"Play what you want"

[Jester Joe]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...t=80&boss=2337

Carapace of nzoth with 1 feral druid, 1 windwalker, 3 affliction locks
With warlocks being rock bottom.

So that is not really true.
And I will probably play demonology there simply because this is my main spec which I am most familiar with and it feels fun.

I already said my RL I won't ever play affliction. Destruction only when there is huge difference between these specs. Because it ultimately boils down to survivability like this:

https://i.imgur.com/6tzXn8U.png

and this:

https://i.imgur.com/DpW0J2i.png

No matter what guild you are, first you need to ensure your raiders can stay alive for most of the fight having at least 95%+ survivability.
Otherwise you will end up with having bunch of unreliable people and problems reclearing raids.

And this is not true for very top guilds simply because dps is a bottleneck and you already have the best players.

You picked a terrible fight for Affliction.

Carapace is heavy aoe damage which is what Affliction sucks horribly at. The best you can do is run infinite corruption to pad on the cysts in phase 2.

Look at something like Ra-den as an alternative-
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...t=80&boss=2331

Or Wrathion which has a far larger sample pool to pull from-
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...t=80&boss=2329

And if you go to N'zoth-
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...t=80&boss=2344

But this just proves their point, that you need to bring the best spec for specific situations, especially right now.


Also if you're aiming for a way to survive better, affliction is the most mobile out of the lock specs anyway.

[mojusk]

Corruptions have been nerfed like crazy, no more Uber powerful ev

it can still make a 10k+ dps difference if you got lucky with corruption or not

[kaminaris]

Also if you're aiming for a way to survive better, affliction is the most mobile out of the lock specs anyway.

Demo is by far the best spec for suvivability because of Demonic embrace that gives you 10% more stamina and Soul link that is basically 20% flat damage reduction.

Plus it is ultra mobile because of demonic core and soulstrike. I would argue that neither destro nor affli can even hope to come close.

[Jester Joe]

Demo is by far the best spec for suvivability because of Demonic embrace that gives you 10% more stamina and Soul link that is basically 20% flat damage reduction.

Plus it is ultra mobile because of demonic core and soulstrike. I would argue that neither destro nor affli can even hope to come close.

Demo is often used as the description of "turret caster". For good reason, demonic core is unreliable procs outside of dogs, and soul strike is a 10 second CD.

The rest of your soul shards have to be hard casted to obtain, and if you mess up or have to move to delay tyrant at all, it suffers quite a bit. Meanwhile affliction's major damage is an extremely short cast.

Being able to avoid damage while pumping out DPS is more just as much in the category of "survival tools" as actual defensives. It's one thing to prefer demo, but there's a reason affliction and destro are pulled in instead of demo, especially considering destro gets health back as part of their mastery and affliction has inevitable demise for a good chunk of self healing.

And demonic embrace is a baseline warlock passive.

[Marrilaife]

My raid got 2 ret. 1 use word of glory and the other simply refused, saying it is a dps loss. Which bring me to think, maybe blizz should banned all damage meters addon...

Or maybe your raid leader should have some balls and bench the people who refuse to use class utility and only parse whore. I've seen players like that especially in m+ pugs where utility is CRUCIAL to timing the key. Dps with zero interrupts, dispels, purges, stuns, cc because "muh dps". Any guild that wants to progress into mythic should pay attention to players utility and defensive usage not just parses. Unless it's a normal / heroic guild, then yolo. But still some bosses require interrupts or soaks or players have to do them and ofc it's a dps loss, it's meant to be, otherwise go play classic where every other boss is Patchwerk's brother.

Dps meters are like gearscore or r.io. Can be used well or bad. "Banning them all" means going back to vanilla where people afked in a corner wanding and nobody noticed, that's why on current classic raids are facerolled in 40 mins when people actually play.

Those that really find a guild that is a true and complete fit for them are the real RNG winners of WoW. Even harder after playing for a long time and all of our interests in and out of game as well as so many other things change. I have been lucky enough a few times to be in a group that checked every box I'd like it to in WoW.

Oddly these lower end groups or ones just on the hump of going up a difficulty seem to be the worst offenders of over doing min maxing. A raid full of grey parses talking about everybody using runes on each pull or some crazy thing like that or constantly backing into progress as they out gear it.

Agreed on all you're saying, it's fairly hard to find a guild that agrees on major points with everything you consider important, and even if official guild policy agrees, there's always a handful of people who don't and create dissent and negative atmosphere. Every guild I've been on as far as I remember had people who were trying to push for "more hardcore" attitude and people who were on the opposite end, barely meeting minimal requirements or sliding just below the line.

I haven't met any guild master I'd say "I 100% support what he says / does". I could understand majority of it, I could respect most of it, but internally, I felt a lot of things were "wrong", I just know "your guild your rules" so I put up with a lot of bigger and smaller bullshit across the years.

For example in my previous guild (disbanded at 7/8 mythic EP so now I'm somewhere else) the GM was super stupidly obsessed about augment runes. Even on bosses where WORLD TOP GUILDS weren't runing on pull (for example watching streams / videos you'd know most top guilds were runing on Kil'jaeden only if they passed first intermission at 90% and on Jaina when they reached wall phase) he demanded that we do it for 300+ wipes all the time. Apparently every raider needs to be eager to sink 150k gold into runes for a boss, or they aren't serious enough and if they really care to kill this boss they would do it.

[Stormgnoef]

yes you can unless you really are pushing mythic raids then its a different storh

[kaminaris]

Demo is often used as the description of "turret caster". For good reason, demonic core is unreliable procs outside of dogs, and soul strike is a 10 second CD.

That is absolutely and completely false. You always keep 2 demonic core procs for movement, then you have instant soul strike and instant bombers/DS.
And lets not forget about implosion.

Demo is definitely more mobile than destro and by far.

The rest of your soul shards have to be hard casted to obtain, and if you mess up or have to move to delay tyrant at all, it suffers quite a bit. Meanwhile affliction's major damage is an extremely short cast.

Being able to avoid damage while pumping out DPS is more just as much in the category of "survival tools" as actual defensives. It's one thing to prefer demo, but there's a reason affliction and destro are pulled in instead of demo, especially considering destro gets health back as part of their mastery and affliction has inevitable demise for a good chunk of self healing.

And demonic embrace is a baseline warlock passive.

False false false. The only thing that is half true is tyrant because of stupid demonic consumption talent. Yeah you gotta stay in place for 8s to set it up.

You completely forgot that explosive potential gives you massive amount of haste and procs demonic core.

affliction:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...asts&source=11

vs demo:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...rue&source=107

Nope, demo is more mobile seeing as most of the time affli is hardcasting shadowbolt.

The only reason affli and destro is pulling ahead on some fights is because people don't know how to play demo and unfortunately demo doesn't scale with gear so well as destro.

[Jester Joe]

That is absolutely and completely false. You always keep 2 demonic core procs for movement, then you have instant soul strike and instant bombers/DS.
And lets not forget about implosion.

Demo is definitely more mobile than destro and by far.



False false false. The only thing that is half true is tyrant because of stupid demonic consumption talent. Yeah you gotta stay in place for 8s to set it up.

You completely forgot that explosive potential gives you massive amount of haste and procs demonic core.

affliction:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...asts&source=11

vs demo:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...rue&source=107

Nope, demo is more mobile seeing as most of the time affli is hardcasting shadowbolt.

The only reason affli and destro is pulling ahead on some fights is because people don't know how to play demo and unfortunately demo doesn't scale with gear so well as destro.

You realize shadowbolt is filler for affliction, and mandatory for Demo, right?

If you're casting a shadowbolt, it's because there's downtime.



And the last line just kinda seals it for me. There is no top players that "don't know how to play" a spec. If the spec is strong, they'll know how to play it. You're not seeing demo because it's punished the most by movement because look at the actual damage output.

Sure, affliction might fill in more shadowbolts, but that isn't their top damage, meanwhile what's demo's top damage?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...rue&source=107

Right, hard casts and demonic tyrant.

[Nite92]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...t=80&boss=2337

Carapace of nzoth with 1 feral druid, 1 windwalker, 3 affliction locks
With warlocks being rock bottom.

So that is not really true.
And I will probably play demonology there simply because this is my main spec which I am most familiar with and it feels fun.

I already said my RL I won't ever play affliction. Destruction only when there is huge difference between these specs. Because it ultimately boils down to survivability like this:

https://i.imgur.com/6tzXn8U.png

and this:

https://i.imgur.com/DpW0J2i.png

No matter what guild you are, first you need to ensure your raiders can stay alive for most of the fight having at least 95%+ survivability.
Otherwise you will end up with having bunch of unreliable people and problems reclearing raids.

And this is not true for very top guilds simply because dps is a bottleneck and you already have the best players.

How man guilds have downed him? 50?
That is not representative of the average mythic raiding community.

[Relapses]

For example in my previous guild (disbanded at 7/8 mythic EP so now I'm somewhere else) the GM was super stupidly obsessed about augment runes. Even on bosses where WORLD TOP GUILDS weren't runing on pull (for example watching streams / videos you'd know most top guilds were runing on Kil'jaeden only if they passed first intermission at 90% and on Jaina when they reached wall phase) he demanded that we do it for 300+ wipes all the time. Apparently every raider needs to be eager to sink 150k gold into runes for a boss, or they aren't serious enough and if they really care to kill this boss they would do it.

Augment runes are really only helpful if you're close to a kill or if it's farm. I could understand being upset if you're not using it for farm if it's something your GM was obsessive over but being upset about not using them for progression leads me to believe he either has millions of gold and doesn't understand why other players may not share the same sentiment or he's just a total fucking moron. I really hope that wasn't the reason your guild disbanded. Holy shit that's dumb.

[kaminaris]

You realize shadowbolt is filler for affliction, and mandatory for Demo, right?

If you're casting a shadowbolt, it's because there's downtime.



And the last line just kinda seals it for me. There is no top players that "don't know how to play" a spec. If the spec is strong, they'll know how to play it. You're not seeing demo because it's punished the most by movement because look at the actual damage output.

Sure, affliction might fill in more shadowbolts, but that isn't their top damage, meanwhile what's demo's top damage?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...rue&source=107

Right, hard casts and demonic tyrant.

You realize shadowbolt for affli is 2nd highest dps dealing ability right? And first one is unstable affliction which isn't instant as well.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...done&source=11

While for demo it practically doesn't do anything?
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...rue&source=107

Demo is not punished by movement, by far. All you gotta do is to stand 8 seconds each 1:30m to pull out FAT tyrant and he does most of your dps (which is kinda bad design but thats another story).

Demo tyrant is like a dot ability that has a cast time and deals tons od damage, your pet is permanent dot.
And first ability that is actually dealing damage is HoG and Demonbolt having 7 and 5 % of your total damage.

Demo hard casted abilities:
https://i.imgur.com/n8gI6sK.png

With the exception of tyrant which is kinda specific ability.

Affli hard casted abilities:
https://i.imgur.com/MU8RQLC.png

The only reason destro is currently best because it has similar dps on single target but does much more if it can make use of havoc.

[Gaidax]

I can safely say that any guild that is ranked 250 or lower - you can play whatever you want and as long as you know what you are doing it will be fine.

Heck, you can do that sub 100 rank too really.

[Jastall]

Exactly and the problem is worsened for tanks. My guild ran V DH and Prot Pally in M EN, M ToV, and halfway through M NH and though we progressed, we lagged behind some other guilds on our server who we usually were very close to. Switching to Guardian Druid and B DK was a night and day difference. Our healers had less pressure on them, we even started dropping healers for more DPS, and our progression was much better afterward.

Tank balance is indeed more important than DPS balance IMO, but you don't see people complain about it anywhere near as much because 1) you can't as easily gauge it with logs and 2) lots fewer people play tank and thus ridiculous nonsense like how good Guardian were in Legion is mostly left untouched, whereas people would be storming Blizzard's HQ with torches and pitchforks if a DPS spec was so, so far above the others.

[Zyky]

Nonetheless, do raiders really get to play the spec that they want to in raids, especially those specs who are always underperforming?

The answer is, very rarely. In Heroic it doesn't matter at all, but when you're talking about true progression raiding, if you're playing a sub-optimal spec then you're riding the bench on progression until several weeks after it becomes farm or if your guilds roster is lacking players for the night.

The way you can truly tell how accurate this statement is, is to pick out any mid-raid boss and see how many parses of certain specs there are. I'll be generous and look at a boss that guilds go to either 4th or 5th: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...s/24#boss=2335

5 Sub Rogues, 25 Survival Hunters and 29 Marks Hunters(opposed to 2,334 BM Hunters), 39 Arcane Mages and 45 Frost Mages(opposed to 3,188 Fire Mages), 59 Demo Locks.

So no, people don't get to play what they want and if they try to go against the grain they don't get to progress.

[Marrilaife]

Tank balance is indeed more important than DPS balance IMO, but you don't see people complain about it anywhere near as much because 1) you can't as easily gauge it with logs and 2) lots fewer people play tank and thus ridiculous nonsense like how good Guardian were in Legion is mostly left untouched, whereas people would be storming Blizzard's HQ with torches and pitchforks if a DPS spec was so, so far above the others.

Yeah but if a guild uses 4 warlocks it's class stacking, but if 90% of the guilds ran double brewmasters in EP that wasn't class stacking according to the forum geniuses who were arguing with me.

A lot of tanks face pressure to "main" multiple classes and swap to whichever the guild needs / wants even way below the ranks where dps are expected to do the same thing.

Also a lot of guilds feel they have the luxury to cherry pick whichever tank class they want and rarely compromise on it, while as a dps you can show "my logs are just that good take me" and someone will give you a chance, for tanks "top logs" doesn't mean anything, namely top dps tank doesn't mean better progression for your guild. I even know a guild that kicked a tank who was padding on Zul adds in Uldir so much it was hindering their progression so he was told to choose between logs and his raid spot and he chose to leave.

I remember back in Legion I applied to a guild and was getting stalling type of answers for 2-3 weeks while they went through 4(!) druid trials until somehow they were left without a tank 1 day before the raid (all the trials bailed for random reasons) that they offered me a trial spot as a non-druid.

Recently in BFA same story, guild disbanded in EP so I was looking for a new one and had my fair share of "why should we take a non-monk tank while we can probably wait until we find one who plays monk".

In one of the guilds I was in Legion I had a druid co-tank who wasn't one of these "druid is strong now I fotm reroll", no, he played one since tbc / wotlk. And now he plays monk because BFA was very negative atmosphere towards druid tanks. Even if after 8.2 druid stopped being underpowered, the general attittude I see is "most top guilds run monk + dk comp so we should too".

To this day when we look at mythic Azshara logs there's more monks than all other tanks combined, and nearly triple as many as the next used tank, dk, which is also triple as many as the next one, paladin, and the other 3 are even less than that.

Nyalotha doesn't have that many public logs yet and not many guilds cleared it, but I expect similar bias where if you're tank class rank 3, 4, 5 or 6 there's gonna be a massive drop off because guilds just don't want to take them and / or persuade their current tanks to reroll.

But even take Shad'har, boss that is early enough to have decent amount of data and a boss that doesn't require any specific tank class as a part of the strat (contrary to for example hivemind / vexiona that benefit from mass grip).

This is the picture, and it's sad:
There's more than 10 monks for every druid. Is it because people enjoy monks so much more? I doubt so. More likely they couldn't find a guild that would accept them as druid (or dh / warrior / pala) and rerolled, quit, or went dps.

It's not a class balance gap that makes monk 10x better than druid. The gap exists but it's much, much smaller. It's the community that shuns and bullies every "non meta" tank spec even way beyond the world rank where this would make or break the progression.

[Jamie081]

Whenever there is a discussion about raid performance, the go-to rebuttal is almost always "play what you want to play", as if it handwaves away the genuine performance concerns that are being raised in the argument. Nonetheless, do raiders really get to play the spec that they want to in raids, especially those specs who are always underperforming?

In content below Mythic you really can play whatever you want. If you're struggling to clear a heroic/normal raid then there's probably something wrong like having 7 healers in a group of 15 or people are just performing badly. Your raid setup (number of healers, DPS etc) has always been a restriction, that's just how the game works.

Most people below Mythic can't accept that they're bad though so they just blame their spec, and the competitiveness of specs/classes trickles down from Mythic raiding and world first raiders. Balancing does hold significance but players mostly self-restrict and play FOTM classes.

[Mokuna]

You've to see 2 things, you can actually play whatever you want, almost every spec is viable, but you're also holding people back playing a non optimal spec and they rightfully can tell you this isn't ok for them,especially when it's so easy to swap specs and play at a more than decent level

More often that not overall dps/hps isn't the problem, for example windwalker isn't that far from rogues dps wise in most scenarios, that said they have lesser defensives, no cloak, less on demand burst, no cheat death, making them much worse
Same goes for mistweavers, hps wise they're more than ok, but why would you pick them over the utility brought by a resto shaman or a paladin?

As for tanks, people pick brewmasters mostly so they don't have to pick a windwalker or a mistweaver for the mystic touch debuff, and they pick a blood dk because having a grip is really useful on a lot of bosses, not that much to do with tank balance(for example dhs are really good this tier and still underrepresented) even if monks and dks are definitely up there, bringing other tanks punishes you in other ways

At the end of the day the real problem is some classes/specs have nothing to offer, while classes like warlocks/mages/rogues/dh still have an insane toolkit, and that's a core design issue, not something you can fix with x% to all abilities buffs.

[Barzotti]

Of course you can play what you want. The first timed +24 of the BfA S4 has been done with an Enhancement shaman. A disc priest has done every dungeon in +20/21 in time. However this kind of specs needs people to play around it more than rogues/Dhs/rdrood who are a known quantity and good no matter the scenario.

[Akka]

If we look at the warcraftlogs statistics, the general trend is that the lower the DPS, the lower the total number of parses. For example, the bottom 10 specs have a total of 17,838 total parses whereas the top 10 specs have a total of 54,698 parses, more than 3x as many. This indicates to me that players aren't really playing "what they want", but playing "what is best".

Or maybe simply that people who bothers to parse tend to be more hardcore ? Most casual don't even KNOW there are parses, and among those who know, most don't care.

[Ehrenpanzer]

There are no genuine performance concerns. The game has never been more balanced than it is now.


Sub rogue is a good example. Sub can do great DPS, in M EP in particular, it was just as good as Outlaw and Assassin on basically every boss. In fact, it was often the #2 spec on WCL.

But people prefer Outlaw and Assassin, so very few people played it. If you took the players generating those top 20,000 logs and made them all play sub, sub would show as the top rogue spec on WCL.

Mage is another good example. Fire is obviously very high in rank right now. Mage theorycrafters believe Arcane might actually do more DPS than fire when fully geared in 8.3. But arcane is often very low (frost is actually lower right now) on the stats because no one plays it. And even if its 1% ahead in 8.3, people are going to play fire instead, so fire will show as better on WCL.

Feral is higher than boomkin right now.
Demo is higher than affliction right now.
Enh is higher than ele right now.


People play the spec they're used to and don't change spec. The ranking isn't necessarily what is best, it is what is popular. It looks to be the best, because it is what the best players are playing, the most often, with the most RNG.

Gonna cut ya off right there.. since you clearly dont have a knowledge of mages and are just listening to the ramblings of a couple people on the internet. Fire is, has and will be the top end of xpac spec, (at least until they change how secondary stats work) due to crit and mastery scaling. Arcane has great single target ability in 8.3, thats about it... Fire and Frost far outshine it in overall ability