What were the best comps for the hardest 10-man Wrath bosses?

[mst3kfan]

The META is garbage, and completely pointless. Make a group of 10 people, and go. The comp, DOES NOT MATTER.

[Grinning Serpent]

If you want to be safe in Wrath, you are right that Holy pala and Disc priest are auto-wins.

Same with Warrior tanks and boomkins. The control they bring is gold the entire expansion and boomkins become a bit crazy late in the expansion with major AOE and moving moonfire.

Outside of that, it was pretty open, but rogues, paladins, DKs and Warlocks had good specs for DPS most of the expansion, so filling that out, makes for a good team.

Weren't Fury Warriors in the top 5 or so by time ICC gear scaling kicked in?

[netherflame]

I didn't raid 10-hard myself, but I remember hearing that Lich King 10 Heroic basically had to be healed by a holy pally and disc priest. (Shields helped with the plague, if a PW:Shield was absorbed completely it gave the priest back almost all the mana used to cast it. Beacon of Light was just really powerful in 10-man content overall IIRC because it was so useful to heal the tanks and spotheal.)

Edit: Yogg+0 greatly favored affliction warlocks because having to turn away from the boss in P3 just hurt everyone else too much and the DPS requirement was too tight.

Also, is there an ideal comp that could easily go through the entire expac? (Edit: the answer was to stack ranged)

How about Sarth+3?

These things only mattered for the bleeding edge guilds who were playing for top of the world rankings, for the general population you just had to play decently well and be responsible about paying attention. The comp discussion is so boring and typically the people who are feverishly worried and trying to win with 'good comps' are the ones who don't win with the good comp anyways because their play isn't up to par. These people typically use 'bad comp' as an excuse to make them feel better about not being able to down a boss.

[garicasha]

There's certainly players that aren't up to par that stress about raid comp, but I mean there are some pretty serious difference in DPS output from the top classes to the bottom.

And in Wrath let's see how much these debuffs make a difference.

Say a 10 man raid does 60k dps, and a 5-minute boss would then have 18 million health. Adding solely the 3% damage taken buff, raid DPS now 61.8k, 18mil / 61.8k = 4 min 51 sec. So I guess that's not too big a deal.

Let's take the 13% spell damage taken, just for the heck of it we'll say the raid group is stacked with casters but missing that buff. So 60k dps now goes to 66k dps, 18 mil / 66k = 4 min 32 seconds so that took a full 30 seconds off the fight. The buffs definitely do add up.

[Flurryfang]

Weren't Fury Warriors in the top 5 or so by time ICC gear scaling kicked in?

Proberly ICC did bring some amazing 2-handers and Warriors often get really powerful late expansions, when they can get enough rage to just spam the hell out of everyhting.

But then again, i can't really remember them being "safe-picks" in raids either, so its not like they were completly overpowered in that sense and mandatory for raid comps.

[Sorshen]

Weren't Fury Warriors in the top 5 or so by time ICC gear scaling kicked in?

Warriors get to 100% armor penetration at that point (actually sooner with proc trinkets but it's not ideal on overall stats) so they wreck shit up.

[Facefive]

Prot Warriors are the highest DPS+Threat

Excuse me? Have you played Wrath? Warriors don't even come close to Blood DKs in terms of ST threat. DPS-wise you are probably right, but DKs rule the threat race and it is not even close.

[garicasha]

I remember "Icy Slam" being a thing for a while as a band aid for DK single-target threat...but when was that, and when was it removed?

[RobertMugabe]

I have done all of the Wrath content when it was the hardest on 10m and I don't recall if I ever specifically had a comp. You'd basically just to cover as many buffs as possible (meaning you want to have almost every class represented ideally and avoid stacking the same dps) or at least the important ones and don't have too many melees (1-2 only). The tanks or healers class didn't really matter either. Sure, holy paladins were excellent, but so were druids and rshamans too.

[Mendzia]

The META is garbage, and completely pointless. Make a group of 10 people, and go. The comp, DOES NOT MATTER.

Does the comp matter? Absolutely yes.
Can you finish all content with any comp? Absolutely yes.

[Grinning Serpent]

Does the comp matter? Absolutely yes.
Can you finish all content with any comp? Absolutely yes.

Comp will likely only matter to speedrunners and parsebrains. For everyone else, it's mostly just going to be "play what you like," and make alterations to strats as needed (if you have a lot of melee you'll play things a little different from caster-heavy groups, etc.)

[Bigbazz]

I just remember it feeling amazing when it first came out. I do also remember it being undertuned/overtuned at some points, but as soon as a big powerful 2-h weapon came out, there was always those looking to see what doubling down on those weapons could do

It was actually deep wounds that was overpowered when WOTLK came out, during prepatch the 1handed Fury Warriors who went into deep wounds were the top dps spec in the game at that point, Titans Grip was quite a way behind. In prepatch now we have the much nerfed version of Fury without the overpowered deep wounds but 1handed Fury still remains stronger than Titan Grip, neither spec are especially strong unless you're lucky enough to have both Warglaives (the set bonus is busted strong).

At 80 Titan Grip can also get deep wounds but due to those nerfs made years ago Fury Titan Grip will actually be one of the weakest specs in the game outside of niche situations (2-4 target cleave), it will eventually get good around late Ulduar and start to become dominant in Icecrown, that's a whole expansion of it being pretty average tho, you probably won't see many high end guilds running any until later in the expansion.

Excuse me? Have you played Wrath? Warriors don't even come close to Blood DKs in terms of ST threat. DPS-wise you are probably right, but DKs rule the threat race and it is not even close.

Blood DK threat is just icy Touch, but I'm not convinced it beats an Arms/Prot Revenge Warrior on threat. Not that it really matters, nobody will be boss tanking with an Arms/Prot after Naxx. Either way, a full Prot Warrior with Vigilance has a massive threat advantage while pulling much higher dps than a DK..

Of course again all kinda irrelevant since Warriors have the worst survival, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to run one unless you're a top end guild and you have a specific reason (example sunder/shattering).

[Grinning Serpent]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the differences in tanks make a material difference in "standard" play - that is, any tank can do the job just fine, even in the hard modes. Maybe not optimal, but "works fine" and "optimal" are not necessarily the same thing. In general, I feel like any class and spec will work fine in a given role for simple clearing, though parsing and speedrunning will obviously demand specific comps and strategies.

[Facefive]

Blood DK threat is just icy Touch, but I'm not convinced it beats an Arms/Prot Revenge Warrior on threat. Not that it really matters, nobody will be boss tanking with an Arms/Prot after Naxx. Either way, a full Prot Warrior with Vigilance has a massive threat advantage while pulling much higher dps than a DK..

Runestrike and IT have a ridiculously high threat modifier. For example IT's modifier is x7 while in frost presence added by the usual x2 modifier coming from frost presence. Ultimately a single IT can ramp up to 20-25k threat on a single use. Obviously you can only IT so many times but combined with RS I don't see how Revenge can compete.

Either way I would almost always go for the Blood DK over the Protection Warrior.

[Bigbazz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the differences in tanks make a material difference in "standard" play - that is, any tank can do the job just fine, even in the hard modes. Maybe not optimal, but "works fine" and "optimal" are not necessarily the same thing. In general, I feel like any class and spec will work fine in a given role for simple clearing, though parsing and speedrunning will obviously demand specific comps and strategies.

There are bosses where having a DK tank over a Prot Warrior will make a significant difference in your ability to keep the tank alive, and for less high end guilds that will make a real difference. Prot Warriors can tank everything, but they are significantly worse at surviving certain death. The one niche where they work well for survival is tanking lots of adds that do smaller damage hits, because of how effective block is, so you could use them for tanking Anub adds by having them go full block rating to hit the avoidance softcap, but when it comes to tanking big hard hitting bosses you're probably asking for a lot more wipes due to tank deaths.

I'd actually say only top end guilds should run a Prot Warrior past Naxx, because they are equipped to deal with that weakness while making use of the strengths (high damage/vigilance/shattering throw/mobility/trash tanking).

[Grinning Serpent]

There are bosses where having a DK tank over a Prot Warrior will make a significant difference in your ability to keep the tank alive, and for less high end guilds that will make a real difference. Prot Warriors can tank everything, but they are significantly worse at surviving certain death. The one niche where they work well for survival is tanking lots of adds that do smaller damage hits, because of how effective block is, so you could use them for tanking Anub adds by having them go full block rating to hit the avoidance softcap, but when it comes to tanking big hard hitting bosses you're probably asking for a lot more wipes due to tank deaths.

I'd actually say only top end guilds should run a Prot Warrior past Naxx, because they are equipped to deal with that weakness while making use of the strengths (high damage/vigilance/shattering throw/mobility/trash tanking).

Prot lacking the cheat death/emergency mitigation of the other tanks is interesting, but I like it. I think there's value to having different tanks suit different niches. Let the Paladin or DK tank the boss, while the Warrior handles all the adds with their mobility and massive block value.

[Ragu4]

I'm leveling a prot Warrior because it's super fun and fast paced. Plus with the new scaled loot system as we advance raid tiers I'm totally OK making it a fun guy to play in heroic + and previous raids.

[Eldar45]

Does the comp matter? Absolutely yes.
Can you finish all content with any comp? Absolutely yes.

Then the comp doesn't actually matter.

A good comp will make fights easier, not doable.

[Exkrementor]

The only thing that really matters is a holy paladin. Paladins are just like twice as good as every other healer.

But if you want THE BEST comp for 10 man it would probably something like this:

Tanks: Paladin, DK
Heal: Paladin and Druid/Disc
DPS: Affli and SV Hunter are pretty much set in stone. And then you have to choose one of those depending on your setup: Elemental, Enhancement, Balance, Shadow, Demo, Unholy, Combat.

I would probably go like this: Demo, Affli, Hunter, Enhance, Unholy, Boomkin.


Boomkin or Shadow doesnt really make a difference but the boomy can take all the leather gear. You want one Shaman and since resto is pretty much useless you want a dps shaman. Elemental is garbage dps but it still brings BL and spellpower and also spellcrit if you dont go with the Boomkin. Demo is better than Elemental in every way though, therefore I would take the Enhance.


Also Unholy DKs are so fucking op right now you could make an argument for just stacking them. Just go with a resto shaman and 6 Unholy DKs and nuke the boss in 40 seconds.

[garicasha]

What does survival hunter bring? Just that good of DPS?

I have been thinking about this a bit, and I think the real issue here is what gets yah past Hodir hardmode? Because I'm guessing Yogg+0 is about the experience of the player hitting the keys and dodging the skulls, but that timed Hodir run is a little more of a numbers game.

And how does heroism / bloodlust work in Wrath, are drums as good as the real thing? It's back to the modern raid-wide thing right?