"Play what you want"

[SkagenRora]

I have mythic orange logs as frost back in bfd, but i dont think you understand how broken fire is right now and in 2 weeks with the cape proc, it will get more broken

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No good ce guild, then

Guilds that manage CE are good by default.. there is no "bad" CE guild.. Since they manage to do CE

[Erous]

Play what you want is fair for everyone except those pushing top 100 pve/m+/pvp. Even if you play a sub optimal class for either healing or dps, you'll wind up outplaying most characters playing the optimal class for the same role if you're somewhat decent.

[Icathian]

No, you can't really play what you want in 2020's world of warcraft. If you can, its because you're either very, very casual or you're in a guild with buddies which will carry you no matter what, and you gotta not feel bad about it at all.

"balance, meta etc are things only for the top 1%" BS. Huge BS.

It doesn't matter if you're in the top 10 guilds or not, people will always follow the things that groups like Method say or do. If your class or spec is not part of the meta, you will struggle to play this game. You will have issues if you try to get a pug or getting a raiding guild, even if those groups or guilds are trash themselves.
Get a BiS aff warlock and a BiS DH, both with above average raider io scores, and measure how long will they take to get a +10 pug. The dh will get an invite immediately, while the aff warlock will get a nice big "lol".

After half an hour he might get an invite from someone, as long as he switches to demo at least. It doesn't matter if both of them had the gear and the knowledge necessary to smoothly beat that +10. The meta says that Dh's are amazing and Warlocks are trash so people will never invite a warlock over a DH, period. And I'm talking about overgeared people, NOBODY will carry a poorly geared spriest, even one with good scores, but many people will take a poorly geared outlaw rogue.

Why? Well, the game is quite poorly balanced. Some specs have tons of cc, interrupts, stuns etc while others have not. Some can roll their heads on their keyboards and do a ton of aoe damage while others gotta play perfectly and they'll maybe do similar dps as the other guy as long as they're 20 ilvls ahead. Blizzard tries to overbuff or overnerf classes just to change the meta a bit which also generates a bunch of problems.
The community just accepts this as part of the way things are and usually people just carry on, becoming a meme class/spec such as shaman or spriest. Some people gotta deal with being a terrible class because they dont wanna reroll, since they're emotionally invested with their character or don't have the time or willpower to start a new character from scratch, which is horrible.

The only way to actually "play what you want" is if you 100% do not care at all about most aspects of the game and you just wanna login, chat with buddies, play the AH, farm transmog, do world quests, stuff that any class can do without any effort.

[kaminaris]

The only way to actually "play what you want" is if you 100% do not care at all about most aspects of the game and you just wanna login, chat with buddies, play the AH, farm transmog, do world quests, stuff that any class can do without any effort.

Or get friends that play with you because they know you are good and class doesn't matter as much as player skills.

That being said. I never take ex MM hunters or spriest or affli lock if we are running with pug either M+ or vision simply because of statistics.
Average DH will do acceptable dps while average spriest might be near the tank.

So having to choose between DH or spriest at the same ilvl, there is much higher chance DH will will be better.

Oh and by the way, fatal flaw in class design is basically multi dotters. By design they will either exceed everyone in multi target situations (like affli locks in MoP)
or will suck hard.

[Video Games]

Guilds that manage CE are good by default.. there is no "bad" CE guild.. Since they manage to do CE

Nah. A guild that doesnt get ce till like the last few weeks arent

[Icathian]

Or get friends that play with you because they know you are good and class doesn't matter as much as player skills.

That's why I said "2020's world of warcraft". A few years ago, sure. Today? If you're one of the few new players out there, you will not have a group of friends or even if you have friends, you're not a skilled player so they wont invite you for serious stuff. Unless they're ok with carrying you.
If you're a skilled veteran, maybe you have no friends at all. Those friends all quit wow a long time ago. Which is surely one of the reasons of why pugging and raider.io is so popular nowadays.

So having to choose between DH or spriest at the same ilvl, there is much higher chance DH will will be better.

Oh and by the way, fatal flaw in class design is basically multi dotters. By design they will either exceed everyone in multi target situations (like affli locks in MoP)
or will suck hard.

That's why I hate the current meta/class design because it creates abominations like that. Wanna play a dot class in a game dominated by burst damage? Well, tough luck.
WoW became a very fast paced game. People don't wanna depend on cc, they don't wanna plan ahead too much, they wanna get the best group possible and clear everything as fast as possible, grabbing tons of mobs at once and then melt them with burst aoe. If you can't do that at all then you're simply not invited, if you can but you suck, you're kicked out of the group/raid and unless you're a tank, you're easily replaceable.

It's hilarious because most of these problems came from stuff like "bring the player not the class" which in the end, the results are the exact opposite of that.

[Trend]

Nah. A guild that doesnt get ce till like the last few weeks arent

So you're arguing over whether the subjective term "good" appropriately applies to a small fraction of the raiding population or just to an even smaller fraction of it? LOL, ok, I can see that really going places.

[dreamdaddy]

So you're arguing over whether the subjective term "good" appropriately applies to a small fraction of the raiding population or just to an even smaller fraction of it? LOL, ok, I can see that really going places.

Having played in guilds that get CE 5-6 weeks after patch release (generally enough to be top 200) and guilds who get it the week before the next patch, the difference is that in the top 200 guild, the group is carrying 1 person who constantly messes up mechanics because they provide mats to the guild or are friends with the raid leader. In the guild that barely gets CE, half the raid is a carry and you only progress because you get streaks of good luck where none of them get targeted for any kind of specific mechanic and they can essentially turret. These groups will kill the hard bosses and extend the lockouts, relying on titanforging (rip lol) from heroic to progress their gear.

[DazManianDevil]

Or, get lucky like I did.
*Watches Preach's video on youtube doomsday prediction for Hunters being benched for Nyalotha, get memed for weeks*
"Well, I parsed well in EP and my guild loves me, maybe I can earn my spot "
*BM Hunters are #2 in overall damage, while being the most forgiving of any dps spec I've ever heard of, with 3 button rotation and unlimited movement options.*
>: D

See guys, just play what you want and get lucky /s

[Logwyn]

If Blizzard really wanted "play what you want" they'd put a cap on dps output. Where the max dps you can do for an iLvl is X. If a class/spec can't reach that then just buff it.

^_^

[Marrilaife]

Having played in guilds that get CE 5-6 weeks after patch release (generally enough to be top 200) and guilds who get it the week before the next patch, the difference is that in the top 200 guild, the group is carrying 1 person who constantly messes up mechanics because they provide mats to the guild or are friends with the raid leader. In the guild that barely gets CE, half the raid is a carry and you only progress because you get streaks of good luck where none of them get targeted for any kind of specific mechanic and they can essentially turret. These groups will kill the hard bosses and extend the lockouts, relying on titanforging (rip lol) from heroic to progress their gear.

It's not so clear cut, but the gist is true.

What differs rank 200 guild from rank 50 guild is that in top 50 people can do mechanics AND dps, and in 200 you get a lot of wipes because people try to dps and fail mechanics (a.k.a. dps whoring).

A guild that is rank 1,5k or less will have people who can neither do good dps (you can put them on a dummy and they'll probably still only blue parse at best) or mechanics, you do get a few people who can do mechanics at the cost of dps and that's why people miss times when you could assign those 3-5 players to "bitch jobs" like kiting, bringing debuffs to correct spots, carrying barrels w/e else even if they did minuscule dps the whole raid depended on them.

But raid design has changed to the point you can't just assign your "bitch team" to do everything, bosses like Xanesh or Raden require majority of your raid to fulfill a "bitch job" at at least 1 point of the encounter. And while dps checks can be outgeared, mechanics checks are much harder to do so. For example in EP there were a lot of these semi-casual mythic guilds that never passed Zaqul because people would die from tentacles or inside delirium and that would wipe them, not dps check.

Another issue is roster stability, guilds above 500 rank tend to have the same raiders on most days and can bench people based on which class is worst for x boss or who doesn't need loot from y boss. Guilds below 1000 rank often go with "whoever showed up today, pray we have 20" setup, their bench is non-existent or consists of socials a.k.a. people with minuscule raiding experience and low gear (you know how that's gonna end), they struggle with recruitment and have high turn over rate of players because players either jump to better guilds or quit / take breaks regularly. A lot of time is wasted on bringing new people up to speed and waiting until they catch up with the rest experience wise. In many cases progression on a long boss looks like 1 step forward 2 steps backward just due to roster instability.

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Or, get lucky like I did.
*Watches Preach's video on youtube doomsday prediction for Hunters being benched for Nyalotha, get memed for weeks*
"Well, I parsed well in EP and my guild loves me, maybe I can earn my spot "
*BM Hunters are #2 in overall damage, while being the most forgiving of any dps spec I've ever heard of, with 3 button rotation and unlimited movement options.*
>: D

See guys, just play what you want and get lucky /s

I don't remember when was the last time that a ranged hunter was "useless" in raiding, even if they weren't parsing well, most guilds used hunters for stuff like immunity cheesing, kiting, high mobility required fights, etc.

It's much harder to "get lucky" with underdog melee spec. I remember in Antorus windwalkers and enhancement were parsing really well and guilds STILL didn't want to recruit them or only took token ones. I've seen raids where rogues or warriors were stacked, but can't remember the last time when guilds would stack feral druids... was the last time on Nefarian in Cata? That's a mighty long ago time.

[De Lupe]

As someone whose only actual "guild raid" experience was Icecrown, I agree. Play what you want.

I raided BM Hunter at a time when MM + ArmP could topple my numbers. Didn't stop me from being good. Was never top damage (that belonged to the only other Hunter in the group; the MM/ArmP one,) but I was always in the top end of the pack. Who actually cares? Shit still died. To this day, I've never touched MM aside from learning the, at the time, basic fundamentals of the spec so I could win the Mage Tower. Yea, you heard me. I played MM for ONE DAY and got the Mage Tower skin for it, and haven't gone back. Forget MM. If I want to play a petless Hunter I'll play something that isn't WoW.

I never got benched. I was never asked to change. I was never told I was bad or holding the group back or other cliche phrases. We just had fun.

If what you want to play is the numbers, then play the numbers.
If you want to play a specific class/spec, then do that.

Play what you want. To hell with people who tell you to do otherwise.

[Th3Scourge]

I've got no problem with people playing what they want, but if their choice is not competitive then they can expect to be benched in favour of something else