Grubsnik

One of the great strengths of WoW is the easy to learn, hard to master element of playing. I recently got into a minor discussion with some friends, about which dps class was the hardest to really master.

Since it's obvious that the maximum dps of the individual classes are not equal, this is not the measure i'm looking for.
One measure could be where the biggest difference is between the performance of the "average" raider, and a true master. But arguments about relative difficulty in achieving mastery are also welcome.

Initially i'd have thought the irregularity of keeping an affliction warlocks dots running, with variable durations and possibly multiple targets. But afaik, once you reach T5-6 gear levels, destruction is the way to go, simplifying the mechanics considerably.

My next thought was hunters with their counter-intuitive shooting mechanics, but as a friend of mine told me, it's all about writing the right macro, and clicking it over and over.

So now i'm stumped, but I figured EJ was most likely the best place for getting both objective and qualified opinions about this subject. So what is your guys take on this subject?

Which is the hardest class to master?
Which is the hardest class to perform "good enough" in?
And for officers/recruiters:
Which is hardest to get filled with skilled players?

 

Covertghost

Ret paladin is actually surprisingly difficult do to swing rotations correctly if you have haste items/procs.

Hunter is also this way as well.

 

Littlefinger

Well, I wouldn't count out hunters that quick. I've raided with alot of diffrent hunters and the diffrence between a bad one and a really good one is very noticeable and that has nothing to do with macros. Even bad performing hunters have the same macros as other hunters but other factors plays a big part it seems. A macro does make a big diffrence of course but to really shine there are more to it than that. I haven't raided as a hunter myself but I know hunters that does have all the crutches that could make them really good but they still fall way short of the best hunters I've seen.

Another class that I would say is hard to puch above and beyond is the mage. Alot of mages I've seen can only go so far in their DPS and they mostly fall short of rogues and warlocks etc but there are a few exceptions where some mages take their class and go outside of the comfort zone and push far beyond the other mages. The is very rare though which ought to suggest that it's quite difficult.

 

Vhex

Slam-warrior/hunter are in the same boat. It's not really 'difficult' so much as annoying since you have to watch your swing timer.

Playing a dps class ultimately isn't too hard. The real skill comes in doing the 'gimic' that your class is set up for. Rogues that continue to kick deaden, shaman that forget to drop earthbind totems on Illidan, etc...the list goes on.

Retadin would probably be the most annoying ultimately to master. Anybody skilled enough to pull off playing a retadin would probably make a great healer, and more guilds need healers then dps. Getting to spec ret is half the battle. Actually getting good at it though...

Not to mention you have to have had the good fortune of rolling Horde for Seal of Blood. <3

 

Chirality

I would say Hunters (running 3:2 shot rotations), Slam Warriors and Arcane Mages (circa 6 months ago) are the three hardest specs to play at their full potential. These are the specs that really require paying constant attention to timing abilities to maximize your personal dps. Too many other class/specs (Fire mages, for example) really only require maximizing your time spent casting.

 

zeidrich

Swing rotations based on haste items/procs?

I don't understand. None of your abilities are based on swing time.

I thought the standard ret paladin rotation was simply to use 1 point in imp judgement and go:

Judge-Seal-CS-CS-Judge-Seal-CS... repeat. (18 second rotation).

Even if you weave consecration/exorcism into it, you don't want to mess up the typical rotation to the point where you could be losing seal uptime.

Or am I missing something fundamental?

 

Joq

I would disagree with fire mages being easy, since the thing that puts a good mage above an average one is knowing when to use every single thing to your advantage, and a fire mage has a whole load of things to juggle. If you use that mana gem now, will you be able to have a flame cap running when you get bloodlust? Or you get everything stacked and realise you forgot your drums, so do you lose a gcd of crazydps for that little extra push on the rest of the time? This is thinking 2 minutes in advance and predicting how the fight is going to run, and every fight I know I could have done better.

 

xellos

Retribution is fairly simple. Prioritize CS, judge on cooldown, try to burn all of your mana by the end of the fight, and stack your cooldowns. I've played a slam warrior and I think that's more difficult than retribution since you actually have to use timing.

 

• Darkmyst

I'm not sure I'd use the term difficult but having recently switched from Fury to Arms (so our raids have Blood Frenzy) I'm finding it..very annoying. Constantly having to watch a swing timer while tracking everything else going on is harder than I would have thought. I find that I'm getting caught unaware in "head down" mode like I did pre tbc when I played a resto shaman and would get too focused in on whack a mole.


Tanks.

 

Bunnyz

Sorry, how is this different from any other dps class?

 

Mode

For 'good enough', I'm going to go with two-handed warrior. It's very simple to explain, but it's a pain in the ass to do well. The rotation is auto attack/special/slam. Slam resets the swing timer, so you only want to do it immediately after an auto attack. You cannot use a hunter-style macro for this; you must manually time every single slam. To add insult to injury, it has a cast time, so it's extremely difficult to maintain your rotation during repositionings.

For mastery, I'm going with mage. Anyone can do decent mage DPS, but there's a large DPS difference between the ones that know how to manage their cooldowns and the ones that don't. For example, I regularly group with a mage who maintains 1k+ DPS in just kara/badge/pvp gear as frost or fire.

 

Vhex

This will boil down to a semantics argument anyways ultimately. "Hard" is too arbitrary a term and we've all seen that one person who takes a class and "pushes it to the limit!"

Like I said, hunter/warrior is all about watching your swing timer, ret paladin is about keeping your shit on cooldown. With the exception of people who just flat out suck at video games, most DPS classes can be mastered simply by figuring out a good rotation and getting better gear.

Ultimately, the only skill that matters comes from not screwing up the important stuff. Kicking the wrong stuff, standing in fires, People who don't take their ports on Kalecgos for a more recent example. Doing 20% more dps on Archimonde doesn't mean crap if you also stand in fires and waste thousands of healer mana. Being able to dodge a bosses gimic -and- keep up your damage rotation? Now that's skill.

 

Grubsnik

For this kind of comparison to be meaningful. It's important to distinguish between running a more challenging build / setup, for a greater result (Hunter, BM -> MM) vs. running a more interesting build (but something you know is sub-optimal), because spamming the same button over and over is just too boring (Mage, most-nonfire specs).

The odd case is of course warlocks, where the "difficult to master" affliction spec, gets surpassed in performance by the "just spam the same button over and over again", destruction spec, as spell damage ramps up.

In the case of warriors, Slam weaving might be challenging to really maximise, especially once you get haste procs into the picture. But is Slam weaving optimal for warrior dps? Mastering a sub-optimal way of playing your class, doesn't really make you a master dps warrior.

I find it hard to think that retri paladins are all that difficult to dps optimally with, since there is simply not enough buttons to push consistently. Could just be me though, since I never managed to play a paladin past lvl 12.

 

Ghando

Mages aren't very difficult to play, but gearing/speccing one for the absolute best raid damage is another thing. There's a lot of mechanics to wrap your head around and a lot of different ways to set your character up; to paraphrase Vontre, 90% of a Mage's damage is done before he casts a single spell. It's also possible that by virtue of being in IRC/guild chat with Manly, I am just deluged by Mage theorycraft and that warps my perception.

<Bryne> >> MILKED TEAT 2, GHANDO NEXT <<

 

Chirality

For Survival Hunters, MS/BloodFrenzy Warriors, and Affliction Warlocks--all of these class/specs are wanted in a raid due to class synergy. ~300 AP, 4% physical damage daken, 3% shadow damage taken and -5% physical damage received are all extremely valuable, and lead to a raid-wide increase in performance over BM, Fury, and Destro specs, respectively. Maximizing your dps with a difficult-to-master raid-support spec is thus very important.

Edit: In terms of gearing as "skill", Mortal Strike warriors also come out ahead--though I may be biased. According to spreadsheets and my own Python-implemented combat simulator, I have no less than 5 stats that are all very valuable and must be carefully balanced. Strength, Crit Rating, Hit Rating, Haste Rating, and Armor Penetration are all valued within about 10% of each other per itemization point, with no clear favorite.

Edit2: I nonetheless feel like this thread will devolve into an ego-stroking 'my class is harder' waste, unless we make ourselves very clear when we ask "what makes X harder to play?". Some might argue that Slam-spec'd warriors are 'hard to play' in high-movement fights, but I simply don't find that to be the case--0.5 sec of casting per 3 seconds allows for more freedom of movement than a mage or warlock and by a huge margin.

If we want to talk about the 'small things' that makes a spec hard to play than we need to set up clear categories. Some examples of 'hard to master' situations that might make this conversation more grounded:

Cooldown usage in non-static fights Example: "should I use icy veins and waste about 20% of it during this tank-and-spank phase of Supremus or delay it to the next phase to stack it with my trinket cooldown?"

Maximizing damage in high-movement and/or high-danger fights Example, Dps'ing on Gathios the Shatterer while constantly avoiding Blizzard and Flamestrike.

Situational Awareness so that you can react to situations unrelated to personal DPS Example: A retribution paladin stunning a BoP'd Veras Darkshadow on Illidari Council, or a DPS warrior Intervening a Shear when the MT on Illidan curses that he used Shield Block on accident.

 

chase

Mostly has to do with the long cooldowns mages juggle (IV/Combustion/AP) so that you get get max use out of them. Tieing them to spells is a loss, as when you use them matters more than simply using them every cooldown. (Molten fury, trinkets while IV/AP is up etc) I know some of our mages have 2-3 macros that simply use different cooldowns in different orders.

From a simple observation point of playing with pickups, it always seems to me that Hunters can show the largest deviation. Probably has more to do with how "hidden" shot rotation mechanics are than anything else though.

 

Howard Roark

Actually dpsing as a shadowpriest is not particularly hard, but managing mana on a ten+ minute fight is genuinely "hard". Unlike any other mana-based dps class (besides warlocks), if you go oom you're useless to everyone. If you're just wanding, you're hurting the raid. And I don't mean when to pot, you pot every cooldown, it's being 2 minutes into a fight and having to decide what you can use now to still have mana in 10 minutes.

 

Joq

Like chase said ^^ and I didn't mention, molten fury is everything. Making full use of trinkets and still making sure they're available when you hit 20% is the mark of a good fire mage, and I can't think of any other talent or ability that forces you to think about the whole encounter to make full use of it.

 

Zaq

Bloodlust?

The point that's coming out of this thread is that dps isn't the most challenging thing you can do. The responsibilities and stresses are lower then for tanks or healers. With the exception of shadow Destro warlocks, nearly everyone has something that spices up their play and allows the truly attentive to shine. Be it shot rotations, swing timers, dot uptime, cooldown management, w/e, every class has something going for it.

Hunters are the least intuitive, and consequently show the greatest range in ability from awful->good->great. Tanks and resto druids/shams are always in short supply. I would not say any single class is harder to master then any other, even Sbolt spammers have enough tools to distinguish good from bad.

"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali

 

Vandermonde

I find that the hard bit of being a shadow priest at higher gear levels isn't so much mana as it is balancing not killing yourself with maximizing dps. At least one out of the range on mind flay and the pain of a potential swd crit is big liability in a large percentage of fights. I rarely swd on council for instance, but i'm confident that it is possible to do safely almost on cooldown if you're aware of the rogue timer and very good at getting out of the aoes quickly.

 

• Aldriana

Now, to be clear, I've never played most DPS classes, so I have a hard time judging which is the hardest in a totally abstract sense. But I will say that playing a rogue at the very top levels is harder than most people give it credit for. Getting to 95% of a rogue's DPS potential is pretty easy (the number of people who manage to screw it up notwithstanding), but getting to 100% is actually surprisingly hard. There's just a lot of subtleties of energy management, cooldown management, buff uptime management, and so on that allow a really top rogue to squeeze out a little more damage than your average "good" rogue. So while I freely admit rogues are probably one of the easier classes to be good - even really good - at, I do think a reasonable case can be made that they're one of the hardest to perfect.

 

glowacks

Mages face far more problems with cooldown management than other classes, due to having both mana and Molten Fury. Given that there are now consumables to increase damage if you don't need to use them for mana, there are a lot of judgment calls that can't be theorycrafted 100% because things happen that you can't fully predict; this is especially true for progression fights. Getting the most out of Bloodlust merely means being aware of when it's coming, but you then have to plan consumable usage around that and the 20% mark. The issues for other classes do not include nearly as much of an overlap between sustainability and damage along with a point in the fight where their damage will spike up.

Optimizing gear is not something Mage-specific, but due to spell hit being somewhat easy to cap, there being lots of gear with spell hit and lots without it gear choices not trivial. I acknowledge that this might be true for other classes, but I'm only very familiar with rogues, for whom the hit cap is insanely high compared to good available gear for quite a while. Since Mages have such low HP and armor, they definitely have to consider adding more stamina for certain fights in expense of DPS especially considering that Mages have to stand still for 3 seconds to cast their best spell. When you need to move and you're 2 seconds through a spell, making the call about whether to finish the spell is not trivial. This may be compared to other classes, but they at least can very often do something besides launch a very low DPM nuke while moving (and only if close-ish to the target). The combination of these effects is perhaps greatest on the Mage.

However.

Hunters definitely have the largest variance when considering the whole population. I played with a hunter once who had decent gear but barely did any damage. I watched Assessment during a fight, and he'd continually fire 3 steady shots without an auto shot. Then he'd stop firing steadies for awhile. I don't know whether he just didn't know what he was doing, or was just awful and timing his steadies. Hunters and Slam warriors need a lot of twitch-skill in order to not completely mess up and significantly lower their damage by jumping the gun. At the same time, they get a decent amount of increased DPS by being able to time their skills perfectly. Casters never get penalized on the extent those two classes do for trying to cast early, and their penalty for casting late is perhaps not even as great.

Personally, I think Mages (and other casters) start at a disadvantage due to the inability to reliably queue spells as well as auto-attacks are queued (ie, perfectly). Combining that with the timing difficulties of Hunters and Warriors, that makes Rogues the easiest class to button-push optimally because you half at least a half-second leeway on every single click except during AR. That makes Mutilate the easiest spec to button push, even if its a bit harder to get the rest of the class/spec right. I rolled a Rogue for my next character to raid with primarily because of the auto-attack advantage; most of the difficulty was deciding on gear, rotations, and cooldown management, not on how well you could press buttons.

I'd say that almost every class is simple to play to 80%, requires very little effort to get 90%, and only casual browsing of TC to get to 95%. Some might be more difficult to play to get the last 5%, but they tend to require completely different skills. I don't think the question as posed really has a valid answer.

 

Felippe

Now, to be clear, I've never played a DPS class in a raid, so I have a hard time judging which is the hardest in any kind of sense. But I will say that DPSing as a holy priest at the very top levels is harder than most people give it credit for.

 

Warfield

I see that Arms warriors have been mentioned several times, but I was somewhat surprised that nobody has commented on Fury. Like most classes, fury warriors are simple to get a hang of, but mastering them is something not many people achieve. Not only do you have to juggle trinkets, potions, cooldowns, and so on like other classes, but the it also requires constant attention and flawless decision making in order to achieve the maximum potential dps. Keeping Bloodthirst and Whirlwind on cooldown while babysitting rampage and keeping shouts up are relatively simple concepts. But throw in a combination of slow/slow weapons and heroic strike usage and the real difficulty comes in the form of rage management. Every few seconds a fury warrior is faced with a split-second decision as to which ability to use, whether or not to refresh rampage now or later, or whether or not to try to squeeze in a heroic strike on the next swing.

If I use a Heroic Strike now, will I have enough rage to use my instant abilities when they're up? If I don't heroic strike now, will my next white hit cause me to lose potential rage by capping out at 100?

Rampage has 3 seconds left, Bloodthirst has 0.5 seconds before it comes up. Should I wait half a second and use Bloodthirst, but risk letting rampage running out? Or do I refresh rampage now, but waste two thirds of a global cooldown that could have been spent doing damage?

I have 40 rage now and Whirlwind is up, Bloodthirst has 2 seconds left. Do I Whirlwind now and hope my white swings generate enough rage to use Bloodthirst the moment it comes up? Or do I play it safe waste potential damage by not using Whirlwind and just waiting for Bloodthirst to come back up, guaranteeing myself that I'll have enough rage to use it?

These are the kinds of questions I find myself faced with dozens and dozens of times per fight, hundreds of times per raid. Some situations have obvious answers, but more often than not a fury warrior's skill comes in the form of the ability to make a large amount of good split-second decisions over an extended period of time. Due to the sheer amount of these decisions that are made during a fight, the likelyhood of making a wrong decision and losing out on dps is high.


I think a good way to recognize which class may be the hardest to master is to take a look at how many truly exceptional players you've seen for a particular class and compare it to how many average or bad players you've seen for that class. I've come across more than a few exceptional mages in my time playing, but I can't really say I've seen more than one or two DPS warriors who really impressed me.