1. #1

    Hardest (raid) fights for Ranged DPS in all of WoW's history

    I generally think that ranged DPS have the easiest role, but the triumvirate of (Heroic) Lords of Dread, Rygelon, and Jailer might just be three of the most ranged-unfriendly fights I've ever seen. I also didn't play BfA and I only tank/heal though so I might be off.

    Lords of Dread they have to deal with clearing and passing the debuff in a fight with intense incoming damage.

    Rygelon is far worse as the quasars spawn when the first set of bombs has only 8 seconds remaining, giving the (ranged) DPS about 4-5 global cooldowns to do the 100,000 damage to them to kill them and then 2-3 seconds to get in. Followed immediately by a second set of bombs for which they're slightly more time. But then the far quasars have to be held for a moment (although the fight was nerfed in that puddles remain slightly longer). And the far quasars of the first set tend to overlap the near ones of the second set, but they still have to be killed fairly precisely as there are 10 bombs and only 12 quasars. All of this while soaking and/or moving away from orbs and dodging lines.

    Jailer is a heavily scripted rapid-fire sequence of clumping and spreading out that takes significant practice to be in position so that bombs can be organized properly and player's backs can be turned so they fall in favorable directions that don't get them mind-controlled. Ranged are actually in a worse position than melee as they're performing the same maneuvers but moving twice the distance.

    I haven't played a ranged DPS pretty much ever, though, so feel free to correct me!
    Raid bosses will always be very similar so long as encounter design requires DPS to always be pumping 100%.

  2. #2
    Often it's been melees who had the easiest time because certain mechanics would flat out ignore them, the biggest offender on this front was probably Nighthold and especially Gul'dan.
    For Melees, the fight was largely a Patchwerk fight on Mythic where the boss just moved around a lot, while Ranged took care of almost every mechanic.

    And in general i'd say playing Ranged is harder than Melee for that very reason, there's rarely any melee specific mechanic and there's always a handful of mechanics that doesn't target melees at all or simply the ranged players have to take care of because melees would lose a ton of uptime.

  3. #3
    I play both melee and range dps and have done so since TBC (and cleared every raid on hardest difficulty), and melee is typically much easier role. Range usually have better ability to handle mechanics, which makes it so that range dpses are generally used more.

    I would say that fights with heavy cleaving and not much mechanics such as LoD favour melee over range.

    Hard to say which fight was hardest for range though.
    Last edited by facefist; 2022-05-15 at 03:23 PM.

  4. #4
    Great question, hard to pin it to one fight off hand. I'd have to rewatch a lot of my old stuff from ranged. But LoD is pretty tough on ranged. Guldan was pretty hard because of the bonds (my guild used a strat where only ranged would soak bonds).

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