My main (and basically only) WoW character has been a Rogue for a long time. But now I have enough WoW spare time for a twink, and for a change after all the endless hours of getting whacked with almost every possible nastyness while standing in melee range I would like to try out a ranged damage dealing class. Which narrows the choice down to Hunter, Mage or Warlock. For all of the following bear in mind I am alliance and interested almost exclusively in PvE.

Now to decide which of those to take I played each class for a few levels (around 10-20) to get a rough feeling for it, but this has not really helped me decide so far. I found all three classes rather enjoyable to play, and none of them significantly more so than the others.

Form what I have learned reading the various forums some pros and cons of the different choices are:

Hunter
Pro:
- the best aggro management of any DPS class in the game
- easy to obtain a very long range for all attacks (41 yards)
Con:
- there are so many, at least on alliance

Mage
Pro:
- Best AoE in the game
- With the coming patch (if not already) very mana efficient and high DPS
Con:
- Spec is very restricted by instance design, e.g. a fire spec in MC or BWL is rather pointless

Warlock
Pro:
- Potentially the largest "manapool" of all classes
- Least played of the classes
Con:
- Worst aggro management of the three classes
- Lots of "filler" talents in every spec
- Not as mana efficient as the mage

Since this did not help me finally to make the decision I tried to approach this from a rogue point of view.

In my rogue mindset one of the most important aspects of the class is trying to maximize ones DPS via choosing the right spec, playstyle and equipment. Now I am able to add another dimension to DPS-optimization: I have the opportunity to chooose the "right" class.

Therefore I am asking you: Which of the classes Hunter, Mage or Warlock, if played optimally and with a Raid-PvE-optimized spec, is capable of the highest single-target DPS on a "normal" target (i.e. no Broodlord Lashlayer)?

Watching our damage meters the order is usually mage - hunter - warlock, but occasionally a warlock is on top and I have the feeling our hunters are not playing optimally and you almost always get some AoE situations where hunters fall behind.

What are your experiences? Does the answer depend on the stage of the game you are at?

The fire Mage is the highest dps out of the three, and with the new aggro talent helps out with that. Granted it is not so good in MC/BWL.

Even with Clearcasting and Master of Elements, fire just uses a lot of mana. 8 min evocation and gems helps lot though. Ice is less dps, but the mana efficiency is nice, and the new ice barrier is quite useful.


Hunters are very easy to solo, due to the the smallest downtime between mobs.
Well played Locks rock in PvP.

Warlocks don't have better mana management than mages. I think someone on FoH said it first - warlocks have incredibly bad *time* management. Lifetapping takes up 1.5 second every time you do it, and shadowbolt is incredibly innefficient as a nuke, so you have to do it a lot on long fights. Soon as you start doing that, you drop well below the mages - and before you can climb back past them, evocation and another mana gem has refreshed for them.

I personally would, in raid circumstances, rank ranged dps for the horde as being :

Fire mage - but only short term
Frost mage - lasts a lot longer, but less in the short term
Warlock / Hunter.

Sometimes our hunters od great, other times our warlocks annihilate them. Even when the warlocks flask up though and spec for ruin, they don't outdamage the equivalent geared mages.

Were we alliance, JoW would probably alter this slightly. And the difference between the 3 classes is not very big at all - our best frost mages outdamage our best warlocks, but they are outdamaging the average mages, etc etc.

If however, your looking to make a twink that's fun to level up, easy to play and a monster in PvP - then go hunter. They are a joy to roam with, never die due to FD etc. and you can go into any battleground and chew up your opponents laughing. Hunter twink alts are great fu - and beneft more from the gear you can twink them with than a mage or warlock would do.

Mage. Hands down, at least from my experiance of raiding since day 1 with all the of best players on my server.

However, there are a few things to consider... Personal 'skill' has a lot more to do with it then most people notice. Ping has a large effect as well. If you're going to be sitting around a 250 ping, hunter is the best choice imo. I have a 16ms ping and no lock could ever dream of touching me in the majority of fights, though one specific hunter can regularly come fairly close.
I quoted the 'skill' above because it really comes down to wether or not you are willing to spam your frostbolt/fireball key so fast your fingers bleed. The difference between doing that, and casually waiting towards the end of your spellcasts to hit the key once can be amazingly significant. From my calculations i figured anywhere around 16% less damage would be a fair estimate. This doesn't apply nearly as much for a hunter, so if you're particularly lazy...

Fire spec isn't nearly as bad as it's made out to be in mc. I was a fire mage from day one until i stopped mc, and was always way above any hunter or lock in a full clear, that was before all these +hit and penetration stats. That being said, I think fire is pretty useless anyway, but not because of resists. Any fight that lasts under 1.5m a fire mage can easily top, as could a properly speced lock, but how many encounters is that? Kazzak maybe? MOAM lol!
Beyond that, you'll be casting scorch, and with a 1.5s cast time you're wasting up to .2s on each cast just from latency even with a low ping which is hurting your dps significantly.
Iceblock is a great dps increasing tool as well. Depending on the fight you don't have to worry about pushing the absolute threshold, and you can put yourself in harms way far more often to stick around and dps. Such as staying in every 25% on whatever that scrub green dragon is called, but there are many others.
Then there is the extreme mana efficiency of arcane/frost. I chain cast highest rank frostbolt on cthun and i fireblast every single small tent/eye in range that i can and still never go out of mana. Not even close actually, the fight usually ends with me having 80% mana and pot timers up.

Perhaps everyone on my server sucks and my experiance is thusly flawed, but outside of one pro hunter (when i was a weird 0/7/44 pvp spec) no one could even come close in a full clear.


Now, to the downsides of mages...
If all you want to do is dps, you might want to consider hunter more seriously. There are numerous fights where either you're busy doing some misc task, such as decursing, or running around to get in potition to aoe some stupid things, or just simply holding way, way back due to agro, though 1.11 will have a significant effect on this and super agro limiting fights will likely never be as prevelant as they were in bwl again according to the devs.

The ping/spam dps issue can be both a foreign concept and an unwelcomed inconveinance coming from a rogues point of view. Half the reason i like the c'thun fight so much isn't because i can wtfpwn everything 100% for 17m, it's probably because i have to release so much adrenaline to keep my finger spamming so hard for so long. adrenaline makes people happy! It also might not be your style.

Insteant deaths are abundant! Even with iceblock, you will occasionally find yourself randomly 1shot by some trash mob or whatnot. Most things are preventable if you are awake, but i am often in a semi-comotose state while raiding.

The new mage always gets the most requests for water/food/buffs. Most people leave me alone, but i always laugh inside when a new mage joins the guild and 4 people pm him for AI during a fight and form a line for water and food infront of him.


Anyway, i hope that sheds some light on your decision making process. It's between mage and hunter imo, while a pro mage will almost always top the hunter it's a rather significant difference in playing style.

It's been said already: Mage. With that in mind though, warlocks have 3 or 4 completely different talent paths that allow for a lot of replayability (conflag, sm/ruin, MD/ruin, Gilliamspec, etc). Based on the fact that you've been playing a rogue for so long, I would think that having some options would be a refreshing change.

Also, you have a spectacular guild name.

Mages do (and rightfully should) rape any other ranged class out there.

In my experience we Hunters have historically been higher than, or around where the (few) warlocks are, most of the time due to warlocks not having feign.

If you go by our Rag DMs (since that's about as pure a "ranged only" DM as you're going to get) then it's almost always Mages as the top two or three, then a mishmash of hunters/locks/remaining mages, then the melee. I don't doubt that a proper warlock with a good aggro management skill of some sort would completely fuck up a hunter, however. They have a lot more tricks up their sleeves, provided they can actually use them all, and even moreso if they get the occasional renew/rejuv while lifetapping...

The big thing is, from a hunter's perspective, that we're horribly mana inefficient. Granted the Alliance don't really have that problem thanks to Paladins (god damn paladins :(), but on the Horde side it's considerable. We've got a mediocre mana pool and I can blow through mine in under 30 sec. or so if I wanted to waste it. I would kill for BoW/JoW you have no idea. :( Any sort of long fight is definitely in the favor of a mage from my perspective. Even if they're fire specced, their mana efficiency is worlds beyond ours.

If you are interested in playing the class that contributes the most damage to the raid, then play a warlock. CoR, CoE, and CoS do more for a raid's damage than the best played mage or hunter can ever hope of doing, but because that damage doesn't show up in damage meters it's somehow discounted. The only drawback is that once you have three warlocks in a raid there really is no need for anymore with the current limitations to the debuff system.

I do not agree with this sentiment. I have always maintained that a Hunter should be second overall in single-target damage contribution. Rogues truly earn the right to be first, with the hardships they face in most high-end encounters. However, why do you feel Hunters should come behind Mages?

To my knowledge, if you discount the very gimmicky Tranq Shot, all a Hunter truly offers is aggro-free DPS. Our pets remain largely useless (and our DPS is balanced with pets in mind, which further hinders us), many of our skills are terrible, and we are grotesquely mana inefficient (Horde Hunters in particular can not sustain max DPS very long, as indicated by Gonkish). I continue to curse being encumbered with the archaic mana-based currency system as a Hunter. As a physical DPS class, I would kill for a novel approach to skill-currency, akin to Energy and Rage. I know that a lot of people aren't sympathetic to the state of the Hunter because they've just gotten out of a BG seething after a Hunter two-shotted their clothy ass, but let's be frank: The revamp did not do much for raiding Hunters (I am 5/31/15). In my view, the single best change to come out of that patch was a mechanic fix (Aimed Shot no longer resetting Autoshot). Regardless, these gripes are best served for another thread. I just feel that when you assign the value of the three ranged DPS classes to a raid, a Hunter bears the least. Therefore, I feel it would be justified if they clearly were first in damage contribution of the three against single targets.

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In response to the original poster; play a Mage. This is speculative and based on second-hand information, but Mages absolutely trounce DPS classes in Naxx encounters. The new aggro reduction talent has seemingly made it very, very difficult for Mages to pull aggro on non-sensitive encounters, which combined with their excellent efficiency has led to a serious shift in the DPS charts.

I have to agree with xyruul about high latency - I lose a certain bit of time for each frostbolt and it seems to be due to lag. Whether hunters have that issue as much or not at all due to auto-shot and instant-casts, I don't know, maybe an experienced hunter can comment. I would really love to see if anyone could report their average time between frostbolt hits from the combat log before and after a reformat or primetime vs. daytime.

That said, I don't know that any one class is superior to another in single-target dps. You could probably use something else to pick, like if you prefer one race over another or if you like having pets to keep you company.

It's just as easy for a shot rotation to be screwed up because of server lag, aimed shot has a casting time just like frostbolt.

My aimed shots rarely last for as short as they should. You just kinda deal with it and keep going.

Sigh. You know, it's posts like this that give the Alliance a bad name. You *cannot* just throw mana tide at the hunters. Most raids wont have 5 mana tide hunters - and after the patch, the hunters that icnrease the hunters dps the most with the Agility totem won't be able to get mana tide. And that means that no healer or caster is getting the benefit of mana tide.

Also, on top of that - it's still far, far weaker than BoW & JoW.

I'd really listen to this man. I've got a mage I leveled to 60 and took to rank 11 in PvP, but doing PvE with him infuriates me. I absolutely despise being lower on the damagemeters than I have to be and not being able to even compete due to gear disparity drove me nuts. Mages are amazingly fun in PvP though.

The most variance from the rogue playstyle is probably an affliction warlock, which is a very considered, carefully measured character that controls the situation and kills with dots.

I love my 29 lock twink. Definitely a change of pace from playing the rogue class. However, I would never raid with him. He's just fun to pvp with. I share Wodin's sentiments pretty much exactly.

I never meant that as literarly throw it at the hunters, I assumed everyone knew how totems worked, and that hunters would be in groups either with other hunters + shammie or other casters benefiting from the mana tide totem. Ant tbh, I would probably rather have the mana tide then the agility if I had to chose (dont know the exact amoutns of either, but from what I remember, that would be the case).
And the mentioned post as promised

1) 3m 40s is a bit more then what is actually the case, and 2) he might of course have been sarcastic and I missed it.

Edited to add: this is becoming a derailment, so if you have any directed comments at me that are not pertaining to the original thread topic, just send a private message please.

I don't get why mages all think they deserve to be higher DPS in raids then hunters... all hunters bring is single target DPS really... mages bring more utility and AE..... espicially now that blizzard seems to get past the "Omg aggro fights" and mage aggro reduction is better then ever..... besides encounters w/ tranq shot your better off w/ a mage then a hunter...

Well it also depends on the environmental dmg, if it's fire or ice a mage can use Wards to increase their survivability...as for FDing out of combat usually with the combat pulses i can start drinking at most... as for DPS yea i can keep up with mages and beat themSupposibly their DPS gets an impressive boost next patch) I was mainly pointing out that mages think they deserve higher DPS then hunters by a considerable amount.

Actually, being able to throw totems at people would fix some of the problems with them. Instead of effecting the Shaman's group, they effect the target's group.

Yes, but only if the shaman had to meditate for 43 minutes first while nervously twitching and having his hair turn bright gold and pointy.

JoW is still much, much better than mana tide for a hunter, and that's even assuming you set up groups like that. Personally, we use shamans primarily with warriors/rogues and in a sham/hunt/hunt/hunt/hunt group. We don't do all-healer groups. So if we have a couple of shamans with mana tide, given the choice of putting them in groups with rogues/warriors or in a group with 4 hunters who can actually use the mana every now and then, the choice is clear.

Is it safe to assume this description of your group makeup changes for the emps? I always thought maybe a leader whowas inclined enough could swap two (maybe four) shamans after every teleport but that seems like way too much work o_O

This is getting pretty far afield, but I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean Mana Tide, we don't currently have any Mana Tide shamans and haven't ever, pretty much. In 1.11 a couple may be picking it up -- I know I will be. But currently, Emps groups still involve a couple of shamans in the tank/healer groups, one with hunters in the middle, and two running from side to side with the melee patching them up through uppercuts and maybe giving totems.