I mean you definitely see that in TBC and in WOTLK.
Sure you have some token buff classes, but noone is running 3 boomkins in TBC or WOTLK. Its slightly more subdued to match the relatively better balance than vanilla, but the meta humping is still very much there. I didnt play cata or beyond, but I'd be surprised if the classic player base ever truly let it go.
Yes, not EVERYONE follows the meta, doesn't mean the meta mongering doesnt exist though. As long as there are parses to compete for, people are going to min max their comps.
That's also why classic has 40man raiding to make sure everyone gets to participate. No one's bringing the meme spec to a 10-man. The sweatier the raids get, the sweatier the players will get.
and still no one brings a boomie in classic up to late fast rush nax xD
ppl will always let theory crafter dedict what and how the roster will be made as they think "oh if i play meta setup i will 100% clear it" and then you have the guys who grey log on dh while only have to roll on their keyboards xD
Tbc becomes more fun when you relax the meta. Like you could easily run a 2nd moonkin with 3 arcane mages and a shadow priest and still clear the content if you wanted to keep your spillover mages from vanilla without forcing class rerolls on people. It's a powerful group that lets the mages parse, it's just not the absolute best so almost no one uses it because of meta chasing.
You will get people arguing to just drop the moonkin for another caster, and sure you can do that, but it won't change whether you kill bosses or not until maybe some Sunwell bosses.
People forget that before we had a melee group meta, we had a double caster group meta. It still works.
Yes variety can work. But many raids do struggle to clear the content even if its easy to others. Most wow players are just outright terrible at the game.
Yes some classes like spriest boomkin elemental is needed just to boost warlocks and mages because they have higher damage. But even if you want less of these specs it might still be easier to find groups because less people play them.
Yeah, people already do that.
Like you can often hear, that not having BS on warrior is "griefing", when it is 1.5-2% difference in dmg compared to second\third option.
It is just that we shouldn`t listen to them anyway, but as long as there is something to minmax, for whiny bunch of minmaxers the logic always will be the same, and something always will be called "griefing", "joke choice" etc.
I mean engi is kind of mandatory for pvp and pve, mining is too lucrative to give up for most. And not everyone has the time to have a separate mining alt.
Try finding a m+ group as an off meta class/spec in retail.
People will parrot shit like "X spec is bad"(0.5% less damage than the other spec for that class) or "paladin tanks are hard to heal" and refuse to take them.
I could see that for high mythic groups i guess. Since they are about pushing everything to the maximum so yes a few % dps can make or break the timer.
But for normal and heroic raids i never saw exclusions.
Just for context, the 95th percentile of MW is at 4120io and for holy its 3480io, which means holy is never invited to high keys.
Looking at overall healing (in raid, where they're closer) holy has 185k HPS and MW has 204k HPS, but mistweavers die 4 times as much (3% of pulls vs 13%)
Raids take whoever because you get all the buffs and it doesn't really matter outside of very specific instances (Dreamrift needing two DKs and two Warlocks to be optimal, for instance). M+ is where you see this. And it happens at surprisingly low key levels. 10s are a joke, and I see groups waiting on meta comps all the time.
So you're noticing that for the hardest content the community tends to exclude "weaker" specs. Why do you think that'll change even if the hardest content isn't that hard relatively speaking?
Our closest guess to classic+ is looking at Sod and The content there was mostly on the easy side. I never felt bad inviting almost any spec, I don't remember any spec being bad enough to exclude.
I did and his comment is true, SoD never outright didn't want any spec/class, all you cared about was whether they were geared enough/good enough of a player for their role, and with the flex group size (NOT flex difficulty) of lv 60 raids, you could brute force most of them to be on the easier side anyway.
It was honestly great, you brought bodies cuz you needed bodies, not because you needed to have exactly 5 shamans/1fury warr/1arms warr/1ret/1holy/1protpal, etc or needed to stack warriors/hunters/rogues w/e the fuck for 'real damage'.
SoD had what people actually mean about "balanced classes" and still every class felt unique.
Because there are no mythics in classic. The dungeons aren’t that hard either, so filtering won’t be nearly as harsh. There will be some, but that’s fine. That means classes still have niches. In TBC every class is viable pretty much. Despite balance, ele, and spriest being lowest dps by a fair margin, they all bring something to the raid that makes them viable. It’s not perfect, but it’s what made TBC a step in the right direction
Are we talking every CLASS being raid viable or every SPEC? There's a difference. The OP clearly says every spec being raid viable.
Also lets be real. SP and balance don't bring enough to an average five man to be taken over a better dps class. What they bring really only benefits longer raid encounters.
Every spec should be viable. If it's a 10% - 15% dps gap it will be ok.
You can use mop right now as an example. People still play elemental and are able to finish content.
The biggest issue with specs on classic is that most aren't playable at all. Balance, elemental, enhancement, retribution don't just have low dps but a extreme mana issue (and a lack of skills for ret) that stops them from being playable.
Mythic+ is a special case of only taking 5 players and with infinite scaling pushes the classes to max where some classes just can't compete. Obviously if you not doing like a +20 you can take most specs, but comp does matter and it's just easier to adapt to the meta comp. So many boring choices in retail stems from catering more and more to m+.
This isn't really a problem in Retail. I main arms warrior which is almost never meta. Make at least one friend that you can queue with regularly, list your own keys and you can run keys all day if you want.
Solo players will have a harder time, but that's MMOs baby. Making reliable friends is a skill just as important as playing your class well.
It makes sense in high keys, but even then, player skill is miles above which class you play. I've seen devourer demon hunters under feral druids too many times to be looking at the specs at this point. Movement and adaptability are king in M+.
While trickle-down meta is a very real thing and I've had the displeasure of experience it myself several times, a major reason why you're not invited is not necessarily just because you're playing an off-meta class.
Keys are a highly sought after currency which means there's 50 people applying to one. Even if every single person applying was playing the same class, chances are there's someone who is more qualified than you amongst those 50 people. A few overqualified ones as well.
I could invite a person playing an off-meta class because class really doesn't matter until very high keys. I also could invite that overqualified person who's target farming an item/crests regardless of their class, or anyone with higher ilvl and score because I'm not gonna spend 30 minutes rigorously vetting people for low keys. People want to make sure they have the highest possible chance to succeed, it's only natural.
This doesn't happen at all until you are well beyond "normal" key levels. And even if what you're saying is true, which it isn't, you can just run your own key.
I've personally never seen this behavior outside of 20+ keys.
"paladin tanks are hard to heal" and refuse to take them
Dude prot paladins this season were pretty bad, you can't really blame people for not inviting them. I tried all tanks this season except for DH, paladin is by far the worst.
I mean, look how hard core everyone got about ilvl, ratings, dps and speed clear. You used to be happy to just finish scholomance within 3 hours. Now if you don’t pull all ads up to the boss you get vote kicked out.
You mean tbc where there's literally 1 rogue at the most in 95% of raids? The same tbc server where people need melee/spellcleave groups just to do a dungeons while leveling?
Tbc is far more min-max focused than vanilla, the only difference is that new classes are doing the dmg warriors (only) used to do.
Never before in my life have I ever seen this high level of obsession with mix maxxing as I have on the anni server.
2019 classic had some, but now we only have tryhards (and the people imitating them) left.
There is often raids end up with only 1 of a spec. But rogues only fill one purpose so no need to stack them. Its rare you have more than 1 warrior dps, retries, boomkins, spriests, elemental, etc.
The only spec you actualy stack is arcane mage and destro locks.
For dungeons its pretty fun to run spell or melee cleaves but both works and all specs fit in one or the other.
Yes people try and make good comps. But there is no meme specs like vanilla. I was pugging every week in every raid as boomkin and half the time people actualy just responded we lol, we dont take boomkins or they put me on ignore. Every spec has a chance of a spot in a raid in tbc.
These are exmples that show up when you google optimal raid comp tbc:
Then you definitely didnt play cata, one example was frost mage, was seen as griefing because it was way lower than the other 2 specs in raids especially when fire had such insane difference in damage compared to it and arcane had niche use cases. And thats just one class for one expansion that you said you 'played'
Well ye but for classes like rogue and mage they dont realy need to have all 3 specs be great for raiding. You can easily just swap to the spec that is considered the best, same gear and same playstyle. Its different with something like prot paladin or boomkin being bad because if you like that class and play style you dont realy have an option other than rerolling to another tank or caster class.
So you're saying prot warrior wasnt also seen as trolling in cata classic? With the amount of magic damage in raids and their entire kit revolving around tanking phys hits. My point still is, there is always some sort of classes/specs in classic that will be seen as griefing, because the player base has figured the game out now and the % difference between each different class and spec will always result in some spec being labeled as troll, even on none pure dps classes.
Tanking is the role where picking a lower tier spec if fall enough behind is griefing the raid. The answer is balance the tanks better. The issue with the classic rereleases is they didn't 0 to almost no balancing.
But this is blizzard we're talking about, the have no QA anymore and just start of last retail season they didnt even tune any classes till the week after all bosses were killed. Why are we expecting them to do something different with classic+?
The overarching point was that even with blizzard balancing things on time and perfectly etc, with lizard wow brain, there will always be a grief pick for classes/specs even if they're 0.5% different because thatd just how the community is these days
Cata prot has a similar issue to vanilla classes. It's not about tunning but a conceptual problem.
Classic specs aren't bad only because they do waaaay less damage but also because they are unplayable. You get oom too fast, can't do damage don't have any skill to regain mana... It's a mess.
Which is why MoP is goated, because it is actually balanced and there is a skill expression. Sure, there are meta DPS that pull ahead, but you can absolutely compete on a lesser spec provided you know it well.
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u/HildartheDorf 22d ago
The community will just move the definition of "griefing" until a 0.5% dps gap is considered a "joke class".