Where's Arms Warrior?
Glad I didn't take DPS druid as a main ! Before Classic, people on forums said that every class would be taken into raid, every class bring a utility etc etc ... 365 druid DPS for 24 000 mage, yeah the buff must be important x)
My problem with tier lists and analysis like this is you can’t accurately quantify the increased DPS that utility classes provide to the raid. As a warlock my dps should actually be increased based on the increased dps my recklessness or elements curse provide to the raid. If my curse of recklessness provides each warrior and rogue a 25 DPS increase (arbitrary number chosen for this example) and there are say a combination of 15 of those in the raid then my effective DPS needs to share in that 375 total DPS increase since there would be an overall DPS drop to the raid if say you didn’t have any warlocks in the raid.Yes it is briefly mentioned about utility, but most people focus on DPS graphs and those can’t quantify the effect on utility on DPS.
The division between rogue specs can be between Backstab users (daggers) and non-Backstab users (swords/maces), at least that's what I thought.
These charts make absolutely zero sense.1) they ignore RDPS - the total value of a character after accounting for the buffs they provide2) they ignore debuff slots. You can't have several dotter characters in a raid for example MC and Ony are a joke anyway. Play whatever you want folks, but first align with your raid leader.
Man all the ignore the dps care more about utility. For utility and buffs youd want atleast 5. Not the 8 you see with the pures. In many cases the healer is almost just as good. You may want 1 of say a feral dps or a enh shaman for improved windfury. But ret and boomy could easily be their healer counterpart and be more contribution. You only need 1 warlock per debuff. So that limits how much you need. Warlocks still get taken because their damage goes up in later tiers. Hunters are kind of strong early raids but then goes into mostly off tanking mechanics and tranqing
enhance shaman do pathetic damage compared to everyone else, but improved windfury totem gives their party a massive 18! extra attack powerobviously every raid needs 3 to buff all the melee
The amount of rage and grief in the comments is absurd at the least lol.I'm not sure which of those commenters played vanilla back in the day, but if you did, you should remember that damage meters already existed back then, and guess what: they more or less corresponded with the metrics shown in this article.If you were involved in the game and had even moderate experience in a raiding guild, you'd know each class' pure dps output. Everyone knew that dw fury warriors were at the top of the heap, but you only saw that in high-end guilds because they're so gear dependent; in small-to-medium sized guilds, combat rogues and mages most often topped the charts (I remember after Razorgore brutally murdered my original guild, I ended up in a guild that was ahead in progression, where my badly undergeared dw fury warrior was only doing around half the damage their combat rogues did in BWL lol).The gist is that if you intend to play off specs, you have to put more work in the game and its social aspects: you need to know your class' mechanics inside out, min max it, make friends in raiding guilds and become a known commodity, so you can clear all content as a suboptimal spec (really no different than in vanilla lol).If anything, it's going to be easier today to play an off spec than it used to be in vanilla. After so many years of experience in pservers, people are much more knowledgeable so plenty more guilds should be confident and willing to take a hit in their global dps to accommodate suboptimal specs and add some variety.