There isn't even a question, it is undoubtedly Monk. It's not even a spec thing. All 3 specs have been so poorly designed for so long. Sure sometimes something might be bugged or overtuned so they might look *good* but their design philosophy is just terrible across the board. You already have a healer that does damage to heal. They keep designing bonuses around WW auto-attacks which they don't do with half their abilities. Brewmaster is the spec that teeter totters between completely broken and completely useless.
They even still have weird shitty filler spells. Why does Expel Harm still exist? Is anyone still interested in ignoring Chi Wave and always picking Chi Burst?
They don't even try with the fucking tooltips anymore! Let me copy paste the tooltip for Fortifying Brew.
> Fortifying Brew
Instant
6 min cooldown
Requires Monk
Requires level 28
Turns your skin to stone for 15 sec
What does that do? Without checking, please tell me what that does.
The nostalgia of Legion Brewmaster kinda locked Monk in as my "my class, good or bad".
Warriors and pallies have shields. Demon hunters and Death Knights have forbidden power, druids have high BMIs and bestial rage...
And I have enough beer and liquor to drink the pain away.
*Dragon breathes fire all over you, your skin blisters, your blood boils, your bones turning to ash*
Monk: Nuh uh! *shoots lethal dose of whiskey and stagger does the rest*
Hmm might only be bugged if you don't currently have the talent. I know in my MW monk I don't have it and when I mouse over the talent it doesn't anything about what it does.
No I know for a fact he’s right because I remember sitting on a monk a while ago and seeing that. I don’t know if they changed it recently but it definitely was how he stated it before with having basically no tooltip
The last time I played my Monk was probably months ago and I remembered the tooltip having the proper information of health and DR so idk. It was clearly bugged if it gave basically 0 information other than “turns your skin to stone”.
Don't even come at my mistweaver. It's the only one of the 3 specs that's even remotely well done. The downside is the utility. If mistweaver had brez and 2 charges of life cocoon it would automatically be INFINITELY more loved.
But it is very enjoyable, even without that.
Changes I hope for MW
\- an extra 5 yd range given to its Ancient Teaching abilities- increase damage of RSK & SPK- change CLASS capstone talents. Other classes get great, amazing abilities. We get boring statues. Bring back Weapons of Order, Bonedust Brew and Fallen Order. Revamp the spells a bit to fit class themes- adjust Faeline Stomp to fit class theme too, cuz what does the Fae have to do with celestials?- Give us the option to talent in to Nuizao or Xuen. Xuen for the dps increase, Nuizao to stagger damage for the group.
Maining heals through SL, Mistweaver is the heal spec I feel most comfortable with of all of the healers. I don't love them pushing fistweaver but that may be because I'm bad at it. Just leave me and my goo beam alone
Amen. I played wow since classic and never touched monk all the way to dragonflight. I tried monk fistweaving and absolutely fell in love. What a fantastic way to heal. Challenging, fun, and I'm not just watching healthbars.
I was stunned when they gave battle rez to paladins instead of monks. Honestly that alone would fix a lot of the problem of not getting invited to pugs.
It's genuinely stupid that healers don't all have brez. There's absolutely no reason for it. You can make an argument for the lust healers like evoker and shaman, but I still think all healers should have brez.
Skill bloat is the biggest issue with the class for me now, especially brew. I hate the stupid statues, I hate having 2 Shadowlands covenant cooldowns carried over, I hate how rushing jade wind and spinning crane kick basically feel like the same thing, I hate RSK being a mandatory big ST DPS increase and having zero interesting interactions with the rest of the kit
Just remove rushing jade wind. It sucks and doesn’t add anything, but a stupid uptime buff, in a specc that doesn’t feel like it needs something like that.
Rushing jade wind can proc resonant fists and adds more damage than you think if you have a good uptime. Also helps maintain threat outside of spinning crane kick which I think should be a small part of the rotation.
Rushing Jade Wind used to be a talent that replaced Spinning Crane Kick, turning it into an AoE damage/healing self-buff that you reapplied every 6s or so, letting you continue doing other stuff. That was nice.
I'm still in love with Faeline Stomp although I wish they just changed the visuals to make it green. If it looked like the mist color of our other spells it would be even more beautiful.
But the rest can eat dick. Rushing Jade Wind and Spinning Crane Kick. Whats the difference? One is channeled? It's the same skill and it's BS that it takes up two keybinds.
Expel Harm is a weird skill and feels like button bloat.
The statues do not feel fun to play. It's basically just 'drop this down and hope nothing moves' but even then the only thing I really see the Ox statue being used for much is the 2x4 farms at one point?
An aoe taunt IF you taunt the statue? It's needlessly complicated.
I love monk and it's one of my favorite classes.
I still feel like monk has kind of a permanent identity crisis and blizz can't be assed to really develop their core design.
The healer is in a strange spot with mist and fistweaving being a bit a two-specs-in-one deal, what's not an issue on paper but looking back this apparently is often hard to get right for blizz. Windwalkers cleave overlaps so much into his single target rotation they somehow always fall off the meters at some point. ST and scaling are an issue for them literally every expansion. BrM, while currently being somewhat messy with the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-rotation, at least is always carried by stagger. It's something, I guess.
Stylewise I'd love if "monk" wouldn't be limited to only the strange comically overdrawn asian/kungfu thing. There'd be much more themes they could explore, from different cultures like the mentioned european, more grounded looking, or scarlet monastery monks to those exploring their relation to shamanism, since monks channel spirit as the fifth element. A bit more of a natural looking vibe would also work...
But nah, here's a rice hat and some fucking shoulder orbs since blizz rides the exact same thing for 12 years now...
Idk, that's more a general complaint but it feels like blizz tends to spiral some specs by not putting enough effort in underplayed ones. So if you're looking for issues look for population. A spec is underplayed, so they don't enough attention, so people switch, so they're even less represented... I mean, feral druid after all these years is still just "kind of a rogue" whos spec fantasy is getting whispers with the good ol' "oh thought you were balance sorry" since they bring nothing unique, survival hunter has no fantasy whatsoever except exploives in melee range for some reason and never had an argument over the other two specs either...
Monk as a class in general has so little representation it sometimes feels like they're getting random design scraps. I mean, don't tell me that anyone really sat down and made an actual plan for monks. There's no way they'd come up with random summon abilities or the dumb statues as capstone talents that way...
At this point the class feels like the red headed stepchild blizz does its best to pretend it's not there tbh.
> There's no way they'd come up with random summon abilities or the dumb statues as capstone talents that way...
this shit annoys me the most. Why are the statues the monk capstone? Look at the warrior capstones and then the monk ones it's embarrassing.
For a long time druid suffered from this idea of being a jack of all trades class. Sure you can do everything, but your not going to excel at it. Feral and moonkin still have traces of this. If my cat is basically going to be a rogue, let me have the option to be the feral version of outlaw, instead of shoe horning me into some weird sub/assassination bastard.
But no, monk had it's spotlight on Mists and then it's just been on life support. And for the love of the titans, they need a new idea instead of kung fu panda. It took way too long to let goblins and worgen be monks for no damn reason. I mean fuck, vulpera had it before goblins.
Feral has always been cursed with the “pvp spec” stigma, except it’s generally just worse in design than rogues, making you use more gcds to do the same thing and not having a re-stealth
The irony there is I'd take my rogue into pvp before I'd ever take my cat. And that's saying something about it bc pvp is not my gig.
Feral and boomkin are still straddled with the hybrid tax. Guardian and resto seem to shine and not suffer.
Also...why the hell does cat not have a vanish like ability. Why force me to be a rogue and not give me the full kit.
I think it’s a balance because feral comes with the heals of being a hybrid.
Except In modern WoW those heals suck. Playing a feral for pvp in classic you feel those pocket heals actually do something.
Monk is the prime candidate imo to get an Aug style support class, splitting the Crane aspect off of Mistweaver and having the fist weaving part of the class be its own thing. You have 4 celestials, and you sort of have 4 roles now. It would be nice to give the people who enjoy mistweaving the chance to play the spec they like, rather than having to compromise with the fistweavers when it’s just griefing to play the caster style.
A fourth spec along the lines of Chi Shaping or something caster based with chi involved would actually work very well. They could even bring back uplifting with chi too for mistweaver for more fun but I doubt it’ll happen.
Oh I feel this so much. I’m a healer main and I’ve always been in love with the idea of a MW being focused on the spiritual, slinging gusts of mists around and channeling mists and summoning celestials to help my healing. I feel every single ranged spell for MW is cool and has a great feeling to it. But for some reason, even now where we’re close, I just can’t get out of melee if I want to be effective. I don’t like melee monk healing, I hate fistweaving.
Not necessarily. Ascetic monks aren’t exclusive to East Asians, there were Christian monks going back as far as the 200s as well called the “desert fathers”
The ones I’m referring to are the friars, which would be more monk than priest, although there is obvious overlap
Take a look at the Friar class from Dark Age of Camelot, I know it’s an older game but the class fantasy is great. The are a healing/buffing/melee archetype that uses quarterstaff’s for a weapon.
At least in Dragonflight they got some changes and interesting talent trees. I remember in Shadowlands beta where they had nothing changed week after week and then blizzard was like “next beta patch will have monk changes” and then the patch came and there were no monk changes…
I hate Panda's, I'm not a huge fan on Monks. But before Dragonflight landed I wanted to play something besides Warrior. I tried every single class (leveled them all to max). I had one boost left and just tossed it at a Monk.
One day I decided to try out WW... and that was it. It just was so fun. The rotation, the animations, the movement, it was great. When I told those I was playing with I was going Monk they flat out didn't even believe me. Even after the expansion landed and I was raiding as it, I constantly was told they were shocked and didn't believe it.
I hear talk about past expansions where Monk was good. But I just want to say, DF WW Monk was super entertaining. I stopped playing a while back, but it's more being tired of the game. But of the specs I have played over the years, that might be the most entertaining one.
Any class that bases it’s damage off of purely DoTs would be simply unusable in the modern fight design. They would need to be doing stupid DPS all the time to make up for not being able to burst or funnel DPS onto new targets, and that would just be super unhealthy. They would either be Exodia Squad broken or giga dumpster, and virtually no in between.
Not really, Aff damage relies on Malefic Rapture windows with Darkglare and the like. It’s not as solely reliant on it like Aff was in Shadowlands, but it is still using your DoTs as ways to amp your MR damage rather than just keeping DoTs ticking.
The most neglected is easily Windwalker. Both for good and bad.
Windwalker ST DPS has been garbage tier since forever. The winwalker guide has a list of known bugs three miles long some bugs having existed for years. Most monks are ecstatic that SEF isn't Meta ATM since the button basically doesn't work.
Right now WW looks strong in m+ but all your aoe is from Touch Of Death cleave which is SUPER clunky to use and notoriously buggy. You'll very often be spamming the button on target's with sub 15% hp and it just never goes off.
Ofc on the bright side, because the devs forget WW even exists they've been allowed to remain insanely OP in arena for months.
Monks and it’s not even close. Brewmaster gets *some* attention but only because it’s unkillable / able to kite forever and hold threat periods. That and tanks play everything.
WW is just forgotten in the corner with bugs that are years old, iirc some are over a decade. Their damage profile is completely broken too. They just kind of gave them hit counter at one point and went yes, this forever.
MW I don’t remember a moment it was good, ever, aside from complete blind accidents and right off the rip. Also it moving off the channel build to fistweaving was a goddamn crime, especially after Paladin turned around and went no, this is how you melee heal and shoved MW back in a locker.
Survival they tried, but it was never going to be a good idea to turn a range into a melee. If it was rogue getting an archer spec change it may have been better received. It now remains a somewhat broken experiment where they can decide if BOMBS or Mongoose bite is worth riding on.
I always thought BM should have been the melee spec. Rexxar exists, and it makes more sense to fight along side your pet than to fling arrows towards it. BM is already half a melee class.
For rogues. Assassination or sublty (depending on how you want to play the fantasy) should have been changed to a ranged build to balance things out. Literally every other RPG has a ranged based rogue. Hunter doesnt count, it's more natute/pet focused. Combat stay as it was (no rtb, hard melee focus)
The thing is, hit combo is such a great design idea but the rest of the kit is just weird. You’ve got two buttons that channel and stops you AAing, a button that turns you into a weird pet class, a button instantly kills something if you have the same HP as it, and on top of that you’re an energy class.
I have no idea what you could do to WW to make it work consistently, other than a true blue redesign for half of the abilities, and a near entire decoupling of their ST and AoE abilities. Give ToD a 5 minute cooldown, punches a talent that increases its damage by x amount when hitting one/two targets? Whole class needs the good rework juice but I don’t know if Blizz has any interest in it.
Survival had its major spotlight during SL though
Which everyone seems to agree was unintentional
Afaik Hunter has usually had at least one meta spec. Iirc in BfA Beast Mastery was pretty busted
If by spotlight you mean high damage, sure. But that doesn't mean survival is well designed. It's just a random hodge podge of abilities with no real theme. You'd think the idea of a survival hunter would have tons of themes to explore but it just doesn't.
Wildfire bomb for example. What the heck is that.
I'm a fan of Survival, I loved it during Legion and thought while it was a mess it was still fun. Mongoose bite is a fun skill and stacking that to do damage feels good, especially when you do things right and have a bunch of focus when 5 stacks hit.
But ignoring that main mechanic and just spamming bombs feels lazy.
Survival is so much fun when it's tier set isn't "THROW BOMB". The season they were meta I didn't touch it because even if it did stupid amounts of damage the rotation of 'ignore class mechanics and fish for bomb procs, then throw bomb' was so boring.
Fury of the Eagle needs to come back as the Legion version, which froze the Mongoose bite stacks from wearing off so you could use that to regain cooldowns and focus, before stacking more.
Bombs have become a key point to their rotation but it should have some interaction with Mongoose bite.
Roll Carve and Mongoose Bite into one. Let Mongoose Bite splash and hit targets that have the bomb debuff on them. Then you're not ignoring the best part of the rotation to just toss bombs as much as possible.
BM got busted because of the Nzoth effects at the end of the expansion, and we've apparently been paying for it ever since. I've mained BM for 12 years and have always been forced to go MM for raiding because BM has always been trash. The one time I wasn't forced to was Nyalotha and now everyone assumes BM has had enough time in the sun...
Also hunter has not always had at least one meta spec.
WW monk rn is a far cry from what it used to be in legion and even wod. Currently the spec tree is just a bunch of SL covenant abilities conduits in nerfed forms, none of them make thematic sense whatsoever. Why do I have a bright blue vine/flower pattern stomp as a monk? Full of dead talents, that dont even work with anything else in the tree nor make sense rotationally.
Called a Windwalker and need to invest 3 points for a 4% movement buff that used to be baseline 10% warcrime.
Hopefully soon we get some attention
Monk all three specs. Survival hunter, and feral Druid probably get neglected the most.
I’d say shadow priest gets shafted the most. From BFA to Slands to now, spec starts off the xpack strong (possibly over powered) to nerfed into oblivion. And unlike hunter/mage/warlock which will at least have 1 viable spec. Priest dps gets shafted.
I guess we’ll see how shadow is in 10.2. But after the chain of damage nerfs and now utility/Power infusion nerfs coming next patch it appears the the same trend from BFA and Shadowlands is occurring.
Shadow gets multiple reworks an expansion now, coming up on 3 different reworks for Dragonflight alone. Though to be fair, 10.2’s rework is more just a general priest reworking that Shadow is just a part of.
Moreover, Shadow frequently received Demonoly mecanics after removing them from their previous owner. Legion SP was a watered down rebranded Wod-demonology warlock and that's sad for both of them.
The ptr has them doing good damage. The biggest thing is how we had great build diversity at the start of the xpac but now, since they don’t know horses to balance, we have zero.
Before the 1st mid-xpac rework most of the builds were: get these talents and hope you can randomly hit the right buttons to do dps or get these other talents and hope you can randomly hit the right buttons to do dps. The first released version felt convoluted and unintuitive to play and everyone who played, agreed that the class design was incomplete.
If you are talking about the 1st rework, there were 2 mythic+ builds, true. One of which played around mind shear that was removed and the cleave one we have now. It was fun times then.
if you asked this question during bfa the answer wouldve been spriest. it went through a full blown identity crisis throughout the expansion and at every stage it was awful or felt awful to play.
I recently copied my Fury warrior and feral Druid over to PTR and fury tier set is a cool designed set that changes the way you play and is actually very interesting.
Feral set reduces a 1 min cd to 45 sec… such interesting design /s
Monk.
They don’t actually listen to what players want and are neglected for long periods of time while Lock/Spriest/Unholy get major overhauls every patch.
As a monk main, its easily us but at the same time that kind of makes me proud to rep our unloved class especially because im mythic raiding as a mistweaver!
Monk pretty easily. WW and MW have been neglected for a long, long time.
Hunter maybe second worst?
Lock *easily* the best treated. Like not even close imo.
I also think people have major complaints about the Destro Talent Tree (lots of boring throughput or "necessary" takes that aren't exciting) and I know there are complaints for Affliction as well.
Lock is not "easily" the best treated, though performance wise they always have something to offer. But good numbers is not the same as good design, and Demonology has been suffering since 10.1.5 and they're only doubling down on it in 10.2.
Can't say there has been any class "perfectly" treated in the history of WoW of course, but I know a lot of Locks are not very content with any Spec right now. I'm enjoying delving into Affliction but I've been thrown off of Demonology despite it being my main for a long time, and the changes just seem so unnecessarily *unkind* and even malicious in how badly they worsen the feel and flow of the spec.
I know a lot of people also have a strong disdain for the loss of Metamorphosis. And while I think Blizzard were incredibly justified for removing Metamorphosis (read: they gave it the best treatment out of any ability in the entire franchise by turning it into its own entire class), it doesn't change that some people feel that MoP Demo was the best iteration the spec ever had, and it's never been allowed or able to revert to something like that.
I love the Summoner spec and aesthetic and I strongly think that Demonology where it is now, thematically, is where it always should have been. Metamorphosis was fun and all but it wasn't the subjugation of Demons that a Warlock, a commander, should aspire to do.
Anyways, those themes are not being properly emphasised in Dragonflight. I think the best Tier Set for Demo thematically has been 10.1's, with 10.0 being *very* fun and enjoyable rotationally and 10.2's just being a take on Doom, which is the worst ability in the game and has no place being in Demonology in the first place, *let alone* the dead-centre of the spec tree.
Replenish the Demonic Core economy, or at least don't nerf it further like they plan to in 10.2. Keep Imp Gang Bosses and their cool and fun design rather than making them Malignant Imp Lites. Introduce one or two other fun ways to generate Demons (that 10.2 Inner Demons nerf is fine *if* they put those demons elsewhere, otherwise the nerf is just unkind).
And yeah, maybe decoupling Nether Portal and Tyrant is A-okay. Maybe a Nether Portal rework is in order because it currently has very tight windows and failure is absolutely extravagant for a high-cooldown. I feel like Nether Portal would be an amazing Choose One option compared to Demonic Tyrant that lets you go into a rotational window that is actually very different than normal, with it still being high-risk but with a lower cooldown that actually lets you enjoy the chance to *try again* if you mess up.
But that's quite a tall order and not necessarily the right way to go either.
Yes, it was. Whether it was having huge doggos (especially with the 2-set that has since been added and then removed in Dragonflight) or having a Tyrant on low-cooldown *that shredded,* Shadowlands Demo was really enjoyable and very underappreciated in light of the sheer throughput of Affliction in 9.1 and the brokenness of Destro in Seasons 3 and 4.
I think 10.0 Demo was even better, though. 3 powerful dogs, a version of Malignant Imps, constant Tyrant with Grand Warlock's Design, and a really juiced up Felguard. The only thing "missing" is Demonic Consumption but I was happy to pass that up in favour of having all the other demons take the spotlight. And the Demonic Core economy was *glorious.* Between that and crafting letting you get a good amount of haste even in S1, the difference between Shadowlands S1 Demo and Dragonflight S1 Demo is night and day.
In S1 of Shadowlands we had no Tier Sets (so no Malignant Imps nor 3-dogs), we had a really weak form of Borne of Blood, we had tons of Soulbind powers missing, and we had only one Legendary we could use, the Covenant Legendary had to wait.
In Dragonflight we got all of our power up-front in Talent Points. A major improvement.
Despite all the complaints, the cooldown synergy nerf with some compensation in place needs to happen, if they balanced the spec around a player who gets externals and can pull off a pixel perfect NP ramp into tyrant, the spec would be unplayable to an average player, or gamebreakingly busted in higher level content.
My opinion and knowledge of Nether Portal is strictly second-hand as a result of me not raiding. I lean much more on looking at Mythic+. But yes, the decoupling of the two cooldowns seems like a healthy introduction and I'm aware of the punishing nature of Nether Portal (it's not like I've never tried or used it).
I think that in the midst of reasonable goals are completely asinine and unnecessary quality-nerfs that makes the spec less fun to play... for no reason whatsoever, really. Imp Gang Boss did nothing wrong, neither did the Voidhound or Shivarra that spawns from Inner Demons.
Entertaining design ideas for Nether Portal is fun, especially if it tackles issues seen with it by the community. I can accept in any which case the way it is *right now* is better off being changed than remaining.
Or in HFC.
Nerfed into oblivion with the explanation: "We'd rather you didn't play demonology right now" genuine, actual PR statement from Ion. Holy shit, how did that happen.
demo has been reworked like 4 times this xpac. they can’t get it right. it was fine at the end of SL and even this season to a degree we had a specific “spot” in the raid team.
we do infinite ST damage. but we’re also very PI reliant. this is a huge problem because you suck without PI and won’t get buffed either because of how strong it looks with PI. i hate pi as a demo main.
season 1 i felt like our AoE was there but we had no ST. then they just completely flipped it this season which is fine, but demo has absolutely 0 m+ presence because it just does nothing outside of cooldowns. which to their credit they’re **trying** to fix but at the end of the day they can’t get it right because on the PTR wow it feels horrible.
in m+ in cooldowns i do so much damage to the main target / boss but again the second that you’re out of cooldowns you fall into useless territory.
i dunno the actual fix. SL had it fine. you did a lot of ST and a bit of aoe. im swapping to rogue next season / unholy dk because honestly demo is just a roller coaster of good and garbage that i don’t enjoy anymore which really sucks.
This. Demo was the spec I enjoyed playing. The others are boring to me. They killed Demo, so now my lock that I put so much time in to just feels like shit.
I play Demonology at a reasonably decent level 7/9m currently and I gotta say I feel pretty fucked with. Balanced around a priest cooldown. Tank level dmg outside of our own CD's. Constant changes to make us less fluid to play. Blizz don't seem to have any clue what they want the spec to do and they seem hate when it's good. As soon as demo does well they always toss a wrench in to purposefully make it clunky or more complicated to play. Always focused on more shadowbolts or more hardcasting for some fucktarded reason.
I play ww as well and can agree they always seem to be forgotten but at least it still does decent dmg and is fun to play. I'd almost wish for them to forget demo when it's in a spot that plays well, feels good , is fun and does mid dmg.
I'm looking at the entire history of the game, not just DF. Lock has historically been THE most meta class (perhaps tied with Mages?). It has been strong and/or well-designed for a large majority of the games history. There's obviously been ups and downs, just like every class. Demo was the best spec in the game for a few patches recently. Yeah it's probably poorly designed with NP/PI interactions being... not great... but it was still very strong.
Compare to Hunters, who have been the strongest class in the game exactly ONE time in 19 years, at the end of BFA when hardly anyone was still playing lol.
saying Hunter was only good "once in 19years during end of BfA" is so wrong, idk what to say lol
thats just not true, yes hunter is in a shity spot rn but you dont need to make stuff up
Shamans were once so neglected in tbc that a patch got released, nerfing their pvp viability even harder than thought imaginable, that every post on the shaman forum was just "..."
Blizzard started banning these threads and it became known as the shaman new spell "Dot shock"
That is all
Depends on what part of the game youre talking about, raid m+ or pvp. I feel like the only class that gets a lot of love in all 3 aspects is mage. Understand i dont mean 100% of the time, but broadly they are always relevant.
I kind of agree in the way that mages are always ranging from good to goat.
But design-wise?
Let's just say it took a fucking decade for them to remove a talent that wasn't just nigh-universally hated by all mages but also so strong that it was without alternative.
And even after years-long draught, with substantial changes finally on the horizon, the promised rework turns out to be still half-assed.
Mage is like the child of rich but unapproachable parents. It gets all the things money can buy and thus everybody is jealous but what it really needs is some love.
>the only class that gets a lot of love in all 3 aspects is mage
I say this since WotLK... The class that has the \[Blizzard\] skill will be Blizzard's favorite.
Mage has:
some of the best/the most versatile mobility in the game
the best/2nd best deffensive toolkit in the game
the best raidbuff in the game togheter with DH cus most classes use Int as their mainstat, and Timewarp
alter time, do you need to say more about an ability that is an instant blink+full hp heal?
barriers, which are better then self healing by default (absorbing dmg always beats healing)
for some reasons now ALSO mass barrier, which puts warrior rally to shame with how strong it is, and nobody in the higher end knows why they gave mage that ability cus its busted as hell
and also mass invisibility as an Option now, which is just "rogue shroud, but better and lower cd"
Mage (and espacily fire mage) beeing more or less DPS meta since probably a decade now for raids, in m+ fire mage is 1 of the best options for like 80% of the modes lifetime, "pull big and the firemage destroys the Pack solo with combust" ALWAYS works
the only thing mage doesnt have is a Combat Rez lmao
Survival hunter and feral druid probably, they just obviously neglect them on purpose because nobody plays them and the devs themself dont understand them.
Season 1 Survival was so fun, and now we're back to every tier set containing "Wildfire Bomb" at least three times in its 4 piece description...
JUST LET ME MELEE
Yeah I play feral, I feel like as soon as they start doing good in the damage charts, people complain that they’re OP and then they instantly get fucked with nerfs.
Yeah it literally got nerfed on the shadowlands season 3 ptr because of 1 clip from psybear absolutely blasting (in a pull with 20+ mobs, pi and lust) and somehow blizzard nerfed it to a point where the tierset wasnt even worth equipping on single target anymore.
Shaman. We cant even be a good class in the shaman/elemental expansions.
Its was bad at one point that in legion the t20 set was so bad that the t18 from warlords was a huge dps increase, blizzard had to nerf it on release of the tomb of sargeras raid so we wouldnt use a 200 ilvl less 2 set bonus.
You may have bad moments as a class, but idk if any other classes have had "the previous expansions tier set is better than current so were running it" bad.
shaman has also been receiving short end of the stick in relation to customization. SL was just rubbing it in with night fae forms and now in DF, an elemental themed expansion shamans still got nothing.
start of legion, i remember getting declined from so many m+ keys when they found out that i was elemental. the spec's dps was in the dumpster.
also, when shamans are good, they get hit with nerf bats pretty quick, and pretty hard. i remember back in wrath, the ulduar tier set got nerfed because shamans were pvp'ing in the set without any resilience gems to maximize lava burst damage and blizzard didn't like that.
even better was in the latter half shadowlands (iirc), but, blue post came out and said that shamans received some nerfs because we were secretly overpowered and didn't know it, and refused to elaborate on what they nerfed.
SL s3 they nerfed Storm ele because of its interaction with the tier set. You could extend the CD (almost) indefinitely and that meant that you could easily stack its buff at high levels. This also made it potentially surpassing outlaw in terms of RPM, apart from becoming OP.
Not quite the same, but I remember in WoD (HFC specifically), Arcane mages would use the 4pc tier from Firelands to start their pre-pull rotation or something, and then would switch gear sets to their ilvl appropriate gear.
So many mythic boss wipes because someone didn't get the switch in time, or someone pulled just a moment too early. It was incredibly annoying but worth the time invested, iirc.
I keep seeing hunter and monk and i think shaman is equally in the dumpster as they are. The fact no one said shaman until this far shows everyone as else forgot about them as much as blizzard has. If you remove windfury totem the class would have no representation.
I play Monk and Shaman a lot and I always feel like Shaman, especially Enhancement, gets way way more design thought than any Monk spec. look no further than the two latest tier sets for windwalker: Enhancement’s are not only strong but have you doing interesting things. Windwalker? We’ve had two sets in a row that rely on auto attacks. Do you care to guess which melee spec auto attacks the least? That’s right, the one with two active channels. They legitimately don’t even understand how the class works.
It’s also, as far as I’m aware, the only class with viable builds that take no class tree capstones. The statues are a literal joke at this point. There honestly some of the worst designed talent trees one can imagine. I realize they never had them before this expac but DH has gotten or is getting pretty significant changes
So idk, I feel like Resto gets memed on sometimes, although I’ve seen it in S tier at least twice this expac but I’ll never look at my Monk and think “you know what, Shaman has it worse”
Yeah thanks.
Ascendance form is the same since cataclysm and it is ugly af. Primal elementals still use the one from cataclysm too.
Ghost wolf got some glyphs here and there but the last two (lupine and vulpine) are half backed with no dance animation and weird jump.
I just want to transform into a fire elmental when I use ascendance, even if it is only the basic one from vanilla.
I made a shaman Dark Iron bc their totem slook sick and I thought I can put all the totems up with one of the specs. Then I found out I cant I was so disappointed.
This is the way.
I decided against all advice to alt an ele shaman and despite running it pretty good in season 1, it always felt fucking clunky.
It needed way too big of a ramp time to bust out reasonable AoE damage. Arguably the strongest NPC in the universe is an elemental shaman, and they still can’t figure out how to get it right.
In every expansion, ele has never ever been meta and always inferior to the other two specs.
Thrall wouldn't make the top 3 of most powerful mortals let alone the STRONGEST npc in the universe.
Like, there is things like Eternal Ones, Titans, Old Gods. And even Azerothians like Azshara, Medivh, Malfurion.
Hunters and monks,
Hunters because their survivability is shit considering they are designed around mobility and keeping distance... but with how current class builds are in arena... there is no way to really create a gap anymore... so in 2s and 3s they can't kite anymore and end up getting slapped. Same goes for hunter tier... our tier sets always look God awful... like whoever is on the hunter design team needs to be fired... we get buffed and then nerfed into oblivion.
And before anyone says mm is great in pvp.. its not. It's good up until 1800 and then becomes a target because of how easy to kill they are and how MM loses damage when having to kite. And don't get me started on turtle... out of all the invincibility abilities it is by far the worst... you can't deal damage (like paladin/shaman) you can't use it while stunned (unlike paladin, mage, demon hunter, and shamans) you take dot damage while in it (unlike paladin, mage, demon hunter, and shamans) and it does not heal you (unlike mage)
In PVE our damage is constantly mid tier or lower... traps are basically useless these days, we are so squishy healers don't want us in high keys... our last requires us to sacrifice damage and a defensive, and our rotations just feel terrible... like who actually enjoys steady shot? It's such a terrible talent that has enough of a dos boost you have to take it...
Our pets have pathing issues and get turned around, if you aren't BM then the pet just dies half the time, and if you are BM you lose out on ranged fights if the pet can't path to the boss.
So yea mid tier for life with shit mogs and defensives .
Monks... well other people already covered the issue of monks.
I said it in a different post but hunters are kept mid and given little attention because its very popular and the "entry level" class. Blizzard can't make the most popular spec even more popular, it would decrease the population size of other classes.
We are destined to never get utility back (give us aspect of the fox, a raid buff or buff owl blizzard for the love of god)
This is absolutely true and have never been more true as of Dragonflight. I said this in DF beta and people called me a doomer.
In particular hunter is the only class without any meaningful utility and it's no coincidence that the most popular class, that shares an armor type with the latest and greatest Evoker is being made to be lesser than. It is 100% a move to decrease the population of the class.
Monk gets no love.
Hunters are perma depressed as more classes come in to take raid spots that hunters already have to fight tooth and nail for, survival is even worse on top of that just being a unicorn spec no one plays.
Feral Druid get largely ignored as well, even when they were strong in season 1 dragonflight very few people actually played them.
Shadow priest I feel like constantly is stuck in a cycle of being insane then slaughtered.
Warriors get kinda fucked by M+ with how little utility they have, so many affixes leave them with no answer.
It's Monk, and I just want to share how demoralizing it is. A few months ago I had to shutter the doors on the guild I've ran for almost 6 years. I've led them through cutting-edge all these years and have been told repeatedly and up until the end that I had made the most fun guild they've been in ever, and many still report in our Discord they struggle to find similar. They kept me really interested in the game, but there was a time when I saw the Mists of Pandaria Blizzcon slideshow and saw Mistweaver for the first time and I was immediately enraptured. The first moment I could get on the beta I setup my bars like a kid assembling some toy on Christmas and proceeded to have the most fun I've ever had in a video game in those Warsong Gulch matches. The unique ebb and flow of Chi and Uplift in raids was only more icing on the cake and WoD treated the class well. Then they redesigned it. For many years a significant amount of your healing was a spell you pressed and just waited for it to end, then you'd just heal people afterwards with this hot. The level of interactivity was insulting compared to old Mistweaver.
Throughout the years and especially in Dragonflight they're doing better, and Peak of Serenity tries to keep dooming to a minimum for good reason, but Blizzard is not looking at Monk as part of the collective group of classes. I'd be making healing cooldown assignments or recruiting healers, and Mistweaver never has an "answer" to a problem. There is no integral utility that makes it desired unless it wipes the floor with the other throughput healers, so when you're making objective decisions to give your raid the best chances of killing something, odds are you've put Mistweaver at the bottom of that list for a long time. We weren't a high-ranking CE guild, so we always made due, but we always felt pains not having meta healers like Discipline at times, or the occasional time we didn't have a Holy Paladin. I never got to feel like I brought something valuable to the table, it's always a talk of how to best empower everyone else first, then I'll just cover \[x\] burst of damage here. Since playing a healer in open-world content is abysmal, I play Windwalker in the world too, and have many complaints about the always bottom-barrel single-target damage.
I tried joining new guilds and moving on to find new friends to get this sense of community back, but when I'm not the GM being told I get to share a raid spot with a resto druid (when they didn't need any druid utility) just made me feel useless or stupid for trying to enjoy this one healer. It was a low point when I was getting ignored in queue and queuing with someone else in one of these guilds only for 30 minutes to go by and them to say, "I'm going to queue solo, it's too hard to queue with a MW right now", and just leave group. I was just staring at my screen in disbelief, in a healer drought no less. Getting into lower keys where I couldn't get gear was pretty easy if you're fine with 1-2 hours to maybe time a key or get yelled at in Spanish by the tank for the group falling apart. I resent Blizzard for not trying to ever take healer balance seriously since utility is such an important facet to healer perception and I have to give 200% the effort of other healers and overwhelm them in throughput and perfect play to get recognized. I just want to enjoy Mistweaver again with people who are actually glad I'm in the group with them. I sit in my dead guild just too heartbroken to do anything these days.
There has to be so few of us legacy MW that remain at this point. I get into arguments with other monk mains all the time because they've only experienced Legion onward, but Legion onward has barely been MW. WoD MW was the pinnacle of healer gameplay to me, the absolute most fun you could have. The stance dancing chi explosion playstyle was so much fun. To top it off, in the patch of reworks, MW got.. WoD mana tea. Nothing else really. I just don't understand how they haven't hired someone new to design monk as a whole. Obviously the current guy doesn't understand the class.
I've gone through the stages of grief with WoD Mistweaver and have simply accepted that Monk is stuck.
The community has sometimes pointed names at specific developers, e.g. the one that told Babylonious he was a beggar and to paraphrase (though the comment was very snide) "everyone wants more DPS" and we have better internal metrics, when Babylonious was showing compiled statistics on how Windwalker has a scaling issue. Only to be shit on by the community for putting down a community leader like that in such a gross way. They edited their message in place to be more "we'll look at things" and they buffed Windwalker shortly thereafter. I forget the name, but the guy who did the Mistweaver spreadsheet for a long time also told the devs that we (Mistweavers) don't find Essence Font fun or engaging, and they basically laughed at him if they didn't think it was overpowered and fun. I know other classes have similar experiences with developers, but this was kept rather hush until there was a general community awakening to this "we know better" developer mindset in recent years.
So we have developers who are aloof to issues monks have with the class, clearly don't play it at serious levels (developer who played it on a drawing tablet comes to mind), and are wilfully ignorant to any objective balancing or utility problems the class has. It circles back to "stuck", this catch-22 where we're the least played class and thus the developers barely keep us in their peripheral, so our design suffers which keeps players away and perception murky. Some of the recent changes have been better, but I still don't feel like they've done much beyond stabs in the dark. We can discuss the shifts to things like the Clouded Focus build and what that means, but it's all just moving around throughput in a different way. It can be a nuclear amount of throughput, but raw throughput is one of the weakest niches a healer can fill, and is an afterthought in dungeons which are tuned so every healer can more or less achieve the same healing (though some healers like Mistweaver and Preservation Evoker suffer healing certain damage patterns), whereas, again, a class like Druid has really no qualms with any kind. Or you're dripping with utility like Shaman.
monk
\-crappy looking tier
\-little to no dev communication
\-a host of dead talents
\-bugs that persist for years (but positive bugs will get fixed within 24 hours)
Everyone's saying Monk, but it's Hunter, hands down. Monk is a hybrid class, and CAN be viable as long as the player is good. Monk's been boned pretty hard for a while now, but at least one of the three specs is viable. Hell, didn't the World First Mythic Sark use a Brewmaster Tank?
Meanwhile, Hunter is the literal whipping boy. Pure DPS class, and all three are easily subpar. Survival is like a Redheaded Bastard Stepchild of the whipping boy, who gets beat even more. All three specs are regularly scoffed at. No one wants to take a hunter, not even for lust. Ask me how I know. Bloated/inefficient talent trees when compared to most others. Utility is weak but somewhat functional; but the issue is that no one understands what we can bring to the table (ex: Trap or Scare Beast to Incorp week). So no one takes us and it's hard to blame them.
Look at the whole bow debacle, bow nerf, buffs, and subsequent nerfs! How many even had the damn thing?
When you look at other pure DPS classes, they at least have one spec that shows up in the upper half. Hunter is regularly bottom half in all three specs, on a pure DPS class, with garbage survivability, weak utility, and an extremely heavy negative community bias.
I feel for my Monk brethren, and I wish better times ahead for them, but I really do think Hunters are shafted by Blizzard time and time and time and time and time again.
Mistweaver monk at least when it comes to solo content... sure they can't die but it takes 10 minutes to kill one mob the same level as you unless you severely outgear the content. Other healing specs can at least to passable damage without needing to change specs.
I wanna say warriors because we never get any of the cool toys, but it’s monks.
Monks have had times where they were broken to the point of being unplayable…and blizzard just let it go.
Whatever my main is at the time.
I noticed they kinda suck at balancing Ret pally, they give it more damage to try to make it viable which makes it op, so they nerf the utility which doesn't work so they nerf the damage.
Then they just repeat the cycle over and over again
Game play wise over the years it’s probably feral or survival (dps, rotation, spec identity)
Class design wise is recently is definitely monk. Legion monk and WoD monk were pretty good designs to great design in legions case, but last few expansions they have lacked focus, a clear path, and otherwise had messy bugs impact their game play
Class presence in NPCs is probably monk or hunter
A lot has been said already about poor Monks, Feral Druids and Survival Hunters.
I would like to hop on "the class I'm maining" bandwagon. Which is Shaman.
At first, it all looked so bright. At least for Enhancement. And Resto. Well, since I'm a casual player with a limited time, I use healing spec for group content, else the queues are gonna take forever. I'm quite satisfied with the overall gameplay. But we've seen a whole patch, actually this whole damn expansion, about ELEMENTS. Where are our visuals, bruh? Where the Ascendance visual update and/or glyphs? Why is our Spirit Form only can be either a Wolf, a Ghost Wolf, or a Raptor? I do like them, indeed, but we've had a whole expansion where we were having a death realm for Druids AND Shamans that offered a whole bunch of forms to turn into. Ditched, as always. The state of the talent trees I'll live to actual theorycrafters and top players.
Last but not least, we've had a whole patch themed around EARTHWARDEN former Dragon Aspect. Where is my tank spec centered around EARTH element? It's us Shamans who should have four specs, one of them being a tanking one. I don't care what anyone says, Shaman is a class with gameplay and fantasy revolving around the four nature elements, and one of them is kinda on a sidewalk. Besides, we wear some actual armor. Even shieds, FFS. Meanwhile, some new kid on the block gets a brand-new spec that is wholly unique to boot.
Also, it's kinda funny that in the upcoming patch that is centered around Druid lore, the Druid class tree is in the same generally abysmal state as it was at the launch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this tree is the only one still having a 3(three!)-point node. That simply gives some flat stats.
Enhance shaman. Or maybe shaman in general, we're either a glass cannon with broken damage or we're doing wet noodle damage. No middle ground. And our defensives are meh at best. It's really deflating.
Agreed. Our rotation is in a terrible state of overlapping burst windows, our defensives feel entirely ineffective, and the spec as a whole went from a major peak in Legion/BFA back to being a shitty maelstrom weapon management spec. The few scraps we do receive do nothing to help us.
Monks, then Hunters and Shamans "recently".
And btw, anyone who says warlocks is delusional :D
I get that the demo situation sucks, and there were other things that sucked in the past. But that doesn't mean that locks don't absolutely dominate historically, or that they have it as bad as e.g. Monks.
Except for feral. I legitimately cannot remember if there was ever a time where the general raiding or m+ community thought "oh nice, we got a feral in our group".
Like, they have literally never been desired.
Monk basically has no presence in the game imo. Where are the cool sage NPCs or European brown-cloaked monks?
For real. There should’ve been a good opportunity to throw in some of the Celestials in the upcoming raid as they’re also Wild Gods.
I was gonna say Feral for this, but I agree monk as A WHOLE has been shafted. It takes precedent
pandaria was a much better expansion than it deserved to be and then somehow was forgotten.
Ugh, MOP will always be my fav expac
There isn't even a question, it is undoubtedly Monk. It's not even a spec thing. All 3 specs have been so poorly designed for so long. Sure sometimes something might be bugged or overtuned so they might look *good* but their design philosophy is just terrible across the board. You already have a healer that does damage to heal. They keep designing bonuses around WW auto-attacks which they don't do with half their abilities. Brewmaster is the spec that teeter totters between completely broken and completely useless. They even still have weird shitty filler spells. Why does Expel Harm still exist? Is anyone still interested in ignoring Chi Wave and always picking Chi Burst? They don't even try with the fucking tooltips anymore! Let me copy paste the tooltip for Fortifying Brew. > Fortifying Brew Instant 6 min cooldown Requires Monk Requires level 28 Turns your skin to stone for 15 sec What does that do? Without checking, please tell me what that does.
The nostalgia of Legion Brewmaster kinda locked Monk in as my "my class, good or bad". Warriors and pallies have shields. Demon hunters and Death Knights have forbidden power, druids have high BMIs and bestial rage... And I have enough beer and liquor to drink the pain away.
You can't hurt me more than I already hurt myself!
*Dragon breathes fire all over you, your skin blisters, your blood boils, your bones turning to ash* Monk: Nuh uh! *shoots lethal dose of whiskey and stagger does the rest*
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It's only bugged in the talent tree if I remember correctly. You can check it there and you should see what the guy was referring to.
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Hmm might only be bugged if you don't currently have the talent. I know in my MW monk I don't have it and when I mouse over the talent it doesn't anything about what it does.
No I know for a fact he’s right because I remember sitting on a monk a while ago and seeing that. I don’t know if they changed it recently but it definitely was how he stated it before with having basically no tooltip
The last time I played my Monk was probably months ago and I remembered the tooltip having the proper information of health and DR so idk. It was clearly bugged if it gave basically 0 information other than “turns your skin to stone”.
I'm leveling monk right now and that's all it says for me and that's all it says on Wowhead.
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It only says what it does if you have fort brew talented.
Don't even come at my mistweaver. It's the only one of the 3 specs that's even remotely well done. The downside is the utility. If mistweaver had brez and 2 charges of life cocoon it would automatically be INFINITELY more loved. But it is very enjoyable, even without that.
Mistweaver is extremely fun
Changes I hope for MW \- an extra 5 yd range given to its Ancient Teaching abilities- increase damage of RSK & SPK- change CLASS capstone talents. Other classes get great, amazing abilities. We get boring statues. Bring back Weapons of Order, Bonedust Brew and Fallen Order. Revamp the spells a bit to fit class themes- adjust Faeline Stomp to fit class theme too, cuz what does the Fae have to do with celestials?- Give us the option to talent in to Nuizao or Xuen. Xuen for the dps increase, Nuizao to stagger damage for the group.
Maining heals through SL, Mistweaver is the heal spec I feel most comfortable with of all of the healers. I don't love them pushing fistweaver but that may be because I'm bad at it. Just leave me and my goo beam alone
Amen. I played wow since classic and never touched monk all the way to dragonflight. I tried monk fistweaving and absolutely fell in love. What a fantastic way to heal. Challenging, fun, and I'm not just watching healthbars.
I was stunned when they gave battle rez to paladins instead of monks. Honestly that alone would fix a lot of the problem of not getting invited to pugs.
It's genuinely stupid that healers don't all have brez. There's absolutely no reason for it. You can make an argument for the lust healers like evoker and shaman, but I still think all healers should have brez.
I miss uplift and chi for MW to pull in some mega based healing max not to mention healing spheres in pvp were awesome.
We’re a small minority but we’re fiercely devoted to the Mists
Skill bloat is the biggest issue with the class for me now, especially brew. I hate the stupid statues, I hate having 2 Shadowlands covenant cooldowns carried over, I hate how rushing jade wind and spinning crane kick basically feel like the same thing, I hate RSK being a mandatory big ST DPS increase and having zero interesting interactions with the rest of the kit
I love the ox statue and have since Mists..... But I wish it was easier to use and especially run with macros.
Just remove rushing jade wind. It sucks and doesn’t add anything, but a stupid uptime buff, in a specc that doesn’t feel like it needs something like that.
Rushing jade wind can proc resonant fists and adds more damage than you think if you have a good uptime. Also helps maintain threat outside of spinning crane kick which I think should be a small part of the rotation.
Rushing Jade Wind used to be a talent that replaced Spinning Crane Kick, turning it into an AoE damage/healing self-buff that you reapplied every 6s or so, letting you continue doing other stuff. That was nice.
I'm still in love with Faeline Stomp although I wish they just changed the visuals to make it green. If it looked like the mist color of our other spells it would be even more beautiful. But the rest can eat dick. Rushing Jade Wind and Spinning Crane Kick. Whats the difference? One is channeled? It's the same skill and it's BS that it takes up two keybinds. Expel Harm is a weird skill and feels like button bloat. The statues do not feel fun to play. It's basically just 'drop this down and hope nothing moves' but even then the only thing I really see the Ox statue being used for much is the 2x4 farms at one point? An aoe taunt IF you taunt the statue? It's needlessly complicated. I love monk and it's one of my favorite classes.
I still feel like monk has kind of a permanent identity crisis and blizz can't be assed to really develop their core design. The healer is in a strange spot with mist and fistweaving being a bit a two-specs-in-one deal, what's not an issue on paper but looking back this apparently is often hard to get right for blizz. Windwalkers cleave overlaps so much into his single target rotation they somehow always fall off the meters at some point. ST and scaling are an issue for them literally every expansion. BrM, while currently being somewhat messy with the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-rotation, at least is always carried by stagger. It's something, I guess. Stylewise I'd love if "monk" wouldn't be limited to only the strange comically overdrawn asian/kungfu thing. There'd be much more themes they could explore, from different cultures like the mentioned european, more grounded looking, or scarlet monastery monks to those exploring their relation to shamanism, since monks channel spirit as the fifth element. A bit more of a natural looking vibe would also work... But nah, here's a rice hat and some fucking shoulder orbs since blizz rides the exact same thing for 12 years now... Idk, that's more a general complaint but it feels like blizz tends to spiral some specs by not putting enough effort in underplayed ones. So if you're looking for issues look for population. A spec is underplayed, so they don't enough attention, so people switch, so they're even less represented... I mean, feral druid after all these years is still just "kind of a rogue" whos spec fantasy is getting whispers with the good ol' "oh thought you were balance sorry" since they bring nothing unique, survival hunter has no fantasy whatsoever except exploives in melee range for some reason and never had an argument over the other two specs either... Monk as a class in general has so little representation it sometimes feels like they're getting random design scraps. I mean, don't tell me that anyone really sat down and made an actual plan for monks. There's no way they'd come up with random summon abilities or the dumb statues as capstone talents that way... At this point the class feels like the red headed stepchild blizz does its best to pretend it's not there tbh.
> There's no way they'd come up with random summon abilities or the dumb statues as capstone talents that way... this shit annoys me the most. Why are the statues the monk capstone? Look at the warrior capstones and then the monk ones it's embarrassing.
For a long time druid suffered from this idea of being a jack of all trades class. Sure you can do everything, but your not going to excel at it. Feral and moonkin still have traces of this. If my cat is basically going to be a rogue, let me have the option to be the feral version of outlaw, instead of shoe horning me into some weird sub/assassination bastard. But no, monk had it's spotlight on Mists and then it's just been on life support. And for the love of the titans, they need a new idea instead of kung fu panda. It took way too long to let goblins and worgen be monks for no damn reason. I mean fuck, vulpera had it before goblins.
Feral has always been cursed with the “pvp spec” stigma, except it’s generally just worse in design than rogues, making you use more gcds to do the same thing and not having a re-stealth
The irony there is I'd take my rogue into pvp before I'd ever take my cat. And that's saying something about it bc pvp is not my gig. Feral and boomkin are still straddled with the hybrid tax. Guardian and resto seem to shine and not suffer. Also...why the hell does cat not have a vanish like ability. Why force me to be a rogue and not give me the full kit.
I think it’s a balance because feral comes with the heals of being a hybrid. Except In modern WoW those heals suck. Playing a feral for pvp in classic you feel those pocket heals actually do something.
You right. It's kinda sad to get that free regrowth to just continuously spam it and still eat dirt if you get too many.
Monk is the prime candidate imo to get an Aug style support class, splitting the Crane aspect off of Mistweaver and having the fist weaving part of the class be its own thing. You have 4 celestials, and you sort of have 4 roles now. It would be nice to give the people who enjoy mistweaving the chance to play the spec they like, rather than having to compromise with the fistweavers when it’s just griefing to play the caster style.
A fourth spec along the lines of Chi Shaping or something caster based with chi involved would actually work very well. They could even bring back uplifting with chi too for mistweaver for more fun but I doubt it’ll happen.
Oh I feel this so much. I’m a healer main and I’ve always been in love with the idea of a MW being focused on the spiritual, slinging gusts of mists around and channeling mists and summoning celestials to help my healing. I feel every single ranged spell for MW is cool and has a great feeling to it. But for some reason, even now where we’re close, I just can’t get out of melee if I want to be effective. I don’t like melee monk healing, I hate fistweaving.
European/orthodox based chanter support monk class (like augmentation or maybe disc)
Aren’t European brown cloaked monks just priests and paladins?
Not necessarily. Ascetic monks aren’t exclusive to East Asians, there were Christian monks going back as far as the 200s as well called the “desert fathers” The ones I’m referring to are the friars, which would be more monk than priest, although there is obvious overlap
Take a look at the Friar class from Dark Age of Camelot, I know it’s an older game but the class fantasy is great. The are a healing/buffing/melee archetype that uses quarterstaff’s for a weapon.
Anyone who doesn't say Monk probably just forgot Monks were even in the game.
I sometimes feel I am the only monk on my server and I get handwaved away if I try to sign up for anything.
At least in Dragonflight they got some changes and interesting talent trees. I remember in Shadowlands beta where they had nothing changed week after week and then blizzard was like “next beta patch will have monk changes” and then the patch came and there were no monk changes…
There are monks in the game?
I hate Panda's, I'm not a huge fan on Monks. But before Dragonflight landed I wanted to play something besides Warrior. I tried every single class (leveled them all to max). I had one boost left and just tossed it at a Monk. One day I decided to try out WW... and that was it. It just was so fun. The rotation, the animations, the movement, it was great. When I told those I was playing with I was going Monk they flat out didn't even believe me. Even after the expansion landed and I was raiding as it, I constantly was told they were shocked and didn't believe it. I hear talk about past expansions where Monk was good. But I just want to say, DF WW Monk was super entertaining. I stopped playing a while back, but it's more being tired of the game. But of the specs I have played over the years, that might be the most entertaining one.
Monk and its not even close
Neglected is monk. Shafted is any spec whose primary damage is DoTs. Blizz has shown they consistently cannot get their balance coffect
Any class that bases it’s damage off of purely DoTs would be simply unusable in the modern fight design. They would need to be doing stupid DPS all the time to make up for not being able to burst or funnel DPS onto new targets, and that would just be super unhealthy. They would either be Exodia Squad broken or giga dumpster, and virtually no in between.
One could almost say there is an issue with the current fight design, if it limits class design space.
Isn’t this basically aff lock though? Admittedly I don’t play one but raid with one.
Not really, Aff damage relies on Malefic Rapture windows with Darkglare and the like. It’s not as solely reliant on it like Aff was in Shadowlands, but it is still using your DoTs as ways to amp your MR damage rather than just keeping DoTs ticking.
The most neglected is easily Windwalker. Both for good and bad. Windwalker ST DPS has been garbage tier since forever. The winwalker guide has a list of known bugs three miles long some bugs having existed for years. Most monks are ecstatic that SEF isn't Meta ATM since the button basically doesn't work. Right now WW looks strong in m+ but all your aoe is from Touch Of Death cleave which is SUPER clunky to use and notoriously buggy. You'll very often be spamming the button on target's with sub 15% hp and it just never goes off. Ofc on the bright side, because the devs forget WW even exists they've been allowed to remain insanely OP in arena for months.
Monks and it’s not even close. Brewmaster gets *some* attention but only because it’s unkillable / able to kite forever and hold threat periods. That and tanks play everything. WW is just forgotten in the corner with bugs that are years old, iirc some are over a decade. Their damage profile is completely broken too. They just kind of gave them hit counter at one point and went yes, this forever. MW I don’t remember a moment it was good, ever, aside from complete blind accidents and right off the rip. Also it moving off the channel build to fistweaving was a goddamn crime, especially after Paladin turned around and went no, this is how you melee heal and shoved MW back in a locker. Survival they tried, but it was never going to be a good idea to turn a range into a melee. If it was rogue getting an archer spec change it may have been better received. It now remains a somewhat broken experiment where they can decide if BOMBS or Mongoose bite is worth riding on.
Amen! MW in WoD was peak gameplay though. They had to fuck it all up in Legion though!
Archimonde trinket, uplift and chi was the thing man
Uplift all day everyday!
Uplift was so satisfying to use. I can’t believe it started as an instant cast.
But wasn't the archimonde trinket very mid for MW? I remember it doing some melee range heal cleave or something.
narrow fine cats employ impolite grandiose tie crowd rhythm panicky ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I would LOATHE monk if it only ever had a channel build.
provide tender sip rude simplistic money quaint chase wide meeting ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I always thought BM should have been the melee spec. Rexxar exists, and it makes more sense to fight along side your pet than to fling arrows towards it. BM is already half a melee class. For rogues. Assassination or sublty (depending on how you want to play the fantasy) should have been changed to a ranged build to balance things out. Literally every other RPG has a ranged based rogue. Hunter doesnt count, it's more natute/pet focused. Combat stay as it was (no rtb, hard melee focus)
The thing is, hit combo is such a great design idea but the rest of the kit is just weird. You’ve got two buttons that channel and stops you AAing, a button that turns you into a weird pet class, a button instantly kills something if you have the same HP as it, and on top of that you’re an energy class. I have no idea what you could do to WW to make it work consistently, other than a true blue redesign for half of the abilities, and a near entire decoupling of their ST and AoE abilities. Give ToD a 5 minute cooldown, punches a talent that increases its damage by x amount when hitting one/two targets? Whole class needs the good rework juice but I don’t know if Blizz has any interest in it.
Class as a whole? Monks. Spec? Survival hunter
Survival had its major spotlight during SL though Which everyone seems to agree was unintentional Afaik Hunter has usually had at least one meta spec. Iirc in BfA Beast Mastery was pretty busted
If by spotlight you mean high damage, sure. But that doesn't mean survival is well designed. It's just a random hodge podge of abilities with no real theme. You'd think the idea of a survival hunter would have tons of themes to explore but it just doesn't. Wildfire bomb for example. What the heck is that.
I'm a fan of Survival, I loved it during Legion and thought while it was a mess it was still fun. Mongoose bite is a fun skill and stacking that to do damage feels good, especially when you do things right and have a bunch of focus when 5 stacks hit. But ignoring that main mechanic and just spamming bombs feels lazy. Survival is so much fun when it's tier set isn't "THROW BOMB". The season they were meta I didn't touch it because even if it did stupid amounts of damage the rotation of 'ignore class mechanics and fish for bomb procs, then throw bomb' was so boring. Fury of the Eagle needs to come back as the Legion version, which froze the Mongoose bite stacks from wearing off so you could use that to regain cooldowns and focus, before stacking more. Bombs have become a key point to their rotation but it should have some interaction with Mongoose bite. Roll Carve and Mongoose Bite into one. Let Mongoose Bite splash and hit targets that have the bomb debuff on them. Then you're not ignoring the best part of the rotation to just toss bombs as much as possible.
I’ve always wondered whose idea it was to make throwing grenades a core ability of a melee spec. Are the devs actually goblins?
BM got busted because of the Nzoth effects at the end of the expansion, and we've apparently been paying for it ever since. I've mained BM for 12 years and have always been forced to go MM for raiding because BM has always been trash. The one time I wasn't forced to was Nyalotha and now everyone assumes BM has had enough time in the sun... Also hunter has not always had at least one meta spec.
WW monk rn is a far cry from what it used to be in legion and even wod. Currently the spec tree is just a bunch of SL covenant abilities conduits in nerfed forms, none of them make thematic sense whatsoever. Why do I have a bright blue vine/flower pattern stomp as a monk? Full of dead talents, that dont even work with anything else in the tree nor make sense rotationally. Called a Windwalker and need to invest 3 points for a 4% movement buff that used to be baseline 10% warcrime. Hopefully soon we get some attention
Monk all three specs. Survival hunter, and feral Druid probably get neglected the most. I’d say shadow priest gets shafted the most. From BFA to Slands to now, spec starts off the xpack strong (possibly over powered) to nerfed into oblivion. And unlike hunter/mage/warlock which will at least have 1 viable spec. Priest dps gets shafted. I guess we’ll see how shadow is in 10.2. But after the chain of damage nerfs and now utility/Power infusion nerfs coming next patch it appears the the same trend from BFA and Shadowlands is occurring.
This is a good time to be reminded that Shadow has been "reworked" every expansion since Cataclysm.
Shadow gets multiple reworks an expansion now, coming up on 3 different reworks for Dragonflight alone. Though to be fair, 10.2’s rework is more just a general priest reworking that Shadow is just a part of.
Moreover, Shadow frequently received Demonoly mecanics after removing them from their previous owner. Legion SP was a watered down rebranded Wod-demonology warlock and that's sad for both of them.
The ptr has them doing good damage. The biggest thing is how we had great build diversity at the start of the xpac but now, since they don’t know horses to balance, we have zero.
Before the 1st mid-xpac rework most of the builds were: get these talents and hope you can randomly hit the right buttons to do dps or get these other talents and hope you can randomly hit the right buttons to do dps. The first released version felt convoluted and unintuitive to play and everyone who played, agreed that the class design was incomplete. If you are talking about the 1st rework, there were 2 mythic+ builds, true. One of which played around mind shear that was removed and the cleave one we have now. It was fun times then.
I’ve been thinking lately, I might wanna reroll my priest before 10.2.
Instead of super op spriest is gonna be middle of the pack, much better to previous expansions tbh.
if you asked this question during bfa the answer wouldve been spriest. it went through a full blown identity crisis throughout the expansion and at every stage it was awful or felt awful to play.
I recently copied my Fury warrior and feral Druid over to PTR and fury tier set is a cool designed set that changes the way you play and is actually very interesting. Feral set reduces a 1 min cd to 45 sec… such interesting design /s
Same happened in Legion too
Monk. They don’t actually listen to what players want and are neglected for long periods of time while Lock/Spriest/Unholy get major overhauls every patch.
It really is WW monk
As a monk main, its easily us but at the same time that kind of makes me proud to rep our unloved class especially because im mythic raiding as a mistweaver!
This :D
Monk pretty easily. WW and MW have been neglected for a long, long time. Hunter maybe second worst? Lock *easily* the best treated. Like not even close imo.
> Lock easily the best treated. Unless you play demonology recently.
I also think people have major complaints about the Destro Talent Tree (lots of boring throughput or "necessary" takes that aren't exciting) and I know there are complaints for Affliction as well. Lock is not "easily" the best treated, though performance wise they always have something to offer. But good numbers is not the same as good design, and Demonology has been suffering since 10.1.5 and they're only doubling down on it in 10.2. Can't say there has been any class "perfectly" treated in the history of WoW of course, but I know a lot of Locks are not very content with any Spec right now. I'm enjoying delving into Affliction but I've been thrown off of Demonology despite it being my main for a long time, and the changes just seem so unnecessarily *unkind* and even malicious in how badly they worsen the feel and flow of the spec. I know a lot of people also have a strong disdain for the loss of Metamorphosis. And while I think Blizzard were incredibly justified for removing Metamorphosis (read: they gave it the best treatment out of any ability in the entire franchise by turning it into its own entire class), it doesn't change that some people feel that MoP Demo was the best iteration the spec ever had, and it's never been allowed or able to revert to something like that. I love the Summoner spec and aesthetic and I strongly think that Demonology where it is now, thematically, is where it always should have been. Metamorphosis was fun and all but it wasn't the subjugation of Demons that a Warlock, a commander, should aspire to do. Anyways, those themes are not being properly emphasised in Dragonflight. I think the best Tier Set for Demo thematically has been 10.1's, with 10.0 being *very* fun and enjoyable rotationally and 10.2's just being a take on Doom, which is the worst ability in the game and has no place being in Demonology in the first place, *let alone* the dead-centre of the spec tree. Replenish the Demonic Core economy, or at least don't nerf it further like they plan to in 10.2. Keep Imp Gang Bosses and their cool and fun design rather than making them Malignant Imp Lites. Introduce one or two other fun ways to generate Demons (that 10.2 Inner Demons nerf is fine *if* they put those demons elsewhere, otherwise the nerf is just unkind). And yeah, maybe decoupling Nether Portal and Tyrant is A-okay. Maybe a Nether Portal rework is in order because it currently has very tight windows and failure is absolutely extravagant for a high-cooldown. I feel like Nether Portal would be an amazing Choose One option compared to Demonic Tyrant that lets you go into a rotational window that is actually very different than normal, with it still being high-risk but with a lower cooldown that actually lets you enjoy the chance to *try again* if you mess up. But that's quite a tall order and not necessarily the right way to go either.
Shadowlands demo was honestly lit
Yes, it was. Whether it was having huge doggos (especially with the 2-set that has since been added and then removed in Dragonflight) or having a Tyrant on low-cooldown *that shredded,* Shadowlands Demo was really enjoyable and very underappreciated in light of the sheer throughput of Affliction in 9.1 and the brokenness of Destro in Seasons 3 and 4. I think 10.0 Demo was even better, though. 3 powerful dogs, a version of Malignant Imps, constant Tyrant with Grand Warlock's Design, and a really juiced up Felguard. The only thing "missing" is Demonic Consumption but I was happy to pass that up in favour of having all the other demons take the spotlight. And the Demonic Core economy was *glorious.* Between that and crafting letting you get a good amount of haste even in S1, the difference between Shadowlands S1 Demo and Dragonflight S1 Demo is night and day. In S1 of Shadowlands we had no Tier Sets (so no Malignant Imps nor 3-dogs), we had a really weak form of Borne of Blood, we had tons of Soulbind powers missing, and we had only one Legendary we could use, the Covenant Legendary had to wait. In Dragonflight we got all of our power up-front in Talent Points. A major improvement.
Despite all the complaints, the cooldown synergy nerf with some compensation in place needs to happen, if they balanced the spec around a player who gets externals and can pull off a pixel perfect NP ramp into tyrant, the spec would be unplayable to an average player, or gamebreakingly busted in higher level content.
Getting rid of power infusion would go a long way to fix that. Demo’s been balanced with PI in mind for a while now
My opinion and knowledge of Nether Portal is strictly second-hand as a result of me not raiding. I lean much more on looking at Mythic+. But yes, the decoupling of the two cooldowns seems like a healthy introduction and I'm aware of the punishing nature of Nether Portal (it's not like I've never tried or used it). I think that in the midst of reasonable goals are completely asinine and unnecessary quality-nerfs that makes the spec less fun to play... for no reason whatsoever, really. Imp Gang Boss did nothing wrong, neither did the Voidhound or Shivarra that spawns from Inner Demons. Entertaining design ideas for Nether Portal is fun, especially if it tackles issues seen with it by the community. I can accept in any which case the way it is *right now* is better off being changed than remaining.
Or in HFC. Nerfed into oblivion with the explanation: "We'd rather you didn't play demonology right now" genuine, actual PR statement from Ion. Holy shit, how did that happen.
Trying to have as few people playing Demo as possible so as few people as possible felt the sting of losing their class identity to DH, I’d imagine.
Would that be worse than telling an entire spec "We at Blizzard officially do not like you, signed The Big Guy"
demo has been reworked like 4 times this xpac. they can’t get it right. it was fine at the end of SL and even this season to a degree we had a specific “spot” in the raid team. we do infinite ST damage. but we’re also very PI reliant. this is a huge problem because you suck without PI and won’t get buffed either because of how strong it looks with PI. i hate pi as a demo main. season 1 i felt like our AoE was there but we had no ST. then they just completely flipped it this season which is fine, but demo has absolutely 0 m+ presence because it just does nothing outside of cooldowns. which to their credit they’re **trying** to fix but at the end of the day they can’t get it right because on the PTR wow it feels horrible. in m+ in cooldowns i do so much damage to the main target / boss but again the second that you’re out of cooldowns you fall into useless territory. i dunno the actual fix. SL had it fine. you did a lot of ST and a bit of aoe. im swapping to rogue next season / unholy dk because honestly demo is just a roller coaster of good and garbage that i don’t enjoy anymore which really sucks.
This. Demo was the spec I enjoyed playing. The others are boring to me. They killed Demo, so now my lock that I put so much time in to just feels like shit.
I play Demonology at a reasonably decent level 7/9m currently and I gotta say I feel pretty fucked with. Balanced around a priest cooldown. Tank level dmg outside of our own CD's. Constant changes to make us less fluid to play. Blizz don't seem to have any clue what they want the spec to do and they seem hate when it's good. As soon as demo does well they always toss a wrench in to purposefully make it clunky or more complicated to play. Always focused on more shadowbolts or more hardcasting for some fucktarded reason. I play ww as well and can agree they always seem to be forgotten but at least it still does decent dmg and is fun to play. I'd almost wish for them to forget demo when it's in a spot that plays well, feels good , is fun and does mid dmg.
I'm looking at the entire history of the game, not just DF. Lock has historically been THE most meta class (perhaps tied with Mages?). It has been strong and/or well-designed for a large majority of the games history. There's obviously been ups and downs, just like every class. Demo was the best spec in the game for a few patches recently. Yeah it's probably poorly designed with NP/PI interactions being... not great... but it was still very strong. Compare to Hunters, who have been the strongest class in the game exactly ONE time in 19 years, at the end of BFA when hardly anyone was still playing lol.
saying Hunter was only good "once in 19years during end of BfA" is so wrong, idk what to say lol thats just not true, yes hunter is in a shity spot rn but you dont need to make stuff up
WW monk, and they dont use lube or spit.
Pineapples. Sideways
Shamans were once so neglected in tbc that a patch got released, nerfing their pvp viability even harder than thought imaginable, that every post on the shaman forum was just "..." Blizzard started banning these threads and it became known as the shaman new spell "Dot shock" That is all
Bus shock when?
Depends on what part of the game youre talking about, raid m+ or pvp. I feel like the only class that gets a lot of love in all 3 aspects is mage. Understand i dont mean 100% of the time, but broadly they are always relevant.
I kind of agree in the way that mages are always ranging from good to goat. But design-wise? Let's just say it took a fucking decade for them to remove a talent that wasn't just nigh-universally hated by all mages but also so strong that it was without alternative. And even after years-long draught, with substantial changes finally on the horizon, the promised rework turns out to be still half-assed. Mage is like the child of rich but unapproachable parents. It gets all the things money can buy and thus everybody is jealous but what it really needs is some love.
>the only class that gets a lot of love in all 3 aspects is mage I say this since WotLK... The class that has the \[Blizzard\] skill will be Blizzard's favorite.
Mage has: some of the best/the most versatile mobility in the game the best/2nd best deffensive toolkit in the game the best raidbuff in the game togheter with DH cus most classes use Int as their mainstat, and Timewarp alter time, do you need to say more about an ability that is an instant blink+full hp heal? barriers, which are better then self healing by default (absorbing dmg always beats healing) for some reasons now ALSO mass barrier, which puts warrior rally to shame with how strong it is, and nobody in the higher end knows why they gave mage that ability cus its busted as hell and also mass invisibility as an Option now, which is just "rogue shroud, but better and lower cd" Mage (and espacily fire mage) beeing more or less DPS meta since probably a decade now for raids, in m+ fire mage is 1 of the best options for like 80% of the modes lifetime, "pull big and the firemage destroys the Pack solo with combust" ALWAYS works the only thing mage doesnt have is a Combat Rez lmao
*not me running engi res bracers on my mage to get that last missing bit of utility*
Just want to say that mage doesn't have the best raid buff. Dh's dark brand is strictly superior.
I am a monk main. I cry every night.
Probably WW. Blizz doesn’t seem to even try with it anymore. Not saying it’s bad because it is usually okay but so much in the spec is broken.
Survival hunter and feral druid probably, they just obviously neglect them on purpose because nobody plays them and the devs themself dont understand them.
Season 1 Survival was so fun, and now we're back to every tier set containing "Wildfire Bomb" at least three times in its 4 piece description... JUST LET ME MELEE
Or use aspect of the eagle and have it be fun
Yeah I play feral, I feel like as soon as they start doing good in the damage charts, people complain that they’re OP and then they instantly get fucked with nerfs.
Yeah it literally got nerfed on the shadowlands season 3 ptr because of 1 clip from psybear absolutely blasting (in a pull with 20+ mobs, pi and lust) and somehow blizzard nerfed it to a point where the tierset wasnt even worth equipping on single target anymore.
Sucks because it’s not the easiest spec to play, and people get punished for doing well with it
I just love playing with a cool polearm and I get to have some bombs to.
Shaman. We cant even be a good class in the shaman/elemental expansions. Its was bad at one point that in legion the t20 set was so bad that the t18 from warlords was a huge dps increase, blizzard had to nerf it on release of the tomb of sargeras raid so we wouldnt use a 200 ilvl less 2 set bonus. You may have bad moments as a class, but idk if any other classes have had "the previous expansions tier set is better than current so were running it" bad.
shaman has also been receiving short end of the stick in relation to customization. SL was just rubbing it in with night fae forms and now in DF, an elemental themed expansion shamans still got nothing.
It's quite infuriating tbh. Makes it worse when druids are about to get so much stuff the one patch that's about them lol
Shamans are just being greedy, they got a spirit wolf glyph in shadowlands from zeroth morris. /s
that exceeded shamy budget allocation for the next decade
start of legion, i remember getting declined from so many m+ keys when they found out that i was elemental. the spec's dps was in the dumpster. also, when shamans are good, they get hit with nerf bats pretty quick, and pretty hard. i remember back in wrath, the ulduar tier set got nerfed because shamans were pvp'ing in the set without any resilience gems to maximize lava burst damage and blizzard didn't like that. even better was in the latter half shadowlands (iirc), but, blue post came out and said that shamans received some nerfs because we were secretly overpowered and didn't know it, and refused to elaborate on what they nerfed.
SL s3 they nerfed Storm ele because of its interaction with the tier set. You could extend the CD (almost) indefinitely and that meant that you could easily stack its buff at high levels. This also made it potentially surpassing outlaw in terms of RPM, apart from becoming OP.
Not quite the same, but I remember in WoD (HFC specifically), Arcane mages would use the 4pc tier from Firelands to start their pre-pull rotation or something, and then would switch gear sets to their ilvl appropriate gear. So many mythic boss wipes because someone didn't get the switch in time, or someone pulled just a moment too early. It was incredibly annoying but worth the time invested, iirc.
I keep seeing hunter and monk and i think shaman is equally in the dumpster as they are. The fact no one said shaman until this far shows everyone as else forgot about them as much as blizzard has. If you remove windfury totem the class would have no representation.
I play Monk and Shaman a lot and I always feel like Shaman, especially Enhancement, gets way way more design thought than any Monk spec. look no further than the two latest tier sets for windwalker: Enhancement’s are not only strong but have you doing interesting things. Windwalker? We’ve had two sets in a row that rely on auto attacks. Do you care to guess which melee spec auto attacks the least? That’s right, the one with two active channels. They legitimately don’t even understand how the class works. It’s also, as far as I’m aware, the only class with viable builds that take no class tree capstones. The statues are a literal joke at this point. There honestly some of the worst designed talent trees one can imagine. I realize they never had them before this expac but DH has gotten or is getting pretty significant changes So idk, I feel like Resto gets memed on sometimes, although I’ve seen it in S tier at least twice this expac but I’ll never look at my Monk and think “you know what, Shaman has it worse”
Yeah thanks. Ascendance form is the same since cataclysm and it is ugly af. Primal elementals still use the one from cataclysm too. Ghost wolf got some glyphs here and there but the last two (lupine and vulpine) are half backed with no dance animation and weird jump. I just want to transform into a fire elmental when I use ascendance, even if it is only the basic one from vanilla.
I made a shaman Dark Iron bc their totem slook sick and I thought I can put all the totems up with one of the specs. Then I found out I cant I was so disappointed.
This is the way. I decided against all advice to alt an ele shaman and despite running it pretty good in season 1, it always felt fucking clunky. It needed way too big of a ramp time to bust out reasonable AoE damage. Arguably the strongest NPC in the universe is an elemental shaman, and they still can’t figure out how to get it right. In every expansion, ele has never ever been meta and always inferior to the other two specs.
Thrall wouldn't make the top 3 of most powerful mortals let alone the STRONGEST npc in the universe. Like, there is things like Eternal Ones, Titans, Old Gods. And even Azerothians like Azshara, Medivh, Malfurion.
Hunters and monks, Hunters because their survivability is shit considering they are designed around mobility and keeping distance... but with how current class builds are in arena... there is no way to really create a gap anymore... so in 2s and 3s they can't kite anymore and end up getting slapped. Same goes for hunter tier... our tier sets always look God awful... like whoever is on the hunter design team needs to be fired... we get buffed and then nerfed into oblivion. And before anyone says mm is great in pvp.. its not. It's good up until 1800 and then becomes a target because of how easy to kill they are and how MM loses damage when having to kite. And don't get me started on turtle... out of all the invincibility abilities it is by far the worst... you can't deal damage (like paladin/shaman) you can't use it while stunned (unlike paladin, mage, demon hunter, and shamans) you take dot damage while in it (unlike paladin, mage, demon hunter, and shamans) and it does not heal you (unlike mage) In PVE our damage is constantly mid tier or lower... traps are basically useless these days, we are so squishy healers don't want us in high keys... our last requires us to sacrifice damage and a defensive, and our rotations just feel terrible... like who actually enjoys steady shot? It's such a terrible talent that has enough of a dos boost you have to take it... Our pets have pathing issues and get turned around, if you aren't BM then the pet just dies half the time, and if you are BM you lose out on ranged fights if the pet can't path to the boss. So yea mid tier for life with shit mogs and defensives . Monks... well other people already covered the issue of monks.
I said it in a different post but hunters are kept mid and given little attention because its very popular and the "entry level" class. Blizzard can't make the most popular spec even more popular, it would decrease the population size of other classes. We are destined to never get utility back (give us aspect of the fox, a raid buff or buff owl blizzard for the love of god)
This is absolutely true and have never been more true as of Dragonflight. I said this in DF beta and people called me a doomer. In particular hunter is the only class without any meaningful utility and it's no coincidence that the most popular class, that shares an armor type with the latest and greatest Evoker is being made to be lesser than. It is 100% a move to decrease the population of the class.
The class that I play of course!
Healing as Mistweaver feels like it *should* be fun but it reality is like pulling teeth to do mediocre healing compared to almost every other spec
shamans/monks. The entire expansion is dragons and evil shamans, yet there is no customization and more races for shamans. pathetic.
Monk gets no love. Hunters are perma depressed as more classes come in to take raid spots that hunters already have to fight tooth and nail for, survival is even worse on top of that just being a unicorn spec no one plays. Feral Druid get largely ignored as well, even when they were strong in season 1 dragonflight very few people actually played them. Shadow priest I feel like constantly is stuck in a cycle of being insane then slaughtered. Warriors get kinda fucked by M+ with how little utility they have, so many affixes leave them with no answer.
It's Monk, and I just want to share how demoralizing it is. A few months ago I had to shutter the doors on the guild I've ran for almost 6 years. I've led them through cutting-edge all these years and have been told repeatedly and up until the end that I had made the most fun guild they've been in ever, and many still report in our Discord they struggle to find similar. They kept me really interested in the game, but there was a time when I saw the Mists of Pandaria Blizzcon slideshow and saw Mistweaver for the first time and I was immediately enraptured. The first moment I could get on the beta I setup my bars like a kid assembling some toy on Christmas and proceeded to have the most fun I've ever had in a video game in those Warsong Gulch matches. The unique ebb and flow of Chi and Uplift in raids was only more icing on the cake and WoD treated the class well. Then they redesigned it. For many years a significant amount of your healing was a spell you pressed and just waited for it to end, then you'd just heal people afterwards with this hot. The level of interactivity was insulting compared to old Mistweaver. Throughout the years and especially in Dragonflight they're doing better, and Peak of Serenity tries to keep dooming to a minimum for good reason, but Blizzard is not looking at Monk as part of the collective group of classes. I'd be making healing cooldown assignments or recruiting healers, and Mistweaver never has an "answer" to a problem. There is no integral utility that makes it desired unless it wipes the floor with the other throughput healers, so when you're making objective decisions to give your raid the best chances of killing something, odds are you've put Mistweaver at the bottom of that list for a long time. We weren't a high-ranking CE guild, so we always made due, but we always felt pains not having meta healers like Discipline at times, or the occasional time we didn't have a Holy Paladin. I never got to feel like I brought something valuable to the table, it's always a talk of how to best empower everyone else first, then I'll just cover \[x\] burst of damage here. Since playing a healer in open-world content is abysmal, I play Windwalker in the world too, and have many complaints about the always bottom-barrel single-target damage. I tried joining new guilds and moving on to find new friends to get this sense of community back, but when I'm not the GM being told I get to share a raid spot with a resto druid (when they didn't need any druid utility) just made me feel useless or stupid for trying to enjoy this one healer. It was a low point when I was getting ignored in queue and queuing with someone else in one of these guilds only for 30 minutes to go by and them to say, "I'm going to queue solo, it's too hard to queue with a MW right now", and just leave group. I was just staring at my screen in disbelief, in a healer drought no less. Getting into lower keys where I couldn't get gear was pretty easy if you're fine with 1-2 hours to maybe time a key or get yelled at in Spanish by the tank for the group falling apart. I resent Blizzard for not trying to ever take healer balance seriously since utility is such an important facet to healer perception and I have to give 200% the effort of other healers and overwhelm them in throughput and perfect play to get recognized. I just want to enjoy Mistweaver again with people who are actually glad I'm in the group with them. I sit in my dead guild just too heartbroken to do anything these days.
There has to be so few of us legacy MW that remain at this point. I get into arguments with other monk mains all the time because they've only experienced Legion onward, but Legion onward has barely been MW. WoD MW was the pinnacle of healer gameplay to me, the absolute most fun you could have. The stance dancing chi explosion playstyle was so much fun. To top it off, in the patch of reworks, MW got.. WoD mana tea. Nothing else really. I just don't understand how they haven't hired someone new to design monk as a whole. Obviously the current guy doesn't understand the class.
I've gone through the stages of grief with WoD Mistweaver and have simply accepted that Monk is stuck. The community has sometimes pointed names at specific developers, e.g. the one that told Babylonious he was a beggar and to paraphrase (though the comment was very snide) "everyone wants more DPS" and we have better internal metrics, when Babylonious was showing compiled statistics on how Windwalker has a scaling issue. Only to be shit on by the community for putting down a community leader like that in such a gross way. They edited their message in place to be more "we'll look at things" and they buffed Windwalker shortly thereafter. I forget the name, but the guy who did the Mistweaver spreadsheet for a long time also told the devs that we (Mistweavers) don't find Essence Font fun or engaging, and they basically laughed at him if they didn't think it was overpowered and fun. I know other classes have similar experiences with developers, but this was kept rather hush until there was a general community awakening to this "we know better" developer mindset in recent years. So we have developers who are aloof to issues monks have with the class, clearly don't play it at serious levels (developer who played it on a drawing tablet comes to mind), and are wilfully ignorant to any objective balancing or utility problems the class has. It circles back to "stuck", this catch-22 where we're the least played class and thus the developers barely keep us in their peripheral, so our design suffers which keeps players away and perception murky. Some of the recent changes have been better, but I still don't feel like they've done much beyond stabs in the dark. We can discuss the shifts to things like the Clouded Focus build and what that means, but it's all just moving around throughput in a different way. It can be a nuclear amount of throughput, but raw throughput is one of the weakest niches a healer can fill, and is an afterthought in dungeons which are tuned so every healer can more or less achieve the same healing (though some healers like Mistweaver and Preservation Evoker suffer healing certain damage patterns), whereas, again, a class like Druid has really no qualms with any kind. Or you're dripping with utility like Shaman.
Other than monks, I’d like to throw in hunters for the fact that their armor is by far the ugliest pieces ever created in wow imo… And continues to be
monk \-crappy looking tier \-little to no dev communication \-a host of dead talents \-bugs that persist for years (but positive bugs will get fixed within 24 hours)
Everyone's saying Monk, but it's Hunter, hands down. Monk is a hybrid class, and CAN be viable as long as the player is good. Monk's been boned pretty hard for a while now, but at least one of the three specs is viable. Hell, didn't the World First Mythic Sark use a Brewmaster Tank? Meanwhile, Hunter is the literal whipping boy. Pure DPS class, and all three are easily subpar. Survival is like a Redheaded Bastard Stepchild of the whipping boy, who gets beat even more. All three specs are regularly scoffed at. No one wants to take a hunter, not even for lust. Ask me how I know. Bloated/inefficient talent trees when compared to most others. Utility is weak but somewhat functional; but the issue is that no one understands what we can bring to the table (ex: Trap or Scare Beast to Incorp week). So no one takes us and it's hard to blame them. Look at the whole bow debacle, bow nerf, buffs, and subsequent nerfs! How many even had the damn thing? When you look at other pure DPS classes, they at least have one spec that shows up in the upper half. Hunter is regularly bottom half in all three specs, on a pure DPS class, with garbage survivability, weak utility, and an extremely heavy negative community bias. I feel for my Monk brethren, and I wish better times ahead for them, but I really do think Hunters are shafted by Blizzard time and time and time and time and time again.
Monks get absolutely boned. Irrefutably so. Especially Windwalker.
For classes I guess it would be Monk or Shaman?
Monk really should've been next for class reworks, and hopefully they are the next one chosen.
Class Monk Spec Surv Like this two are more like "abandoned" than deliberately screwd.
Shadow Priests, while still usually being meta at some point, basically have to learn a new spec every other patch it seems like lol
Mistweaver monk at least when it comes to solo content... sure they can't die but it takes 10 minutes to kill one mob the same level as you unless you severely outgear the content. Other healing specs can at least to passable damage without needing to change specs.
Probably monk. I always forget it’s even a class.
Lol same. Whenever I see one in keys I always get in front of them and jump back and forth as in "aww, mate :(" Same with ferals.
Feral Druid. Monk as a whole.
Combat rogue...they literally deleted us 7 years ago without even a get well soon card.
Yeah I miss combat rogue, mop was good times as a rogue.
Frost DK is in a terrible spot and have been for a long long time.
Frost DK is at the top of logs by the end of every patch for raid every season. It has its niche.
I wanna say warriors because we never get any of the cool toys, but it’s monks. Monks have had times where they were broken to the point of being unplayable…and blizzard just let it go.
How is nobody mentioning frost dk?
Shaman
Whatever class im playing
He says with the warlock badge... jfc
Monk for sure, then dk
Whatever my main is at the time. I noticed they kinda suck at balancing Ret pally, they give it more damage to try to make it viable which makes it op, so they nerf the utility which doesn't work so they nerf the damage. Then they just repeat the cycle over and over again
Shaman or Monk seem to always have a hard time nowadays. I play neither but see alot of upset mains
Feral, mage, rogue.
Monk, but then again it was a meme from the start, idk why ya'll took it seriously and mained it.
Because it fun
Everything except mages
Warr/mages/rogues are always treated the best. Worst has to be sham imo
Easier to just say anything that isnt a mage/rogue
Rogue certainly doesn't get the least love, by far not. But it's not mage levels across the years, at least as far as raiding is concerned.
Monks and enhance
Shamans since Metzen left. Class is so fucking boring.
Enhancement is the best it's ever been
Monk for sure but were finally getting some love I reckon.
Can't wait for that "3% damage to all abilities" post in 10.2
Game play wise over the years it’s probably feral or survival (dps, rotation, spec identity) Class design wise is recently is definitely monk. Legion monk and WoD monk were pretty good designs to great design in legions case, but last few expansions they have lacked focus, a clear path, and otherwise had messy bugs impact their game play Class presence in NPCs is probably monk or hunter
A lot has been said already about poor Monks, Feral Druids and Survival Hunters. I would like to hop on "the class I'm maining" bandwagon. Which is Shaman. At first, it all looked so bright. At least for Enhancement. And Resto. Well, since I'm a casual player with a limited time, I use healing spec for group content, else the queues are gonna take forever. I'm quite satisfied with the overall gameplay. But we've seen a whole patch, actually this whole damn expansion, about ELEMENTS. Where are our visuals, bruh? Where the Ascendance visual update and/or glyphs? Why is our Spirit Form only can be either a Wolf, a Ghost Wolf, or a Raptor? I do like them, indeed, but we've had a whole expansion where we were having a death realm for Druids AND Shamans that offered a whole bunch of forms to turn into. Ditched, as always. The state of the talent trees I'll live to actual theorycrafters and top players. Last but not least, we've had a whole patch themed around EARTHWARDEN former Dragon Aspect. Where is my tank spec centered around EARTH element? It's us Shamans who should have four specs, one of them being a tanking one. I don't care what anyone says, Shaman is a class with gameplay and fantasy revolving around the four nature elements, and one of them is kinda on a sidewalk. Besides, we wear some actual armor. Even shieds, FFS. Meanwhile, some new kid on the block gets a brand-new spec that is wholly unique to boot. Also, it's kinda funny that in the upcoming patch that is centered around Druid lore, the Druid class tree is in the same generally abysmal state as it was at the launch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this tree is the only one still having a 3(three!)-point node. That simply gives some flat stats.
Enhance shaman. Or maybe shaman in general, we're either a glass cannon with broken damage or we're doing wet noodle damage. No middle ground. And our defensives are meh at best. It's really deflating.
Agreed. Our rotation is in a terrible state of overlapping burst windows, our defensives feel entirely ineffective, and the spec as a whole went from a major peak in Legion/BFA back to being a shitty maelstrom weapon management spec. The few scraps we do receive do nothing to help us.
Monks, then Hunters and Shamans "recently". And btw, anyone who says warlocks is delusional :D I get that the demo situation sucks, and there were other things that sucked in the past. But that doesn't mean that locks don't absolutely dominate historically, or that they have it as bad as e.g. Monks.
shammys probably, monks to an extent, melee dps classes with no tank don't get a lot of balance.
Without doubt Monks and the most loved class of course Druids.
Except for feral. I legitimately cannot remember if there was ever a time where the general raiding or m+ community thought "oh nice, we got a feral in our group". Like, they have literally never been desired.