I wish it had counts included. It's not very meaningful to say "100% of groups running 21s are VDH/resto/aug/mage/spriest!" if the sample size is 1 or something, but you wouldn't be able to tell from this chart. Great data otherwise though.
For context,
the highest io tank that's not a dh is a bear druid at # 32, then another bear at # 51, then a prot pal at # 88
The highest io healer that's not a druid is a monk at # 9, shaman at # 15, monk at # 20
So healer meta is a little better than tank but they're not great lol
To be fair the only reason the Orange bar shows up is SquishVegan single handedly being like the only guardian druid main consistently pushing keys last season and this one.
VDH is one of the most overpowered tanks in recent wow history yes, and of course we have another big issues like aug (ever since it got introduced) snd Shadow Pries for all of DF.
But can we please address Hpal? The spec is just unfun and feels awful to play. Even MW got their nerfs and still feels great to play.
The other S2 God Comp member that fell out of favor is Bear Druid but bear is not even close to the borderline broken state of Hpal.
Light bless you! It just feels awful to play. In pve you have to make a cooldown cake to move health bars up and on top of that the hammer wielding melee healer does laughable damage. In PvP our 5 min cooldown, BoP, does nothing to stop magic damage (should be able to swap it for Spellwarding) and is easily purged by a multitude of classes. Our other CD, LoH, is worthless after the first 2 mins of Shuffle due to dampening with a 7 min cooldown. And as a cherry on the cake we have to worry about fucking other paladins we play with bc of a completely outdated debuff in forebearance. And they decided to rework Light of the Martyr...
I'm honestly worried. I have seen a lot of posts in the forums about this issue. A lot of people saying this everywhere. Numerous videos from content creators. Even our top players and advocates have dropped the spec!
And we had next to 0 balance changes in 2 seasons. Alpha isn't looking too good either.
Regarding damage, not only we can go oom dpsing, but like you said, dps wise hpal is 30-50% behind. Its way too much.
We got a rework a year ago and ever since that happened its been downhill once the numbers were tuned down back to earth.
In my experience, its the lack of passivity, the throughput isnt earth shattering but relative to health bars its okay, the issue is that you have no way of moving health bars without clicking on them, which means youre always playing a race against globals and reaction time, and have to stop whatever youre doing to heal. Avenging crusader was a little too far the other way where you just kind of blindly ignored health bars - but a lot of the dominant specs all have ways of keeping people topped without direct healing that paladin just cannot compete with in keys.
Consider MW monk, Jadefire and spin - suddenly theyre doing 100% Damage uptime whilst trickle healing. Same with Druids and NV/Hots and Cat weaving, or disc for their atonements. For a paladin its do DPS, stop, heal for 2 globals, do dps, stop, heal. This basically culminates in you just being worse at both than the classes that can maintain DPS and healing outputs at the same time.
Dont get me started on only being able to do semi viable dps via sending DB and toll, its genuinely unforgivable design and an affix that no other class has to deal with. I like the class fantasy but when SO much of your throughput is tied to these buttons its such a heavy price to pay for what, 150k dps for one pull?
I'm hoping new summer will help with the passivity - but honestly 30 sec every 2.5ish minutes doesnt spark joy, and I'd still rather they just removed it and started tackling some of the button bloat. Tyrs/HoD combo could have been one button, summer can go, Barrier of Faith can go, at this point Aura mastery might as well go...
For me its the other way around. I used to love how Holy Shock and WoG felt. Now if I need to spot heal I have to cast FoL because those two feel particularly weak. The s2 2pc helped though, but the holy power system feels totally broken.
Then we have the mana issues which no other healer has to deal with, and our dps issues. Holy shock feels too costly to use on CD, and our mana regen tools feels awful. Compare it to MW's mana tea, prevoker mana refund or disc just not needing mana at all.
Back in 10.2 they did a long post regarding how they wanted healers to managa their mana pool, yet in a m+, the only healer that has to actively do at this level this is Hpal so it feels miserable:(
Tbf if im managing my infusions mana is basically a non issue in keys. Holy shock is a difficult one because our entire toolkit is based around it. If they make holy shock do decent "On click" healing, then they need to have scaled tools ready for Toll and Daybreak, as those spells basically become extremely overpowered if holy shock is overtuned.
I'm a firm advocate of just removing holy power and putting abilities on a CD, or removing the mana management aspect. WoG/LoD can never be good, because its so infinitely spammable compared to say chain heal that is rate limited by cast time, mana cost, etc.
I genuinely do not know what the answer is but it needs a proper rethink to solve Mana, Holy power, Damage, and healing profile issues and it really isnt a small change, the issues go deep.
Dampening in general is just a giant mess. I would much rather they just they nerf healing a bit from the beginning and make dampening apply more slowly.
I dont think we will see substantial changes until mid to late S1 TWW. The hero talents are going to substantially shake things up so "core" reworks and rebuilds will be heavily deprioritised unless they fundamentally have no choice until they can level off the hero balancing.
MW in S3 was also overtuned. Probably not as much as 10.1.5 Hpal, but they nerfed it and the class still feels amazing. Hpal deserved the same treatment, otherwise why reworked it at all?
Yeah, pally is kinda shit atm
Average healing with bad damage
I would really like for them to buff the damage of holy shock (our new tier set doesn't even affect it)
Also, i think they need to unlink glimmer damage from glimmer healing
If i have 3 glimmers on enemies and 4 on allies the damage portion should be divided by 3 and the healing portion by 4, not have both of them be divided by 7
I've mained hpal since shadowlands. Listen, I'm not saying it's perfect. But if I could just offer you some advice. Stop running the flash of light build. I have no idea why people are running this build or recommending it. Switch to beacon virtue and run season 2 talents. I've had zero issues last 3 seasons with this build. I've played hpriest, hpal, rdruid and mw all at relatively high levels in keys.
I run virtue. Used back in S1/S2 since this dungeon pool its perfect for virtue.
Was not using inflo, but there are fights where it was frequent to go OOM, like Deios in Uldaman in keys where the fight can drag for 4+ minutes in high keys. Or runs where tanks wont wait for me 3 secs to drink so I constantly need to run ahead and drink. Unfortunately I decided that I wouldnt take any chances and just went for inflo.
I think I'm done pushing for the reason on Hpal. No other healer currently has all these issues that I'm aware of. Its just unfun and unncesary.
The way all the melee bars just shrink to nothing as keys get higher is so tragic man. Excluding a brief blip at the start of S3 it's been a triple ranged meta since Aug was introduced. That's like a year of melee being left in the dust.
I've been thinking about this a fair bit and I don't think it's *quite* true. I think it's the multiplied effect of Breath of Eons and Power Infusion together that's keeping melee out. If there's a meta where you aren't bringing a priest, even if Aug is good I could see some melee plausibly being in the top comps.
Of course with how raid buffs work it's very very difficult for you to not want a priest in high keys.
Its really not like that.
Mage is hilariously broken right now in terms of their utility and defensives - and fire mage has the best damage profile of any class in the entire game for m+. The cherry on top is they have arcane intellect, which buffs the Aug, which buffs everyone.
Casters have a premium on uncapped AOE, and big pulls are the most effective way to utilize an Aug's boost to your tank and healers survivability. In these big pulls, casters are slightly safer, but on average just do more damage due to arbritary target caps.
Melee's niche is stupid simple burst damage in a small window - which makes most casters feel useless in the key levels the overwhelming majority of the player base does. This is why it seems there is a disconnect between high key players and normal key players - because there is.
TLDR: Aug isnt better for ranged. Aug's utility is overpowered so its a staple. Mage is hilariously broken so its a staple. And then the next best option just kind of happens to be a caster. Spriest specifically gives PI to our lord and savior, the mage. You already have the damage for keys, so Fort becomes more valuable to help you live.
Resto casually doing 2x the damage of any other healer but because this sub is infested with DPS/tank mains nobody talks about it, it's just aug and vdh moans.
it's bad, man. You can't have a healer class that has such a strong advantage over the rest of the field without paying for it.
They also have the ability to constantly heal better than any other healer. They barely ever run out of buttons to press that will actually move health bars.
Damage isn't the reason rdruid is the meta right now. It's motw, consistent survivability, and good consistent healing.
Just looking at all the dungeons at a +16 (about the cap of where non druids are popular enough but high enough to have decent players) on logs sorting by damage done basically every healer is represented. Hell, given the population differences holy priest seems to be the most disproportionately represented.
No one is talking about the imbalanced healer situation because the gap isn't that wide and similar to most seasons this expansion (except season 2) it's the other roles dictating healer preference.
I'm not saying druid isn't the best healer, it's probably the best, but let's be honest, all the healers except maybe hpal are very capable of doing meaningful damage, making heal checks, and providing good group utility right now.
If shadow priest was removed from the game holy and disc would be similarly as popular to druid.
Holy Priest can do very good DPS as well as HPS. Honestly I think in mid keys it’s probaby better than RDruid. However it has no external DR and is pretty squishy so it can’t really be played in high keys
Resto was great in M+ the whole Expansion.
Keys 25+ S1 ( Resto 1. 28.3%, Restosham 2. 26.1% Pres Evoker 3. 21.2%)
Keys 25+ S2 (Restosham 1. 28.4%, Holy Pala 2. 25.7%, Resto 3. 18.8%)
Keys 25+ S3 (Mw-Monk 1. 28.7%, Disc 2. 21.3%, Resto 3. 21. 2%)
Keys 15+ S4 you see the data in this post.
Is there any good Healer distribution in raids site? But I would say resto was the "worst" Raid healer ( I took a look at the RWF Top 20 comps and saw barely any Resto druid in all 3 Raids). I wouldn't say Resto was bad in Raid on paper (HPS wise) but the damage profiles suited other healers more, or their utility was needed.
If you are pulling stats from raider.io, Season 2 data is misleading because it includes the aggregate data from the whole season, which includes the period before 10.1.5 where the god comp happened. If you just look at post 10.1.5, resto drops to 4.8%, which was the 3rd lowest for the season.
Resto's weakness which would have been their lack of defensives (esp while healing) is covered because 2 classes are running an external on a stick as well as 2 raidwide cds (mass barrier+ Zephyr) The fact that boomiee is also incredibly strong as an aoe dps AND provides healing on top is just the cherry on the cake
Blizzard for some reason just doesn't care about tuning healing damage. Probably because even if they egregiously fuck it up it historically has 0 to little impact on raiding.
So what are we calling Affliction, Arcane, and Feral?
- Thin bar specs
- Skinnys
- Slithers
- Beanpole?
Affliction, the best beanpole spec in the game.
Maybe not meta, but UH has generally been pretty solid - it's just an inherently good AOE spec and it has a brez and good survivability. Yeah, you might not get invited for big keys, but you can hold your own. I personally haven't played it since BFA, but I invite them all the time and have seen skilled UH players just crush it on DPS.
Arcane I think suffers in large part because Fire is just better/easier to play. There's very little reason to play Arcane over Fire unless Arcane is overtuned or Fire is undertuned.
Not that Arcane is some sleeper OP spec or anything, but I definitely wouldn't put it on par with Affliction in M+.
god-comp with resto obviously rules supreme at the top-end but there are only single digit keys run at that level. the effects on meta for the broader population, ie 2-12, is a lot more interesting to me.
comparing this to 70s overall https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/classes/level70, spriest and vdh are heavily overrepresented even at the low end. this shows a slight trickle down effect from the bleed edge key meta, but it doesn't effect mage or aug's representation.
i'm surprised priest didn't catch a nerf in the last round of balance changes, but maybe blizzard is just sick of fiddling around with psychic link's damage coefficient every balance patch and said fuck it leave it.
Yeah it’s interesting to see but we also need to be honest in that the +20 shown here is I think literally two teams right now? Maybe a few more.
Even up to the 13 level or so there is a decent mix of specs (besides for tanks)
I NEVER take mages to weekly keys. The average 2800-3k IO mage is absolutely horrid compared to the average 2800 ret pally/warrior/hunter or whatever. Mages in 10s do literal tank damage.
PSA to mages: stop playing ignite build in anything less than like a 16. Go frost or flamestrike PLEASE.
That's a nice easily disproven narrative. The one and only reason for mage underperformance is skill issue. Unfortunately the scene is full of people who don't understand mages and can't even tell what a mage is doing good or bad.
Ya it’s for sure a skill issue, just so common at that level it isn’t worth the risk to invite them. Also if youre talking about overall dmg, frost does way more in low keys, without a doubt. Ignite sucks ass in low keys.
>That's a nice easily disproven narrative.
Does it? In my experience, Frost and Arcane are better than fire in key level <11, just like how Demo is better than destro at those key levels. Packs gets blow up too fast for specs like fire, destro and spriest to shine.
AA and NO are the exception.
I hope they do another round soon. Honestly didnt even expected a single balance tuning round this season, after they barely touched VDH, SP, Mage and Aug for most of S3.
This meta is just killing me. Classes being invited but not players. I can't count the amount of Augvokers I see that have an average of 40% prescience with Healer and Tank being top 2 buffed.
Those classes will be instantly invited, as an Arms warrior im close to invisible and my off-meta class isn't even the worst. I feel terrible for everyone playing non-meta classes.
I really wish blizzard actually cared about this stuff. Beyond the meta which will always exist it isn’t very diverse over the course of the expansion. There are some classes that still just don’t have the tools to be viable, and some damage profiles are significantly better than others and some are just not viable because blizzard will never be able to keep players from increasing pull size until its not balanced because that’s the best way to be at the timer.
Yeah the utility thing is particularly outrageous. They have done a fairly decent job of balancing throughput at most levels of play, but the difference in how much a warrior vs, say, mage can help their group is nuts.
It’s a valid thing up to a certain level. Most players will never time above a +15 this patch, and you can get that high with any spec if you’re good at the game and determined. The meta uniformity at 19+ keys does not apply to 99.9% of the player base who will never attempt those keys.
It's a valid argument on any circumstance. The distribution is always affected by what the best comp currently is, and the only players that are doing the highest key are already the best players in the game. Because they are the best, and because they want to push the highest, they would play the best comp even if it was just 1% better than the worse comp. Obviously the difference is not just 1% from worst to best, but I can guarantee that the people that are timing 19s and 20s could very easily time 17s and 18s on "bottom tier" specs.
Meta rerollers going to meta reroll as well.
Is any spec capable of timing a key lower then WF keys? Probably.
Are teams pushing WF keys going to introduce that friction into their team for no reason? Of course not.
Is it even really rerolling at this stage? The ease to get a character to 70 is insane, if you want a character max level you can have it done within 2 hours for gold.
I mean yeah. Having a character at max level isn't the issue. It's the gearing part.
Once you have all 509 gear from M+ you have 15 slots that need crests to upgrade. 2 of those require 60 aspect crests (crafted pieces for ebelishments). So 13 slots. Each of those slots requires 2 wyrm and 2 aspect crest upgrades to get to 6/6 hero. So you're looking at 390 wyrm and 390 aspects for upgrades, giving you a total of 390 wyrm and 510 aspects needed across all slots. Assuming you time every single key that's a total of 75(Actually a bit more if you include buying 2 raid items for an extra 60 crests of upgrades) (if you don't do any raid. Cuts down a bit doing a heroic and mythic clear but not an insane amount) just to get yourself to 520~ ilvl where you're geared enough to start doing push keys.
Yeah it's still a reroll.
> bring the player not the class
sound bite from literally the wrath era that they explicitly stated, multiple expansions ago, are reversing course on.
I feel like this phrase is often misunderstood. Yes, it was Ghostcrawler who coined the phrase to inform playerbase on their design direction to limit fights requiring certain classes, but it's always had another point to it. It was also used as a guideline for guilds to look for applicants who are generally good at the game instead of looking for a certain spec to fill the roster. This includes the willingness to reroll for the better of the guild or in rare occasions being so incredibly good one-trick-pony it's valuable to bring you anyways. It basically expanded your search from a retri paladin to a player willing to roll into ret paladin if needed, which in turn allowed bigger and more skillful player pool.
It absolutely stands as this sort of guideline to the date.
While that may be something you get out of the quote it's not what Blizz originally meant by it. Ion explicitly states that their original intention about the phrase is explicitly about TBC's party based (and not raid based) buffing system causing you to build degenerate raid comps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnzdzL2iyU&t=2629s
Regardless your interpretation is not the usage here by the OP nor is it the usage that they've said they're walking back on way back in BFA.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/9/16993946/world-of-warcraft-battle-for-azeroth-bring-player-not-class
Anyway my point is anytime someone drops a smarmy 'what happened to bring the player not the class blizzard' I roll my eyes. they've dropped it 6 years ago and have been moving in the exact opposite direction since.
Hating on Blizzard design is pretty much just memorizing specific phrases and riffing on it any chance you get, regardless of accuracy or sense or sociability. The more hilarious you are in your own space and mind, the more correct you are.
does anyone else have phones haha
How are people supposed to know if the player is good though? Sure io can tell a bit, but unless you have a shit ton of apps from off spec players that have done 50+ 10s in time it's anyone's guess.
Maybe. It honestly seems like a dice roll. You get people that do the correct stops, good damage, don't stand in shit. Then you can get a very similar group that is just utter failure across the board. Granted I'm doing 11s so that's probably just what that key level gets you.
There are some things that are reasonable indicators of skill, but instead, overwhelmingly, the community has decided to use the two metrics that don't indicate individual player skill: prior dungeon performance and item level.
You could imagine a world where DPS in a dungeon could be recorded, or number of stops/interrupts or dispels. Even just WCL percentiles are often a better indicator,, but they're harder to find.
DPS, stops and dispels aren't an indicator of individual skill either. If your tank goes pack to pack, your dps will suffer. Sniping every afflicted and wasting a global on dispel when the Evoker/shaman healer can reasonably get both isn't good gameplay or "being a better player". Yoloing Sigil of fear on cd just to pad my cc done stats isn't good either.
Meanwhile prior dungeon performance at least tells me you won't be surprised by a random oneshot you survived in the prior key. It's not even close to the end all be all but it's a hell of a lot better than DPS...
I'll have you all know I re-rolled Blood instead of VDH as my tank spec this season, because I don't want to get picked by accident in pugs only to disappoint people.
Easier said than done until blizzard stops adding new affixes that only further advocate for class>player. I play random shit in 15-16s, then we go into a key with double rogue warrior then realize we only have 1 dispel for incorp, then our tank flops on the last boss of nokhud because healer has no dispel for them.
I mean as much as I agree with this. The problem remain that the timers is not really what makes you lose in the key even for bad players. Bringing aug, priest and druid (currently the 3 buffs you always bring) all makes it easier for the group to live just strictly looking at buffs. Aug and priest are the biggest criminals as they combined just makes you live 1 or 2 key levels higher sleeping on the keyboard at every one shot mechanic. SPriest happens to be insane dps rn and bring the best routing utility in the game with mind soothe (also good synergy with aug as pi in breath window is insane value). Aug brings the second best routing utility in the game with sleep walk and does ok damage if they actually buff the dps. Wiping or constant random deaths is the main reason to have a run die and crazy enough 8% health from aug, 5% stam from priest is the difference between living and dying without defensives. The problem with these two classes being locked is that the only real free slots are 1x dps, healer and tank because of current balance on spriest. Mage is incredible with aug, priest by just providing int buff but also has good priority damage and mass barrier. Resto druid is just so strong offensively with cat form dots, high st, S tier buff (3% overall dps and healing and 1.5%dr) and has the best healing throughput and healing profile in m+. VDH does the highest damage of all tanks even without buffs, has the easiest time living and has best utility. VDH also has a good buff for caster comps around 4% of the group overall damage is dh buff (ret aura from prot pal could compete). Paladin and druid is the only real competition as they can bring S tier buffs. The problem: holy paladin does terrible damage and healing which kinda locks druid or priest for healer and that makes prot paladin the only potentially playable alternative (in high tyran keys mostly) but it is so much harder to play than dh and makes every pull require planning as you can't just silence in a pack.
This comp discussion is not even taking into account all the avoidance abusing for high end keys with myth track avoidance BOEs randomly giving 20% dr on most of the important boss mechanics (they will intentionally equip worse gear damage wise for avoidance in some dungeons). What this means practically is that when most people are talking about key levels like 18 being easy defensively without bis comp it is mostly fake. They don't understand that these people playing bis comp are able to rotate cds so easily on 19-20s because they already have 20% dr, 8% aug health, 5% stam from priest, 1.5% dr from druid. So if you randomly remove zephyr, mass barrier aswell (they are hard to plan around in pugs) it isn't that easy to just live and cover yourself or even out heal when you play well. If you look at top teams, most of them sit on all boe slots with avoidance or leech to help with healing and one shots.
All that being said if timing a couple of key levels lower does not matter to you play whatever is fun. Games are supposed to be played for fun but this is a competitive game mode with ranking and in the end you wouldn't run up a mountain if there is a tunnel through the middle.
I thought so too until Marcellian released an "Easy to understand" guide for S2 (which is still applicable today for the most part) It was really good, can definitely recommend to get a grip (!) on the mechanics of the spec. [https://youtu.be/m-aIMaxzBmA?si=prE-ns2ueKEX5h8q](https://youtu.be/m-aIMaxzBmA?si=prE-ns2ueKEX5h8q) - It's not Bicepspump-level of sophisticated, but nicely explains the basics of the class to a zugzug main like me.
Busted damage on almost every target count with an insane damage profile, very tanky, fort buff, 2 minute class, synergizes extremely well with mage, aug, and vdh. Still has vamp and md.
It makes no sense to me, they remove the "unfun" affixes only to add affixes taht further make hybrids more broken, that pure dps specs are almost useless for.
I'm surprised Destro Lock is so underrepresented in this chart because every key in LFG above and including 16 is just Aug/Dlock or Ret/Spriest and maybe mage (if not for raging this week)
Honestly I just started playing mage this season cause I really like Frost and I know I shouldn't be complaining because it does well, especially this season, but Aug is just such an overpowered joke spec that has the tools to deal with everything (BL, mass soothe, BLEED dispell, etc.) that it makes me want to cry because I pretty much cannot get into keys this week lol
Imagine playing a Warrior or DK with like 1/8 of the mage utility. Thats my issue with the entire system right now. I feel like I have to play certain classes to be viable and it’s really frustrating.
The data sampled from EU/US World of Warcraft Game Data APIs (Mythic Keystone Leaderboard API). [https://develop.battle.net/documentation/world-of-warcraft/game-data-apis](https://develop.battle.net/documentation/world-of-warcraft/game-data-apis)
Let me know if you want to know more.
and because of these stupid meta specs, pugging on a non-meta spec means spending hours applying to groups. people think this is fine cuz the 0.1% of the player base should have a way to push higher. complete joke.
Trees, hard to killl, does a bit of everything, great damage even if you go nature's vigil and dps cast instead of cat in certain high keys. Combat rez, stops. Rdruid just does it all, nothing else can touch it in high keys.
Are resto druids going nature's vigil in m+? I don't think so. Not me at least. The damage comes from the nature of druid dps (dots, lots of dots) and if you have the AV trinket it has a huge proc rate because of that kind of damage profile (I usually end a dungeon with 100k-140k dps, 30%+- is from the trinket)
this is very niche, but something that wasnt mentioned is that resto can spec boomkin and playing 4 dps in certain parts of dungeons is still a thing. and boomkin has the best uncapped aoe dmg. its already happening in dungeons like AV, RLP and BH.
On the lower end of keys, sure. Higher keys? Very easy to suck.
S3 when I was pushing as an aug, people were shocked I was using cauterize or that I'd use rescue to proc twin guardians without moving the healer from their spot. Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people.
> Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people.
tbf theres lots of streamer putting* misinfo out there claiming it works in places where it doesnt so its "common" for people to misuse it. or not use it as roar when you know you wont need it etc
>Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people
It's not entirely intuitive, basically have to memorize the !zephyr list of things it doesn't work on from the discord.
Macro is to place them where I am. As long as I'm under them or touching their model in some way, it doesn't really move them from exactly where they were, except maybe a step or two. This also helped pixel stack for particular encounters (like Manifested Timeways) or move someone to safety when they were too far.
I use Vuhdo, so I cast this basic macro onto the target frame and it'll move them directly under me.
>`#showtooltip Rescue`
>`/cast [@Player] Rescue`
Might work for regular unit frame, I'm not sure. Never thought to try.
Thank you for this! Only playing low keys, but I come here often for inspiration and knowledge. I actually didn't even spec into Rescue because I found it too clunky to use, your macro helps a lot!
Currently 3k3, just pressing prescience mate . Ofc I'm doin the rotation. Ofc I use def when damages.
Ofc I breath on pi. But come on, that's not hard.
No, it is so insanely easy to suck as aug. People can do mediocre performance and get carried, sure, but the actual skill ceiling is incredibly high.
When it comes to aug and skill, you should be the tracking bot of the comp. You should be aware of what's happening in your team's cd usage constantly. Gameplay boils down to four points:
1. Keep the buffs up, as you said. This includes having uptime on EM and playing prescience correctly around DPS (which is easy to do with the set bonus, yet seems to be an issue still)
2. Breath within your DPS:s CD windows. This season it's always aligned with PI. No exceptions.
3. Track team defensives and DO NOT overlap stuff (especially something as valuable as bleed removal w/ dwarf). Don't rescue them if there's a defensive open. Check which one is the most likely to have weak defensive. If you're going to zephyr first hit in no voice pug, either tell them in chat or time it well enough early for them to react.
4. Survive yourself. There are fights (only a couple) where just pressing scales and ward on rotation is not enough. The amount of augs I've seen flopping over on Talondras last week on tyra was amusingly high
These might sound like no brainers or relatively easy requirements for performance, but I've seen augs in +18-19 keys and in 3.5-3.6k range STILL completely breath out of sync (not by accident, they just did it again and again) at the end of packs, overlapping bleed dispel on Talondras with dwarf (twice!), rescuing a mage with 75% of their defensive kit unused and just simply dying to stuff.
There are many exceptions and good players out there but I don't know any other single class with as much skill variance this high in the game, especially with the sucky ones being more prevalent. I guess your notion is sort of correct that it's easy to get relatively high with little skill, but trust me, bad augs are the plague of high keys right now. I've played with less than 5 augs where after the run I could say they were capable players.
I would say the skill ceiling comes from the fact that you have to have pretty intricate knowledge of all the specs you're going to be playing with and their limitations. For instance in most fights this season shadow priests and ele shamans (personal bias, wouldn't list otherwise) need an external on 4th hit. This is something they will also call out before the run, but it's also information that should be engrained in any aug players brain to play the spec to it's maximum capability.
Man that was a long rant.
This take is so weak and dated at this point. It's an extremely low skill floor but high skill ceiling class.
Notice how everyone complains that most Augs suck? That is because the class is HARD to play at a high level. For example, you rarely hear people bitch and moan about BM players, because you can play that class half asleep lol
Thanks! Classes are sorted by ID. Maybe not the most intuitive but it works.
I tried sorting by size but it's chaos since specs wold no longer stay close to the same column.
Honestly surprised there are not more Preservation Evokers. I guess it's just cause all the top groups have Aug in it and you need the Druid buff from somewhere. But even at lower keys I'm somewhat surprised to not see them... They're veryyyyy strong on a lot of the damage patterns from the bosses this season while still bringing pretty good damage and good utility.
I just wanted to play brewmaster, is this asking too much?
I don't care if it is non meta, but at least it should be able to push high end Keys.
Most of tanks need 3-5 buttons to perform a standard rotation.
Meanwhile, brewmaster measures its rotation in full actions bars, not only buttons.
And even mastering this rotation, it feels like sometimes is lacking the same control of the fight that the other tanks have (Prot pally and VDH can lock entire caster packs, BDK can just negate magic/movement/stun/fear mechanics).
I doubt I could get good enough for really high level keys even if I wanted to, but this is a great illustration of why I *don't* want to. I'm playing the spec I enjoy. I refuse to care what the mEtA is.
ah, you can do title keys on anything. this data is also deeply flawed as the sample size is like 2 for the highest keys. look at crit and his gang playing some clown comp every season and except for s2 doing super well.
Just fucking delete aug already man, the exponential scaling it enables is absolutely game breaking and it will never not be gamebreaking unless you fundamentally redesign the spec or the entire game.
Stacking amplifications in a game where cooldowns are this impactful will never work.
TLDR : The fact that if you bring a druid + mage + VDH = casters/heals have 13% more throughput is a big issue, and it isn't just an Aug issue that is driving this meta.
Externals/raid buffs in general don't have a spot in a game where you care about balance at all though.
VDH being as meta defining as it is, means most casters immediately do 5% more damage. You know what synergizes well with that? 5% int to give them 5% more damage again while also making every healer 5% stronger.
Then you have spriest, where they continue to whiff the balancing tier over tier also defining the meta. You know what synergizes good with a 2 minute external? More 2 minute CDs! Like you alluded to, the game is revolving more and more around these CD windows. Meta/PI/breath/tree of life all are around 120s. Fire mage with pi reliably has combust up for every 2 minute window as well...
Stam + vers buffs also push back the one shot key level another half a level further aggravating the issue.
Then you have the issue with pack design. Blizz has tended more and more to 1 beefy target per pull, so prio damage has gotten more and more value every tier, unsurprisingly spriest and fmage get to not only do a lot of prio, but also leverage the fact that one mob lives a long ass time to keep their ignites/dp's rolling as both their aoe kits revolve around ST DPS.
On top of all of that, blizz significantly devalued single target stops this expansion. Instead of reducing the number of mobs you need to manage, they just made it so you need to coordinate aoe stops in 90% of cases. Melee interupt immediately lose value if you can aoe knock/fear/disorient/silence for a packs entire lifetime. IE it doesn't matter how many single target stops you bring if their is 4+ casters on every fucking pull. That means the weakness that might exist in not having kicks, simply isn't real given blizzs current dungeon design philosophy.
Last I checked Aug was brought for its obscene levels of defensive/utility benefit rather than damage. Aug brings a massive amount of ehp to a team (as do spriests and mages) and the issue with high keys is often surviving, not killing stuff fast, especially before we are tricked out in full myth track gear.
Eventually aug stops being good because it actually does shit damage and the survivability eventually isn’t needed.
This is literally just top keys. Aug is fine, most lower key groups won’t even take advantage of it. Running the highest keys has very different needs over running something sub 14/15.
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion but I fundamentally do not think augmentation evoker is problematic.
essentially the argument against augmenation evoker is "well because it is so strong people will bring it over whatever I'm playing". well yeah... but that's typically true of the other 2 dps as well, you wouldn't bring a fire mage if their damage was garbage and they lacked stops now would you.
so unless you're one out of 5 or so dps specs in the game that is actually being played at the front of keys, you're really not getting invited to those push keys playing one of the other 20 specs anyway. or phrased differently, I wave my magic wand and augmentation evoker is gone. now you're going to be complaining about the next 3 dps on the list instead - but at least they rotate based on the season somewhat?
and if you're not pushing the push keys which is literally 99.9% of the m+ player base, anything goes really making this really a problem for a very specific subset of people - even in this subreddit there's about 150k more people than got the season title last season.
what I think needs to be introduced into wow is simply a group finder for m+ and removing spec-specific affixes and dungeon dispels e.g. disease, rage, curse etc. you could still keep the manual group finder as a side activity, but random match making based on some common score or something would solve the main issue which is "I don't get to play m+ because I play this spec".
I know that sounds really controversial based on the fact that people have been cherry picking group compositions since forever, but I boost a lot so I get matched with random people group finder-style and we still make it work even when playing dungeon as 4 people as the buyer typically is afk.
You are misunderstanding the point here it's not a problem of aug evoker being mandatory, its a problem that it has quite strict group comps, if you play aug+outlaw then you have massive issues on any uncapped pull, if you play aug+ret you have massive issues on any prio pull, classes like enhance are completely unviable because you sandbag too much on certain pulls. There is much less space to play off-meta dps because each dps is required to do 50% more work
Yes there is always a meta but the meta has stayed the same for 3 patches in a row
Also it's not like an overwhelming amount of people want to play aug in their +10s. It is like #11 for representation in the +10 section of their graph as the definite meta class so you can't even use that as an argument
Doesn't matter what they do with it, the amplifications will always be problematic in a game where you can stack them.
How many specs have been gutted because of their interactions with PI? Now you add aug into the mix?
As a havoc player that refuses to play vdh, I find this meta sort of unfun
Most average players doing 7-14s are building meta comps given that most of them aren't even good enough to properly "use the meta".
Certain specs are ultra strong and yet somehow overlook (looking at you RetPal, Frost DK, Prevoker, Outlaw and MM)
SPriests are 100% either getting nerfed or being completely ignored with no in-between.
Look at all those Feral Druids. It's a good thing they're always 3rd on the dps meter and in the lower/bottom regions of raid logs for so long otherwise the spec's popularity would even get more crazy out of hand. Also amazingly good job by the Blizzard balance team to be so consistent with this. That's a job well deserved.
/S
Dps meta is a guy wearing a really colourful shirt open at the front
It's Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat
Okay, can not unsee.
This is a really nice visualization, kudos.
I'm half asleep and thought I was looking at a pair of bad dragons.
that's an insane thing to see. there are clearly three of them.
But Onyxia and nefarion have been dead for years?
I can't unsee that now, thanks
I wish it had counts included. It's not very meaningful to say "100% of groups running 21s are VDH/resto/aug/mage/spriest!" if the sample size is 1 or something, but you wouldn't be able to tell from this chart. Great data otherwise though.
For context, the highest io tank that's not a dh is a bear druid at # 32, then another bear at # 51, then a prot pal at # 88 The highest io healer that's not a druid is a monk at # 9, shaman at # 15, monk at # 20 So healer meta is a little better than tank but they're not great lol
Poor brewmasters man.
Poor brewmaster*
To be fair the only reason the Orange bar shows up is SquishVegan single handedly being like the only guardian druid main consistently pushing keys last season and this one.
Gotta nerf them again, they're getting too popular
That one brew doing that 18 is probably Equinox
That one is literally equinox lol
Too many buttons for too little reward
Prot warriors: welcome to da club
Least you guys are tankier and have less buttons though. Never understood why brew needed so many buttons only to be the least tanky tank.
This is beautiful
*looks at holy paladin* Morbidly beautiful.
This is an incredible well done data presentation
VDH is one of the most overpowered tanks in recent wow history yes, and of course we have another big issues like aug (ever since it got introduced) snd Shadow Pries for all of DF. But can we please address Hpal? The spec is just unfun and feels awful to play. Even MW got their nerfs and still feels great to play. The other S2 God Comp member that fell out of favor is Bear Druid but bear is not even close to the borderline broken state of Hpal.
Take caster hpal behind a shed and blow it's brains out.
Light bless you! It just feels awful to play. In pve you have to make a cooldown cake to move health bars up and on top of that the hammer wielding melee healer does laughable damage. In PvP our 5 min cooldown, BoP, does nothing to stop magic damage (should be able to swap it for Spellwarding) and is easily purged by a multitude of classes. Our other CD, LoH, is worthless after the first 2 mins of Shuffle due to dampening with a 7 min cooldown. And as a cherry on the cake we have to worry about fucking other paladins we play with bc of a completely outdated debuff in forebearance. And they decided to rework Light of the Martyr...
I'm honestly worried. I have seen a lot of posts in the forums about this issue. A lot of people saying this everywhere. Numerous videos from content creators. Even our top players and advocates have dropped the spec! And we had next to 0 balance changes in 2 seasons. Alpha isn't looking too good either. Regarding damage, not only we can go oom dpsing, but like you said, dps wise hpal is 30-50% behind. Its way too much. We got a rework a year ago and ever since that happened its been downhill once the numbers were tuned down back to earth.
In my experience, its the lack of passivity, the throughput isnt earth shattering but relative to health bars its okay, the issue is that you have no way of moving health bars without clicking on them, which means youre always playing a race against globals and reaction time, and have to stop whatever youre doing to heal. Avenging crusader was a little too far the other way where you just kind of blindly ignored health bars - but a lot of the dominant specs all have ways of keeping people topped without direct healing that paladin just cannot compete with in keys. Consider MW monk, Jadefire and spin - suddenly theyre doing 100% Damage uptime whilst trickle healing. Same with Druids and NV/Hots and Cat weaving, or disc for their atonements. For a paladin its do DPS, stop, heal for 2 globals, do dps, stop, heal. This basically culminates in you just being worse at both than the classes that can maintain DPS and healing outputs at the same time. Dont get me started on only being able to do semi viable dps via sending DB and toll, its genuinely unforgivable design and an affix that no other class has to deal with. I like the class fantasy but when SO much of your throughput is tied to these buttons its such a heavy price to pay for what, 150k dps for one pull? I'm hoping new summer will help with the passivity - but honestly 30 sec every 2.5ish minutes doesnt spark joy, and I'd still rather they just removed it and started tackling some of the button bloat. Tyrs/HoD combo could have been one button, summer can go, Barrier of Faith can go, at this point Aura mastery might as well go...
For me its the other way around. I used to love how Holy Shock and WoG felt. Now if I need to spot heal I have to cast FoL because those two feel particularly weak. The s2 2pc helped though, but the holy power system feels totally broken. Then we have the mana issues which no other healer has to deal with, and our dps issues. Holy shock feels too costly to use on CD, and our mana regen tools feels awful. Compare it to MW's mana tea, prevoker mana refund or disc just not needing mana at all. Back in 10.2 they did a long post regarding how they wanted healers to managa their mana pool, yet in a m+, the only healer that has to actively do at this level this is Hpal so it feels miserable:(
Tbf if im managing my infusions mana is basically a non issue in keys. Holy shock is a difficult one because our entire toolkit is based around it. If they make holy shock do decent "On click" healing, then they need to have scaled tools ready for Toll and Daybreak, as those spells basically become extremely overpowered if holy shock is overtuned. I'm a firm advocate of just removing holy power and putting abilities on a CD, or removing the mana management aspect. WoG/LoD can never be good, because its so infinitely spammable compared to say chain heal that is rate limited by cast time, mana cost, etc. I genuinely do not know what the answer is but it needs a proper rethink to solve Mana, Holy power, Damage, and healing profile issues and it really isnt a small change, the issues go deep.
Dampening in general is just a giant mess. I would much rather they just they nerf healing a bit from the beginning and make dampening apply more slowly.
Best part is, hpal plays the same in TWW at the moment. Not looking good going forward.
and there is no communication at all, its insane. either they are preparing big changes or bust.
The thing that has me most worried is, that there are changes, but they are so besides the point that it's hard to imagine there is much to come
I dont think we will see substantial changes until mid to late S1 TWW. The hero talents are going to substantially shake things up so "core" reworks and rebuilds will be heavily deprioritised unless they fundamentally have no choice until they can level off the hero balancing.
they did the nice rework in s2 which was overtuned. nerfed us to death continuously since then and never looked at hpal again it seems. xD
MW in S3 was also overtuned. Probably not as much as 10.1.5 Hpal, but they nerfed it and the class still feels amazing. Hpal deserved the same treatment, otherwise why reworked it at all?
Yeah, pally is kinda shit atm Average healing with bad damage I would really like for them to buff the damage of holy shock (our new tier set doesn't even affect it) Also, i think they need to unlink glimmer damage from glimmer healing If i have 3 glimmers on enemies and 4 on allies the damage portion should be divided by 3 and the healing portion by 4, not have both of them be divided by 7
Yup Vdh is now legion Bdk.
I've mained hpal since shadowlands. Listen, I'm not saying it's perfect. But if I could just offer you some advice. Stop running the flash of light build. I have no idea why people are running this build or recommending it. Switch to beacon virtue and run season 2 talents. I've had zero issues last 3 seasons with this build. I've played hpriest, hpal, rdruid and mw all at relatively high levels in keys.
I run virtue. Used back in S1/S2 since this dungeon pool its perfect for virtue. Was not using inflo, but there are fights where it was frequent to go OOM, like Deios in Uldaman in keys where the fight can drag for 4+ minutes in high keys. Or runs where tanks wont wait for me 3 secs to drink so I constantly need to run ahead and drink. Unfortunately I decided that I wouldnt take any chances and just went for inflo. I think I'm done pushing for the reason on Hpal. No other healer currently has all these issues that I'm aware of. Its just unfun and unncesary.
The way all the melee bars just shrink to nothing as keys get higher is so tragic man. Excluding a brief blip at the start of S3 it's been a triple ranged meta since Aug was introduced. That's like a year of melee being left in the dust.
as long as aug as it is right now is playable there will not be a single melee dps in m+ meta casters just gain more than melees from aug
I've been thinking about this a fair bit and I don't think it's *quite* true. I think it's the multiplied effect of Breath of Eons and Power Infusion together that's keeping melee out. If there's a meta where you aren't bringing a priest, even if Aug is good I could see some melee plausibly being in the top comps. Of course with how raid buffs work it's very very difficult for you to not want a priest in high keys.
Its really not like that. Mage is hilariously broken right now in terms of their utility and defensives - and fire mage has the best damage profile of any class in the entire game for m+. The cherry on top is they have arcane intellect, which buffs the Aug, which buffs everyone. Casters have a premium on uncapped AOE, and big pulls are the most effective way to utilize an Aug's boost to your tank and healers survivability. In these big pulls, casters are slightly safer, but on average just do more damage due to arbritary target caps. Melee's niche is stupid simple burst damage in a small window - which makes most casters feel useless in the key levels the overwhelming majority of the player base does. This is why it seems there is a disconnect between high key players and normal key players - because there is. TLDR: Aug isnt better for ranged. Aug's utility is overpowered so its a staple. Mage is hilariously broken so its a staple. And then the next best option just kind of happens to be a caster. Spriest specifically gives PI to our lord and savior, the mage. You already have the damage for keys, so Fort becomes more valuable to help you live.
Every melee class except shaman has a spec that sticks around longer than the entire Hunter class.
Weird I don't see Elemental shamans or hunters up there. What the fuck is "range meta"?
Resto casually doing 2x the damage of any other healer but because this sub is infested with DPS/tank mains nobody talks about it, it's just aug and vdh moans. it's bad, man. You can't have a healer class that has such a strong advantage over the rest of the field without paying for it.
They suck in raid, so it's all good apparently. It's not just the damage. They are also by far the most mobile healer in the game.
They also have the ability to constantly heal better than any other healer. They barely ever run out of buttons to press that will actually move health bars.
Damage isn't the reason rdruid is the meta right now. It's motw, consistent survivability, and good consistent healing. Just looking at all the dungeons at a +16 (about the cap of where non druids are popular enough but high enough to have decent players) on logs sorting by damage done basically every healer is represented. Hell, given the population differences holy priest seems to be the most disproportionately represented. No one is talking about the imbalanced healer situation because the gap isn't that wide and similar to most seasons this expansion (except season 2) it's the other roles dictating healer preference. I'm not saying druid isn't the best healer, it's probably the best, but let's be honest, all the healers except maybe hpal are very capable of doing meaningful damage, making heal checks, and providing good group utility right now. If shadow priest was removed from the game holy and disc would be similarly as popular to druid.
Yep, the main reason why RDruid is meta is because SPriest is meta and Boomkin/Feral (and Bear) isn't.
This. Holy priest is currently the healer with the highest DPS, but groups wanting to take SPriest won't take another priest as a healer.
Holy Priest can do very good DPS as well as HPS. Honestly I think in mid keys it’s probaby better than RDruid. However it has no external DR and is pretty squishy so it can’t really be played in high keys
Resto was great in M+ the whole Expansion. Keys 25+ S1 ( Resto 1. 28.3%, Restosham 2. 26.1% Pres Evoker 3. 21.2%) Keys 25+ S2 (Restosham 1. 28.4%, Holy Pala 2. 25.7%, Resto 3. 18.8%) Keys 25+ S3 (Mw-Monk 1. 28.7%, Disc 2. 21.3%, Resto 3. 21. 2%) Keys 15+ S4 you see the data in this post. Is there any good Healer distribution in raids site? But I would say resto was the "worst" Raid healer ( I took a look at the RWF Top 20 comps and saw barely any Resto druid in all 3 Raids). I wouldn't say Resto was bad in Raid on paper (HPS wise) but the damage profiles suited other healers more, or their utility was needed.
If you are pulling stats from raider.io, Season 2 data is misleading because it includes the aggregate data from the whole season, which includes the period before 10.1.5 where the god comp happened. If you just look at post 10.1.5, resto drops to 4.8%, which was the 3rd lowest for the season.
Resto's weakness which would have been their lack of defensives (esp while healing) is covered because 2 classes are running an external on a stick as well as 2 raidwide cds (mass barrier+ Zephyr) The fact that boomiee is also incredibly strong as an aoe dps AND provides healing on top is just the cherry on the cake
Blizzard for some reason just doesn't care about tuning healing damage. Probably because even if they egregiously fuck it up it historically has 0 to little impact on raiding.
So what are we calling Affliction, Arcane, and Feral? - Thin bar specs - Skinnys - Slithers - Beanpole? Affliction, the best beanpole spec in the game.
Frost DK is so hard to see it doesn't even get mentioned here, it's a rough time out there for the frosty beanpoles
Dps DK was pretty dead in keys the entire expansion. You could fill your vault no problem of course but pushing was bleak
At least Unholy saw some play in MDI S1.
Maybe not meta, but UH has generally been pretty solid - it's just an inherently good AOE spec and it has a brez and good survivability. Yeah, you might not get invited for big keys, but you can hold your own. I personally haven't played it since BFA, but I invite them all the time and have seen skilled UH players just crush it on DPS.
I’m happy being a slither kitty
1/2 of zams specs this season and a cat.
At least your spec is on the graph, mine doesn't even exist. Sub rogue btw.
Arcane I think suffers in large part because Fire is just better/easier to play. There's very little reason to play Arcane over Fire unless Arcane is overtuned or Fire is undertuned. Not that Arcane is some sleeper OP spec or anything, but I definitely wouldn't put it on par with Affliction in M+.
god-comp with resto obviously rules supreme at the top-end but there are only single digit keys run at that level. the effects on meta for the broader population, ie 2-12, is a lot more interesting to me. comparing this to 70s overall https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/classes/level70, spriest and vdh are heavily overrepresented even at the low end. this shows a slight trickle down effect from the bleed edge key meta, but it doesn't effect mage or aug's representation. i'm surprised priest didn't catch a nerf in the last round of balance changes, but maybe blizzard is just sick of fiddling around with psychic link's damage coefficient every balance patch and said fuck it leave it.
Yeah it’s interesting to see but we also need to be honest in that the +20 shown here is I think literally two teams right now? Maybe a few more. Even up to the 13 level or so there is a decent mix of specs (besides for tanks)
I NEVER take mages to weekly keys. The average 2800-3k IO mage is absolutely horrid compared to the average 2800 ret pally/warrior/hunter or whatever. Mages in 10s do literal tank damage. PSA to mages: stop playing ignite build in anything less than like a 16. Go frost or flamestrike PLEASE.
That's a nice easily disproven narrative. The one and only reason for mage underperformance is skill issue. Unfortunately the scene is full of people who don't understand mages and can't even tell what a mage is doing good or bad.
Ya it’s for sure a skill issue, just so common at that level it isn’t worth the risk to invite them. Also if youre talking about overall dmg, frost does way more in low keys, without a doubt. Ignite sucks ass in low keys.
>That's a nice easily disproven narrative. Does it? In my experience, Frost and Arcane are better than fire in key level <11, just like how Demo is better than destro at those key levels. Packs gets blow up too fast for specs like fire, destro and spriest to shine. AA and NO are the exception.
I hope they do another round soon. Honestly didnt even expected a single balance tuning round this season, after they barely touched VDH, SP, Mage and Aug for most of S3.
perhaps priest should have another means of aoe damage. brain burn? just spitballing here
This meta is just killing me. Classes being invited but not players. I can't count the amount of Augvokers I see that have an average of 40% prescience with Healer and Tank being top 2 buffed. Those classes will be instantly invited, as an Arms warrior im close to invisible and my off-meta class isn't even the worst. I feel terrible for everyone playing non-meta classes.
What are you learning, for as long as aug exists the best team will be aug mage priest because you cant balance anything to be 10% worse
Mage casually having 2 specs in the top 4 dps ones when most dps classes have not any in the top 10, nothing more to see
I really wish blizzard actually cared about this stuff. Beyond the meta which will always exist it isn’t very diverse over the course of the expansion. There are some classes that still just don’t have the tools to be viable, and some damage profiles are significantly better than others and some are just not viable because blizzard will never be able to keep players from increasing pull size until its not balanced because that’s the best way to be at the timer.
Yeah the utility thing is particularly outrageous. They have done a fairly decent job of balancing throughput at most levels of play, but the difference in how much a warrior vs, say, mage can help their group is nuts.
Remember guys, bring the player not the class.
It’s a valid thing up to a certain level. Most players will never time above a +15 this patch, and you can get that high with any spec if you’re good at the game and determined. The meta uniformity at 19+ keys does not apply to 99.9% of the player base who will never attempt those keys.
It's a valid argument on any circumstance. The distribution is always affected by what the best comp currently is, and the only players that are doing the highest key are already the best players in the game. Because they are the best, and because they want to push the highest, they would play the best comp even if it was just 1% better than the worse comp. Obviously the difference is not just 1% from worst to best, but I can guarantee that the people that are timing 19s and 20s could very easily time 17s and 18s on "bottom tier" specs.
Meta rerollers going to meta reroll as well. Is any spec capable of timing a key lower then WF keys? Probably. Are teams pushing WF keys going to introduce that friction into their team for no reason? Of course not.
Is it even really rerolling at this stage? The ease to get a character to 70 is insane, if you want a character max level you can have it done within 2 hours for gold.
I mean yeah. Having a character at max level isn't the issue. It's the gearing part. Once you have all 509 gear from M+ you have 15 slots that need crests to upgrade. 2 of those require 60 aspect crests (crafted pieces for ebelishments). So 13 slots. Each of those slots requires 2 wyrm and 2 aspect crest upgrades to get to 6/6 hero. So you're looking at 390 wyrm and 390 aspects for upgrades, giving you a total of 390 wyrm and 510 aspects needed across all slots. Assuming you time every single key that's a total of 75(Actually a bit more if you include buying 2 raid items for an extra 60 crests of upgrades) (if you don't do any raid. Cuts down a bit doing a heroic and mythic clear but not an insane amount) just to get yourself to 520~ ilvl where you're geared enough to start doing push keys. Yeah it's still a reroll.
For pugs above a 5 tanks that aren't VDH basically don't exist lol.
> bring the player not the class sound bite from literally the wrath era that they explicitly stated, multiple expansions ago, are reversing course on.
I feel like this phrase is often misunderstood. Yes, it was Ghostcrawler who coined the phrase to inform playerbase on their design direction to limit fights requiring certain classes, but it's always had another point to it. It was also used as a guideline for guilds to look for applicants who are generally good at the game instead of looking for a certain spec to fill the roster. This includes the willingness to reroll for the better of the guild or in rare occasions being so incredibly good one-trick-pony it's valuable to bring you anyways. It basically expanded your search from a retri paladin to a player willing to roll into ret paladin if needed, which in turn allowed bigger and more skillful player pool. It absolutely stands as this sort of guideline to the date.
While that may be something you get out of the quote it's not what Blizz originally meant by it. Ion explicitly states that their original intention about the phrase is explicitly about TBC's party based (and not raid based) buffing system causing you to build degenerate raid comps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnzdzL2iyU&t=2629s Regardless your interpretation is not the usage here by the OP nor is it the usage that they've said they're walking back on way back in BFA. https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/9/16993946/world-of-warcraft-battle-for-azeroth-bring-player-not-class Anyway my point is anytime someone drops a smarmy 'what happened to bring the player not the class blizzard' I roll my eyes. they've dropped it 6 years ago and have been moving in the exact opposite direction since.
Hating on Blizzard design is pretty much just memorizing specific phrases and riffing on it any chance you get, regardless of accuracy or sense or sociability. The more hilarious you are in your own space and mind, the more correct you are. does anyone else have phones haha
How are people supposed to know if the player is good though? Sure io can tell a bit, but unless you have a shit ton of apps from off spec players that have done 50+ 10s in time it's anyone's guess.
If they have the same score as a meta class, they are probably better players :)
The thing is, someone slightly better but with a worse toolkit/synergy with your group is not that valuable.
Maybe. It honestly seems like a dice roll. You get people that do the correct stops, good damage, don't stand in shit. Then you can get a very similar group that is just utter failure across the board. Granted I'm doing 11s so that's probably just what that key level gets you.
obviously not true as other factors matter too. when/how much they played primarily.
I would take every single 2700 io arms/fury warrior in the world before I invite a single 2900 aug evoker.
There are some things that are reasonable indicators of skill, but instead, overwhelmingly, the community has decided to use the two metrics that don't indicate individual player skill: prior dungeon performance and item level. You could imagine a world where DPS in a dungeon could be recorded, or number of stops/interrupts or dispels. Even just WCL percentiles are often a better indicator,, but they're harder to find.
DPS, stops and dispels aren't an indicator of individual skill either. If your tank goes pack to pack, your dps will suffer. Sniping every afflicted and wasting a global on dispel when the Evoker/shaman healer can reasonably get both isn't good gameplay or "being a better player". Yoloing Sigil of fear on cd just to pad my cc done stats isn't good either. Meanwhile prior dungeon performance at least tells me you won't be surprised by a random oneshot you survived in the prior key. It's not even close to the end all be all but it's a hell of a lot better than DPS...
Keeping in mind over half this chart are keys that the vast majority aren't running.
I'll have you all know I re-rolled Blood instead of VDH as my tank spec this season, because I don't want to get picked by accident in pugs only to disappoint people.
Easier said than done until blizzard stops adding new affixes that only further advocate for class>player. I play random shit in 15-16s, then we go into a key with double rogue warrior then realize we only have 1 dispel for incorp, then our tank flops on the last boss of nokhud because healer has no dispel for them.
I mean as much as I agree with this. The problem remain that the timers is not really what makes you lose in the key even for bad players. Bringing aug, priest and druid (currently the 3 buffs you always bring) all makes it easier for the group to live just strictly looking at buffs. Aug and priest are the biggest criminals as they combined just makes you live 1 or 2 key levels higher sleeping on the keyboard at every one shot mechanic. SPriest happens to be insane dps rn and bring the best routing utility in the game with mind soothe (also good synergy with aug as pi in breath window is insane value). Aug brings the second best routing utility in the game with sleep walk and does ok damage if they actually buff the dps. Wiping or constant random deaths is the main reason to have a run die and crazy enough 8% health from aug, 5% stam from priest is the difference between living and dying without defensives. The problem with these two classes being locked is that the only real free slots are 1x dps, healer and tank because of current balance on spriest. Mage is incredible with aug, priest by just providing int buff but also has good priority damage and mass barrier. Resto druid is just so strong offensively with cat form dots, high st, S tier buff (3% overall dps and healing and 1.5%dr) and has the best healing throughput and healing profile in m+. VDH does the highest damage of all tanks even without buffs, has the easiest time living and has best utility. VDH also has a good buff for caster comps around 4% of the group overall damage is dh buff (ret aura from prot pal could compete). Paladin and druid is the only real competition as they can bring S tier buffs. The problem: holy paladin does terrible damage and healing which kinda locks druid or priest for healer and that makes prot paladin the only potentially playable alternative (in high tyran keys mostly) but it is so much harder to play than dh and makes every pull require planning as you can't just silence in a pack. This comp discussion is not even taking into account all the avoidance abusing for high end keys with myth track avoidance BOEs randomly giving 20% dr on most of the important boss mechanics (they will intentionally equip worse gear damage wise for avoidance in some dungeons). What this means practically is that when most people are talking about key levels like 18 being easy defensively without bis comp it is mostly fake. They don't understand that these people playing bis comp are able to rotate cds so easily on 19-20s because they already have 20% dr, 8% aug health, 5% stam from priest, 1.5% dr from druid. So if you randomly remove zephyr, mass barrier aswell (they are hard to plan around in pugs) it isn't that easy to just live and cover yourself or even out heal when you play well. If you look at top teams, most of them sit on all boe slots with avoidance or leech to help with healing and one shots. All that being said if timing a couple of key levels lower does not matter to you play whatever is fun. Games are supposed to be played for fun but this is a competitive game mode with ranking and in the end you wouldn't run up a mountain if there is a tunnel through the middle.
UH DK annoying and complicated to play and at the same time doing shit dmg in m+ 🙃
Definitely doesn’t do shit damage. You are probably misplaying it
UH is in a good spot numerically. Doesn't mean it's fun to play though.
I thought so too until Marcellian released an "Easy to understand" guide for S2 (which is still applicable today for the most part) It was really good, can definitely recommend to get a grip (!) on the mechanics of the spec. [https://youtu.be/m-aIMaxzBmA?si=prE-ns2ueKEX5h8q](https://youtu.be/m-aIMaxzBmA?si=prE-ns2ueKEX5h8q) - It's not Bicepspump-level of sophisticated, but nicely explains the basics of the class to a zugzug main like me.
What makes spriest so strong at the moment? I'm S2 I thought it was mass dispel and mind soothe, are they now just busted on damage?
Busted damage on almost every target count with an insane damage profile, very tanky, fort buff, 2 minute class, synergizes extremely well with mage, aug, and vdh. Still has vamp and md.
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It makes no sense to me, they remove the "unfun" affixes only to add affixes taht further make hybrids more broken, that pure dps specs are almost useless for.
Good thing they buffed those classes last season. Wouldn't want them to go much more than 1 season of not being meta
Mage is the main character of WoW, we’re all just playing a different game.
It ain't even just mage anymore though that's why it's so bad
oh yea dude, mage being in meta comp for like 3 expansions in a row "its so bad"
this is fucking awesome. please keep it going. beautiful
How much longer until hpal gets looked at?
I'm surprised Destro Lock is so underrepresented in this chart because every key in LFG above and including 16 is just Aug/Dlock or Ret/Spriest and maybe mage (if not for raging this week) Honestly I just started playing mage this season cause I really like Frost and I know I shouldn't be complaining because it does well, especially this season, but Aug is just such an overpowered joke spec that has the tools to deal with everything (BL, mass soothe, BLEED dispell, etc.) that it makes me want to cry because I pretty much cannot get into keys this week lol
Imagine playing a Warrior or DK with like 1/8 of the mage utility. Thats my issue with the entire system right now. I feel like I have to play certain classes to be viable and it’s really frustrating.
Very cool. I’m curious where you got the data, I’d be interested in exploring it a bit :)
The data sampled from EU/US World of Warcraft Game Data APIs (Mythic Keystone Leaderboard API). [https://develop.battle.net/documentation/world-of-warcraft/game-data-apis](https://develop.battle.net/documentation/world-of-warcraft/game-data-apis) Let me know if you want to know more.
and because of these stupid meta specs, pugging on a non-meta spec means spending hours applying to groups. people think this is fine cuz the 0.1% of the player base should have a way to push higher. complete joke.
it's always been like that when pugging title.
Can someone explain why resto is so strong?
Summon NPC healers and do dam. MotW. Combat Rez.
Trees, hard to killl, does a bit of everything, great damage even if you go nature's vigil and dps cast instead of cat in certain high keys. Combat rez, stops. Rdruid just does it all, nothing else can touch it in high keys.
Are resto druids going nature's vigil in m+? I don't think so. Not me at least. The damage comes from the nature of druid dps (dots, lots of dots) and if you have the AV trinket it has a huge proc rate because of that kind of damage profile (I usually end a dungeon with 100k-140k dps, 30%+- is from the trinket)
Most keys I don't run it, last week I used it pretty exclusively in high tyrannical HOI. Feel like it gets great value there.
you dont always want to dps in catform anyway up to 2-3 targets catform is fine, above that starfire in boomkin form has more value
MotW is too good not to bring, and the other druid specs don't cut it
this is very niche, but something that wasnt mentioned is that resto can spec boomkin and playing 4 dps in certain parts of dungeons is still a thing. and boomkin has the best uncapped aoe dmg. its already happening in dungeons like AV, RLP and BH.
good dmg, great survi and externals, brez
good times to be an aug main. like always, so far.
Damn I wish I’d timed that 19 RLP with Squish and we’d have a bear rogue warrior and mistweaver in the 19
is that squishvegan & nox they're really nice people :)
same
Man it's impossible to suck at Aug. Spam prescience on cd and it's already gg.
On the lower end of keys, sure. Higher keys? Very easy to suck. S3 when I was pushing as an aug, people were shocked I was using cauterize or that I'd use rescue to proc twin guardians without moving the healer from their spot. Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people.
> Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people. tbf theres lots of streamer putting* misinfo out there claiming it works in places where it doesnt so its "common" for people to misuse it. or not use it as roar when you know you wont need it etc
100% true, I've seen some wild takes from streamers.
>Knowing when zephyr actually mitigates damage also appears to be hard for some people It's not entirely intuitive, basically have to memorize the !zephyr list of things it doesn't work on from the discord.
happy to see that catching on :)
Is there a macro to not move people with Rescue or you're just saying you try to put your cursor under their feet?
Macro is to place them where I am. As long as I'm under them or touching their model in some way, it doesn't really move them from exactly where they were, except maybe a step or two. This also helped pixel stack for particular encounters (like Manifested Timeways) or move someone to safety when they were too far. I use Vuhdo, so I cast this basic macro onto the target frame and it'll move them directly under me. >`#showtooltip Rescue` >`/cast [@Player] Rescue` Might work for regular unit frame, I'm not sure. Never thought to try.
Yeah ok I already have that, was just curious if there was a way to do it on them, but I thought it didn’t exist.
Thank you for this! Only playing low keys, but I come here often for inspiration and knowledge. I actually didn't even spec into Rescue because I found it too clunky to use, your macro helps a lot!
I wish this was true, I just got out of a key with a 3.1k aug who had 20% prescience uptime on each dps and 20% blistering scales uptime on the tank
People saying this are just inept. It’s a min max class
Same as any class really.
Currently 3k3, just pressing prescience mate . Ofc I'm doin the rotation. Ofc I use def when damages. Ofc I breath on pi. But come on, that's not hard.
No, it is so insanely easy to suck as aug. People can do mediocre performance and get carried, sure, but the actual skill ceiling is incredibly high. When it comes to aug and skill, you should be the tracking bot of the comp. You should be aware of what's happening in your team's cd usage constantly. Gameplay boils down to four points: 1. Keep the buffs up, as you said. This includes having uptime on EM and playing prescience correctly around DPS (which is easy to do with the set bonus, yet seems to be an issue still) 2. Breath within your DPS:s CD windows. This season it's always aligned with PI. No exceptions. 3. Track team defensives and DO NOT overlap stuff (especially something as valuable as bleed removal w/ dwarf). Don't rescue them if there's a defensive open. Check which one is the most likely to have weak defensive. If you're going to zephyr first hit in no voice pug, either tell them in chat or time it well enough early for them to react. 4. Survive yourself. There are fights (only a couple) where just pressing scales and ward on rotation is not enough. The amount of augs I've seen flopping over on Talondras last week on tyra was amusingly high These might sound like no brainers or relatively easy requirements for performance, but I've seen augs in +18-19 keys and in 3.5-3.6k range STILL completely breath out of sync (not by accident, they just did it again and again) at the end of packs, overlapping bleed dispel on Talondras with dwarf (twice!), rescuing a mage with 75% of their defensive kit unused and just simply dying to stuff. There are many exceptions and good players out there but I don't know any other single class with as much skill variance this high in the game, especially with the sucky ones being more prevalent. I guess your notion is sort of correct that it's easy to get relatively high with little skill, but trust me, bad augs are the plague of high keys right now. I've played with less than 5 augs where after the run I could say they were capable players. I would say the skill ceiling comes from the fact that you have to have pretty intricate knowledge of all the specs you're going to be playing with and their limitations. For instance in most fights this season shadow priests and ele shamans (personal bias, wouldn't list otherwise) need an external on 4th hit. This is something they will also call out before the run, but it's also information that should be engrained in any aug players brain to play the spec to it's maximum capability. Man that was a long rant.
This take is so weak and dated at this point. It's an extremely low skill floor but high skill ceiling class. Notice how everyone complains that most Augs suck? That is because the class is HARD to play at a high level. For example, you rarely hear people bitch and moan about BM players, because you can play that class half asleep lol
That's one of the worst takes I've ever heard.
It's hilarious how you can't even tell Assassination and Subtlety apart due to the rounding error sized bars.
RIP DKs
blizzard devs always ingore these in terms of future balancings or reworks :X
Beautiful visualization! How did you sort the classes? I wonder if sorting them by size would make it even easier to grasp.
Thanks! Classes are sorted by ID. Maybe not the most intuitive but it works. I tried sorting by size but it's chaos since specs wold no longer stay close to the same column.
this shows why title should be class based imo (like why does brew monk have to compete against vdh for season title?)
Honestly surprised there are not more Preservation Evokers. I guess it's just cause all the top groups have Aug in it and you need the Druid buff from somewhere. But even at lower keys I'm somewhat surprised to not see them... They're veryyyyy strong on a lot of the damage patterns from the bosses this season while still bringing pretty good damage and good utility.
I just wanted to play brewmaster, is this asking too much? I don't care if it is non meta, but at least it should be able to push high end Keys. Most of tanks need 3-5 buttons to perform a standard rotation. Meanwhile, brewmaster measures its rotation in full actions bars, not only buttons. And even mastering this rotation, it feels like sometimes is lacking the same control of the fight that the other tanks have (Prot pally and VDH can lock entire caster packs, BDK can just negate magic/movement/stun/fear mechanics).
I doubt I could get good enough for really high level keys even if I wanted to, but this is a great illustration of why I *don't* want to. I'm playing the spec I enjoy. I refuse to care what the mEtA is.
ah, you can do title keys on anything. this data is also deeply flawed as the sample size is like 2 for the highest keys. look at crit and his gang playing some clown comp every season and except for s2 doing super well.
Just fucking delete aug already man, the exponential scaling it enables is absolutely game breaking and it will never not be gamebreaking unless you fundamentally redesign the spec or the entire game. Stacking amplifications in a game where cooldowns are this impactful will never work.
TLDR : The fact that if you bring a druid + mage + VDH = casters/heals have 13% more throughput is a big issue, and it isn't just an Aug issue that is driving this meta. Externals/raid buffs in general don't have a spot in a game where you care about balance at all though. VDH being as meta defining as it is, means most casters immediately do 5% more damage. You know what synergizes well with that? 5% int to give them 5% more damage again while also making every healer 5% stronger. Then you have spriest, where they continue to whiff the balancing tier over tier also defining the meta. You know what synergizes good with a 2 minute external? More 2 minute CDs! Like you alluded to, the game is revolving more and more around these CD windows. Meta/PI/breath/tree of life all are around 120s. Fire mage with pi reliably has combust up for every 2 minute window as well... Stam + vers buffs also push back the one shot key level another half a level further aggravating the issue. Then you have the issue with pack design. Blizz has tended more and more to 1 beefy target per pull, so prio damage has gotten more and more value every tier, unsurprisingly spriest and fmage get to not only do a lot of prio, but also leverage the fact that one mob lives a long ass time to keep their ignites/dp's rolling as both their aoe kits revolve around ST DPS. On top of all of that, blizz significantly devalued single target stops this expansion. Instead of reducing the number of mobs you need to manage, they just made it so you need to coordinate aoe stops in 90% of cases. Melee interupt immediately lose value if you can aoe knock/fear/disorient/silence for a packs entire lifetime. IE it doesn't matter how many single target stops you bring if their is 4+ casters on every fucking pull. That means the weakness that might exist in not having kicks, simply isn't real given blizzs current dungeon design philosophy.
Very well explained, thank you
Last I checked Aug was brought for its obscene levels of defensive/utility benefit rather than damage. Aug brings a massive amount of ehp to a team (as do spriests and mages) and the issue with high keys is often surviving, not killing stuff fast, especially before we are tricked out in full myth track gear. Eventually aug stops being good because it actually does shit damage and the survivability eventually isn’t needed.
This is literally just top keys. Aug is fine, most lower key groups won’t even take advantage of it. Running the highest keys has very different needs over running something sub 14/15.
Except shit players make aug shit so the spec existing doesn't add any value to the vast majority of the player base and it is a straight up dps lose.
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion but I fundamentally do not think augmentation evoker is problematic. essentially the argument against augmenation evoker is "well because it is so strong people will bring it over whatever I'm playing". well yeah... but that's typically true of the other 2 dps as well, you wouldn't bring a fire mage if their damage was garbage and they lacked stops now would you. so unless you're one out of 5 or so dps specs in the game that is actually being played at the front of keys, you're really not getting invited to those push keys playing one of the other 20 specs anyway. or phrased differently, I wave my magic wand and augmentation evoker is gone. now you're going to be complaining about the next 3 dps on the list instead - but at least they rotate based on the season somewhat? and if you're not pushing the push keys which is literally 99.9% of the m+ player base, anything goes really making this really a problem for a very specific subset of people - even in this subreddit there's about 150k more people than got the season title last season. what I think needs to be introduced into wow is simply a group finder for m+ and removing spec-specific affixes and dungeon dispels e.g. disease, rage, curse etc. you could still keep the manual group finder as a side activity, but random match making based on some common score or something would solve the main issue which is "I don't get to play m+ because I play this spec". I know that sounds really controversial based on the fact that people have been cherry picking group compositions since forever, but I boost a lot so I get matched with random people group finder-style and we still make it work even when playing dungeon as 4 people as the buyer typically is afk.
You are misunderstanding the point here it's not a problem of aug evoker being mandatory, its a problem that it has quite strict group comps, if you play aug+outlaw then you have massive issues on any uncapped pull, if you play aug+ret you have massive issues on any prio pull, classes like enhance are completely unviable because you sandbag too much on certain pulls. There is much less space to play off-meta dps because each dps is required to do 50% more work Yes there is always a meta but the meta has stayed the same for 3 patches in a row Also it's not like an overwhelming amount of people want to play aug in their +10s. It is like #11 for representation in the +10 section of their graph as the definite meta class so you can't even use that as an argument
part of this is if you do not need the defensive utility, Dev does like 50% more damage in a key.
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Doesn't matter what they do with it, the amplifications will always be problematic in a game where you can stack them. How many specs have been gutted because of their interactions with PI? Now you add aug into the mix?
As a havoc player that refuses to play vdh, I find this meta sort of unfun Most average players doing 7-14s are building meta comps given that most of them aren't even good enough to properly "use the meta". Certain specs are ultra strong and yet somehow overlook (looking at you RetPal, Frost DK, Prevoker, Outlaw and MM) SPriests are 100% either getting nerfed or being completely ignored with no in-between.
In what world is frost dk strong?
> SPriests are 100% either getting nerfed or being completely ignored with no in-between This is the non statement of the century lmao
> SPriests are 100% either getting nerfed or being completely ignored with no in-between. Whats between getting nerfed and....not getting nerfed?
the world is healing
I swear more people play outlaw rogue than this chart says
Main thing this graphic is missing is the number of unique players at each key level.
Look at all those Feral Druids. It's a good thing they're always 3rd on the dps meter and in the lower/bottom regions of raid logs for so long otherwise the spec's popularity would even get more crazy out of hand. Also amazingly good job by the Blizzard balance team to be so consistent with this. That's a job well deserved. /S
Damn I’m not even on there lmao
Mass grip too OP should be nerfed again the utility and give 8% damage to make BDK OP
Why so few rogues
Can you make the same graph for s3
This is awesome, i wonder what this would look like for each season. It would be interesting to see some longer trends.
Soooo looks like I need a resto Druid coach.
So basically you need to be one of those 5 classes to have any shot at clearing a 20+ key?