Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Unfortunately the attack table got solved the first time in late december 2006/january 2007, just before TBC. Before that milestone in the history of wow theorycrafting nearly all numbers were incorrect or misinterpreted. In that time theorycrafting was no mans land with only a few nerdy hardcores working around it. 99% of the player base in vanilla did actually feelcrafting.
With the right gear decission combat dagger could destroy combat sword rogues with the same quality of gear quite easily. The updated sheets with the solved attack table were telling this as well. Unfortunately this information were quite useless for vanilla just a few days before tbc.
Last edited by Millyraynge; 2018-02-07 at 10:18 PM.
While their were few people that did theorycraft, their were theorycrafters and they were close to correct if not correct. At the time combat swords with bloodfang was the highest rogue dps spec. As I mentioned above, later on, with bonescythe and daggers (and beyond), due to better itemization, was rumored to be better. I tried it once, but went back to combat swords, during vanilla for two reasons.
I was doing more dps as combat swords.
Since we had four other rogues, and were working on progression, I made the decision to stay combat swords so that we wouldn't have 5 people going after certain weapons, & so we could move on to the next boss/raid.
However, as with multiple other situations in this game over the years, once itemization becomes better, coincidentally so do other specs.
I can say something similar - in pvp, mace spec rogues destroyed both swords and daggers. Also, keep in mind I wasn't talking about right before TBC. I mentioned progression during MC and BWL, and at the time their were a lot of theorycrafters supporting combat swords being top dps.
Last edited by Epoch; 2018-02-08 at 06:05 PM.
Originally Posted by 25165453757
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Of course you didnt, but I did. Fact is, that the riddle about the correct numbers about the true attack table got solved just before TBC got released. Before that point, nearly all caps etc. were completely wrong, the forumals were completely wrong and weapon skill was totally underrated or rather misinterpreted. Before that point, there wasn't any mathimatically proof of how powerful weapon skill was in vanilla. All players which decided to stack this stat were doing this without safetyness, without mathematical certainty. I know excalty that date at which the truth about weapon skill got released the first time, it was like the release date of the first smart phone. A huge impact for all theorycrafting nerds, especially for plebls like me which decided to believe in weapon skill (aged core leather gloves FOREVER!, even in Naxx40)
A group of players decided to make a huge project which took them month until they gathered all the data. They introduced their project on the elitist jerks forum in december 2006. They tested a huge amount of different classes with different specs and different gear setups (especially gear setups with huge differences in hit and weapon skill values). The result of that project was a fully encrypted attack table for melee classes (offensive values) and tank classes (defensive values). The forumals gathered by this project accompanied us for a long time.
It feels like a lot of the people in this thread just have either forgotten what it was like or they've been reading too much MMO champ.
Shadow, elemental and balance for example weren't bad DPS. Hell, shadow was CRAZY strong DPS-wise but was limited by mana.
Elemental and balance were also very strong but again, limited by mana.
Regarding melee, you've got feral that can get pretty damn competitive with abusing Wolfshead and powershifting. Yes it was not intended, but it shows that you can make it work to quite a decent level.
Hunters were always quite good when played correctly, albeit boring.
Another weird misconception is that warlocks were somehow bad. They were weak early on since they didn't have an easy way to get hit rating through talent trees for example, but they scaled like a goddamn truck.
I genuinely think warlocks are the one class that somehow went under the radar during the initial Vanilla period because if you ever had a warlock get into T3 gear, they genuinely became tied top DPS with a geared fury warrior and the one fire mage that got ignite.
Not to mention a good warlock with engineering is one of the scariest things ever in PvP, though this is mostly for horde warlocks. Unfortunately WotF completely shafts alliance warlocks but it does mean that alliance warlocks will have an easier time getting raid spots, since there will be less played.
A build that I HIGHLY recommend for any PvP-toting warlock is the Conflag/Nightfall build. If you've got decent gear you've already got monstrous damage and survivability as a warlock and Conflag/Nightfall just gives you even more instant damage capabilities.
Thirdly is the misconception about tanks. Yes if you were raiding current content then warriors were the tanks you were after.
However, if you're outgearing a raid or running dungeons, you could easily get a paladin or druid tank. Hell, paladins were brilliant dungeon tanks.
I feel like you're missing the point. Those specs were bad BECAUSE they were limited by mana. Sure boomkins could go hard as fuck, for about a minute, then you did less damage than the tank for the rest of the fight cause you had no mana.
Edit: The hybrids you mentioned that is.
Last edited by Siglius; 2018-02-09 at 08:22 AM.
Considering that I was referring to the time of Vanilla which was quite some time before tbc was even announced, and you stated you understood this, logically that would make your post above pointless, since we are talking about different times.
As to all caps being wrong, no. It was simple to figure out what to go for back then as their weren't very many stats at the time. A lot of the stats were copies of stats in games of which the devs came from prior to blizzard. If someone had played those games, they had somewhat of an understanding of what to go for. Heck it could even be said that wow vanilla itself was a ripoff of other games which the devs came from, in that the devs took what they liked from previous games and created vanilla wow, but I digress. It didn't take a theorycrafter to figure out which stat to go for during vanilla, though theory crafters did exist on the wow forums back then and they did help. Try to not make it sound complicated - it wasn't. Any competent player could figure out what to go for.
During Vanilla, many players essentially theory crafted on the wow class forums. Interestingly, a good percentage of these same posters came from other games such as final fantasy, ultima and more. While you are correct that what these posters did eventually led to websites like elitist jerks being created. These theory crafters also continued to post on the wow forums among others. Some of us theory crafted in other games before coming to vanilla, and continued to do so on the vanilla forums. Incidentally enough, I was temp banned on ej during wotlk due to posting about black magic being good for ferals. At the time they wanted pages upon pages of math supporting this, when I did so they were of the opinion that it wasn't enough and wanted more. Essentially it came down to certain members there being lazy and not wanting to go against the norm. Wouldn't you know it, months later black magic was proved to be good for feral. Coincidentally sites like ej and others did and continued to post and push incorrect data.
While the idea of ej in itself can be viewed as good for players who want the most out of their character, there is also the other side of ej, the not so good side - many times over the years ej has been found to not only be wrong, but to have shockingly inaccurate information for many specs. Due to what boiled down to be laziness or incompetence.
Last edited by Epoch; 2018-02-11 at 05:08 AM.
Originally Posted by 25165453757
I suspect there are no true nonviable specs. In the modern game classes regularly come from nowhere due to some incredible insight someone stumbles upon in an otherwise
hopeless class-assasination rogues being a good recent example.
There weren't really 'specs' like there are now. All Classes were viable the same as it is today. Saying "Ret wasn't viable!" is like saying "Taking the middle talent for Ret in Legion isn't viable". You didn't pick a spec in vanilla, you picked talents.