Is there a such thing as a bad spec anymore?

[ElDoorO]

Are there any specs, currently in this patch, that are so horrible that you'd recommend not be used in any situation (World, BG, Arena, Raid, M+)?

It seems like, roughly, things are "close enough" that a competent player of a spec if better than an incompetent player of a "good" class+spec.

So excluding personal preference, are there any specs so bad that the spec alone, for the moment, is a "horrible choice"?

I'm an altaholic so I tend to bounce around and right now it seems gear and skill matters more than class+spec in, literally, every single way. Is this an incorrect assumption?

[Lochton]

Are there any specs, currently in this patch, that are so horrible that you'd recommend not be used in any situation (World, BG, Arena, Raid, M+)?

It seems like, roughly, things are "close enough" that a competent player of a spec if better than an incompetent player of a "good" class+spec.

So excluding personal preference, are there any specs so bad that the spec alone, for the moment, is a "horrible choice"?

I'm an altaholic so I tend to bounce around and right now it seems gear and skill matters more than class+spec in, literally, every single way. Is this an incorrect assumption?

Most likely. WoW is cursed by a cookie-cutter mentality.

[Devilyaki]

Yes melee hunter is a bad spec regardless of how it plays.

[Puxycat]

It is even worse than Classic now, you have;
Best spec+best covenant for Mythic+
Best spec+best covenant for PvP
Best spec+best covenant for Raid
All rest are bad spec or considered not viable.
Edit: Forgot to even mention the "best legendary" combined with these.

[Kithelle]

Yes melee hunter is a bad spec regardless of how it plays.

So what you're saying is it's a bad spec because you don't like it? Kinda irrelevant here because the OP said excluding personal preference

[Tyris Flare]

DPS is actually really well balanced right now, comparatively to the past.

The biggest problem and gap is the balance of healer DPS.

[brigada]

DPS is actually really well balanced right now, comparatively to the past.

The biggest problem and gap is the balance of healer DPS.

DPS isnt balanced well AT ALL lol, at least in m+

[MoanaLisa]

It is even worse than Classic now, you have;
Best spec+best covenant for Mythic+
Best spec+best covenant for PvP
Best spec+best covenant for Raid
All rest are bad spec or considered not viable.
Edit: Forgot to even mention the "best legendary" combined with these.

Saying "best spec" for any one piece of the game and saying that all the rest are bad because they might be a couple of percentage points off is nonsense. I don't think that for DPS specs there are any that are outright terrible as there used to be years ago. These days smooth play and lack of awkwardness in lining up abilities is what makes one spec 'better' than others.

In any case, skill and good response to priorities brings more to the table than most differences in spec setup.

[Coniferous]

Healer balance is always terrible. Holy priest is always bad, mistweaver is usually bad, resto druid is only good for m+ occasionally, it's been bad in raids for like 6 years (the existence of spirit link means druid is rarely a good pick). Tank balance is also not great but not remotely as bad as healers - I was a guardian druid and I was awesome for Legion, terrible for most of BFA (fine by the end after buffs). It feels like prot warrior is rarely a good raid tank, occasionally it's good at m+.

DPS balance seems to be better, ironically it's less important outside the very top end (where every choice is important) because there are fewer healers and tanks, and if the tank is dying because he's soft or the healers are missing a spirit link because you brought a druid, it's complicated to recover. You can mostly kill bosses with a few suboptimal dps specs as long as the players play well, but suboptimal tanks and healers leave you pretty nerfed because of specific utility that the best ones have.

That's why healers and tanks mostly just switch to FOTM - there are more Holy Paladin parses on Sylv than 4 other specs combined, and nearly as many Shammies as Pallies - and tanking is dominated by monks right now where last patch it was something else.

[threads]

i dont see any purpose to ever play a melee hunter or feral druid but thats about it

[Tyris Flare]

DPS isnt balanced well AT ALL lol, at least in m+

The biggest issue with dps balance in m+ is utility more than damage (of course there are insane outliers like WW)

But you can check out warcraft logs for raid fights. Again there are always a couple outliers, but it in generally it is really well balanced, nothing like 8.3 fire mage.

[Firefall]

Classes and specs have been within about 10%-20% of each other since Cataclysm, and usually 10% at most. Every spec in the game (even Cataclysm frost mage) has been capable of hitting minimum DPS contribution requirements since Cataclysm as well. Every spec is viable. Minmaxing has never been required. People will still always choose the path of least resistance and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that or wanting to minmax.

Ultimately even if you can play anything, no one would reccomend a spec that is 10-20% worse over one that is not. So to the question in the OP, yes. To the thread title, not really because it's all technically viable and has been for most of WoW's history.

Same goes for tanks and healers, who currently, despite what others may say, are nearly exclusively all distinguished by how much damage they can do without sacrificing any healing or survivability. Prior to that mostly by how cooldowns lined-up on specific fights for the mechanics. Since Wrath-ish everyone can heal and reduce damage as needed (arguably TBC or even Vanilla, my Classic guild ran a Druid tank and even a shaman for a ZG raid and we had a skilled Warlock that could tank some fights too). Some will still make content easier.

[Log Cabin]

Yes but it is far better now then it has been at any other time I would argue.

[crakerjack]

Outside of world first or R1, every spec in the game can complete all content in the game.

[Dadwen]

Yes melee hunter is a bad spec regardless of how it plays.

That would be my vote too.

[Log Cabin]

Outside of world first or R1, every spec in the game can complete all content in the game.

Mostly incorrect to take a page from a certain website.

Every spec can be carried through all content but there are a select few that can't pull their own weight and need stronger classes to pick up their slack. That said it isn't really an issue till deep mythic raiding or absurd key levels.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Depends on what you consider bad? So.. like.. when you are trying to do max damage to beat mythic raid content in the first week are some bad compared to others? For sure. Are you trying to complete a +25 mythic+ in time.. sure.. for sure. Trying to get to gladiator and you aren't one of the gods of WoW? Yeah.. yeah some specs are bad.

You just progressing the game even to the highest ends but just not very quickly does anything work? Yeah. Like almost all of them work in that case. Almost. That melee hunter thing is pretty bad. But I am sure a really good player of it could do better than some trash players at the absolute "top" damage specs. So it could work.

[Schizoide]

Sure, class/spec balance hasn't noticeably improved over the years. The top spec in mythic performs ~14% better than the bottom. Ideally you'd like to see that under 10%, 5% would be better, but that's easier said than done.

More tellingly in heroic raids (which are relevant to a vastly larger portion of the competitive playerbase) the top spec is a whopping 26% above the bottom!

And interestingly, the rankings look pretty different based on difficulty, so there are optimizations to be made at the highest level of play in raid strats and/or individual play that change it up. In mythic you've got fury at the top and enhance at the bottom. In heroic, fury is ranked #20 out of 24 (!) and enhance is in the middle of the pack.

[Traveler Voltin]

there will always be a bad spec.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Mostly incorrect to take a page from a certain website.

Every spec can be carried through all content but there are a select few that can't pull their own weight and need stronger classes to pick up their slack. That said it isn't really an issue till deep mythic raiding or absurd key levels.

Guardian of the First Ones is the purest DPS check in the raid. The slowest kill of that boss is here, at 5:59. The raid did 113k DPS.
The worst recorded spec in the game for that fight is Destruction Warlock, which deals 8.8k DPS on average to that boss. Based on this, 14 Destruction Warlocks would deal on average 123.5k DPS, comfortably more than the required 113k. While this analysis does have some flaws (namely not accounting for DPS variance due to kill time and the presence of raid buffs), it strongly indicates that the worst possible DPS comp for the fight would still be capable of killing it. It's not close, they're comfortably above the required DPS.