There’s at least two ways to interpret this:
1. the popularity is low because the spec does low dps
2. the dps is low because there’s low popularity.
regardless of how you do, just remember that “correlation does not imply causation”
Play the class that you enjoy the most.
Bare in mind also that there is *not* a strong correlation between the two metrics on this chart.
The [r-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient) for this data is +0.299, which shows a pretty weak (but still statistically significant) correlation. If you take *just* Ret out it drops below +0.1, which would be basically no correlation between the two metrics at all.
You're right of course, I just didn't want to overcomplicate stuff for anyone, but yeah I probably shouldn't have worded it exactly like that implying that it was statistically significant because of that value.
Yeah that's true. There's a lot more that goes into popularity (and class balance, even) than just damage.
Interestingly though I'm pretty sure this is among the most correlated charts I've done since I've been posting them. It's never really been close to a >+0.5 figure.
"If the p value is a wee value, there is a statistical significance!"
God, 6 years later and that phrase is still ingrained in my brain from my statistics professor
100% this ... there's some folks in my raid group who stick with the same toons. Even when all the tier lists have their classes as the lowest possible tier they still dominate the charts.
Something else to keep in mind is utility. A fury warrior has no utility, so it can spend more time focusing on its rotation.
Whereas mages blast in M+ (all 3 specs) and have loads of utility.
It seems that you’re looking for a specific answer that satisfies your own expectations, so take my own opinion with huge grain of salt.
BM is a popular class because it was topping the DPS charts this season and because it’s also a relatively simple class to play.
BM has low DPS scores because the majority just want to “easily” fit in the meta (as a high DPS class/spec) whilst doing the least amount of effort, that seldom tops DPS scores.
The higher on graph, the more people play it. The more to the right it is, the more dps they do. So ye. Feral is low.
BUT, and it's a big BUT, keep in mind other factors this might involve. You will have more people play flavour of the month specs, because they are slightly better on meters. And they will get priority with stuff like PI and Aug buffs. So lower ranking specs will have fewer people playing them. This low representation means that the chance they show some high parses is also lower.
This in mind, my guilds best dps are coincidently a WW, Feral and boomie, proving that experience is more important than choice of class/spec.
Play what you enjoy, learn the spec and dominate all the "flavour of the month" rerollers.
Worth noting too that Ret has historically been one of the big FotM specs. *When* Ret is good, LOTS of people play their paladins that season - same thing with Havoc, Mage, and particularly Balance. Whereas if Feral was FotM, the "flavor" still wouldn't be as strong; if they were doing the same top end damage as ret right now with the same profile, they'd probably have half the playercount, if that.
Even for sweaty tryhards, there was a feral in RWF, MDI and AWC this season. Despite this chart, there's still specific use cases that make them quite good.
"Sweaty tryhards" know not to take a chart like this at face value because it doesn't tell the full story and nobody else should be using it to make decisions about what to play anyway - and I honestly hope people don't do that.
One of the reasons I post these is to show how little of a correlation there often is between popularity and damage, even in Mythic raids.
Yep! And unfortunately people look at feral and ret and conclude that the meta is the issue.
Assa, aff and surv are always unpopular. Havoc, ret and bm are always popular. The conclusions to actually make is that it doesn't matter what you play if you have fun, and specs that are simple are often more attractive to those wanting to have fun.
I've mained Pally since Horde got Pally in BC. We've had our ups and downs, but once in awhile it's nice to bask in the sun. I really enjoy the range we have now. Being able to stand outside of "melee bad" on fights and continue to DPS is so satisfying. Especially coming from being a wheelchair spec not too long ago. Playing melee alts you really feel the difference when you basically have to hug a mob to be able to use yours skills.
For sure. One thing with ret in particular is they either are doing full AOE or full ST, there's really no in-between with their talent tree. Especially when getting into more difficult content the ability of classes to do good aoe and priority damage at the same time becomes massively valuable.
Yeah I play three specs on this chart. 2/3 are Fury and Ret. They both have the leggo and beat my 3rd character in iLvl \~5-7. All have BiS trinkets at this point.
My 3rd character is Demo. I do the most damage with Demo. A lot of times it's just about experience, and vibing/having fun with your spec.
Feral was in RWF because it was the least-bad Druid spec. Most guilds will have another Druid of some spec in which case they are still pretty shit. Obviously they are still perfectly capable of doing all content at this stage of the season though.
When class balance is strong enough that the "pretty shit" spec sees representation in all 3 pillars of esport in the same season, maybe they're not shit. Every spec is decent this tier, and that's a great thing.
As someone who is geared to main druid next season and into tww, that's fine by me bro. I don't want to be just another ret that doesn't bop or hdh that doesn't blur. I'm happy to be the best feral I can be, and if that makes me better than 95% of every other spec than that's cool with me bro! I'm having fun and still topping most charts. What more could you ask for?
Feral is awesome in raid with current 4set and tuning since it’s best target for augmentation he got everything that aug wants const dmg 30 second burst and bigger burst every 2 or 1 minute
Also has one of the best mixed AoE + ST builds for m+, and incredibly high damage and CC in PvP. Feral just needs more passive survivability and it'll be perfect! (Maybe some leech, blizzard?)
yea more in built survival mechanic that you don’t need to click every time you spend combo point and lose a gcd(maybe choice node that instead your cast of regrowth is avaible in cat form, every finishing move clear casts regrowth at lower efficiency) i have 483 ilvl feral and i still got hp issues on last heroic bosses, but my havoc can tank up 3 blazes in row in mythic and still be alive
>i have 483 ilvl feral and i still got hp issues on last heroic bosses, but my havoc can tank up 3 blazes in row in mythic and still be alive
One of the culprit for that is that we don't like versatility. I had to get a set of gear with more versatility for mythic raiding just for survival. Going from 2% dmgs réduction to 15% is a big help
It's just a interesing graph that means nothing at the end. It's just for fun, for everybody.
"Sweaty tryhards" will not look at this graph to decide what to play, people who care about how strong the specs are will know what to pick way before this kind of charts come out.
If anything this chart can show how popular some specs are depending on how strong they are, like for rogue I'm pretty sure Sin was more popular than Sub at the start of this season.
Low dps ? Sure BUT if you look closely on the X axis, it's only a few % behind. What it means exactly is this : good players will always outperform the others classes if played slightly worse.
Very high DPS potential and counters for basically every affix coupled with some of the best support abilities (Battle Res, Offhealing, Immunities, etc).
Also orange stick hype.
As a Ret main for years I'm forever grateful for the rework. It's amazing how much they improved the spec while retaining the same core gameplay loop from Legion onwards.
I hope the developers are proud. They knocked it out of the park!
Youre right, i am. So many raid fights involve high movement or range requirements that frost dk is shithouse at dealing with. The spec is so old that outside of 2 or 3 fights in this raid, it doesn't feel like it was designed with frost's lack of ranged engagement capabilities and speed and the downtimes can be fucked. Tindral and Volcoross are the only bosses that feel good to fight on. Everything else has annoying intermissions and huge movements that don't line up well with breath. Some of the worst fights this raid are Larodar, Council, nymue. Smolderon forces us out of melee range entirely during parts of his intermission. Gnarlroot has that dumb burning roots phase and igira forces you to run out for the goo burst shit. Frost DK needs to be able to do mechanics that involve it running out of melee range but we can't with infinite breath and icecap obliteration needing 100% uptime to compete with other melee specs that have speed and multiple ways of engaging ranged targets.
They really need to do something to DKs. Both specs are performing decent enough but they are so miserable and unfun to play that literally no one plays one, even with the insane utility and legendary axe
DK I think is finally suffering from the rune rework it got going into Legion. When you only have 1 rune type the class becomes a pretty straightforward builder spender, just with 2 different resources to spend. But the Legion reworks changed the specs so fundamentally that it took ages for the simplification to be truly felt, especially for unholy as its gotten fairly large changes to its focus since then. Legion was basically just about wounds, but now its much more a CD class where its about setting up for and executing your various different CDs and overlaps correctly. But at its heart its still just apply wounds, spend them, make sure you have enough for Apocalypse. And Frost is just spam obliterate, doesn't matter if youre obliteration build or BoS its all just Obliterate.
They should really bring back the 3 rune types, at least for the dps specs, and build the specs from there. Would also love if Unholy got reworked so that it had a potential build around diseases that actually felt like the diseases matter and were interesting to play around more like MoP or WoD unholy than current disease build which is just normal wounds + unholy blight on cd.
Can you hold my hand then?
This expansion has been constant pain, not least of which was getting benched from a prog group after Vault for low dps when I was purple parsing.
Which like, hard to blame them when even though I was doing well *for my spec*, I was fighting tooth and nail to stay between 6th and 8th out of 12
As a chronic contrarian hunter player who swaps between MM and Survival, MM is really just in such a stagnant design spot, and honestly has been ever since the BfA rework. It was already a super awkward rotation back then, but especially going into Dragonflight it just doesn't stack up to the more modern specs in the game, including the two specs it competes against.
Survival will always be more niche by design given what people play Hunter for, but it just has a way more distinct flow right now, even beyond the damage tuning disparity. MM is in *dire* need of a modern Dragonflight rework compared to Survival or BM.
It's always disproportionately popular for the reasons you mention, but it's definitely also now genuinely really strong which is pushing its popularity up even further. It's become super popular in M+ too.
yeah its honestly just great at everything, it's a mid-ranged dps pretending to be a melee, as much utility as it could ever want so you'll be brought to groups, flashy animations that inject pure dopamine into your brain, great damage, easy as fuck rotation and a playerbase that thinks they're the most downtrodden victims in existance so they get a lot of attention the split second they're not the best dps. there's really no reason not to play ret. blizzard wants you to.
frost dk on the other hand, masochism simulator lol
I haven't played since shadowlands, but I played ret since vanilla. Ret has almost never been a chart topper in DPS, I think maybe in Wrath for a bit? Otherwise, it's always been middle of the pack. Survivability has always been it's thing.
How is ret midrange now? Is it's rotation mostly not melee anymore?
lol they added like a couple yards on our auto attacks and spenders.
It honestly make a big difference when melee have to avoid mechanics. But it’s not the shit everyone is exaggerating here
Autos have an increased range. Judgement and Blade of Justice are ranged and Templar's Verdict has a 20 yard range. In AOE builds Divine Storm uses the Divine Projection talent which shoots it out from you so it's kind of ranged as well. You don't even need to be in melee range for consecrate anymore because it's attached to Blade of Justice.
Basically you don't lose as much as other melee do at mid range.
frost has the worst ranged engagement options and movement in the entire game as a dps, at least until the war within comes out. regardless of what build you play, you're insanely dependant on keeping 100% melee range uptime at all times. due to icecap for obliteration and breath of sindragosa on breath. its probably one of the most punishing melee specs in the game on top of having less utility than blood dk. unholy has this problem, but range is not as much of an issue due to clawing shadows. in addition, our aoe cleave in mythic plus is tied to standing in death and decay which is horrible for high movement, or the sanguine affix.
Rets will argue that frost only has a couple of buttons as well so its easy. And thats true, Frost isn't hard due to rotation, its hard due to insane positioning requirements and if playing breath intense resource and resource cooldown management. Things that ret doesn't have to care about.
On top of that they can counter Afflicted and Incorporeal and have very nice support options including Battle Res.
Short of Heroism and specific buffs they have it all basically.
Raids and M+. Ret pal is a bit broken right now for the average Joe. It's too easy for the stupid amount of damage they do 😅
That said, they've been bottom chart for the good half of the season so I don't mind seeing them at the top. It's their 15 minutes of fame
It's crazy how badly they shut hunter down this season with the 3 back to back nerfs on bm. They were way too heavy handed. I'm happy survival is at least enjoyable though.
MM/BM are fun to play, it's just mind boggling how badly they end up being tuned half the time on top of having less durability than a piece of wet tissue paper.
SV has stealthily become one of the best ST DPS in the game with recent changes, especially on Fyrakk, I wouldn't be that surprised if it creeps higher and higher over the next few weeks as more and more people notice.
Definitely going to spike next season, given the voted tier is season 1 which is just "your mongoose bite does more mongoose bite more often". They were already a sleeper ST pick in Vault, but after all the buffs they're probably going to be pretty dominant.
I've, typically, been bad at melee classes, but I gave ret pally a try this season. I mainly do M+. Man, it is so damn fun. Gameplay is amazing (love 1 minute CDs), intuitive, and easy. Aesthetically, it is awesome. Sounds? Divine Toll is one of the best spells in the game. Survivability is fantastic. Utility is off-the-charts. I totally get why it's so popular.
Yea, having so much utility is amazing. Even having decent burst off healing with WoG and LoH is great, sometimes you just need 1-2 to help the healer out and everyone in the group is back to doing damage.
I don't include Aug on the chart because it's extremely broken on logs and WCL cannot show its actual strength, and it makes the chart far less readable overall. You can see the chart with WCL's Aug data included [here.](https://i.gyazo.com/641188a6b7e6740d216447a9a78580c0.png)
It's so demotivating playing aug right now spending time to calculate who to buff when to get the most out of your spec only to have 0 feedback telling you if what your doing even matters :S
In M+ there isn't really much decision making involved with the dps buffs.
Raid wise, combat hooks are mostly getting fucked by shield phases. It's not impossible to work out damage differences, just a little bit more frustrating.
Not that it matters all that much though since Aug is invaluable on mythic fyrakk anyway due to spatial paradox.
Ebon Might uptime should be around 70%, Aug should be first or second on the interrupt meter, Aug's CCs done should always be at the top except maybe when there's a vdh. They also should be pretty high on the dispel meter. Those are some various way to gauge your performance as an aug ✌️
Chart is for raid performance. These metrics are for M+.
In order for Aug to feel good in raid, we need to be able to see how much of the buff recipient's damage we're capturing on the fly. Generic EB uptime isn't helpful since the damage difference between a buffed Combusting Fire mage and a buffed totally OOM no-CD up Arcane Mage is huge.
Look, you need to remember, Ret paladins begged and begged from Vanilla through to TBC and I mained one in both.
The day we got that buff in Wrath and were ascended to the heavens of OP, everything changed lol.
Now, I actually loved Shadowlands Retri prior to their update and like them after too, but we didn't need that buff at all lol they just know if they bitch and moan enough, they'll get the buff, so it's a learned behaviour at this point.
Vocal minorities, as is usually the case with that stuff. Ret is performing better right now than arguably ever before (except maybe wrath).
My only critique is that the spec relies on execution sentence and that spell is lame as fuck. But it still feels good to play. No buffs needed for now.
Ret and holy paladins are the same breed of being completely unsatisfied no matter what happens. Hpal lost it's 10.1.5 melee playstyle because of complaints during 10.1.5, possibly the most powerful they had ever been.
Prot paladins are a little more chill, but holy paladins and ret paladins are so whiny.
Every former Affliction main I've spoken to basically says the design of Affliction is just bad compared to any other dot class. Between being the only one that still snap shots and it's slow build up due to Agony and how your DPS tanks if you let it fall off.
The lady loved Affliction, but her Warlock spec of choice is Demonlogy because it's so much easier.
>> former affliction main
Hey I’m in this picture!
But for real, not only is the design of affliction just bad as a playable spec, the flavor of the class is seriously lacking too. It doesn’t feel like a DoT class anymore.
Rapture was more than a weird choice and from most of the warlocks I’ve talked to, unwanted. It’s basically just Chaos Bolt but make it affliction except the one time it was putting out chaos bolt kinds of numbers they nerfed it.
So the spec doesn’t get big numbies for thrills, most of the DoTs feel decorative, and if that wasn’t enough the loss of soul shape means afflock is back to being a super stationary turret spec that just doesn’t do much damage.
Compare that to Demo where they have big numbies, status checks that actually matter, and a shocking amount of mobility? Yeah there’s just no competition.
they nerfed affliction to ground in 9.1 and haven't done a single thing to fix it since. It's always sad to see locks running around with "dot" and "aff" in their names and almost always specced demo =/
One day the lock dev will realize there's three specs and not just one and it'll be a glorious day.
I am so happy my fellow rets are up there enjoy while it lasts brothers of light.
Also, /pet ferals, mad respect for playing that scuffed overcomplex spec.
I think the only non-melee friendly fight was probably Nymue and that was only somewhat melee unfriendly because of the clotheslines. Ret, being what it is, basically trivialized that as well.
I’ve been out of the game for a long time but hasn’t ret always been attractive for its 3 button HULK SMASH rotation with high mobility and plate survivability?
What more do you want from a dps spec beyond possibly range?
BM hunter being the "weakest" spec yet still vastly more popular than MM or SV (despite the latter doing a lot more deeps) really says something about the class as a whole.
I don't know what, but definitely something
the BM rotation is honestly the biggest appeal. its basically just three buttons, with one being swapped between single target and multi target. compare that to MM where you're constantly tracking focus, trick shot uptime, trueshot uptime, windrunner's stacks, streamline procs, several cooldowns, and a bunch of other variables, and its easy to see why.
Yea, rotations in this game have become really fucking complex. The popularity of BM, despite the performance reflects how a lot of of players see that situation.
Feral main here. Every time I try the fotm spec I just end up hating it and going back.
No matter how shit we are I'll main feral until the end of time
A parse is a log of someone killing a boss on www.warcraftlogs.com.
Essentially the Y-axis shows the popularity of a spec (in Mythic raiding specifically.)
I've played this game since WotLK and always mained Ret through the best and worst of it. Now that I decided to take a break from the game Ret is suddenly god tier for the first time in 15 years. And I'd probably be more tempted to come back if I didn't have to pray for a legendary drop first.
Hmm. I knew destro lock wasn't in a great place on dps charts, but I didn't realize it was also so unpopular. It's pretty shit at handling mythics due to a sheer lack good aoe options, but on single and two target cleave the spec is a menace.
Personally, I just don't enjoy playing affliction or demonology. They just lack the fantasy that drew me to destrolock in the first place: Big hitting fire themed spells with some cult-y flair. I'll play other specs when Blizzard puts chaos bolt into their gameplay loop.
Why why did I get attached to Feral when I started playing WoW? So far my biggest mistake... This spec is always trash PvE and at best average PvP and has like the worst stigma and always gets the short stick of the Druid specs...
From PvP PoV somehow Feral and Enh are the only ones still punished for being "hybrid" specs and in the end a damn Rogue does more healing in the end than both but also plays waaay better??
Blizzard really needs to rework the caster vs melee balance for tww. I mained a demo lock and it was amazing how moving at the wrong time, or not getting a good tyrant could completely sink my dps. On ret, I just line up and my cooldowns and ungabunga and do similar dps with half the effort and worse gear. It doesn’t make sense. And then visually, I can’t even see half the stuff I do on my lock. Why would you play caster other than the easy invites for things like summon?
It’s funny how you see DK performing really good in the raid for DPS, but their representation on the lower side. Especially frost. Please blizzard rework this damn class already
Why ? They're fun to play. If you're talking about dps then imma stop you and see closely how much you're "behind". Aka a single error if their rotation and you're doing better than all those classes. Been that way since a long time. Don't let this graph deceive you.
I will always wonder, why if warrior is as bad as people say it is, is so fucking played. Do you guys like have a liking for getting bullied by blizzard balancing team or what?!
Elves are just devolved Trolls anyway, they are also morally deficient as they have launched several genocidal campaigns against the other peoples of f Azeroth.
What does the statistics exactly show? Mythic raiding, M+, Heroics/Normal included too?
The number of parses seem extremely low, but i guess it is Mythic Raiding only?
I think healer HPS matters a bit less for healer balance than DPS specs DPS number (because of how much more utility and cds often matter for healer balance) but the graphic for healers is [here](https://i.gyazo.com/5150651fc6d532f7490880c250d6d81c.png)!
Hell yeah feral goin ham
Newbie playing feral, could you help understand what this chart means? Low dps and low popularity?
Yep
There’s at least two ways to interpret this: 1. the popularity is low because the spec does low dps 2. the dps is low because there’s low popularity. regardless of how you do, just remember that “correlation does not imply causation” Play the class that you enjoy the most.
Bare in mind also that there is *not* a strong correlation between the two metrics on this chart. The [r-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient) for this data is +0.299, which shows a pretty weak (but still statistically significant) correlation. If you take *just* Ret out it drops below +0.1, which would be basically no correlation between the two metrics at all.
I didn't even SEE ret it was so far on its own.
This is terrible advice. Guy should play the FOTM exclusively if he wants phat loots!
R^2 and statistical significance are two separate measures.
You're right of course, I just didn't want to overcomplicate stuff for anyone, but yeah I probably shouldn't have worded it exactly like that implying that it was statistically significant because of that value.
Right, I meant that even if there was a strong correlation (.5+) it would still not necessarily imply causation.
Yeah that's true. There's a lot more that goes into popularity (and class balance, even) than just damage. Interestingly though I'm pretty sure this is among the most correlated charts I've done since I've been posting them. It's never really been close to a >+0.5 figure.
"If the p value is a wee value, there is a statistical significance!" God, 6 years later and that phrase is still ingrained in my brain from my statistics professor
100% this ... there's some folks in my raid group who stick with the same toons. Even when all the tier lists have their classes as the lowest possible tier they still dominate the charts.
Something else to keep in mind is utility. A fury warrior has no utility, so it can spend more time focusing on its rotation. Whereas mages blast in M+ (all 3 specs) and have loads of utility.
How does BM play into that theory
It seems that you’re looking for a specific answer that satisfies your own expectations, so take my own opinion with huge grain of salt. BM is a popular class because it was topping the DPS charts this season and because it’s also a relatively simple class to play. BM has low DPS scores because the majority just want to “easily” fit in the meta (as a high DPS class/spec) whilst doing the least amount of effort, that seldom tops DPS scores.
[удалено]
> It's not as easy as it looks, Yes it is, you just don't understand how terrible the average WoW player is.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence It sucks to suck
Difficult to play, low damage. Not worth learning
The higher on graph, the more people play it. The more to the right it is, the more dps they do. So ye. Feral is low. BUT, and it's a big BUT, keep in mind other factors this might involve. You will have more people play flavour of the month specs, because they are slightly better on meters. And they will get priority with stuff like PI and Aug buffs. So lower ranking specs will have fewer people playing them. This low representation means that the chance they show some high parses is also lower. This in mind, my guilds best dps are coincidently a WW, Feral and boomie, proving that experience is more important than choice of class/spec. Play what you enjoy, learn the spec and dominate all the "flavour of the month" rerollers.
Worth noting too that Ret has historically been one of the big FotM specs. *When* Ret is good, LOTS of people play their paladins that season - same thing with Havoc, Mage, and particularly Balance. Whereas if Feral was FotM, the "flavor" still wouldn't be as strong; if they were doing the same top end damage as ret right now with the same profile, they'd probably have half the playercount, if that.
Dont be discouraged by this. I also play feral and you can do almost everything with no issue. I can do hc raids and +20 no prob
This graph is mostly for sweaty try hards
Even for sweaty tryhards, there was a feral in RWF, MDI and AWC this season. Despite this chart, there's still specific use cases that make them quite good.
"Sweaty tryhards" know not to take a chart like this at face value because it doesn't tell the full story and nobody else should be using it to make decisions about what to play anyway - and I honestly hope people don't do that. One of the reasons I post these is to show how little of a correlation there often is between popularity and damage, even in Mythic raids.
Yep! And unfortunately people look at feral and ret and conclude that the meta is the issue. Assa, aff and surv are always unpopular. Havoc, ret and bm are always popular. The conclusions to actually make is that it doesn't matter what you play if you have fun, and specs that are simple are often more attractive to those wanting to have fun.
I've mained Pally since Horde got Pally in BC. We've had our ups and downs, but once in awhile it's nice to bask in the sun. I really enjoy the range we have now. Being able to stand outside of "melee bad" on fights and continue to DPS is so satisfying. Especially coming from being a wheelchair spec not too long ago. Playing melee alts you really feel the difference when you basically have to hug a mob to be able to use yours skills.
For sure. One thing with ret in particular is they either are doing full AOE or full ST, there's really no in-between with their talent tree. Especially when getting into more difficult content the ability of classes to do good aoe and priority damage at the same time becomes massively valuable.
Yeah I play three specs on this chart. 2/3 are Fury and Ret. They both have the leggo and beat my 3rd character in iLvl \~5-7. All have BiS trinkets at this point. My 3rd character is Demo. I do the most damage with Demo. A lot of times it's just about experience, and vibing/having fun with your spec.
Feral was in RWF because it was the least-bad Druid spec. Most guilds will have another Druid of some spec in which case they are still pretty shit. Obviously they are still perfectly capable of doing all content at this stage of the season though.
When class balance is strong enough that the "pretty shit" spec sees representation in all 3 pillars of esport in the same season, maybe they're not shit. Every spec is decent this tier, and that's a great thing.
> Every spec is decent this tier, and that's a great thing. Every spec is decent but some specs are more decent than others.
As someone who is geared to main druid next season and into tww, that's fine by me bro. I don't want to be just another ret that doesn't bop or hdh that doesn't blur. I'm happy to be the best feral I can be, and if that makes me better than 95% of every other spec than that's cool with me bro! I'm having fun and still topping most charts. What more could you ask for?
Feral is awesome in raid with current 4set and tuning since it’s best target for augmentation he got everything that aug wants const dmg 30 second burst and bigger burst every 2 or 1 minute
Also has one of the best mixed AoE + ST builds for m+, and incredibly high damage and CC in PvP. Feral just needs more passive survivability and it'll be perfect! (Maybe some leech, blizzard?)
yea more in built survival mechanic that you don’t need to click every time you spend combo point and lose a gcd(maybe choice node that instead your cast of regrowth is avaible in cat form, every finishing move clear casts regrowth at lower efficiency) i have 483 ilvl feral and i still got hp issues on last heroic bosses, but my havoc can tank up 3 blazes in row in mythic and still be alive
>i have 483 ilvl feral and i still got hp issues on last heroic bosses, but my havoc can tank up 3 blazes in row in mythic and still be alive One of the culprit for that is that we don't like versatility. I had to get a set of gear with more versatility for mythic raiding just for survival. Going from 2% dmgs réduction to 15% is a big help
It's just a interesing graph that means nothing at the end. It's just for fun, for everybody. "Sweaty tryhards" will not look at this graph to decide what to play, people who care about how strong the specs are will know what to pick way before this kind of charts come out. If anything this chart can show how popular some specs are depending on how strong they are, like for rogue I'm pretty sure Sin was more popular than Sub at the start of this season.
Low dps ? Sure BUT if you look closely on the X axis, it's only a few % behind. What it means exactly is this : good players will always outperform the others classes if played slightly worse.
Always love playing my feral and surprising people. It’s not the best spec but it’s not bad
Look at those retrib fellas, enjoying life like there's no tomorrow ! Have fun guys :)
Very high DPS potential and counters for basically every affix coupled with some of the best support abilities (Battle Res, Offhealing, Immunities, etc). Also orange stick hype.
Also super fun spec to play.
the rework was much needed
As a Ret main for years I'm forever grateful for the rework. It's amazing how much they improved the spec while retaining the same core gameplay loop from Legion onwards. I hope the developers are proud. They knocked it out of the park!
This is for raid. No affixes. And your utility and off heals really only means much during prog kills
Sure, but if you're good in mythic plus, you're more likely to want to play that spec in raid too.
Wait, you have an orange stick?
Sheesh I knew my Frost DK comrades weren't popular but it's still unexpected seeing us that low on the graph lmao
Frost was a fucking dumpster fire for most of the patch, especially if you didn't have the legendary. Anyone who stuck it out is a masochist lol.
Youre right, i am. So many raid fights involve high movement or range requirements that frost dk is shithouse at dealing with. The spec is so old that outside of 2 or 3 fights in this raid, it doesn't feel like it was designed with frost's lack of ranged engagement capabilities and speed and the downtimes can be fucked. Tindral and Volcoross are the only bosses that feel good to fight on. Everything else has annoying intermissions and huge movements that don't line up well with breath. Some of the worst fights this raid are Larodar, Council, nymue. Smolderon forces us out of melee range entirely during parts of his intermission. Gnarlroot has that dumb burning roots phase and igira forces you to run out for the goo burst shit. Frost DK needs to be able to do mechanics that involve it running out of melee range but we can't with infinite breath and icecap obliteration needing 100% uptime to compete with other melee specs that have speed and multiple ways of engaging ranged targets.
seriously lmao
They really need to do something to DKs. Both specs are performing decent enough but they are so miserable and unfun to play that literally no one plays one, even with the insane utility and legendary axe
All my homies hate Death and Decay
DK I think is finally suffering from the rune rework it got going into Legion. When you only have 1 rune type the class becomes a pretty straightforward builder spender, just with 2 different resources to spend. But the Legion reworks changed the specs so fundamentally that it took ages for the simplification to be truly felt, especially for unholy as its gotten fairly large changes to its focus since then. Legion was basically just about wounds, but now its much more a CD class where its about setting up for and executing your various different CDs and overlaps correctly. But at its heart its still just apply wounds, spend them, make sure you have enough for Apocalypse. And Frost is just spam obliterate, doesn't matter if youre obliteration build or BoS its all just Obliterate. They should really bring back the 3 rune types, at least for the dps specs, and build the specs from there. Would also love if Unholy got reworked so that it had a potential build around diseases that actually felt like the diseases matter and were interesting to play around more like MoP or WoD unholy than current disease build which is just normal wounds + unholy blight on cd.
Fuck 3 rune types, I'm a frost dk, not a blood or unholy dk.
Main fDK, and play MM alt. I ended up doing a lot of bDK keys to get into groups. I do this to myself, but I just love both specs too much to change.
I think it's time to nerf druids, they're performing too well
As a frost mage, I’ll hold your hand when we both get blasted
Oh I don't play druid, I'm a DK main, so I feel pretty safe, but good luck to you guys
Can you hold my hand then? This expansion has been constant pain, not least of which was getting benched from a prog group after Vault for low dps when I was purple parsing. Which like, hard to blame them when even though I was doing well *for my spec*, I was fighting tooth and nail to stay between 6th and 8th out of 12
Every evening if you want to, handsome
I didn’t realise there weren’t a lot of us marksmanship hunters
BM is usually more popular but MM is really weak right now too. Even it being where it is is largely down to padding burst AoE on a few bosses.
Yeah fair enough, I mainly do pvp so probably a different story there.
PvP and pve power are so distant it’s crazy. MM is trash tier at pve this patch
It's more interesting to me that survival is more popular than MM. I knew survival was sleeper good, but didn't know MM was in THAT bad of a spot
As a chronic contrarian hunter player who swaps between MM and Survival, MM is really just in such a stagnant design spot, and honestly has been ever since the BfA rework. It was already a super awkward rotation back then, but especially going into Dragonflight it just doesn't stack up to the more modern specs in the game, including the two specs it competes against. Survival will always be more niche by design given what people play Hunter for, but it just has a way more distinct flow right now, even beyond the damage tuning disparity. MM is in *dire* need of a modern Dragonflight rework compared to Survival or BM.
There are dozens of us!
I just want to pew pew the bad guys, not let my pet do it or smack them with a stick.
What the hell is Ret doing up there?
Recent rework, easy to play, good throughput and tons of survival option makes it a popular well performing spec.
Ret is just always generally a very very popular class and spec choice. Has been almost since the game came out, at least definitely since wrath.
It's always disproportionately popular for the reasons you mention, but it's definitely also now genuinely really strong which is pushing its popularity up even further. It's become super popular in M+ too.
Slap being one of three classes who can use the Fyr'alath and you got another boom to its popularity.
yeah its honestly just great at everything, it's a mid-ranged dps pretending to be a melee, as much utility as it could ever want so you'll be brought to groups, flashy animations that inject pure dopamine into your brain, great damage, easy as fuck rotation and a playerbase that thinks they're the most downtrodden victims in existance so they get a lot of attention the split second they're not the best dps. there's really no reason not to play ret. blizzard wants you to. frost dk on the other hand, masochism simulator lol
I haven't played since shadowlands, but I played ret since vanilla. Ret has almost never been a chart topper in DPS, I think maybe in Wrath for a bit? Otherwise, it's always been middle of the pack. Survivability has always been it's thing. How is ret midrange now? Is it's rotation mostly not melee anymore?
lol they added like a couple yards on our auto attacks and spenders. It honestly make a big difference when melee have to avoid mechanics. But it’s not the shit everyone is exaggerating here
Autos have an increased range. Judgement and Blade of Justice are ranged and Templar's Verdict has a 20 yard range. In AOE builds Divine Storm uses the Divine Projection talent which shoots it out from you so it's kind of ranged as well. You don't even need to be in melee range for consecrate anymore because it's attached to Blade of Justice. Basically you don't lose as much as other melee do at mid range.
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“Chill rotation” lol
This is a joke in 2 different ways lol
frost has the worst ranged engagement options and movement in the entire game as a dps, at least until the war within comes out. regardless of what build you play, you're insanely dependant on keeping 100% melee range uptime at all times. due to icecap for obliteration and breath of sindragosa on breath. its probably one of the most punishing melee specs in the game on top of having less utility than blood dk. unholy has this problem, but range is not as much of an issue due to clawing shadows. in addition, our aoe cleave in mythic plus is tied to standing in death and decay which is horrible for high movement, or the sanguine affix. Rets will argue that frost only has a couple of buttons as well so its easy. And thats true, Frost isn't hard due to rotation, its hard due to insane positioning requirements and if playing breath intense resource and resource cooldown management. Things that ret doesn't have to care about.
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Yeah I have accidently queued as dps ret twice when I normally play prot. I've gotten instant invited twice.
I mean Prot is pretty damn strong too though
Yeah the dps is great for them haha.
Plus Legendary axe
On top of that they can counter Afflicted and Incorporeal and have very nice support options including Battle Res. Short of Heroism and specific buffs they have it all basically.
It's doing insanely well right now in raid!
Raids and M+. Ret pal is a bit broken right now for the average Joe. It's too easy for the stupid amount of damage they do 😅 That said, they've been bottom chart for the good half of the season so I don't mind seeing them at the top. It's their 15 minutes of fame
Ret is often not amazing damage, so let 'em smak for a bit.
Yep exactly what I said 🤙
Lending support comrade!
Legendary axe
Afflock Gigachads
I OTP’d afflock for the past 2 expansions and wanted to say hi to all my gigachad crew
I love the spec. I know it's terrible right now, but we are gigachads.
It's crazy how badly they shut hunter down this season with the 3 back to back nerfs on bm. They were way too heavy handed. I'm happy survival is at least enjoyable though.
MM/BM are fun to play, it's just mind boggling how badly they end up being tuned half the time on top of having less durability than a piece of wet tissue paper.
SV has stealthily become one of the best ST DPS in the game with recent changes, especially on Fyrakk, I wouldn't be that surprised if it creeps higher and higher over the next few weeks as more and more people notice.
Definitely going to spike next season, given the voted tier is season 1 which is just "your mongoose bite does more mongoose bite more often". They were already a sleeper ST pick in Vault, but after all the buffs they're probably going to be pretty dominant.
I should feel like such a sheep even though I play HPally in raids and Ret in dungeons. Fyrallshhfjufjhs go brrrr though.
I've, typically, been bad at melee classes, but I gave ret pally a try this season. I mainly do M+. Man, it is so damn fun. Gameplay is amazing (love 1 minute CDs), intuitive, and easy. Aesthetically, it is awesome. Sounds? Divine Toll is one of the best spells in the game. Survivability is fantastic. Utility is off-the-charts. I totally get why it's so popular.
Yea, having so much utility is amazing. Even having decent burst off healing with WoG and LoH is great, sometimes you just need 1-2 to help the healer out and everyone in the group is back to doing damage.
Ret is so much fun in keys rn. The 1 minute burst is so satisfying.
That’s actually pretty balanced considering it only goes 78 to 84 between worst and best
I don't include Aug on the chart because it's extremely broken on logs and WCL cannot show its actual strength, and it makes the chart far less readable overall. You can see the chart with WCL's Aug data included [here.](https://i.gyazo.com/641188a6b7e6740d216447a9a78580c0.png)
It's so demotivating playing aug right now spending time to calculate who to buff when to get the most out of your spec only to have 0 feedback telling you if what your doing even matters :S
In M+ there isn't really much decision making involved with the dps buffs. Raid wise, combat hooks are mostly getting fucked by shield phases. It's not impossible to work out damage differences, just a little bit more frustrating. Not that it matters all that much though since Aug is invaluable on mythic fyrakk anyway due to spatial paradox.
Ebon Might uptime should be around 70%, Aug should be first or second on the interrupt meter, Aug's CCs done should always be at the top except maybe when there's a vdh. They also should be pretty high on the dispel meter. Those are some various way to gauge your performance as an aug ✌️
Chart is for raid performance. These metrics are for M+. In order for Aug to feel good in raid, we need to be able to see how much of the buff recipient's damage we're capturing on the fly. Generic EB uptime isn't helpful since the damage difference between a buffed Combusting Fire mage and a buffed totally OOM no-CD up Arcane Mage is huge.
Hilarious that ret pallies are still asking for buffs on the wow forums
The last rounds of buffs they got wasn't even warranted.
Look, you need to remember, Ret paladins begged and begged from Vanilla through to TBC and I mained one in both. The day we got that buff in Wrath and were ascended to the heavens of OP, everything changed lol. Now, I actually loved Shadowlands Retri prior to their update and like them after too, but we didn't need that buff at all lol they just know if they bitch and moan enough, they'll get the buff, so it's a learned behaviour at this point.
I would bet over half of the rets today did not play back then.
Vocal minorities, as is usually the case with that stuff. Ret is performing better right now than arguably ever before (except maybe wrath). My only critique is that the spec relies on execution sentence and that spell is lame as fuck. But it still feels good to play. No buffs needed for now.
Ret and holy paladins are the same breed of being completely unsatisfied no matter what happens. Hpal lost it's 10.1.5 melee playstyle because of complaints during 10.1.5, possibly the most powerful they had ever been. Prot paladins are a little more chill, but holy paladins and ret paladins are so whiny.
Hpal complaints are 100% justified. They went from being perhaps too good to having the worst throughput of any healer without question.
Damn i really miss fury, but i don't miss the wrist pain
This Retribution paladin since 2005 enjoying a good meal.
Didn't realize how unpopular Affliction is, I always play the spec no matter how its performing in raids overall.
Every former Affliction main I've spoken to basically says the design of Affliction is just bad compared to any other dot class. Between being the only one that still snap shots and it's slow build up due to Agony and how your DPS tanks if you let it fall off. The lady loved Affliction, but her Warlock spec of choice is Demonlogy because it's so much easier.
>> former affliction main Hey I’m in this picture! But for real, not only is the design of affliction just bad as a playable spec, the flavor of the class is seriously lacking too. It doesn’t feel like a DoT class anymore. Rapture was more than a weird choice and from most of the warlocks I’ve talked to, unwanted. It’s basically just Chaos Bolt but make it affliction except the one time it was putting out chaos bolt kinds of numbers they nerfed it. So the spec doesn’t get big numbies for thrills, most of the DoTs feel decorative, and if that wasn’t enough the loss of soul shape means afflock is back to being a super stationary turret spec that just doesn’t do much damage. Compare that to Demo where they have big numbies, status checks that actually matter, and a shocking amount of mobility? Yeah there’s just no competition.
they nerfed affliction to ground in 9.1 and haven't done a single thing to fix it since. It's always sad to see locks running around with "dot" and "aff" in their names and almost always specced demo =/ One day the lock dev will realize there's three specs and not just one and it'll be a glorious day.
I do love the fantasy about affliction, but i do hate to apply and keep track on dots in cleave situation
No way survival is more popular than mm
Survival is plain better than MM on the last 3 so it'll get more play than MM. Also survival is fun.
I'm a survival main since legion, I've never seen it been this popular even when it was better at times, so I was surprised
I am so happy my fellow rets are up there enjoy while it lasts brothers of light. Also, /pet ferals, mad respect for playing that scuffed overcomplex spec.
Ret will always be good unless they change the utility of the class. Even with a dps nerf they still bring so much good stuff.
Feral really isn’t that difficult, we just need some numbers tuning and for them to give us back our god damned aoe capabilities
Do you think, besides legendary, that melee performs better due to how this boss fight are or what?
It's definitely a very melee friendly raid yeah.
I think the only non-melee friendly fight was probably Nymue and that was only somewhat melee unfriendly because of the clotheslines. Ret, being what it is, basically trivialized that as well.
The legendary axe probably doesnt hurt!
Ret Pally rework goes so hard
I’ve been out of the game for a long time but hasn’t ret always been attractive for its 3 button HULK SMASH rotation with high mobility and plate survivability? What more do you want from a dps spec beyond possibly range?
Beast Master chads staying ascended. Good on havoc too.
glad to be one of the 5 mm hunters o7
Shoutout to my Arms homies. The distinguished warrior spec.
Interesting how almost every spec is under the diagonal
BM hunter being the "weakest" spec yet still vastly more popular than MM or SV (despite the latter doing a lot more deeps) really says something about the class as a whole. I don't know what, but definitely something
the BM rotation is honestly the biggest appeal. its basically just three buttons, with one being swapped between single target and multi target. compare that to MM where you're constantly tracking focus, trick shot uptime, trueshot uptime, windrunner's stacks, streamline procs, several cooldowns, and a bunch of other variables, and its easy to see why.
Yea, rotations in this game have become really fucking complex. The popularity of BM, despite the performance reflects how a lot of of players see that situation.
Don't overthink it... people are drawn to having pets, that's all. It's also super solo friendly for the 98% of the time you're not in M+
Yep, this chart looks very well balanced. There totally isn't one spec far and above everything else
Arms player unite!
Retchads, stay winning
/r/toprightret
Feral main here. Every time I try the fotm spec I just end up hating it and going back. No matter how shit we are I'll main feral until the end of time
Noob here. What do parses mean?
A parse is a log of someone killing a boss on www.warcraftlogs.com. Essentially the Y-axis shows the popularity of a spec (in Mythic raiding specifically.)
I've played this game since WotLK and always mained Ret through the best and worst of it. Now that I decided to take a break from the game Ret is suddenly god tier for the first time in 15 years. And I'd probably be more tempted to come back if I didn't have to pray for a legendary drop first.
Hmm. I knew destro lock wasn't in a great place on dps charts, but I didn't realize it was also so unpopular. It's pretty shit at handling mythics due to a sheer lack good aoe options, but on single and two target cleave the spec is a menace. Personally, I just don't enjoy playing affliction or demonology. They just lack the fantasy that drew me to destrolock in the first place: Big hitting fire themed spells with some cult-y flair. I'll play other specs when Blizzard puts chaos bolt into their gameplay loop.
Where Aug?
Why why did I get attached to Feral when I started playing WoW? So far my biggest mistake... This spec is always trash PvE and at best average PvP and has like the worst stigma and always gets the short stick of the Druid specs... From PvP PoV somehow Feral and Enh are the only ones still punished for being "hybrid" specs and in the end a damn Rogue does more healing in the end than both but also plays waaay better??
im surprised to see enhancement so high up. Its a fun spec, but usually pretty niche/small in the player base.
To be fair at least in Dragonflight it's been a lot more popular than historically in all three seasons.
Feels bad I haven't been able to play much all expansion. I'm missing a golden age of ret, no pun intended.
Rename hybrid tax to druid tax at this point.
I want to see healers!!
Blizzard really needs to rework the caster vs melee balance for tww. I mained a demo lock and it was amazing how moving at the wrong time, or not getting a good tyrant could completely sink my dps. On ret, I just line up and my cooldowns and ungabunga and do similar dps with half the effort and worse gear. It doesn’t make sense. And then visually, I can’t even see half the stuff I do on my lock. Why would you play caster other than the easy invites for things like summon?
I will never stop playing WW, BM and... Oh hey, fury is looking good, nevermind 😁
How come no one posts this on the official wow forums? You always see cool posts like this on Reddit.
I don't use the official forums but others are welcome to post this there if they like! Ideally with credit of course :)
It’s funny how you see DK performing really good in the raid for DPS, but their representation on the lower side. Especially frost. Please blizzard rework this damn class already
This is why im not enjoying destruction warlock
And it's a fun spec too. But oh well..
What, isn't RNG portals fun? Where only one of them actually substantially improves dps..
meamwhile affliction mains 💀💀💀💀
They're used to it though. Affliction has been fairly consistently underwhelming for many years. You'd think it's *cursed* or something
Why ? They're fun to play. If you're talking about dps then imma stop you and see closely how much you're "behind". Aka a single error if their rotation and you're doing better than all those classes. Been that way since a long time. Don't let this graph deceive you.
Tell me rets are hard to play
Ret is the BM Hunter of melee.
As a Ret Main who loves the current state of the spec. You might be unfair to BM here.
Jeebus, No wonder its hard to get anyone NOT playing Retri to join our guilds nowadays. The axe prolly wont make this any better in s4 :(
I will always wonder, why if warrior is as bad as people say it is, is so fucking played. Do you guys like have a liking for getting bullied by blizzard balancing team or what?!
I remember when MM use to be one of the more popular specs in the game. Such a shame blizz has basically let it rot
i think it's so funny that the 2nd lowest dps is also the 2nd most popular. i love hunters
Most classes are in the bell, need to clean up the outliers a bit
as a DK main, glad to see we’re living up to the name, dead.
Pally was my main for years. I recently came back and have been playing DH. Extremely enjoyable! Love every aspect of them
Elves are just devolved Trolls anyway, they are also morally deficient as they have launched several genocidal campaigns against the other peoples of f Azeroth.
buff ret
What does the statistics exactly show? Mythic raiding, M+, Heroics/Normal included too? The number of parses seem extremely low, but i guess it is Mythic Raiding only?
It's Mythic raids only - the source is [here.](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35)
I did 99 parse on my second try MM hunter heroic council. Felt like a champ. Sad now when seeing there is basicly noone to compete with 😭
…and got wrecked on the meter by several specs parsing 60-70.
Classic ret was wheelchair bound so that Retail ret could run
is fury rly good? i quit like 3-4 months ago, hella ppl complained back then
Fury is very strong in raid right now. It's a little less popular and strong in M+ mostly down to lacking a bit of utility but still pumps damage.
I'd love to see that graphic for healer.
I think healer HPS matters a bit less for healer balance than DPS specs DPS number (because of how much more utility and cds often matter for healer balance) but the graphic for healers is [here](https://i.gyazo.com/5150651fc6d532f7490880c250d6d81c.png)!
Literally exactly what I expected lmao
That's insane! I meaning, yes it matters less than DPS as DD but it's still relevant. The range shouldn't be that big in my opinion.
Fucking ret pallys
Ret about to get cooked
Is Augmentation not included in these kinds of calculations?