Will You Pick Underrated Specs in Vanilla for PvE?

[Queen of Hamsters]

Playing specs for fun is a thing for Live, where I care about my characters and my experiences and classes ARE fun.

On Classic, my goal will be to clear every raid and never touch it again (unless they make rewards account-wide, ZG tiger yo!) so I'll go with the optimal class and spec which will be needed, but not easiest to level.

[Daggot Ur]

Will you go against the norm and try to make them work?
Or you gonna play it safe and pick the most successful specs?
Don't you fear not being invited to raids and groups?

For some reason i really want to play an Enh Shaman in Vanilla but i fear not getting picked for anything since i will be playing with strangers and without a friendly guild.

Unusual Specs:
Druid
Blance
Feral (DPS)
Feral (Tank)
Hunter
Beast Mastery
Survival
Paladin
Retribution
Protection
Priest
Discipline
Shadow
Shaman
Elemental
Enhancement
Warlock
Affliction
Demonology

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20747736615

Let's not combine everything into one pile - feral was a viable off-tank if you new what you were doing. We had an awesome feral who was OT with insane threat generation, throwing heals and Bressing people.
Shpriest and afflict became viable with16 slot debuffs. We also had ench shaman to buff our melee dps grpor tank threat generation. Yes he wasnt't top dps but impact he did with his totmes was well worth bringing him in.
And please keep in mind that it was back then when people didn't know how to play. I bet today after years of competitive rading people will develop builds for most if not all specs to be viable in raids.
Finally, if you don't care to be server first to kill the boss you can choose a more relaxed progression and play you favourite class.

I will play shammy healer (troll) - because that was and is my favourite class. I remember hating to take our ench shaman in raid first but we made a deal - he uses a full totem buff spec, brings pots and elixirs in the raid for him and farmed at one flask for other in raid and he could come in. That alone made enough impact to allow him in the raid.

[Restors]

Here is the thing: People didnt used to have simcrafts or the immense of guides we have today, back in the days. All we had to go was dmg meter, and that was barely.

Im pretty sure, once WOW Classic hits live, there will be theorycrafters all over that game. There will be so many awesome guides where people WILL find out other ways to play.

You say its unusual now, who can tell what the answer will be once theorycrafters and sims runs on wow classic. You just might find out paladin and druids are the new tank metas.. who knows.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

One handed Retribution Paladins coming for those meters!

[Gref]

Oh how much I will be laughing hysterically after killing players who are eating food in the most sinister ways possible then spamming /laugh /spit /fart emo-combo. Good old days.

[Tyze]

Here is the thing: People didnt used to have simcrafts or the immense of guides we have today, back in the days. All we had to go was dmg meter, and that was barely.

Im pretty sure, once WOW Classic hits live, there will be theorycrafters all over that game. There will be so many awesome guides where people WILL find out other ways to play.

You say its unusual now, who can tell what the answer will be once theorycrafters and sims runs on wow classic. You just might find out paladin and druids are the new tank metas.. who knows.

You are aware of that private servers has been a thing for years right?

[Bigbazz]

Here is the thing: People didnt used to have simcrafts or the immense of guides we have today, back in the days. All we had to go was dmg meter, and that was barely.

Im pretty sure, once WOW Classic hits live, there will be theorycrafters all over that game. There will be so many awesome guides where people WILL find out other ways to play.

You say its unusual now, who can tell what the answer will be once theorycrafters and sims runs on wow classic. You just might find out paladin and druids are the new tank metas.. who knows.

Private servers, hundreds of thousands of players experiencing them over the years... Yeah I think you don't realise that currently the knowledge of Vanilla is highly developed and theorycrafting is already pretty advanced.. Private server raiders are gonna hit 60 within about 5-6 days played, which they will do within 2 weeks and then they will methodically run through the well practiced preparation and gearing process just enough that they can enter Molten Core and clear it in the first night.

Vanilla might have ended over 10 years ago but private servers have been running the game that entire time and continuously getting better and better, with the playerbases growing and the knowledge of the game continuing to develop. You use that current knowledge as the new starting point and then add in the huge playerbase of retail and you will see it evolve even further very quickly, it will be Legion level theorycraft but with a far more mechanically simple game.

[Restors]

You are aware of that private servers has been a thing for years right?

And not many people supports private servers. Thats the reason why there are guides that was written back in the old days. Same goes for every private server expansion, forums filled with guides that was copied from elitist jerks etc etc.

Yeah, I do think once WoW: Classic actually becomes reality and hits live, I do think the most serious theorycrafters and softwares will be done alot better than what private servers had during all theese years.

Its just my predicment, I could be wrong.

[VincentWolf]

No. I'll be playing a mage.

[Xkiller9000]

there is no making them work - they just dont

- - - Updated - - -

For Raids you won't get invited unless you're :

Tank: Warrior
Healer: Priest or Shaman/Paladin
Caster: Mage or Warlock
Melee: Rogue or geared Warrior

So there's essentially 2 choices per role, and only 1 for tank. Good luck rolling a Druid of any spec, I believe only 2 are taken per raid.

thats pretty wrong actually

some fights take a druid for a 3rd, rare but it happens
for healers, druids u want 2-3 for brez/innervate
casters: hunters are good
melee: u need an enh sham with nightfall

[Cainium]

This is nonsense, min-maxing on private vanilla servers is more prevailent than it was 10 years ago because not only is knowledge more developed and refined but access to that knowledge is more widespread and common.

With your warrior example you exactly confirmed what i've said. Warriors are the best tanks available, but they aren't FORCED to tank 'cause people know they are good DPS as well. If they are "best" DPS it's even better.

And if you think "skill" is important in classic (what i doubt), then my point gets even bigger relevance.

[Bigbazz]

With your warrior example you exactly confirmed what i've said. Warriors are the best tanks available, but they aren't FORCED to tank 'cause people know they are good DPS as well. If they are "best" DPS it's even better.

And if you think "skill" is important in classic (what i doubt), then my point gets even bigger relevance.

Skill is important in classic, it's just a completely different type of skill. Like the largest difficulty factor in Warrior dps is rage management, because the resource is volatile. Even though the complexity is lower, it's easy to fluff up the basic rotation by maybe using a HC strike when you shouldn't and cause a rage starve which messes you up for maybe 3-4 seconds, or a hit miss streek pulling you out of the flow and causing abilities to sit off cooldown, if people are used to the more streamlined flow of Legion they could get tripped up on managing the resources in Vanilla, which isn't nice and predictable like in Legion..

On top of that GCD management, everything takes a bloody GCD (interrupts) so a modern player who is used to pressing 1 button and everything firing off might get caught off guard, you have to plan a few GCD's ahead of time and use stuff in the right order on cooldowns, you have to know which order your shopping list is going to be.

The other part is obviously threat management, which can sometimes catch a player offguard who lets it slip their attention just briefly, especially on some of the more bullshit fights. For sure though Vanilla doesn't have a high skill cap, but what it asks of players can easily catch people out and does provide an obvious difference between players.

[Temis]

I play a feral druid and a shadow priest on private vanilla servers hard to get in to raids still fun to play.

[GennGreymane]

I know I will be a balance druid BOOMKIN!

[Deleted]

Just don't join a douchey min/max guild. Just gear/play your spec properly in a less hard core guild.

I was in a server first (horde) MC and BWL clearing guild back in Vanilla. We had a wide variety of classes and specs. The only thing that was kind of locked in place was warrior tanks. Honestly, back then, the guild officers didn't even check specs (I'd sometimes cheat and heal outside shadow form as shadow spec, when I couldn't afford a respec). They just wanted people to have good attendance.

If the community, as a whole, is stuck in a retail world first mentality, I probably won't play on the server for long.

reminds me of when i healed ZG and MC and they started to question me about mana tide totem, i said i had used it and it was on cooldown, the raidleader stopped the whole raid to wait for my "mana tide totem" to go off cooldown, which it never did cus i was specced enhancement pvp LOL, well they took some dkp from me and gave me gold to respec into mana tide when they found out.