What competetive dps PvP spec has LEAST cooldown dependency?

[Deleted]

Shadow priest & ele shaman. Shadow priests dont really even have a burst cooldowns apart from shadow fiend.

[Hand Banana]

RTS and FPS say hi.

Except they are just as imbalanced? Terran, Zerg, Protoss, or MLS, KFC, LSD? As long as there are different choices there can never be balance in anything; in an FPS if there are different guns and perks there are imbalances. To be "properly" balanced you would need everyone to run the same comp, same guns, same everything in every game. That balance exists in wow too if everyone just runs the same 3s comp. But thats boring (hence why RTS is boring in a competitive sense IMO).

[Socialhealer]

elemental i often forget to even use ascendance because all it does it go LOL LOOK CC AND LOS thats all people do for 15 seconds, only complete scrubs will let you get about even 3 casts of lava burst in a row.

so all your kills are just lava surges, no cooldowns required.

[Thelxi]

If you are talking about rotational cooldowns I would definitely say rogue. I basically don't have to check for a single cooldown outside of trinket/SB/vendetta/SD which all have 1m+ cds.

If you are looking for DPS outside of long cooldowns, no one does that better than spriests who don't even have a dps cd other than fiend! they can multi dot too for constant reliable pressure.

[Bigbazz]

No game is competitive then...

MM, spriest (though orbs could be considered a "cd"), arms (stun spec), ele. I would say afflic too honestly; Dark soul is great but they still feel strong without it through the pressure and the cc.

Racing games are pretty competitive, fighting games, fps games, strategy games. Lots of games rely on pure skill. WoW isn't one of them but competition between players is not lacking in WoW, it's a very very competive game in both PVE and PVP.


On Topic. You can say Warrior but it's very cooldown based as a playstyle, you won't get anywhere if you don't want to use your cooldowns. Recklessness and Skull Banner are key to killing anything, just as as Intervene, Die by the Sword, Shield Wall, Rallying Cry and Demo banner are key to survival. Very cooldown heavy overall in PvP.

[Yvaelle]

Hmm dunno, RTS is transferrable, but fps isn't. I was CPL in Source before starting WoW and it has never helped me apart from reactions.

Particularly when I was interested in 1.6 and briefly Source, strategies on maps were constantly evolving every season - and they made a colossal impact on who won and lost - reaction times had like... the least to do with top end play IMO: it was a variable, it's just the least important one.

Also, I'm not saying you weren't CPL in source - but I'd be curious how - Source was only in the CPL for two LAN tournaments (same year) in Dallas, Texas - and I'm not sure any of the teams in attendance were from outside US/CAN/MEX?

You could argue the ability to play as a team, but I think that's just common sense really. I will actually agree slightly, I always want to be the best at the game I'm playing which is something I developed from CSS, this has helped me in WoW because it's made me do a lot of research and testing on my class in order to be as good as I can. Maybe that's just me though as I'm competitive by nature.

The guy I was originally responding to was implying that MMO's, by their very nature, cannot be competitive - which is obviously false - so I wasn't really talking about the transfer of skills across games - but that as a once-sponsored FPS player - if CS is supposedly competitive, but WoW isn't - I should be able to leap into WoW and stomp everyone - which is what Porisyum was implying - but which is, of course, not remotely the case


As far as the transfer of skills goes across games, I'll even go further than you and Snuggli are agreeing and say that it's

- competitive spirit
- dedication and perseverance
- no drama
- strong teamwork

And - intelligence, and the ability to anticipate enemy actions/reactions - this last one being the single most important skill we take with us into new games. It's not a skill you learn, it's something innate that makes some gamers better than others - not only faster learners, but capable of attaining a higher maximum potential. Your ability to rapidly read a situation in a constantly changing battle and decide whether it's safe to overextend, because the opponents won't swap to you as they are pre-occupied - or whether you want them to overextend - anticipating a swap to you - because your teammate is in more trouble than they might realize: not everyone can be taught that to the same degree.

For some, anticipating opponents is innate - for others you can teach them a simplified formula for it - but they will never be able to really analyze it themselves. The same is true for tracking enemy player and ally cooldowns - defensive and offensive, kicks, resources, etc - some people are far better at keeping all that in their head than others. The same is true for anticipating CC breaks - is the enemy healer going to just eat this CC you put on them? Or will they trinket it instantly and you need another CC prepped to follow - and only burst after that lands?

That's anticipation - and that applies to FPS just as much as it applies to RTS, just as much as it applies to MMO's. In all sufficiently complex games - you cannot merely predict the available next moves of your opponent (ie. Tic-Tac-Toe) - you need to predict their behaviour, their aims, and the places they perceive themselves to be vulnerable (and you also need to assess whether they are actually vulnerable there - meaning you should hit it when you have a window. Alternatively, whether they are over-aware of something (ie. mana burn, B site, etc), or someone (new healer on team, squishy caster, etc) when that person isn't actually all that vulnerable - they are just quick to react and protect it - in which case striking them somewhere else would be more likely to go unnoticed.

Play the (enemy) player, not the game

For example, back when RMP had Mana Burn - having the mage/rogue kite the enemy DPS into the open might not actually be to put them at burst-risk - but instead to drag their healer into LoS of your Priest to burn them - something which is more likely to go unnoticed when the healer is worried about an over-extension, not the enemy Priest - there are tons of examples in every game - I just kind of miss mana burn lately in WoW

[Deleted]

I just kind of miss mana burn lately in WoW

Who doesn't. When it was taken out they killed a level of complexity in PvP that I still sorely miss.

[Yvaelle]

To be "properly" balanced you would need everyone to run the same comp, same guns, same everything in every game. That balance exists in wow too if everyone just runs the same 3s comp. But thats boring (hence why RTS is boring in a competitive sense IMO).

I hadn't considered this in an RTS sense before - but ya - the only times I ever really enjoyed watching StarCraft/II and Dawn of War/II matches were shortly after the games came out - balance is wonky and the meta-game is evolving too fast to keep up with - once balance starts to occur, and once I can follow the meta - RTS loses its appeal to me. Previously I had always thought my interest in new RTS's just waned quickly - but it's probably that the imbalance and the velocity of evolution of tactics/strategies/meta is what is actually appealing about them

- - - Updated - - -

Who doesn't. When it was taken out they killed a level of complexity in PvP that I still sorely miss.

Right? I'm skeptical about this whole WoD philosophy they are moving toward - simplifying the game is great for the new players they must anticipate the WoW-Orc movie to bring into WoW: they don't want to leap into playing a 100 keybind Piano-game. But for those 9 million of us who have been playing the game for a decade now - we know these abilities - and we're just losing game-depth: and that really sucks.

[Mormolyce]

Shadow priests have pretty much none.

[Hand Banana]

Who doesn't. When it was taken out they killed a level of complexity in PvP that I still sorely miss.

In 3s maybe. In 2v2 it was way more mindless than anything else in this game. Priest just follows my pally around spamming mana burn while my dps tries desperately to stop it from happening. The game ends when he gets 1 fear on me and he burns me to 0. Or my dps gets lucky and grabs a kill. My problem with manaburn (holy pally mostly so im biased) is that it affects healers way too differently. Druids, for example, don't even stress it, but my pally would get destroyed by mana burns.

I think the game has alot of complexity still but its hidden under overly strong healing, burst, and cc. I remember recently a hpriest/mage/war won some tourney, I forget which, and the priest was pulling of some seriously legit shit against other healers and even though priest is considered subpar for that comp he made it work. Made me think about how things like baiting tremor with MC are completely lost on the fact that being out of place for 1 second against a KFC results in instant death. Hopefully alot will be fixed in WoD.

[DiscoGhost]

every spec is cooldown dependent. thats what the meta game has turned into and pretty much the only way you will get a kill these days.

[Anzen]

Definitely Elemental Shaman. I don't even use Ascendance in most games anymore (unless I use it for peeling or I'm just bored and want to watch the whole team start rotating round pillars across the room).

[TJ]

Particularly when I was interested in 1.6 and briefly Source, strategies on maps were constantly evolving every season - and they made a colossal impact on who won and lost - reaction times had like... the least to do with top end play IMO: it was a variable, it's just the least important one.

Also, I'm not saying you weren't CPL in source - but I'd be curious how - Source was only in the CPL for two LAN tournaments (same year) in Dallas, Texas - and I'm not sure any of the teams in attendance were from outside US/CAN/MEX?

Ofc strategies were the most important thing (main reason Salvo dominated in CGS even though they were carrying a terrible player like Mangiacapra), my point was that you can't use them strategies in WoW. You couldn't do a ramp and squeaky split on WoW, you can't learn the recoil patterns and control them in WoW, so the only directly transferable thing is reaction times. Obviously my point furthers to say teamwork and competitiveness can be transferred in a way, but it's not direct as in you play WoW and boom you have it, where it is the case with reactions.

Yeah, I should've said CPL level rather than implying I actually played at the CPL events. I mean, I don't have any proof so I don't expect you to believe me, but I used to play against some of the big names regularly such as re1ease, tils, crazycat, beta, pt etc etc. My source mates at the time also played against Salvo whilst I was away, they got pretty much battered but it aimwise they were competitive, just that Salvo's tactics were damn flawless. At the time I was young so my parents wouldn't let me go to alot of the events which was very frustrating, but at least they decided to completely break source so I haven't lost much in the long run.

edit: All this talk is making me nostalgic, damn I miss Source so bad. Nothing like having an insane FPS to have fun on in so many mods, really is a big shame they ruined it. Sucks that GO is terrible as well, imo.

[shise]

Shadow priest by far. We simply have no offensive cd's as shadow, we stack orbs sure, still not a CD.

[DenniZ]

Destro lock, even though we have cd's to marco on Chaos Bolt, my incinerates still hit like a truck even outside of a cd-window. 106% mastery full pridefull geared though.

[pkm]

every spec is cooldown dependent. thats what the meta game has turned into and pretty much the only way you will get a kill these days.

Nope.

I have gotten plenty of kills as marksman hunter and ele shaman without using CDs. Those 2 specs have rng burst that helps though.

[Crruor]

Shadow priest by far. We simply have no offensive cd's as shadow, we stack orbs sure, still not a CD.

Shadowfiend? Hits for a lot more then stampede.

[pkm]

Shadowfiend? Hits for a lot more then stampede.

I would argue that its more of a mana cooldown than offensive. Shadow priests are like the only dps caster that actually has to manage their mana in pvp.

[DenniZ]

I would argue that its more of a mana cooldown than offensive. Shadow priests are like the only dps caster that actually has to manage their mana in pvp.

Havent played Shadow on my priest but does Shadowfiend hit harder for Spriest compared to Holy priest?
In that case, I need to remember to banish them ;-)

[roahn the warlock]

Shadow priests have 0 cooldowns, because it's the class blizzard forgot existed