Which Classic WotLK DPS takes the MOST SKILL ?

For me assassination rogue is prob the hardest to master

I'm a arms warrior and I can attest its Hella easy to play it

So many factors you didn't account for, but it's ok. Had a buddy who played feral back when wrath was the new New and he laughed about his rotation and still laughable now talking with a feral druid atm.

As a combat rogue main, I have to disagree about this spec being top 2 or even top 5 most difficult. I'm unsure why the discrepancy is so high but its really not a complicated spec IMO. I'd say the most difficult are 1. feral 2. enhance 3. affliction 4. unholy 5. spriest, but its just a hunch based on hearing from others in raids/discords.

I am a top 300 parsing unholy dk, the large variance is due to differences in kill times and lust timing. Two unholy dks with the same gear and skill but one has a 1 min 30s patchwerk and the other has a 2 min patchwerk for example will be a world of difference in parsing. Unholy is also reliant on stacking their procs with bloodlust to snapshot their gargoyle so not lusting in the first 7 seconds is a HUGE grief to their dps because procs will fall off. The actual gameplay isn't difficult compared to something like feral druid.

I disagree that mapping out damage outputs is a measure of skill. The only thing that data shows is how much you will be rewarded for playing your class at the highest level, it in no way shows how difficult it is to optimally play your class. In past expansions like vanilla and tbc I played a feral druid as an alt for fun, and that class had a ton of different things they had to do to optimize DPS, a lot of them were not the easiest to do, but using this data they would have been deemed one of the lowest skill impact classes just because it had a low damage output overall, so the DPS range would have been lower.

As a rogue main this is skewed. Rogues are faceroll in PVE and rogue variance in PVE is mainly due to dual speccing for PvE only. which has possibly the biggest class swing in the game, especially if trash is considered (FOK build) in the metrics. Most good pvp rogues (Sub) don't pick a rogue to only PVE with and most good PVE melee pick a class that can dual role to gear guildies, save time or be more flexible in a raid. That further skews things. What I'm saying is there aren't too many Simonize rogues that dual spec for raids and switch gear for fights and trash. When they do does that make him a better player than Snutz who just plays Sin in PVE with a Sub dual spec? No.

For PVE the answer is simply feral druid with UH DK a distant second and prob enhance next (though modern UI/weakauras has made them way easier than they were way back in the day). Casters are all faceroll in WOTLK PVE. Doesn't mean a class like Mage doesn't have a high skillcap in PVP, but this is a PVE discussion.

Frostmage so high ?

Sry but calling Arms Warrior lol Skill Ceiling is just dumb

I feel like this needs to be sorted by ilvl to some degree. Arms doesn’t ramp very much with gear and is always relatively shit. Same with most of the rock bottom classes at this tier. Looking at overall skews the data quite a bit as # of parses/gear available increases

As Ele sham main I completely agree with this list.

Hi Staysafe! I m really liking wotlk so far love your content too!

1 feral 2 enhancement shaman 3 combat 4 unholy

Feral is so much effort to play at the best level comparatively...it's just unfortunate that it's mid-ish tier in terms of dps. Would be really fun to see it pop off as the best players crush it

This isn't about how hard a cerain specc is to play. It's more how punishing/rewarding mediocre/close to perfect gameplay is.

A lot of(if not all) classes has tricks they can pull off that requires high skill, but if it doesn't result in a high dps gain, the "dps per skill" ratio becomes lower.

feral def the highest skill cap I think. would like to see the top 3 highest caster skill caps, if feral, uh, and combat were top 3 overall.

All the dks saying how hard their spec is to play, meanwhile 90% of you are using clc ret for UH 🤷‍♂️

Pretty sure it's feral Druid having the highest skill cap

I feel the skill cap on arms are quite spot on... Blizzard took almost everything away from this spec and you basically supposed to stack sunders and thunderclap.

DPS is a poor metric when the content isn't challenging. Most people in my raids are there to have a natter and a laugh, they're not prepotting and using farmed legacy consumes just so they can top the meters. When the bosses fall so fast why bother?

Surprised combat rogue is up there. Assassination is definitely braindead easy. On most boss fights i press 2 buttons for 90% of it and have top dps lol

Part of it can also be that there may be an association between class choice and player skill level. For example, it may be possible that noob players choose to play a rogue more often than other classes. This could cause there to be a wider variance in the damage range due to a larger variance in player skills rather than in the skill potential of the class.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I’m a 4200 gear score Rey pally- and yeah- my damage is top tier for ret pallies. But I am buried in the meter on most fights because other classes have more to do. Ret pally is really 4-5 good abilities for damage and snapshotting on consecrate.

On my warlock alt, the snapshotting and managing of dots is WAY more complicated and a rotation of spells and timers is required.

The skill to play most melee is low, and thusly we have to deal with the most positioning requirements in phase 1.

Well yes and no. What the logs proves feral is rly how punishing the spec is when u make mistakes. Still one of the more difficult specs due to that ofc, especially in a raid environment

Some specs flow better with me than others. I picked Arms Warrior to be my main in WOTLK. While I parse in the mid 80’s, I have to be hyper focused to do so. For some reason, Arms feels very complicated to me. I find Aff to be easier. Part of this is realizing I much prefer ranged DPS.

I played ret because they said it took no skill and to be honest that's true but only in the sense that even if you do everything perfectly you aren't rewarded for it.
I am however rewarded for showing up and pressing button so I get big loot EZ OkayChamp

Feral druid DPS definitely the highest skill cap IMO.

Feral druid was the hardest back in the day and is still is. Managing the bleed dots, positioning, and dealing with energy is the toughest to play at a high level

feral

Fun way to look at it, very little value. Balance druids and arcane mages take more skill than arms and SP based on this list, think 99% of players who have played these classes at any decent level will agree its not true. How do you define skill is a hard question. Being good vs bad on a feral druid will result in a high % diff between the two players in dmg output. For a class like fury war which is mainly auto attack damage the actual "skill" factor might be a lot smaller % wise in dmg output but might require more "skill (some classes just deal most of their dmg even when you play it wrong).

Did u just introduce us to variance? Clever man

Ret.. ards

Long time feral Druid and dk here. I’d have to say unholy dk is harder because it has a much larger rotation and more things to manage. It’s deffinitely easier to do good on a dk, but I’d argue that it’s much harder to perfect dk. Whereas feral, there’s half as much bleeds/buffs to track and your rotation has half as many buttons. Feral is really easy if you’re tryhard, I feel there’s just a lot of shitter RP druids who make the feral gap seem larger, but that could be a big bias because I’ve got a lot of time as feral under my belt

Feral isn’t that hard. Enh sham, and unholy dk is harder. Most feral Druid’s just don’t care about parsing or doing damage, they’re just a Druid because they like that they can be a lion. They’re not a meta dps spec so only a select few push it to the limits. This graph doesn’t prove feral is hard to me it just proves there’s a lot of shit ferals. I think to really determine what’s easiest you need ti make a list of all the rotations and openers, and look at them unbiased how many buttons are in them, how many things are you having to track, how does your rotation evolve or adapt throughout fights, ect. Sadly weak auras have made a lot of the skill to pve simply just sitting there lookin at your ui letting it tell you what to do while weapon swapping for you and having all the things you need to track neatly in one area

Frost dk near the top of this chart… i gotta call bs

Having a higher skill ceiling is not necessarily better. If you ever observed professional fighting games like Street Fighter 4, a character such as C. Viper had an insane skill ceiling, but despite that the pros always gravitated towards easy to use and solid all around characters instead. The reason is because the highest level of play is pretty much hard reads, spacing, and godly reaction time. If a person has to fumble with execution then it puts them at a disadvantage.

The same can be said with Wotlk. An enhancement shaman has a much more complex rotation than an arcane mage, however the mage can out dps a shaman. If you match two equally skilled players against each other, the one with the easier class will do better.

I’ve been raiding as arcane mage and can take you down a rabbit hole on the intricacies of the class. You may disagree with me, however there are two other mages in my guild who consistently get green parses. How is it that with identical/better gear than me they do about 2k less dps? How can there be such a discrepancy with dps when it’s literally just a two button rotation?

The beauty of playing an “easy” spec is that in order to parse high you truly have to learn and focus on everything else outside of your rotation like positioning, mana management, raid composition, things outside of your control. It is so much harder to parse as a class with a low skill ceiling vs a high skill ceiling. That was my TED talk lol

From a 80 Pally/Druid/Priest/Shaman, playing all specs - Ret->Ele->Shadow->Boomy->Enhance->Feral looks absolutely correct in terms of rotation/situational complexity.

I'm a 99 parsing feral main. I think the unholy dk numbers are a little skewed because not everyone knows about/is playing morb.

"trash can ret paladins" lol all paladins are trash can class. Druid ftw all the way, forever

Honestly as someone who mains unholy DK, and just leveled a feral alt to 80, feral can be bruuuutal if you make a mistake. Unholy is more or less get a good snapshot and coast the rest of the fight. So much thought and planning goes into your feral rotation.

i really think uh is much easier than frost, the data is probably liek that because of people trying out the dual wield uh spec and being new at it

As someone who played both fire mage and affliction there is no way fire has a higher skill ceiling then affliction. I think this graph is a good start but requires a much further analysis to make something out of it.

Two survival hunters listed. Hmmm

Enhance > Feral >>>> Affliction > Rest

Unholy is just skewed by the ammount of DK's

I don't think you're completely wrong with how you're judging hard from easy. I main combat rogue and I think it's simple. I've been playing it a long time. I see lots of people struggle on it. It usually comes down to not understanding your skills. I also have a Ret alt and personally it's harder to play. You can macro the entire rotation but it doesn't put out nearly as much dps as someone who knows what to hit when situationally. So if you are doing the rotation it's 5-6 buttons and in addition to that you have like 6-7 utility spells that need to be timed right. So I think it's far harder to play. At least if we're talking about performing as good as you can with each class. How you are measuring yes.. a Ret with a macro can do 80% of what I do mashing keys. You can't do that with a Rogue on boss fights.

Nah enhance is definitely top 3

After they fixed bearweaving and dynamic haste for gargoyle, I would say UH DK is the hardest to play, with feral shortly behind. There is just so much to track as Unholy, whereas with feral its more about timing and understanding when it's appropriate to Bite vs Rip. If you see a 4.9k GS Unholy gapping the other melee, you can be sure that they're playing it almost flawlessly. Additionally, shadow priest does not have a difficult rotation, it's difficult to min/max. Knowing when to clip your Devouring Plague can be the difference of a few hundred DPS. Like affliction warlock, snapshotting is vital as well. This is what will separate that average warlocks/spriests from the S-tier ones.

I always knew ret was the most difficult spec in the game and it's nice to see a video finally recognize that. Thanks staysafe 🙏
Edit* my phone was upsidedown when looking at the graph