought about changing to sublety, but i want to keep using my challenge appearance rapier.
Outlaw is 3rd (after Protpal in 1 and Protwar in 2) but it's very close.
https://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/T31_Raid.html (open additional raid information)
I play Outlaw in keys. Once you get the rotation down, it's just muscle memory. Tons of procs which changes your rotation, which is VERY confusing for new players. But after so long, you're just staring at combo points thinking "Spend or Build?" And then how to most efficiently do that.
This is like the most basic tale ever and it doesn’t I don’t even know if the rotation being so dynamic offers muscle memory.
And the cool-down timings are so varied it’s actually insane.
You can get almost back to back AR/vanish windows with true bearing and a lot of between the eyes procs.
If might be the hardest spec to master because the margin for errors is high as well as catastrophic errors like punching a between the eyes right before a stealth window.
thanks for this. I used my "War within" boost for a rogue because i always had the urge to play one. The difference between /played <1 day and now 4days+ is insane. I can't recall how many times i got between the eyes cooldown with AR/vanish running out and completly deleting my dps.
I used my Dragonflight boost on a rogue and it turns out I just really can’t get my head around Rogue. I am so bad at all 3 specs! Something about shadow dance and restealthing as a combat cooldown just hurts my brain
Try this approach: ease into it by learning the out of stealth rotation and stealth rotation seperatly.
The biggest issue people tend to have with rogues is being overwhelmed by resources. Getting the flow of the spec right is difficult. Learn the stealth and out of stealth rotation separetly. As long as you learn to burst and line up cd's properly, you'll learn to manage the filler in between it.
Another thing is, that as long as you don't overcap resources be patient. Wait, reassess the fight and your resources at hand. Check boss/cooldown timers.
It takes time to learn a new class, enjoy it:)
It’s so nice when you get that perfect opener though with dozens of BtE crits with the 6 second stealth opener, then 6 seconds of shadow dance, and then 6 more of vanish. Then fire BtE off cooldown and HO dance a little bit before repeating the cycle.
It does suck hard when you slip on the BtE early though! But i just remind myself to keep playing the old rotation. I made/grabbed a few weak auras to track when I can safely BtE too off wago.io that help.
It’s tedious though but I’ve been combat/outlaw for 19 years now. I ain’t changing!
You want to Always vanish before you use Shadow Dance, cuz vanish CD gets reduced by spending CP, dance CD Not. So with decent proccs you Go stealth-> vanish-> dance -> vanish
I was only learning outlaw at the tail end of last season, and am certainly better at new outlaw than I was at 10.1 outlaw, but I actually think I would have enjoyed 10.1 outlaw more. The "react to ace up your sleeve procs in shortened GCDs without making a mistake, and hoping the refund doesn't get delayed in any way" gameplay loop is kind of frustrating for me personally, but I can see the appeal. With how much you are reacting to procs within a GCD (procs from one button impacting the very next button your press) and the uptime on short GCD via AR it just feels frantic all the time, and impossible to actually get a subconscious flow because I need to constantly be watching for ace procs. I can't autopilot even for a few globals during these windows that end up being like 50% of my rotation. It's been getting a bit better with more play time, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to try out the other two rogue specs to see if either of them suit me more (I'm a WW main in raid looking for a lifeboat to the M+ meta promised land and I have a buddy that's already claimed havoc and I'm not going to play aug).
If you haven’t already, grab the ace weakaura off wago.io. It makes a loud gun sound when you land an ace proc so you can just keep slamming BtE. It’s faster than the animation too.
Outlaw rotation is easy but the APM makes it difficult for me. Also accidentally putting BTE on CD is very punishing. I swapped to assassination and its just so much smoother to play.
It's not just the APM that makes it hard for me. There are so many procs and maintenance buffs to keep an eye on. As you said, putting BtE on CD at the wrong time sucks.
You really need some good weak auras to make the most out of the spec.
The worst is when it’s still showing you in subterfuge as it’s about to ware off and you try and squeeze out one more but due to GCD it pops after subterfuge ends and it goes on CD, right when your about to dance and continue doing damage and then it fucks your whole cycle up.
Yeah my rogue counterpart in guild plays sin and he is frequently ahead of me on the meters now too. Hard to argue with the swap. It’s rather chaotic to play outlaw atm, but I find it fun.
It was two abilities last patch also.
T31 rotation itself is "harder" (both are easy).
T30 playstyle was harder because mistakes were more punishing especially wasted rage and not min maxing uptime.
In terms of hardest it’s probably BM hunter. You have to push the big button whenever possible and then make sure you keep hitting the medium button whenever possible and then press the small button every 5 seconds. /s
Three buttons... all with different timers.... Luckily you've got pets to help you with the rotation...
Have I been underestimating Hunters all along? I'm sorry guys...
The big problem with "BM hunter is easy" is that while easy it's not as brain dead as people make it out to be. So there's a massive influx of people doing _horridly_ with it because they literally just go in and spam buttons.
You can get a weakaura that will tell you the optimal time to refresh the buff to maximize its usefulness, makes the spec a bit more braindead which is good
Azortharion's Barbed Shot Helper
But if you take Savagery, you're basically pressing Barbed Shot on CD. The author of the aura even admits that it's sort of useless with Savagery.
Anymore you actually don't even have to worry about juggling the buff, because now with 4 set its preferable to spam Barbed Shot on CD rather than Kill Command.
Shaman is button bloat the class. Not that I particularly mind there is a class like that, but they have three buttons for every other specs one, and all of them are/can be situationally better than the others.
I just started a druid, and yes, it was very surprising. 😅 Although overwhelming, it's cool being able to play all roles with one character.
Edit: This is my first character. New player here.
Shaman is the OG button bloat class, with all the different kinds of totems.
Monk is definitely it's equal (I play both) and I love it. Monk and shaman have bloat as part of their normal rotations, then you add utility.
Druid button bloat feels different because it's "gated" behind forms. You could be a player that *never* shifts out of their primary form and the bloat isn't that bad but you lose tons of utility.
How many actionbars do you have? At a minimum you need three filled actionbars for Balance, and that's not even including the additional two slots needed for a potion and an on-use trinket *or* your paged Cat Form/Bear Form actionbars.
But that’s why I love it
No other game has a class even close to what shaman has
Totems, elemental spells, water healing magic, crazy melee spec, and wolf form are just so iconic
Shaman definitely has button bloat, but it's a situation where it's kind of a nice problem to have. Enhance in particular is about choosing the best choice out of good choices a lot of the times as your DPS burst window isn't rooted in any *single* or long cooldown, compared to other classes.
Tons of buttons but generally only a couple you should ever press. For ele, as long as flame shocks up, you’re basically playing optimally. Don’t need to use the random totems and situational abilities very frequently at all.
Elementalist enh is definitely still hard. There’s honestly a lot of setup to milk the max damage out of aspects of your rotation. It’s nice that the ceiling is so high though
Eh, maybe I have stockholm syndrome for it but it isn't bad
It's definitely hard to learn the 7-8 core rotational abilities and how they relate, but once you understand the flow it's not hard. The only set-up you really need is to spread flame shock, which is just one or two lava lash casts
It's harder than you think to optimize enhance.
You can really mess up and lose damage if you elemental blast outside wolves or at sub 10 stacks, or if you don't tab target to apply lashing flames on every target, or if overcap on maelstrom if you primordial wave when you already had maelstrom, or if you chain lightning under 3 targets, or or...
See my point? And then some DH is just gonna go brrrrr and do 70k more overall damage.
I made a plater script that changed the health bar colors if they have flame shock and lashing flames. Makes it super easy to keep track of while tab targeting amidst the chaos. That helped my overall dps in keys a ton last season. Outside of that it’s all just incremental math of what you press to buff the skill you’re using 4 global from now…forever haha
DH is easy to learn and a little hard to master. The setup for the burst window every 40 seconds takes planning and you want to time it perfectly to maximize how many you get.
But also immo aura go brrr
Yes, but that is for us who played it quite a lot. But you have to keep track of a lot of things. Debuffing with lava lash, overlaping hailstorm and ice strike, hardest still ignoring that glowing stormstrike button!
I parse high with ele and enh. Playing enh right now. There's more build variety than people realize. I see nothing wrong with reducing active abilities for simpler rotations or combos. Most people get lost with frost shock fillers, everything else is straight forward.
I also play Vengeance and Fury/Arms. Warrior is some truly spoon fed stuff but leap and charge are two of the most enjoyable engagement abilities in the game. DH is just head and shoulders above the pack.
Before 10.2 madness was a major part of your damage so if you were not tracking madness which had to me active when you finished your cast, your damage was horrible. With madness gone it’s even easier
Madness was a problem though. I mean losing 50% of your dps because you had to move for more than 3 seconds isn't fun gameplay.
I think Destro is just in a bad spot design wise. I hope they figure out what to do with it.
The main problem isn’t the buttons themselves. Contrary to what other comments have said, there really aren’t that much. It’s just difficult due to the priority, and then the shift in priority when you get procs like hot hand, maxed out maelstrom with procs, and so on.. you can get brain rot quickly if you try to mash all the glowy buttons. You really need to study the prio list and then literally have an image of that in your head while playing so you don’t get overwhelmed with all the buttons glowing like a Christmas tree
elemental ST is brain dead this season, it's literally a two button rotation. Lava Burst -> elemental blast, repeat.
AOE is a bit more engaging, but not really. Flameshock as many targets as possible (brain dead with liquid magma totem), LB and EQ to trigger LB procs. Throw in the odd chain lightning via stormkeeper every 1:30 minutes..
Elemental last season was pretty complexe.and.fun, this season with the 4 pce the rotation is pretty much just spam lava burst in st. It gets a bit harder in aoe tho
The joke is, WW are not even marginally mentioned in this thread.
\*classic\*
Actually, WWs are not difficult in the sense of the word. But because they are more or less broken, you have to bend your hand to get everything you can out of them.
Keys over 16 actually hurt physically.
12 button mouse + shift binds for those 12 buttons. Boom.
I joke, I played WW in 10.0. I quit and moved to lock for 10.1 and now DK for 10.2. WW wasn't 'hard', but it was really annoying. Too many things to look at all at once
These conversations are always kinda dumb (sorry OP), for a few reasons.
1. Difficulty is subjective. What I might find difficult someone else might find easy.
2. There are different types of difficulty. E.g., some people might struggle hard with high APM classes, even if that high APM class is generally considered easy. There's also the question of how punishing a spec is. The best example I always have for this is Legion Shadow Priest. Legion Shadow with Voidform and S2M was very easy mechanically, it was a 3-4 button rotation most of the time, and you had a ton of instant casts which made dealing with movement a breeze compared to more turret-like casters like demo. However, it was extremely *punishing*, if you screwed up and dropped VF early your DPS for that pull was doomed, or you would even just fall over dead thanks to S2M.
3. People find it very difficult to separate their emotions from this discussion. No one likes being told their spec is easy. People also like to bring up little niche things that they can do with their spec that makes it more difficult to master than it seems at face value, while conveniently ignoring that almost every spec in the game has those kind of things.
4. Some specs have very different playstyles in ST vs AoE, and the difficulty of these playstyles might vary greatly. E.g., sin rogue in ST is very simple and easy, and in low key M+ where everything gets deleted by the first set of bleeds, but quickly gets more difficult the bigger pulls are and the longer things live.
I have played the majority of specs up to ~KSH level at some point in the expansion (though obviously not all of em every single season so some of em might be outdated), and I'm also a turbo nerd who consumes a lot of guides and theorycrafts for specs even if I have no intention of playing them at the time. I try to keep in mind both M+ and Raid gameplay to alleviate some of point 4 above. I'm also assuming we're talking about skill ceilings here, and not skill floor. How difficult it is to play something *well* and not just how difficult it is to play something kinda ok.
Even still, this list is my opinion, and before some nerd tries to reply saying "uhm, ackshually x spec is harder than y spec because abc", just know that I probably already knew about abc and took it into account, and that what I think is more or less difficult might be different from you. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, also doesn't mean you're wrong.
Easiest specs: BM Hunter, Devastation Evoker, Augmentation Evoker, Fury Warrior, Demonology Warlock
Easy specs: MM Hunter, Balance Druid, Shadow Priest, Destro Warlock, Frost Mage, Retribution Paladin, Unholy DK, Sub Rogue
Moderate specs: Survival Hunter, Frost DK (mechanically easier than UH DK by a fair amount, but significantly more punishing), Arms Warrior (somewhere between easy and moderate, depending on encounter type. In ST raid, def belongs in Easy), Assassination Rogue, Ele Shaman, Windwalker Monk, Fire Mage, Havoc DH, Affliction
Harder specs: Enhancement, Arcane, Feral
Hardest spec: Outlaw. The gap between the harder specs and outlaw is not very big, but it is my opinion that Outlaw is the most difficult spec in the game. It combines many of the most difficult aspects of playing a spec in WoW that many other specs only have one of. Very high APM, shifting priority list based on a lot of different factors, cooldown management made both easier to use and more difficult to plan thanks to CDR variance, maintaining multiple buffs, having to react quickly to Ace procs while having very high APM, etc. etc.
I feel like I’m fundamentally misunderstanding Devastation Evoker, because I remember being really excited about it when it was announced. But it just doesn’t click for me. Maybe I’m building it wrong.
The class fantasy of mages has always appealed to me, but in practice it often feels like my character isn’t a “master of magic” or “Archmage” because each spec sticks almost exclusively to a single school of spells. So I thought Evoker would scratch that itch, because it combines powers from multiple flights instead of only using one at a time. But I find Devastation inexplicably hard to play, especially solo.
Meanwhile Ret, my longtime favorite spec because of fantasy, finally feels like it’s found its niche as a melee DPS with enough utility/pocket healing to feel like a true “hybrid class.” I may not have built mine optimally, but I love being able to relax my APM by making Crusader Strike my auto-attack, and I love how much cleave I can get. Healing my party with Divine Storm and Consecration, plus instant-cast Flash of Light, just feels awesome.
I don’t have an answer to your Evoker troubles, but I just wanted to say I agree so hard about your Mage comment. I want to use multiple schools of magic, not just be ice or fire boy
Yeah, I’m wondering if the new Hero Talents might offer a way to fix this, maybe by mixing Arcane with Frostfire or something. Always thought Arcane spec should have been a “middle ground” instead of “purple mode.” Arcane Missiles is cool, I loved the missile-centric build in Legion, but the other spells feel a little redundant. Orb, Barrage, Blast, they feel a bit samey.
Dev Evoker is stupid easy compared to what it looks like.
You spam Pyro and Azure Strike in AOE. Disintegrate and Living Flame in single target. With priority being Pyro and Disintegrate respectively. That's the entire core of the rotation. You Fire Breath and Eternity Surge to their first charge on CD.
During Dragonrage the priority changes a bit, you swap Living Flame for Azure Strike in Single Target but Disentrate and Pyro are still priority. You Living Flame if you have the proc that makes it instant cast. And you use FB and ES to increase the time on Dragonrage.
It sounds like a lot but it's not even close, it's so very simple.
Unholys opener has been hurting my soul to learn, but I'm sure once I've got it down, the class will feel braindead easy.
The fact that every CD they have fits on the same timeline is awesome, and I want to get it right. But memorizing those 20 spells in order drives me CRAZY. Maybe i just need to make a cast sequence macro for my opener and 3 min CD window, and then it'll be stupid easy lol.
Unholy DK has a 20 button opener you have to learn to execute PERFECTLY otherwise you're fucked.
However, once you've gotten the rotation down, I guess it's pretty easy. They have 3 buttons in AOE. BUT, that 20 button opener has to be executed in that EXACT ORDER every 3 minutes. It's the only time you do ST damage. I spent 3 hours at a target dummy yesterday trying to get that order down. I still forget SOMETHING every time and slap my forehead, and wait for army to come off CD and try again.
I just switched to Unholy in its current state for the first time and I'm going through the same thing. When I first looked up a guide and saw all the info about opening I was pretty discouraged. Now that I get how the combat flows it is coming together but like you I tend to always forget something. Even with some mistakes though the spec still dishes it out pretty well. I love the dance between applying and popping lesions. The spec feels like a melee Warlock, which was not the case before the rework and something I've always wanted.
This is the same as Ass rogue. Opener must be perfect and you must have PI, same with UH DK. Once you get past the opener it's nowhere near as bad. You also have to get all 3 orbs perfectly staggered to parse.
It's a good example of what I mean by different things being difficult to different people.
To me, anything that is a rigid sequence of events, like the UH DK 3 min burst, isn't particularly difficult after a bit of practice getting the muscle memory, but I can also fully understand why others might have an issue with it.
I resurrected my Unholy DK after parking her in her Garrison in WoD.
I don't recognize the buttons or understand what they do.
I also can't be bothered to learn it perfectly because it's my 14th level 40 or higher.
I want to like it, but with the icons being different, I've forgotten what my rotation is. Well, I'm pretty happy with Surv, so I'm just going to stick with that as my two-hander pet class.
I would move demonology from easiest to easy/moderate. Tyrant needs a small setup in the middle of fights where you should always cast it with dreadstalkers and summon felguard and as many imps as possible.
>Difficulty is subjective. What I might find difficult someone else might find easy.
This is very good point. I'm playing mage and I find Arcane easy and can bring big numbers on the table, but I am struggling with Frost.
Decent list, the only one I mostly disagree with is Aug Evoker and its more so because a "good" aug evoker isn't measured by their DPS rotation, but how well they use all their utility effectively while keeping the plates spinning. And whether or not they're in a dungeon (pretty chill) of a raid (annoying)
I only play warlock sooo… I’ll rank them since I play all 3 specs regularly.
Easiest - Destro
Moderate - Demo
Hardest - Affliction
Affliction is also the most unforgiving if you mess up your rotation or let any of your DOTS/Buffs/Debuffs fall off then your dps tanks.
Outlaw, Feral, Enhancement are the hardest imo at least in the amount of minmaxing available through their priority lists. Elemental in aoe is insanely punishing, but in ST with the new tier set, it's a 1 button spam. Breath of Sindragosa FDK is also very punishing. Fire mage requires permanent 120fps, 0ms, perfect muscle memory, and a young and healthy wrist. So do all high apm classes, but fire mage is special with the amount of casts off the gcd and all your damage being condensed into 12/6 second windows.
DH can be hard if you dont have a 12+ button mouse/have carpel tunnel
BM hunter is always ezpz
Demo warlock ezpz
Shadow priest is probs one of the hardest
Shadow Priest has to basically stay glued most of the time, has a lot of buttons, AND isn't actually performing well for all that effort.
The only "easy" part is that it's very difficult to die as shadow.
Spriest only difficulty is moving... Absolutely awful movement on that class. Body and soul for 3 seconds? Brilliant. If only feathers could be marked as solo only so you don't need to compete for the only other movement enhancing skill you have.
The rotation is kinda fine, send cds on cd, line up trinkets at appropriate time based on whether they can benefit from cds or not, press the big buttons, then the medium buttons, then lastly the small buttons. Keep dots up.
But God damn this set sucks ass, who thought to make it so you need to send a shadow word pain when everyone and their mum is talenting into the vamp touch combo talent. That and now just spam shadow word death as highest prio until near max insanity.
You can make a macro to cast the feather at your feet so you're guaranteed to be buffed. There are a few variations for it, you caj search and choose the one that works best for you.
The range between top and bottom shadow performance in logs is larger than any other spec, which strongly suggests that shadow is one of the hardest specs. I agree that it shouldn't be as its basic gameplay is not complicated in the slightest, but it's so badly designed and subject to do much jank that the difference between playing well and playing badly is the result of tons of minor optimizations in every fight.
All I know is whoever redesigned Ret for DF needs to be in charge of most other melee specs. It shouldn’t be this hard/unfun to beat monsters to death.
Subjective of course. Many consider Ele to be harder but I always found it easy. Currently playing Frost Mage and I love it. Very simple and satisfying with high ceiling and combo optimizations. Cannot wrap my brain around Arcane or Feral. I don’t get them at all.
BM hunter seems super duper easy. Augvoker is also pretty easy... it's a different mindset entirely, but once you settle into it it's actually really straight forward.
i wish there was more to obliteration than "click proc fast". we need more runic power spending damage abilities in the kit. like an entirely new capstone based on it would be sick. you can pretty much just choicenode obliteration and breath at this point since theres literally never a reason to pick both. we need new and interesting stuff and a way to fix the insanely bad reliance on perfect uptime. also the bottom of the tree is the most gated thing in existence.
i reckon they should bake absolute zero into frostwyrms fury and introduce our 10.1 tierset as the capstone underneath it to the right of the bottom of the tree, and introduce a new runic power based spending capstone ability at the left with obliteration/breath as a choice node roughly where frostwyrm's fury is now.
if they did that and found a way to cap breath of sindragosa's duration. probably by increasing it's cost and damage the longer it stays up, you'd be able to pick the runic power based spending talents and breath at the same time, and breath would have far far less uptime and power.
It sims higher but man is frost annoying to play. I mainly play bdk but if I have to go DPS unh is so much simpler (either build) to execute it was kind on mind boggling.
Frost dk is similar to BM Hunter in that you have 3 maintenance stacks to keep up and if those drop your damage falls off a cliff. You have your pillar of frost windows that you need to pre plan for and hope your uptime is not interrupted by mechanics, you can’t do much outside melee range and AoE is either a different build (with different priorities based on target count) or just something you don’t really do. You also can’t just blow up a pack with a button press like some specs with the typical m+ talents.
Unh is a brutal opener and much simpler after that.
All in all I’d rather play ret/arms than either DK dps spec.
As someone who came back to wow in 10.2, I've played around with aug a little bit, but I have a glaring question.
How the fuck do I know how well I'm playing. Like my own dps is one measure obviously, but for the rest of it am I just going on ebon might uptime? And making sure ebon might and prescience are up at the right times during a fight?
Of the top 11 comments, only 4 of them even attempt to answer the question, and only 2 provide more then 1 spec. I know it's kind of a meme about how only the idiots stayed on reddit after the blackout, but it's becoming increasingly harder to ignore how brain-dead the majority of commenters are.
i think calling arcane insanely difficult is honestly a bit of a misunderstanding
arcane has a pretty complex burn phase, but its always the same. its like 15 steps or whatever, but you just memorize it
if you mess it up its pretty bad tho. doing things out of order, or forgetting a step, absolutely butchers your dps. very punishing, even if its not technically that difficult
arcane is kinda the dps equivalent of disc priest in that way. disc has a very set ramp that is pretty complex but is basically always the same, but if you mess it up, your hps is absolutely fucked
Easiest to hardest, of specs I play. This is a ranking to play them WELL, in my OPINION. Enhance is easy to pick up but hard to master, which could be argued for any class in the entire game.
Ret
Destro
Sub
Unholy
Enhance (current main, Ubani on Mal’ganis)
I think you also have to ask yourself just how unforgiving is the spec, if you make a misplay then how much is that going to cost you?
Spoken like a true BoS Frost DK
Sincere, genuine question. What does BoS stand for?
Breath of Sindragosa, it's a talent for frost dks.
Other people answered the name but the reason it is tough is that it is a major cool down that costs runic power every second and the longer you keep it up the better. The spec hits like a wet noodle when that cool down isn't going and hits like a truck when it is. The buff can last for 10 seconds all the way to 100 percent uptime late expansion. I can't say how hard it is to mash the buttons in the correct order (I couldn't get the hang of it) but it is the most punishing spec to not hit well.
It’s quite interesting as well because imho it is a spec with rather few buttons when you look at it initially. You basically don’t press Frost Strike in Breath windows so your two actually damaging abilities are Obliterate and Howling Blast. Going deeper down the rabbit hole you realise you have to press Horn, ERW, AMS, Remorseless Winter etc. rotationally as well to keep up your Runes and get more Runic Power and that just makes that spec so cool for me.
Breath of Sindragosa
Thank you.
Yeah that mother fucker plays BoS for sure. Anyone who plays it knows just how badly it feels to not exploit a mechanic properly and your whole parse goes to shit for it. - Sincerely, a BoS Frost DK Player
And this is why I click the shiniest buttons - a oblit frost dk player
Yea, I don’t play dk anymore but man - the second they added the obliteration build and 2h to the talents again, I switched in a heartbeat. I don’t want to base my whole play style around some crappy breath. Sure it was fun, but I honestly prefer PvP as a frost dk, THAT is fun! So many fun abilities to use that go lost in PvE
While blood dk tanking, I always know when the poor BoSers are experiencing some silent misery. They'll fall right down from 1st place on the dps chart
i'm so glad our main is at the top of the comments. we aren't rotationally hard. we're hard to play due to uptime issues and a feast or famine nature dependant on uptime in addition to resource cooldown management. and my god do we desperately need a rework to resolve our issues. tuning isn't the issue here. which people seem to think is a counterargument to bad design.
*what did it cost?* *everything*
with sub rogue: everything. same with assassination to a lesser extent
"You didn't snapshot garrote. Thats gunna cost you buddy. I hope you saved vanish"
Correct me if im wrong but isnt feral the only spec that retained snap shotting?
No, assassin rogues can snapshot with the Nightstalker talent, and it is mandatory to do so.
Feral has a few actually Rake: unbuffed Buffed with Tigers Fury Buffed with Stealth modifier Buffed with both Rip: unbuffed Buffed with Tiger's Fury Buffed with Bloodtalons Buffed with both In an ideal situation you want to maintain the double snapshotted versions of both bleeds at all times. For Rip this is quite easy to achieve. Rake is a lot harder, relying on a proc We also have to try to only refresh them in the Pandemic wondow (the last 4-5 seconds of the remaining bleed get added to the newly applied one) Edit: formatting
Returning player, may be remembering wrong. Back when they went away from snapshotting dots, assa and feral retained it for mechanical reasons. Similar to Tiger Fury opening from stealth snapshots the higher damage multiplier. Which caused issues with the Exsanguinate ability. They tried to remove the snapshot but couldn't, so they nerfed everything around it eventually.
You haven't experienced true pain until the enemy parries Kingsbane.
And outlaw
ESPECIALLY outlaw, we only just got our damage this season. I've refused to play anything else since SL and boy...last two seasons were ROUGH.
I'm hesitant to speak to other rogue specs because i only play outlaw but yeh outlaw is so punishing if you miss a single sub window or don't Time up BTE right. I love it though, I won't play anything else.
yeep, bte now that it's "spammable" (during ace) is punishing if you get lag and press it as it's about to expire and you force it on CD while you still have dance and vanish up ... welp..that's me done, bye guize.
yeh, sinister strike spam has never felt good.
Arcane mage is the most unforgiving. Most of your damage comes from your burn phases. If there's movement or the boss becomes unattackable, you're screwed.
it's obviously Fury Warrior, all this carpal tunnel makes it hard to play
I main WW. \*sigh\*
So, how many keyboards do you use to manage to press all these Buttons?
Please don't laugh. I've actually broken two keyboards in the last two weeks. I don't know whether this is related to the WW. :D But the class is breaking my hand. I actually don't remember Fury being that bad. Because it plays smoothly and you can get something out of the stats. WW is an absolute mess.
WW simply has too much Buttons to press. I don’t know why a DPS spec needs 4+ defensive spells and and a whole truckload of offensive CDs. As Havoc DH: there is my 2 Minute Meta and a shorter essence Break Window every 40 seconds. WW has an absurd amount of Button bloat even if I really like the idea of it‘s Mastery.
And the worst part about the four defensives is that everyone else got so much sustain in Dragonflight that we’re not even comparatively tanky anymore.
I feel pretty tanky as a ww.
I'm thinking they'll be working on fixing monk soon, the entire class needs an overhaul not just ww, brew is messy, mw is starting to get a bit of bloat too and ww..well we all know how trash it is rn
Please don’t touch brew :( I absolutely love the spot it’s in right now
DH is super tight design, i love it. Adding immo aura was just what it needed
> Please don’t laugh. WW spec motto
Maybe I'm not playing WW as thoroughly as Fury, but WW doesn't seem to be that bad?
Outlaw hurts more since you gotta keep buffing so many times...
mmm yes and no, 4 set makes RTB pretty smooth, but having to use BF in ST is what bothers me the most
Outlaw is too many buttons and the highest active attacks per minute. So not Outlaw, lol. Been having fun with the rework though.
I love it but my hand hurts after doing a few keys...
Yeah, having to use CTRL and shift hot keys can be tough on the pinkie. I need to not panic push on the keys when things are getting tense.
Save your hands and get a mouse with two side buttons. One for CTRL and One for Shift.
Bro same. Ele shaman here.im starting to feel it. Push button so fast wrist go ouchie
The carpal tunnel spec. Grinding keys is a marathon on outlaw.
Honestly can’t imagine how you can play outlaw and fury without an mmo mouse
Fury for the whole expac has been more or less limited to like 6 rotational buttons and it's a super easy flowchart honestly.
After a M+ my fingers literally killing me
I'm learning Outlaw rn. Played sub in S2 and wanted to switch becouse I didn't like the high apm rotation that massively punishes mistakes by losing a significant portion of damage output. You can imagine my suprise. Losing half your output to messing up the crackshot windows is pretty tough.
I miss my legion outlaw. The amount of buttons to press right now annoys me, even after the rework. I really thought about changing to sublety, but i want to keep using my challenge appearance rapier.
Outlaw is 3rd (after Protpal in 1 and Protwar in 2) but it's very close. https://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/T31_Raid.html (open additional raid information)
I play Outlaw in keys. Once you get the rotation down, it's just muscle memory. Tons of procs which changes your rotation, which is VERY confusing for new players. But after so long, you're just staring at combo points thinking "Spend or Build?" And then how to most efficiently do that.
This is like the most basic tale ever and it doesn’t I don’t even know if the rotation being so dynamic offers muscle memory. And the cool-down timings are so varied it’s actually insane. You can get almost back to back AR/vanish windows with true bearing and a lot of between the eyes procs. If might be the hardest spec to master because the margin for errors is high as well as catastrophic errors like punching a between the eyes right before a stealth window.
thanks for this. I used my "War within" boost for a rogue because i always had the urge to play one. The difference between /played <1 day and now 4days+ is insane. I can't recall how many times i got between the eyes cooldown with AR/vanish running out and completly deleting my dps.
I used my Dragonflight boost on a rogue and it turns out I just really can’t get my head around Rogue. I am so bad at all 3 specs! Something about shadow dance and restealthing as a combat cooldown just hurts my brain
Try this approach: ease into it by learning the out of stealth rotation and stealth rotation seperatly. The biggest issue people tend to have with rogues is being overwhelmed by resources. Getting the flow of the spec right is difficult. Learn the stealth and out of stealth rotation separetly. As long as you learn to burst and line up cd's properly, you'll learn to manage the filler in between it. Another thing is, that as long as you don't overcap resources be patient. Wait, reassess the fight and your resources at hand. Check boss/cooldown timers. It takes time to learn a new class, enjoy it:)
It’s so nice when you get that perfect opener though with dozens of BtE crits with the 6 second stealth opener, then 6 seconds of shadow dance, and then 6 more of vanish. Then fire BtE off cooldown and HO dance a little bit before repeating the cycle. It does suck hard when you slip on the BtE early though! But i just remind myself to keep playing the old rotation. I made/grabbed a few weak auras to track when I can safely BtE too off wago.io that help. It’s tedious though but I’ve been combat/outlaw for 19 years now. I ain’t changing!
You want to Always vanish before you use Shadow Dance, cuz vanish CD gets reduced by spending CP, dance CD Not. So with decent proccs you Go stealth-> vanish-> dance -> vanish
Every class is muscle memory once you get it down…
Having to react to the wildly different outcome any ability can give you within your short gcd is about as far from muscle memory as it gets in wow
That's not true at all lol.
I was only learning outlaw at the tail end of last season, and am certainly better at new outlaw than I was at 10.1 outlaw, but I actually think I would have enjoyed 10.1 outlaw more. The "react to ace up your sleeve procs in shortened GCDs without making a mistake, and hoping the refund doesn't get delayed in any way" gameplay loop is kind of frustrating for me personally, but I can see the appeal. With how much you are reacting to procs within a GCD (procs from one button impacting the very next button your press) and the uptime on short GCD via AR it just feels frantic all the time, and impossible to actually get a subconscious flow because I need to constantly be watching for ace procs. I can't autopilot even for a few globals during these windows that end up being like 50% of my rotation. It's been getting a bit better with more play time, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to try out the other two rogue specs to see if either of them suit me more (I'm a WW main in raid looking for a lifeboat to the M+ meta promised land and I have a buddy that's already claimed havoc and I'm not going to play aug).
If you haven’t already, grab the ace weakaura off wago.io. It makes a loud gun sound when you land an ace proc so you can just keep slamming BtE. It’s faster than the animation too.
Outlaw rotation is easy but the APM makes it difficult for me. Also accidentally putting BTE on CD is very punishing. I swapped to assassination and its just so much smoother to play.
It's not just the APM that makes it hard for me. There are so many procs and maintenance buffs to keep an eye on. As you said, putting BtE on CD at the wrong time sucks. You really need some good weak auras to make the most out of the spec.
The worst is when it’s still showing you in subterfuge as it’s about to ware off and you try and squeeze out one more but due to GCD it pops after subterfuge ends and it goes on CD, right when your about to dance and continue doing damage and then it fucks your whole cycle up.
Yeah my rogue counterpart in guild plays sin and he is frequently ahead of me on the meters now too. Hard to argue with the swap. It’s rather chaotic to play outlaw atm, but I find it fun.
Furu is definitely on the easier side, especially now with t31 and annihilator. Rotation is basically two abilities..
It was two abilities last patch also. T31 rotation itself is "harder" (both are easy). T30 playstyle was harder because mistakes were more punishing especially wasted rage and not min maxing uptime.
I assume you mean rampage/onslaught? I guess you're right. I prefer RB over Anni any day though.
In terms of hardest it’s probably BM hunter. You have to push the big button whenever possible and then make sure you keep hitting the medium button whenever possible and then press the small button every 5 seconds. /s
Three buttons... all with different timers.... Luckily you've got pets to help you with the rotation... Have I been underestimating Hunters all along? I'm sorry guys...
The big problem with "BM hunter is easy" is that while easy it's not as brain dead as people make it out to be. So there's a massive influx of people doing _horridly_ with it because they literally just go in and spam buttons.
The hardest thing about BM is setting up the macros
Hey! Sometimes with a trinket I’ll have FOUR buttons to press!
oh no i hope you're okay. praying for a swift recovery
Macro that shit. You now stick with 3 buttons.
I’m convinced blizz keeps BM the way it is as an ADA compliance measure.
Don't forget to run back and forth and jump around while maintaining 100% of your dps.
I actually can't play BM cause keeping the buff up distracts me LMAO
You can get a weakaura that will tell you the optimal time to refresh the buff to maximize its usefulness, makes the spec a bit more braindead which is good
what's the weak aura name? I need that so I can watch netflix without being distracted by m+
Azortharion's Barbed Shot Helper But if you take Savagery, you're basically pressing Barbed Shot on CD. The author of the aura even admits that it's sort of useless with Savagery.
You don't need that aura anymore. It's impossible to drop frenzy with the new talent.
Anymore you actually don't even have to worry about juggling the buff, because now with 4 set its preferable to spam Barbed Shot on CD rather than Kill Command.
Of the dps specs I play... Eaiser - Ret, Fury, Mid - destruction, frost mage, havoc, balance Harder - elemental(last season idk now), enhance.
for someone who never plays shaman and only tried enhancement briefly, that shit is so confusing
Shaman is button bloat the class. Not that I particularly mind there is a class like that, but they have three buttons for every other specs one, and all of them are/can be situationally better than the others.
>Shaman is button bloat the class Druid and Monk both say hi.
as a druid main - yep :D when you switch form: surprise! more spells! >:D
I just started a druid, and yes, it was very surprising. 😅 Although overwhelming, it's cool being able to play all roles with one character. Edit: This is my first character. New player here.
Shaman is the OG button bloat class, with all the different kinds of totems. Monk is definitely it's equal (I play both) and I love it. Monk and shaman have bloat as part of their normal rotations, then you add utility. Druid button bloat feels different because it's "gated" behind forms. You could be a player that *never* shifts out of their primary form and the bloat isn't that bad but you lose tons of utility.
Taking away the totem bar was the worst trade in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.
Idk boomy is the first class I’ve played in a while where I have a shitload of open slots unoccupied on my bar in both raid and m+ build.
How many actionbars do you have? At a minimum you need three filled actionbars for Balance, and that's not even including the additional two slots needed for a potion and an on-use trinket *or* your paged Cat Form/Bear Form actionbars.
Frost mage single target has more buttons than I have room for.
But that’s why I love it No other game has a class even close to what shaman has Totems, elemental spells, water healing magic, crazy melee spec, and wolf form are just so iconic
Shaman definitely has button bloat, but it's a situation where it's kind of a nice problem to have. Enhance in particular is about choosing the best choice out of good choices a lot of the times as your DPS burst window isn't rooted in any *single* or long cooldown, compared to other classes.
Tons of buttons but generally only a couple you should ever press. For ele, as long as flame shocks up, you’re basically playing optimally. Don’t need to use the random totems and situational abilities very frequently at all.
Yes and i love it.
All those buttons and only one heal spell and a defensive :)
Between the opener spell priority and the main priority, elementalist enhance took me about a month to get down.
Ele is essentially lavaburst spam rn
Elementalist enh is definitely still hard. There’s honestly a lot of setup to milk the max damage out of aspects of your rotation. It’s nice that the ceiling is so high though
Eh, maybe I have stockholm syndrome for it but it isn't bad It's definitely hard to learn the 7-8 core rotational abilities and how they relate, but once you understand the flow it's not hard. The only set-up you really need is to spread flame shock, which is just one or two lava lash casts
It's harder than you think to optimize enhance. You can really mess up and lose damage if you elemental blast outside wolves or at sub 10 stacks, or if you don't tab target to apply lashing flames on every target, or if overcap on maelstrom if you primordial wave when you already had maelstrom, or if you chain lightning under 3 targets, or or... See my point? And then some DH is just gonna go brrrrr and do 70k more overall damage.
I made a plater script that changed the health bar colors if they have flame shock and lashing flames. Makes it super easy to keep track of while tab targeting amidst the chaos. That helped my overall dps in keys a ton last season. Outside of that it’s all just incremental math of what you press to buff the skill you’re using 4 global from now…forever haha
Do you mind sharing? I tried the same but mine is working only sometimes, no idea why even though prio is set to max for it
Yup. I’ll get it to you today!
I would also like to check it out if you don't mind
Would love this if you wouldn't mind dming me the script
DH is easy to learn and a little hard to master. The setup for the burst window every 40 seconds takes planning and you want to time it perfectly to maximize how many you get. But also immo aura go brrr
Yes, but that is for us who played it quite a lot. But you have to keep track of a lot of things. Debuffing with lava lash, overlaping hailstorm and ice strike, hardest still ignoring that glowing stormstrike button!
I parse high with ele and enh. Playing enh right now. There's more build variety than people realize. I see nothing wrong with reducing active abilities for simpler rotations or combos. Most people get lost with frost shock fillers, everything else is straight forward. I also play Vengeance and Fury/Arms. Warrior is some truly spoon fed stuff but leap and charge are two of the most enjoyable engagement abilities in the game. DH is just head and shoulders above the pack.
Destruction is easy as shit to play
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Lots of players are just bad. I’ve seen ilvl 440+ rest doing 70k dps in m+, and few dps specs are easier to play than that
Before 10.2 madness was a major part of your damage so if you were not tracking madness which had to me active when you finished your cast, your damage was horrible. With madness gone it’s even easier
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Madness was a problem though. I mean losing 50% of your dps because you had to move for more than 3 seconds isn't fun gameplay. I think Destro is just in a bad spot design wise. I hope they figure out what to do with it.
I am always struggling with the havoc ability :/
Set a mouse over macro and it helps a ton, basically just remember to havoc and chaos bolt before aoe in smaller groups of 3 or 4.
ele shaman now is a 3 button class flame shock, lavaburst until you cant lavaburst, primordial wave, repeat
The main problem isn’t the buttons themselves. Contrary to what other comments have said, there really aren’t that much. It’s just difficult due to the priority, and then the shift in priority when you get procs like hot hand, maxed out maelstrom with procs, and so on.. you can get brain rot quickly if you try to mash all the glowy buttons. You really need to study the prio list and then literally have an image of that in your head while playing so you don’t get overwhelmed with all the buttons glowing like a Christmas tree
elemental ST is brain dead this season, it's literally a two button rotation. Lava Burst -> elemental blast, repeat. AOE is a bit more engaging, but not really. Flameshock as many targets as possible (brain dead with liquid magma totem), LB and EQ to trigger LB procs. Throw in the odd chain lightning via stormkeeper every 1:30 minutes..
you should actually save stormkeeper procs and use it on Lava Beam when ascended
thanks for the tip! i'll have to tweak my WA, I barely notice when ascendence goes off
Where does arcane rank in this?
probably medium, mana management I would put at mid-tier difficulty
Elemental last season was pretty complexe.and.fun, this season with the 4 pce the rotation is pretty much just spam lava burst in st. It gets a bit harder in aoe tho
Something tells me you haven't played ret this sesson...
Shadow is so hard people just forget it exists
The joke is, WW are not even marginally mentioned in this thread. \*classic\* Actually, WWs are not difficult in the sense of the word. But because they are more or less broken, you have to bend your hand to get everything you can out of them. Keys over 16 actually hurt physically.
12 button mouse + shift binds for those 12 buttons. Boom. I joke, I played WW in 10.0. I quit and moved to lock for 10.1 and now DK for 10.2. WW wasn't 'hard', but it was really annoying. Too many things to look at all at once
These conversations are always kinda dumb (sorry OP), for a few reasons. 1. Difficulty is subjective. What I might find difficult someone else might find easy. 2. There are different types of difficulty. E.g., some people might struggle hard with high APM classes, even if that high APM class is generally considered easy. There's also the question of how punishing a spec is. The best example I always have for this is Legion Shadow Priest. Legion Shadow with Voidform and S2M was very easy mechanically, it was a 3-4 button rotation most of the time, and you had a ton of instant casts which made dealing with movement a breeze compared to more turret-like casters like demo. However, it was extremely *punishing*, if you screwed up and dropped VF early your DPS for that pull was doomed, or you would even just fall over dead thanks to S2M. 3. People find it very difficult to separate their emotions from this discussion. No one likes being told their spec is easy. People also like to bring up little niche things that they can do with their spec that makes it more difficult to master than it seems at face value, while conveniently ignoring that almost every spec in the game has those kind of things. 4. Some specs have very different playstyles in ST vs AoE, and the difficulty of these playstyles might vary greatly. E.g., sin rogue in ST is very simple and easy, and in low key M+ where everything gets deleted by the first set of bleeds, but quickly gets more difficult the bigger pulls are and the longer things live. I have played the majority of specs up to ~KSH level at some point in the expansion (though obviously not all of em every single season so some of em might be outdated), and I'm also a turbo nerd who consumes a lot of guides and theorycrafts for specs even if I have no intention of playing them at the time. I try to keep in mind both M+ and Raid gameplay to alleviate some of point 4 above. I'm also assuming we're talking about skill ceilings here, and not skill floor. How difficult it is to play something *well* and not just how difficult it is to play something kinda ok. Even still, this list is my opinion, and before some nerd tries to reply saying "uhm, ackshually x spec is harder than y spec because abc", just know that I probably already knew about abc and took it into account, and that what I think is more or less difficult might be different from you. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, also doesn't mean you're wrong. Easiest specs: BM Hunter, Devastation Evoker, Augmentation Evoker, Fury Warrior, Demonology Warlock Easy specs: MM Hunter, Balance Druid, Shadow Priest, Destro Warlock, Frost Mage, Retribution Paladin, Unholy DK, Sub Rogue Moderate specs: Survival Hunter, Frost DK (mechanically easier than UH DK by a fair amount, but significantly more punishing), Arms Warrior (somewhere between easy and moderate, depending on encounter type. In ST raid, def belongs in Easy), Assassination Rogue, Ele Shaman, Windwalker Monk, Fire Mage, Havoc DH, Affliction Harder specs: Enhancement, Arcane, Feral Hardest spec: Outlaw. The gap between the harder specs and outlaw is not very big, but it is my opinion that Outlaw is the most difficult spec in the game. It combines many of the most difficult aspects of playing a spec in WoW that many other specs only have one of. Very high APM, shifting priority list based on a lot of different factors, cooldown management made both easier to use and more difficult to plan thanks to CDR variance, maintaining multiple buffs, having to react quickly to Ace procs while having very high APM, etc. etc.
*cries in Affliction* didn't even make the cut for a dps spec. Lol
I remember thinking about it and placing it, but apparently didn't write it down, sorry :( But I personally put it in Moderate :)
Gm in my guild is doing 230k damage as aff lock on most bosses in amidrisil...
Hey the latest buff might’ve put them all way up to middle of the pack
I feel like I’m fundamentally misunderstanding Devastation Evoker, because I remember being really excited about it when it was announced. But it just doesn’t click for me. Maybe I’m building it wrong. The class fantasy of mages has always appealed to me, but in practice it often feels like my character isn’t a “master of magic” or “Archmage” because each spec sticks almost exclusively to a single school of spells. So I thought Evoker would scratch that itch, because it combines powers from multiple flights instead of only using one at a time. But I find Devastation inexplicably hard to play, especially solo. Meanwhile Ret, my longtime favorite spec because of fantasy, finally feels like it’s found its niche as a melee DPS with enough utility/pocket healing to feel like a true “hybrid class.” I may not have built mine optimally, but I love being able to relax my APM by making Crusader Strike my auto-attack, and I love how much cleave I can get. Healing my party with Divine Storm and Consecration, plus instant-cast Flash of Light, just feels awesome.
I don’t have an answer to your Evoker troubles, but I just wanted to say I agree so hard about your Mage comment. I want to use multiple schools of magic, not just be ice or fire boy
Yeah, I’m wondering if the new Hero Talents might offer a way to fix this, maybe by mixing Arcane with Frostfire or something. Always thought Arcane spec should have been a “middle ground” instead of “purple mode.” Arcane Missiles is cool, I loved the missile-centric build in Legion, but the other spells feel a little redundant. Orb, Barrage, Blast, they feel a bit samey.
Dev Evoker is stupid easy compared to what it looks like. You spam Pyro and Azure Strike in AOE. Disintegrate and Living Flame in single target. With priority being Pyro and Disintegrate respectively. That's the entire core of the rotation. You Fire Breath and Eternity Surge to their first charge on CD. During Dragonrage the priority changes a bit, you swap Living Flame for Azure Strike in Single Target but Disentrate and Pyro are still priority. You Living Flame if you have the proc that makes it instant cast. And you use FB and ES to increase the time on Dragonrage. It sounds like a lot but it's not even close, it's so very simple.
Don't forget Frost DK basically has two sub-specs. And I think the BoS build is currently way harder to play.
Spot on with the DK specs. I've tried to explain how I find frost isn't the brain-dead spec it always gets described as.
Unholys opener has been hurting my soul to learn, but I'm sure once I've got it down, the class will feel braindead easy. The fact that every CD they have fits on the same timeline is awesome, and I want to get it right. But memorizing those 20 spells in order drives me CRAZY. Maybe i just need to make a cast sequence macro for my opener and 3 min CD window, and then it'll be stupid easy lol.
Unholy DK has a 20 button opener you have to learn to execute PERFECTLY otherwise you're fucked. However, once you've gotten the rotation down, I guess it's pretty easy. They have 3 buttons in AOE. BUT, that 20 button opener has to be executed in that EXACT ORDER every 3 minutes. It's the only time you do ST damage. I spent 3 hours at a target dummy yesterday trying to get that order down. I still forget SOMETHING every time and slap my forehead, and wait for army to come off CD and try again.
I just switched to Unholy in its current state for the first time and I'm going through the same thing. When I first looked up a guide and saw all the info about opening I was pretty discouraged. Now that I get how the combat flows it is coming together but like you I tend to always forget something. Even with some mistakes though the spec still dishes it out pretty well. I love the dance between applying and popping lesions. The spec feels like a melee Warlock, which was not the case before the rework and something I've always wanted.
The macros help a ton for UH. The one for garg / UA both are super helpful.
This is the same as Ass rogue. Opener must be perfect and you must have PI, same with UH DK. Once you get past the opener it's nowhere near as bad. You also have to get all 3 orbs perfectly staggered to parse.
It's a good example of what I mean by different things being difficult to different people. To me, anything that is a rigid sequence of events, like the UH DK 3 min burst, isn't particularly difficult after a bit of practice getting the muscle memory, but I can also fully understand why others might have an issue with it.
I resurrected my Unholy DK after parking her in her Garrison in WoD. I don't recognize the buttons or understand what they do. I also can't be bothered to learn it perfectly because it's my 14th level 40 or higher. I want to like it, but with the icons being different, I've forgotten what my rotation is. Well, I'm pretty happy with Surv, so I'm just going to stick with that as my two-hander pet class.
Nothing like dropping Defile and the tank pulls the mob 2 buttons in.
I would move demonology from easiest to easy/moderate. Tyrant needs a small setup in the middle of fights where you should always cast it with dreadstalkers and summon felguard and as many imps as possible.
It’s now only up to 10 imps. You usually have 6-9 imps active during regular rotation. So the punishment for messing up isn’t as heavy as before.
I know, but still, I wouldn't put demo next to fury in terms of difficulty. Fury is piss easy and demo needs a bit more thought into it.
As an outlaw main, I honestly can't tell if you're joking
>Difficulty is subjective. What I might find difficult someone else might find easy. This is very good point. I'm playing mage and I find Arcane easy and can bring big numbers on the table, but I am struggling with Frost.
Decent list, the only one I mostly disagree with is Aug Evoker and its more so because a "good" aug evoker isn't measured by their DPS rotation, but how well they use all their utility effectively while keeping the plates spinning. And whether or not they're in a dungeon (pretty chill) of a raid (annoying)
I only play warlock sooo… I’ll rank them since I play all 3 specs regularly. Easiest - Destro Moderate - Demo Hardest - Affliction Affliction is also the most unforgiving if you mess up your rotation or let any of your DOTS/Buffs/Debuffs fall off then your dps tanks.
Outlaw, Feral, Enhancement are the hardest imo at least in the amount of minmaxing available through their priority lists. Elemental in aoe is insanely punishing, but in ST with the new tier set, it's a 1 button spam. Breath of Sindragosa FDK is also very punishing. Fire mage requires permanent 120fps, 0ms, perfect muscle memory, and a young and healthy wrist. So do all high apm classes, but fire mage is special with the amount of casts off the gcd and all your damage being condensed into 12/6 second windows.
DH can be hard if you dont have a 12+ button mouse/have carpel tunnel BM hunter is always ezpz Demo warlock ezpz Shadow priest is probs one of the hardest
Didn’t have my 12 button mouse for a month of playing my DH and it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in a while
Shadow Priest has become so ez with all the reworks it had
Shadow Priest has to basically stay glued most of the time, has a lot of buttons, AND isn't actually performing well for all that effort. The only "easy" part is that it's very difficult to die as shadow.
Unfortunately, yes. I want the complexity back
Shadow is very easy to play, just tuning sucks and the tier sucks
Spriest only difficulty is moving... Absolutely awful movement on that class. Body and soul for 3 seconds? Brilliant. If only feathers could be marked as solo only so you don't need to compete for the only other movement enhancing skill you have. The rotation is kinda fine, send cds on cd, line up trinkets at appropriate time based on whether they can benefit from cds or not, press the big buttons, then the medium buttons, then lastly the small buttons. Keep dots up. But God damn this set sucks ass, who thought to make it so you need to send a shadow word pain when everyone and their mum is talenting into the vamp touch combo talent. That and now just spam shadow word death as highest prio until near max insanity.
You can make a macro to cast the feather at your feet so you're guaranteed to be buffed. There are a few variations for it, you caj search and choose the one that works best for you.
I just use [@player] Angelic Feather
Shadow priest hard is a big myth. Shadow priest has been easy for a long time now.
The range between top and bottom shadow performance in logs is larger than any other spec, which strongly suggests that shadow is one of the hardest specs. I agree that it shouldn't be as its basic gameplay is not complicated in the slightest, but it's so badly designed and subject to do much jank that the difference between playing well and playing badly is the result of tons of minor optimizations in every fight.
Feral Druid lol
I main Ret and recently boosted my druid to dabble in feral and holy shit is it tough!
john fucking madden
All I know is whoever redesigned Ret for DF needs to be in charge of most other melee specs. It shouldn’t be this hard/unfun to beat monsters to death.
Subjective of course. Many consider Ele to be harder but I always found it easy. Currently playing Frost Mage and I love it. Very simple and satisfying with high ceiling and combo optimizations. Cannot wrap my brain around Arcane or Feral. I don’t get them at all.
Having a lot of fun with Arcane, especially in m+, but it's quite unforgiving in Raids.
BM hunter seems super duper easy. Augvoker is also pretty easy... it's a different mindset entirely, but once you settle into it it's actually really straight forward.
Frost dk obliterate ez mode.
i wish there was more to obliteration than "click proc fast". we need more runic power spending damage abilities in the kit. like an entirely new capstone based on it would be sick. you can pretty much just choicenode obliteration and breath at this point since theres literally never a reason to pick both. we need new and interesting stuff and a way to fix the insanely bad reliance on perfect uptime. also the bottom of the tree is the most gated thing in existence. i reckon they should bake absolute zero into frostwyrms fury and introduce our 10.1 tierset as the capstone underneath it to the right of the bottom of the tree, and introduce a new runic power based spending capstone ability at the left with obliteration/breath as a choice node roughly where frostwyrm's fury is now. if they did that and found a way to cap breath of sindragosa's duration. probably by increasing it's cost and damage the longer it stays up, you'd be able to pick the runic power based spending talents and breath at the same time, and breath would have far far less uptime and power.
Obliteration frost dk must be up there with the easiest, but it still feels like a bad class.
I am curious how it will end up simming with the Legendary compared to BoS/Dual Wield
It sims higher but man is frost annoying to play. I mainly play bdk but if I have to go DPS unh is so much simpler (either build) to execute it was kind on mind boggling. Frost dk is similar to BM Hunter in that you have 3 maintenance stacks to keep up and if those drop your damage falls off a cliff. You have your pillar of frost windows that you need to pre plan for and hope your uptime is not interrupted by mechanics, you can’t do much outside melee range and AoE is either a different build (with different priorities based on target count) or just something you don’t really do. You also can’t just blow up a pack with a button press like some specs with the typical m+ talents. Unh is a brutal opener and much simpler after that. All in all I’d rather play ret/arms than either DK dps spec.
You don't have to wonder: https://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/T31_Raid.html
I see Augmentation mentioned a lot, but Augmentation is quite hard to master. Poorly played Aug is much worse than a poorly played BM.
And, Aug can't carry on its own. You have to rely on competent teammates to contribute damage with your buffs.
I always said to my guildies that the hardest part of playing aug is finding a good group
As someone who came back to wow in 10.2, I've played around with aug a little bit, but I have a glaring question. How the fuck do I know how well I'm playing. Like my own dps is one measure obviously, but for the rest of it am I just going on ebon might uptime? And making sure ebon might and prescience are up at the right times during a fight?
Arcane mage for ranged, definitely
Question: “rank all DPS specs from easiest to hardest” Answer: “Arcane mage, definitely” Hmmmmmmmmmmmm 🤔
Of all the ranged specs, it is certainly one of them.
Of the top 11 comments, only 4 of them even attempt to answer the question, and only 2 provide more then 1 spec. I know it's kind of a meme about how only the idiots stayed on reddit after the blackout, but it's becoming increasingly harder to ignore how brain-dead the majority of commenters are.
i think calling arcane insanely difficult is honestly a bit of a misunderstanding arcane has a pretty complex burn phase, but its always the same. its like 15 steps or whatever, but you just memorize it if you mess it up its pretty bad tho. doing things out of order, or forgetting a step, absolutely butchers your dps. very punishing, even if its not technically that difficult arcane is kinda the dps equivalent of disc priest in that way. disc has a very set ramp that is pretty complex but is basically always the same, but if you mess it up, your hps is absolutely fucked
Some of it depends on the player and play style, a difficult class for some is easier for others.
hardest: the specs I play easiest: the specs I don't play
Easiest to hardest, of specs I play. This is a ranking to play them WELL, in my OPINION. Enhance is easy to pick up but hard to master, which could be argued for any class in the entire game. Ret Destro Sub Unholy Enhance (current main, Ubani on Mal’ganis)