Which Class Was Most Desired For Raids In Vanilla?

[czarek]

Hunters are only brought along for kiting/traps/tranq shot. You don't need more than 3.

Yes, thats why i said that. Good hunter was very valuable because of that.

[Nailer]

Nothing beats a dwarf priest for Alliance. FW for Onyxia and Magmadar, but your tanks can stance dance if they are anyway good. Also if you level as Tank they are limited at the start as once raid really needs only 3 / 4 until Naxx

[Emerald Archer]

Yes, thats why i said that. Good hunter was very valuable because of that.

There's going to be a lot of "good hunters" competing for those spots.

Hunter being the most desirable is a bit of a joke, you're very limited in how many you want, you'll pick up the 2-3 best and then you'll go pick up the shit ton of mages and warriors etc that your roster wants.

2-3 slots in a 40 man roster isn't highly desirable unless no one plays those roles, there's going to be plenty of hunters.

[anon5123]

Yes, thats why i said that. Good hunter was very valuable because of that.

The skill floor needed to kite/trap/tranq is very low. Hunter is not very hard to play in PvE.

[Marxman]

Warrior > Mage / Paladin (3) / Priest / Shaman > Rogue / Warlock (2) > Hunter (2) / Druid

[(x) indicates the minimum you need in a raid for buffs/debuffs]

-Warriors are the best tanks and DPS. You want as many as you can bring, basically.
-Mages are the best ranged DPS.
-Paladin/Shaman/Priest are your healers.
-Rogues are just worse Fury Warriors. Aside from disarming suppression room, they really don't serve a purpose in raids.
-Warlocks are worse Mages, though they do scale well and can somewhat compete in Naxx. Also need 2 for Curse of Elements/Recklessness.
-Hunters are awful DPS. Only brought for Tranq and some minor kiting utility.
-Druids aren't great at anything. They can offtank as Bear decently, DPS as Kitty somewhat, and heal fairly well, though none of those roles are as good as the other classes.

[deenman]

Based on what? The leveling of both of those are huge turn offs for a lot of people.

based on player perception,now everyone knows how important a good tank is,everyone knows warriors dominate dps,back in the day warriors were actualy seen as bad dps early on,priests being the best healer,shadow being fun for pvp,i am 100% sure we will be flooded with warriors,priests and proly shamans

[NovatHunter]

Warrior > Mage / Paladin (3) / Priest / Shaman > Rogue / Warlock (2) > Hunter (2) / Druid

[(x) indicates the minimum you need in a raid for buffs/debuffs]

-Warriors are the best tanks and DPS. You want as many as you can bring, basically.
-Mages are the best ranged DPS.
-Paladin/Shaman/Priest are your healers.
-Rogues are just worse Fury Warriors. Aside from disarming suppression room, they really don't serve a purpose in raids.
-Warlocks are worse Mages, though they do scale well and can somewhat compete in Naxx. Also need 2 for Curse of Elements/Recklessness.
-Hunters are awful DPS. Only brought for Tranq and some minor kiting utility.
-Druids aren't great at anything. They can offtank as Bear decently, DPS as Kitty somewhat, and heal fairly well, though none of those roles are as good as the other classes.

Those are some very strong opinions you got there.

First of, if we had it your way. And the way of the many people who subscribe to the idea that you form a raid around a warrior/mage/rogue/healer core, we would have a very fun time indeed. However, you want to take it a step further and name rogues as the ''worse fury warriors'', who ''don't serve a purpose in raids''. I bet you got a math sheet, calculating the amount of weeks it would take to gear all of the Fury warriors with onslaught girdles. You can split the melee between rogues and furies, or you can start disenchanting rogue tier pieces while the fury warriors are in 4-8 week rotations for a piece of loot. The same goes for hunters and warlocks in regards to mages being the ''best ranged dps''.

Second, why would you exclude excellent and dedicated druids, warlocks, hunters and rogues because you regard them as discount versions of better classes. Instead of bringing excellent players of undesirable classes, you bring mediocre to decent players from desirable classes. No matter what idealized vision you have for your raid roster. You won't be able to bring the exact amount of classes. Sometimes you have no choice.

Third, it's not all about PVE content. You can bring 2 hunters and do fine from Molten Core to Naxxramas. But you will curse when only one of them can make it to a world boss spawn, and the opposing mages are holding you off with Blizzards. Meanwhile, your mage line is being devastated by competent hunters in the required numbers. Need some rogues to look around? Too bad, of the 3 you recruited, only 1 is online. But hey, you got 12 warriors online.


It seems to me. You base your opinion on what you have read. Instead of basing it on actual experience.

[Tojara]

Warriors, mages, rogues if you're talking DPS.

When I played 15 years ago rogues generally did the most DPS for the majority of Vanilla content. Once geared, fury warriors would compete, and eventually they became better than rogues by the time you started doing Naxxaramas. Warriors just scale better, and this is evidenced even further when you go out of your way to max your group out with world buffs.

The reason why the above is unrealistic is because most guilds aren't going to operate like this, nor did many guilds operate like this 15 years ago. A lot of the BiS DPS warrior gear was a giant mess of random shit from nearly every single instance, with a mixture or non plate gear as well. What are you going to do with the daggers, or the gear that fury warriors wouldn't want? Let it rot? No, because that's retarded. The gap between rogues and warriors simply isn't large enough to dump the 4-6 rogue slots a standard raid group might have in favor of running with probably 15 warriors. There just isn't enough gear to go around. So yeah, you're just not going to stack the highest theoretical DPS class, because that theoretical BiS DPS class is pretty gear dependent, and gear just doesn't shower from the sky in Vanilla. Furthermore not every group is going to go out of their way to make sure that they are fully world buffed for every raid (which was way more difficult to do in Vanilla, unlike private servers).

Horde have an additional problem in threat too. I suppose theoretically the highest DPS possible would be Horde warriors with totem twisting shaman, but it's fairly unreasonable considering you're limited by your tanks threat. Alliance have BoS, Horde don't, which makes fury warriors more attractive on Alliance compared to Horde.

For the other DPS classes? You'll have a few hunters simply because the gear would go to rot anyways, and a few encounters require* tranquilizing shot (you can get by without on some). Hunters actually have innately pretty good DPS, but scale pretty poorly compared to every pure DPS class in the game, and they start to fall off once you go beyond BWL. Warlocks actually do good DPS, but were completely dependent on fight length. As soon as you hit fight lengths where you have to start life tapping an obscene amount, they start to drop off pretty heavily. The reason 1.12 was such a boon for warlocks is because they finally allowed life tap to scale with spell power, thus making warlocks far more viable on fights that had any length to them.

Alliance side you can't go wrong with priests or paladins for healers, as both are pretty evenly split. You at least want enough paladins to cover every major blessing, which I believe is 4? The rest you fill with whatever, but generally you fill with priests and add a couple druids. Horde is a bit more unique because shaman buffs are party based, meaning that the typical Horde raid group will have a few more shamans than priests, finally filling with a couple druids.

Are druids bad? Kinda, but it's more of a symptom of two things. Druids were insanely unpopular in Vanilla (I believe warlocks/druids were the lowest represented classes) and didn't really bring a whole lot to your raid group. You wanted MoTW, and that's about it. It's not like they were terrible healers, but you generally didn't benefit much from bringing a lot simply because 'rot' healing (which is traditionally druid niche) wasn't really that rampant in Vanilla, and I believe only one instance of a certain type of hot could be applied at once (so you couldn't have multiple rejuvs on the same target).

As far as hybrids go ferals aren't actually that meme. Feral DPS easily transitions to a third tank for the same spec, and if your feral druid is actually committed to the spec they can actually do pretty competitive DPS (have fun farming Gnomeregan). You can fit one into your raid if you're dedicated to it, and as stated, it serves a purpose as a third tank for some encounters. If you actually run with 4-5 warlocks you can make a case for a dedicated shadow priest, but the priest better love farming demonic runes. Otherwise you just have one of your healing priests go down shadow to maintain shadow weaving for your warlocks.

I mean if you had infinite resources and have access to a metric shit ton of geared fury warriors, then yeah, theoretically it would be best to just bring a billion of those.

[EliWallach]

We had one resto druid per holy priest for innervates and to help buffer damage spikes.

[Thetruth1400]

The rarity of classes is roughly equivalent to their desirability. You want a lot of warriors/rogues/mages/priests, but there's a lot of them. You want a druid or two, but they're rare as dick.

DPS is definitely going to be a majority and Rogues and Mages bring good CC, so I can see those numbers being high. Warriors and Priests were a pain to level so that will cut those numbers down a bit of who actually makes it to max level. They were desired though, especially warriors since they were pretty much the only tanks.

As for Druids, yeah they weren't that popular, mostly because you couldn't have two versions of the same HoT on a single target so they kind of were pointless to stack.

Don't pick a class based on desireability. Just play what you like...unless you're terrible. Play mage then.

Exactly. This is the best answer to the question

[Emerald Archer]

based on player perception,now everyone knows how important a good tank is,everyone knows warriors dominate dps,back in the day warriors were actualy seen as bad dps early on,priests being the best healer,shadow being fun for pvp,i am 100% sure we will be flooded with warriors,priests and proly shamans

But a good tank has always been important through expansions, tanks have always been desirable, healers have always been desirable, it hasn't changed the fact that people just haven't played them.

How bad warriors are to level is very off putting for a lot of people who do any research, as well as being very gear dependant.

I think you're overestimating the amount of people willing to play non-dps. And overestimating the amount of people who wouldn't be scared off of warrior by its difficulty in getting to max+raid ready.

[Segus1992]

The answer is Warrior. It is not debatable.

[VanishingAct]

There were metas that everyone goes on about now.

But shit it really doesn't matter. We rolled with anywhere from 6 to a dozen fucking pallies, 4 druids and a few priests for heals depending on the amount of damn pallies. About 4 or 5 of us huntards would be in, shitting up the raid with our truly deranged banter that would result in a perma ban in this decade. Our Huntard chat channel was a raid in itself, with other classes coming in to listen to us shit talk each other. For *some* reason in Australian guilds, us hunters were the most bogan of them all. Our class leader was covered in bogan tatts, like me and half of us had a v8 holden (I had a VQ statesmen v8). One hunter was a quiet asian guy playing a female nelf who we paid out on constantly because back then in '05 you were gay as shit for playing a chick lol. We had half of naxx cleared just from half arsing it while being heavily drunk and calling each other names on vent and chat.

The biggest issue we had was our GM had a raging hate on for fury warriors because the two we had, one was alright (but we needed him as 2nd MT), and the other was pants on head retarded but he was with us from the beginning so yeah he was never dropped. But that retard was enough to have us wipe on Twin Emps in AQ enough that the GM and his missus never wanted another fury war for the longest time which really hurt us with naxx progression in the end. I think we could have gotten all wings down (we had spider and abom wings down), if we had good geared and competent fury wars.

That was the shitty thing with naxx, while the rest of the content you can half arse with 30 or so people where the raid composition is a secondary thought (besides cthun, and also twin emps until you over gear the enrage timer). 2nd half of Naxx was a complete cunt where you suddenly had to be pretty perfect with consumables, buffs, raid set up and execution. Best that us lesser guilds could do was at least clear spider wing and a couple bosses of each of the other wings.

But Naxx is the end of the phase release, so enough time to level another toon if you want to for naxx raiding.

In the end if you want an easy raid slot covering all phase releases, priest heals, pally/shaman heals, mage dps, warrior tanking (dps comes later), rogue (but pvp servers usually have a lot of them), will get you constant raid spots. Warlock too because a lot of people don't play lock but into naxx, min maxing dickheads will drop locks besides like 1 because fire mage too strong.