Originally Posted by
Erythros
i wasn't really following the vanilla discussion all those years but from what i can recall:
tanks: essentially only warrior was truly viable, with a tons of work to overcome gearing issues other tanks could work too but warrior was better nonetheless so you had no reason to play other tanks except 'fun'
healers: i can't recall much about healers tbh other than that we had tons of holy priests and that disc was unplayable (not even niche spec, just garbage)
DPS:
generally most classes had a 'go-to' DPS spec that was simply superior to others, we used to call them 'cookie-cutter' builds and usually not playing one of them meant you're doing it wrong
the DoT classes were not really viable due to the fact that every character (bosses included) had a hard debuff limit on it, therefore raiding with multiple locks or shadow priests would mean that only few of them will be able to apply their corruption/immolate/shadow word pain etc, but still those debuff slots were better reserved for debuffs that benefit the entire raid (like Curse of Shadow etc)
now for the more direct casters essentially rolling an elemental shaman or balance druid over a mage was a suboptimal decision (aka less DPS in some cases considerably) and you would often have to answer following FAQ: 'why didn't you roll mage if you wanted to nuke things?'
mage on the other hand was picking specs based on mob immunities: in MC and BWL everything was immunue to fire while in Nax everything was immunue to frost, while arcane blast did not exist and arcane was a tree that was simply enhancing your frost/fire spells in a more generic manner
for the melees rogue was the king of DPS, fury was also capable of some big numbers but it had suffered from severe threat issues (meaning it had to stop DPS in order to not get aggro from the tank)
usually the optimal raid setup was more like:
a warrior only tank group
a healer group of mostly holy priests (aka the primary healers) and some 'support' healers like resto shaman/druid
a melee group who grabs all the buff it needs from retri/enha etc and then stacks rogues
a ranged group who graps all the buffs/utility it needs from locks/moonkings/ele and stacks mages
i can't recall much about hunters i believe that MM was a solid spec
in essence there were entire classes without a single viable DPS spec, that includes priests and shamans who were almost exclusively healers in pve
also in both classic and tbc certain specs were only brought in for a buff/debuff they had exclusive access to and counterbalanced their own poor performance