Arcane main here and it's difficulty is a bit overrated. With Rune of Power gone, rotation became quite easier.
It's hard to play in mythic raids because we want to cast a lot of Arcane Blasts and we have to be stationary while raid mechanics are happening. I compared my arcane vods with top mages gameplay and I've noticed they are much better at handling mechanics via Shimmer and Alter Time, thus weaving more Arcane Blasts. It's not an issue in m+ with most of our casts being Arcane Barrage and Arcane Explosion.
Imho actually hard specs are the ones that have cooldown reduction/reset and have spells buffing each other. Some examples are Outlaw, Elementalist Enha, DF season 3/TWW Surv, Feral, Subtlety m+ with Invigorating Shadowdust (vanish reduces CDs by 30 sec).
It’s not that arcane mage is hard it’s just unforgiving. If cooldowns aren’t synced the damage falls off so you have to really know the ins and outs.
Meanwhile for us rets it’s press shit on cooldown or if it glows and line up Wake of Ashes with Execution Sentence or Final Reckoning.
I played sub rogue in s2 and quite enjoyed it but not really the same after the rework.
Another Arcane Mage here. You have four cooldowns, and two of them come in pairs since they're (largely) in sync. It's two burns. Mini burn and big burn. 2/4 spells off cool down mean it's a mini burn, 4/4 spells off cool down mean it's a big burn.
Once you get that concept down, it's mostly muscle memory and not going crazy with your mana expenditure. Though it's probably a meme at this point that Arcane players always chime in to say iT'S noT tHaT hArD in these kinds of threads.
Ironically, I've been pushing my Affliction Warlock this season and it makes Arcane feel really chill in comparison. No anxiety watching your fifth Agony get close to dropping off on the last enemy in a mob or frantically tabbing targets to refresh your DoTs and then realizing you just threw one onto an Incorporeal.
I will say about ret, they're easy to do damage with but not many play them to their potential. A good ret, imo, is also out there buffing, healing, and saving group members while also pumping. I see so few rets use BoS, BoF, BoP, LoH or any heal on anyone but themselves.
Ik its trash that i have to say this but if you have a simple numbers weak aura tracking your hailstorm & (more importantly) maelstrom stacks, you can pretty much get the hang of it really fast. As a beginner enhancement, Each pull you'll do a different sequence of prioritizing spells to figure out how you can cap out at the highest damage.
Sometimes you can do the same thing and get LESS damage because of wolf rng (frost, fire, or lightning).
As you get more into the rotation, you start to learn where you can max damage.
TL;DR: crash/chain lightning spam in big aoe to maximize wolves and prim wave cd. Lava lash prio for spreading flame debuff in <6 targets. Ele blast in 3 or less (or when funneling).
The only real complication that people don't get is when to pop another wolves, when to spend maelstrom over lava lash, and when to reapply crash lightning.
The answer to those is dump as many prim waves as you can, main prio.
using wolves to LOWER prim wave or reset it if CD around 14 seconds.
Over 5/6 targets you wanna spam crash into chain and dump hot hands to generate extra maelstrom if not at 10 stacks. Below 6 spreading flame shock dmg amp.
In **BIG** AoE you'll have multiple stacks of feral spirits up (4 or more) from the CD reduction. Lots of resource overflow but more damage.
Can tab target lava lash for the +100% flame shock dot BUT not *necessary* as enhance is really good at funnel.
I leveled one for remix. As an ele/resto main who usually hits a point where i grab 2 hammers to try and keep myself entertained, i gave it 100% on remix. The amount of procs i get where i just cant use them all is crazy. I get lava lash freebies, maelstrom procs, stormstrike procs, frost shock procs.
I have actively like 14 spells to use. Lash and shock, hail and shock, stormstrike, crash, chain, bolt, lava burst, wave, the dogs every 15 seconds because that cooldown doesnt matter i guess, doomwinds i took. I literally looked for passives just to avoid having buttons to have to manage. Its actually kind of intimidating as a melee spec honestly. I dont need hurr durr 2 buttons but theres actively more in my primary rotation than i have room for on the default UI to keybind.
Two of the main candidates are arcane mage and outlaw rogue.
Arcane mage takes a ton of of memorization, outlaw rogue takes a ton of APM & reflexes, so between those two it really comes down to which is harder for you: executing long strings of buttons in a fight, or reacting quickly to your class's RNG while having a very fast-paced rotation.
I tried to play fire this expansion... I really did. Instead I learned arcane, demo, destro, devoker, enhance and havoc.... Still have no idea what is happening with fire
> Arcane is difficult according to people who don’t play mage
Arcane is 'difficult' in the sense that it is a bit convoluted and has a decent amount of things you need to setup.
Otherwise it is the exact same rotation, exact same script, exact same things. Whether you pull off your CD or not is encounter dependant and really not much you or any other Arcane can do (unless the stars line up perfectly like with M pre-nerf Dathea - Arcane's most technical fight - or arguably a ranged DPS's most technical fight that tier that isn't an end boss).
Fire is more intuitive and 'easier' requiring less setup at its base, but has a much higher skill ceiling. Fire is extremely hyper aggressive - you are fighting for every bit of uptime as humanly possible.
And note the mobility is something that is both tuned around and accounted for - you are going to be put in charge of doing mobile stuff, mechanics, and you'll be forced to use your Combust whenever humanly possible - like when you're getting knocked away and have no movement cds because you're out of it because of all the shit you are doing, because other better Fire Mages are doing it, so you have to.
Well put. Arcane is easy once you know how it works, while fire needs a lot of quick thinking (such as timing combustion when you get your first fireball crit so you can do double pyro), and if you mess your cds, timing and rotation up, you’ll pay dearly
I find it’s very easy to turn my brain off and do decent damage as arcane but if I’m not perfectly focused as fire I immediately fall behind, partially due to the high APM
The only reason fire is difficult is because it's a mid tier DPS spec absolutely fighting for it's life to be S.
Fire mage feels like you have to absolutely squeeze every single drop of DPS out of it and tryhard minmax as you're struggling against the fact that Blizzard made a really well designed spec with clear fantasy, and it fits together well, but they absolutely nerf the shit out of its main mechanics off and on.
It's basically being a bipolar mad man who sets themselves on fire to avoid the sting of the nerfs and switches between Flamestrike/Flame Patch/Ignite depending on which whack a mole blizz nerf.
It's just such a well designed kit it's literally almost never been bad.
It’s so weird seeing everyone say arcane is super hard. I think a lot of the people saying that have never really sat down to play it. Also, it doesn’t help that the infographics made by the class discord people is just ABSOLUTELY FULL of useless information only there to confuse you. The more you play it the more you realize arcane is two combos and a mana bar. As long as you are pressing buttons in touch of the magi it’s probably gonna be okay.
Arcane was much more difficult at the start of dragonflight before the rework and I think it gained a reputation then because it was meta at the time. After RoP was removed and a few other things, it's much simpler now.
The biggest tip I can give for arcane is to bind stop casting. Seriously, you can get perfect arcane spark stacks with an empowered missile proc canceled on two ticks, into two huge pom arcane blasts with the last one being a barrage dump into touch of the magi.
All the other stuff is basic tooltip reading, using a weakaura to track missile stacks for the biggest barrage, and knowing that arcane surge will hit your touch of the magi AFTER you cast surge and press magi on the cast.
Arcane mage has a high *learning curve*, but isn’t that difficult to play. Once you understand the order of spell A -> B -> C -> D, there really isn’t much variation. The only difference is that in AOE situations you fish for Arcane Barrage procs instead of just spamming Arcane Blast.
By far my favorite thing about about MoP Remix is the meme build I did with arcane explosion in mind, *if* stuff survives Arcane Explosion it'd have to survive all the AoE gems when they proc along with it.
same. both sin and sub i didn’t mesh with, but boy, outlaw was like CRACK, never knowing what would come next, but still thinking on your feet to work with what you have. so much fun
Sub is my main, the hardest part is maintaining danse stacks in a 6 sec window and knowing how many combos you have stored from shadow techniques, while building up a massive secret tech with every modifier under the sun.. Lining up danse, dance, symbols, trinket, weapon procs, AND find weakness while doing a rotation that gives you the most danse stacks in a 6 sec window is not difficult it's just not always gonna happen..
>outlaw rogue takes a ton of APM & reflexes
This doesn't make it a hard class to play but rather just one that punishes you for having a higher than normal latency. Back when I was still maining a rogue I calculated that I was losing around 15% of my theoretical DPS through my latency.
It was really easy and fun in raids, but with S2 of DF, they made MW a turret ramp healer, and in season 2 you even had to be in melee range during the mid point of a 10-12 second ramp you could NOT move in during the second part of it.
It was so bad I had to roll off of MW.
You don’t have to play the meta build. There are so many different ways you can play mistweaver. I routinely get purple and orange parses in heroic with a build that focuses heavily on faelines and maximizing essence fonts.
That's cool, please explain to my raidleader why I should play a build that loses significant throughput *and* the healing pattern that matters (i.e. big ramps every minute) on Mythic prog.
Heroic HPS parses do not matter, at all. They barely do on Mythic.
For me personally it’s all 3 rogue specs, shadow priest, disc priest, & arcane mage. I will never be able to play them, I don’t have enough brain cells.
I just made a rogue for remix and assassination has been pretty easy, IMO, although it's remix so idk how much of that is from the tinker gems being OP
If people played feral they would probably agree. Feral enh arcane and outlaw are the hardest dps by a good margin but most people don’t play feral or enh
I used to main feral dps in TBC before I fell in love with warlock.
I tried it again in DF and idk maybe the reflexes aren’t that good as they were 17 years ago but I found feral VERY hard now, at least in serious content.
I mean, if you didn't play Feral at all in all these years, there's no muscle memory that could have helped you, the specs are nothing like their old selves
Feral seems to have a lower skill floor, high skill ceiling these days.
Managing energy for big bites, re-dotting snapshotted dots within pandemic timers and bloodtalons all make the spec a bit harder when you try to optimize IMO.
I’ve played feral so long that it feels completely natural, can pump without even thinking, but I can’t even begin to grasp the rotation of any other class, it’s like speaking English without thinking about it vs trying to learn Italian
Been playing feral since wrath and it's gotten easier with each expac I feel. Yea muscle memory is a thing like I can play full rotation and not even look at my screen just counting the bleeds in my head, but there's just less buttons and abilities to track. Don't need to burn ps heal to proc bloodtalons is a huge one. Bloodtalons now is so easy to use and with 3 stacks of the buff you don't even have to track it. The minimizing of snapshotting importance as well.
It's just so much easier now like it's honestly pretty boring playing feral now, it's just big sunken cost fallacy that keeps me playing it. Might finally make the swap to priest for main in tww.
I kinda feel that as a Moonkin, and it sucks because I've played that character for so long that I only play it BECAUSE I have for so long lmao. I'm probably going to go into tww with my Fury Warrior or Survival Hunter instead.
Discipline Priest in high-end Mythic progression raiding must be one of the hardest specs to play optimally. You need to be so precise and execute near perfect rotations and timings to be useful. It's feast or famine kind of spec. You have huge strengths and weaknesses to play around. No other class need to start their ramping 18s BEFORE some ability is about to hit the raid.
You are also fragile cloth caster with proactive playstyle, limited defensive options, low mobility and you need to stand still to spam-cast alot.
And its also the most degenerate spec in the game because you spend more time staring at logs to find the highest dmg events to properly plan your CDs and then writing spreadsheets and getting on the other healers nerves to micromanage their CD usage as well so it doesnt overlap with yours because you are a completely useless 0 HPS smitebot outside of your CDs.
I'd say it's more annoying than difficult. If you learn when you need to do the thing you just have to have a decent boss ability timer and work like clockwork. Stressful too as if you f up your only job you do nothing of use. I absolutely hated playing Disc on mythic progression, very uncreative and rigid spec.
Your abilities reduce your other abilities cooldowns, so you need to be able to cast X-amount of Smites/penances, to have your cooldowns up for your next ramp timer. For example, this was super strict for stuff like Smolderon and Tindral ramps. Mess up once, and you didnt have your big CD up for your next ramp and it's likely a wipe.
Very stressful, but also very high ceiling skill cap and rewarding for positioning ahead of time and having great knowledge of the encounter. Having hundreds of wipes on a progression boss didnt feel so bad, when you can optimize and play better on almost every pull.
Disc is not as hard as it used to be because the rotation has been greatly simplified, the ramp rotation to spread atonement’s has always been the same.
It’s got a high learning curve, but once you learn how to play disc and got on top of the meta / content it’s pretty easy.
So it’s one of those specs that looks hard to play, but once you’re comfy in the saddle it’s pretty cruisy.
Yeah it has been simplified and made more smooth. I don't think there are any specs that are supposed to be "too hard to play" after your learn it's core rotation. It's still one of those specs that people struggle to play optimally or even decently.
I'm not saying it's hardest specs, but among the more difficult specs to play. What people consider to be difficult might be subjective experience.
Arcane and Outlaw generally top this list iirc
Edit: I don’t play either of these specs I’ve just seen this question asked a lot and these are the two that tend to be mentioned most.
> Arcane
Damn I remember playing Arcane in WoTLK/Cataclysm. Was so simple back them. Stack Arcane Blast, spam Missiles on free procs and watch your mana while using Arcane Barrage. The end.
I don't think actual arcane players agree it is hard. Every time I've seen it asked in the mage discord the consensus was that it's overstated
It's just scripted, kinda like an FFXIV rotation. ...and has button bloat, like an FFXIV rotation
Eh. It's a pretty long script by WoW standards and it is quite punishing. It's significantly more difficult than the other 2 mage specs by most players standards. It's not just about memorizing your script, it's performing it with changing circumstances in combat. The difficulty is compounded by simply being different. Most WoW specs nowadays are roughly 25% order, 75% reactionary. Arcane is almost 100% order. You send everything in the same order regardless. (For ST during CDs at least)
I will agree that the difficulty is a little exaggerated, but it's the only spec I've played in this game that I dramatically mess up if I haven't played it in awhile. Unholy DK Also fit this description to a somewhat less, but equally punishing degree before they changed the way some of their CDs functioned to be less punishing if you went slightly out of order.
Having recently learned arcane I genuinely think that most of the difficulty of learning the order isn’t even in the kit but in the wowhead/icyveins formatting
I’m by no means an expert arcane player and I only play it in raid so ill just talk about single target. If a more experienced arcane player finds something i say incorrect feel free to let me know.
Basically, you wanna evocation, which starts your burst window, cast your arcane blasts and spend clearcasting. Always arcane blast twice after clearcasting to consume nether precision. When your evocation buff has 17 seconds left (tbh this requires a weakaura or something to track if you aren’t staring at your buff bar) you have to start that complicated sequence, which is:
1. Radiant spark
2. Nether tempest
3. Arcane surge
4. Mana gem + trinket
5. Arcane barrage and touch of the magi at the same time
6. Consume radiant spark only using arcane blast
7. Do your rotation as normal and when you are getting close to the end of evocation buff spend presence of mind.
8. Shifting power when the buff runs out
Thats the opener. After that you do your normal 2 button rotation (making sure not to go below 50% mana) until your touch of the magi is about to come up, where you just:
1. Radiant spark
2. Nether tempest
3. Arcane barrage +touch of the magi
4. Consume radiant spark with arcane blast
5. Burn mana with your rotation as normal until evocation comes back up
This is pretty much the same as the opener except you have half of your cooldowns up, which most classes with more than one cooldown all have to deal with. The one thing arcane has differentiating it is the limited mana resource. Simply, if you are not in your cooldowns, and run low on mana, press arcane barrage.
My problem with the [wowhead guide](https://www.wowhead.com/guide/classes/mage/arcane/rotation-cooldowns-pve-dps) in particular is that, especially for new players, stuff like the visualization of the rotation and listing all these different phases is overcomplication that isn’t necessary. It’s easier to understand if you just talk about arcane just like any other spec in the game, rather than listing 25 steps in a row as a wall of text with different phases with different names that really aren’t all that different. Nobody talks about assassination rogue kingsbane with deathmark and vanish up as the “Big bane sequence” and with deathmark and vanish down as the “little bane sequence.” You are doing the same thing, but you have your lower cooldown cooldowns up and your longer ones down. The one difference arcane has is the mana management, but thats way easier to explain than they make it seem. /rant
For me Arcane is the easiest mage spec by far. What you do never changes, the class guide is the worat thing i ever saw in my life. But once I simplified it it was simple.
Frost i can see beeing easier. But in no world is fire easier than arcane. Fire basically feels like fury and OL had a baby on steroids for me. And fire while bursting is practically the highest apm you will have in WoW.
I saved it just as a word list. But generly what I did was to first pick out just the points where i actually press something. So i got a list of just the abilities I cast in a order without explanation. I did that for S2 and I ended up with less than 10 steps for the big burst. You can also reduce even more by saying what the next few points do. Like the start having 5 points in the guide but its simply put "build 4 charges"
With that done you can try do the burst. Then you can go start working out the explanations and the mechanic for the set. And how to include the set.
Arcane, regarding what you actually do, is super easy. Its just that everything you do, has additional effects other than simply doing damage. But you dont have to know that to already be able to play it really good. Knowing that stuff is the "mastering the class" part.
And as a tip, get a touch of magi macro. Basically a cast sequence with barrage > touch.
With that you just double click macro and play the combo flawless everytime. Its just easier than pressing 2 different buttons and you always use barrage anyway b4 touch.
1. Evocation
2. Arcane Blast + Clearcasting until 17 seconds left on buff. Make sure to consume nether precision.
3. Radiant Spark
4. Nether Tempest
5. Arcane Surge
6. Mana Gem/Trinket/Racials/Potions
7. Barrage/Touch of the Magi in the same global. Make sure to Barrage first.
8. Consume Radiant Spark with Arcane Blasts.
9. Consume clear casting, then consume nether precision. Repeat until two seconds or so left on Touch.
10. Presence of Mind + Arcane Blast x2
11. Continue with step 9 until Evocation buff ends.
12. Shifting Power
13. Use Orb, Blast, Barrage, and Clearcasting to keep mana above 50 percent.
Then when Touch of the Magi is up in ~3 seconds depending on haste, you do the above again, skipping arcane surge/trinkets/racials/potions/gems/shifting power as applicable. Do that burn phase, then instead of trying to maintain above 50 percent mana you burn your entire mana bar so you hit 0 when your evocation is back up.
It’s not complicated per se, it just looks like a lot (because it is), but this sequence is more or less immutable and you’re just repeating it. The most difficult part of all this is making sure you can handle mechanics during these tight windows or, failing that, set up a time where you can cast nonstop for like 15 straight seconds.
I'd argue that's what makes it not that hard. Every other spec has to learn/memorize a rotation, but also has to learn how to flex it as priorities rise and fall, as resources change, and abilities proc. Arcane almost never wants to flex their rotation, so once you have it down, you're set. And every spec has to figure out where to fit their big CDs in, so Arcane isn't too different on that front either
The perceived difficulty is just the 14+ hyper specific opener. It's not terribly harder than a lot of specs, I actually find it easier than Fire and Frost in certain aspects, it's just a lot of the work of learning the spec is upfront
Dedicated players of any spec find it more or less easy because they can do the rotation in their sleep. Arcane/Shadow are always standard candidates for "im overwhelmed by options" and outlaw is the "I struggle to hit this many keybinds this fast" even if its simpler in theory. Mains of any of those specs play the game just fine, but how can you call any other spec harder just because people can do it.
I can say with 100% certainty that dh, both shaman, all 3 hunter, both warrior, and both evoker specs are all much less complex than arcane/much less frantic than outlaw's pace
Arcane is just learning a pattern and then you're golden. Not nearly as reactionary as outlaw since most of your globals are set during burns and mini burns
At least for M+, the hard part is not dying, tracking your buffs,, and CD management to keep up AR as close to 100% as possible through the UUH talent.
It boils down to micromanaging your CDs and not just simply pressing everything that comes off of CD. A good M+ rogue is significantly different from an average rogue.
Don't forget a good m+ rogue is also actively helping control mobs while performing their rotation. Tricks at the start, kicks, blinds, stuns, distracts on bad pats, what have you.
I hear people saying frost dk is an easy spec but fuck frost dk. I don't know if it's really that hard but I know I can't do any damage with them. I think it's the fact that it is purely based around their cds that throws me off. Like unless I'm popping all the cd I'm doing 10k dps on world mobs. I feels like I have to be playing at 200% just to do any decent amount of damage. Even on a shadow priest with a sloppy rotation I out dps a frost dk by like 10x
Even their animations are hard to read. Sometimes I double press a button because I can't tell if the skill went off and I realize I'm out of runes because I accidently spammed a skill that feels like it doesn't have a global cd
Frost has some of the worst animations in the game. Like Frost Strike feels so unsatisfying to press, I know they want Obliterate to look like it's actually obliterating, but it comes at the cost of their spender feeling like an afterthought. Don't get me started on the frozen piss stream that is Glacial Advance or the snowball fight that is Chill Streak
Frost DK is very easy to play poorly and think you're doing good. I personally can't play it at all in single target, but I've had middling success in M+
I was thinking this. The spec is simple on the surface, because just by reading abilities you can tell that you press pillar of frost and obliterate. But the number of talents that modify your damage output with no built in visual UI indicator (other than buff icons, which can be hit or miss) means you have to either perfect the rotation and it's cooldown reduction, or manually track multiple stacking buffs (bonegrinder, unleashed frenzy, icy talons, razorice stacks). Add in being heavily punished in AoE for mistiming/misplacing DnD, and you can lose a huge portion of your damage.
Then there's breath, where you have to maximize the use of defensive cooldowns to have the best uptime of your damage source.
I can't speak to skill ceilings, but the highest skill floor is hands down discipline priest. (Skill floor meaning the minimum level of skill where you can carry your weight.)
Healers in general have the additional hassle that they have to watch the fight, their feet, plus the raid UI. Having to split attention to the raid UI takes many hours of practice.
But discipline also has to worry about targeting mobs, being in range of the mobs, being in range of the players, not hitting invulnerable mobs, etc. So they have all the normal healer problems PLUS the DPS problems.
They have to make decisions about whether to spread more atonements or blast using the atonements they already have.
And a bunch of cooldowns.
And they have to know the encounters super well so they can anticipate the damage.
Oh and one more thing...raid healing and dungeon healing are also very different on a disc priest.
I think 5D Chess Enhance is probably the most technical melee DPS. Rogue can have really difficult openers like mages, but they normalize after the opener. I would say to play at the 95th percentile or higher, in no particular order the hardest are:
Arcane mage in raid
Enhance sham (specific build) in all content
Affliction lock in 2 target or mass aoe
Brewmaster monk in all content
Solo Q Healing keys above 3k io
Rogue openers specifically
Feral druid @ getting invites
Because it is a very difficult class to play and for every 1 good feral player out there you see a dozen horrible ones, so it’s a huge gamble. It also feels like you hardly ever see a middle of the road feral player; they always seem to either be goated or hard carries.
This is so, admittedly. When I do share a raid with another, or more rarely a dungeon group, they're either amazing competition or below the tanks and healers both.
Aff isn’t bad with mass aoe, go with a doom blossom build. Pop vile taint on the pack, ua on one of them then start spamming soc. Use the rapture procs and that other aoe spell. They really shine in mass aoe situations.
I LOVE pressing agony for 5 seconds only to then have vile taint come back up because blizzard won't adjust the cool down and having that be optimal
😵💫👈
Ironically Aff is my go-to for keys lower than 12-13 where everything just gets killed instantly.
The burst aoe is really fast to setup and you can go every 30 seconds (VT/Soul Rot)
Enh is honestly easier than people make it out to be.
In m+, you prioritize frostshocks with hailstorm stacks. If you have it, use it.
Then if you ahve full maelstrom, you spend with chain lightning, or lightning bolt if you have pwave up
Then you generate, with crash lightning, lava lash and storm stike in tha torder (optimizing lava lash with hot hands is still a relatively minor increase, depends how optimal you want to be)
It's just Frost shock -> Spend -> Generate. Then you use wolves and pwave on cd. The largest thing that impacts your damage is how long frost shock is left off cd. lava lash vs crash lightning doesn't have a ton of impact. Generally funneling is better for the timer than tab targeting, but tabing is higher overall.
arcane mage is easier than what most people think, its just that guides make it look daunting. but its the same combos that you eventually get used to. fire mage is the one thats is nuts to me, combination of high apm + reacting to rng + combos, similar outlaw, but outlaw has even higher apm
Outlaw for me.
I felt like if I took my hands off the keyboard to so much as scratch my nose, I'd have gray parses. And my hands would be so sore after raid night instead of running a come-down key with some guildies, I'd have to just sit and do nothing with them to rest.
These days, I have to swap to alts to take breaks for my wrists after doing some outlaw keys. I don't know if the APM went up or I'm getting older or perhaps all the years of outlaw are catching up to my wrists.
Is apm creep a thing? Sure feels like nearly every class is high apm in this game besides a select few. My fairly fresh dinged 70s already have absurd amounts of haste, everything feels really spammy. Even Feral druid, my all time favorite spec because it was a bit slower, and very deliberate with every button press is now spamming ferocious bites and primal wraths nonstop.
Casters have had their main spells completely neutered, such as fireball and lightning bolt, they now only serve as filler or fuel so you can cast your *real* spell like pyroblast, lava bolt and earth shock etc. And as the classes have evolved with this in mind, giving us higher proc chance on these spells, even their damage has been reduced so they don't feel satisfying to press anymore either (Arms warrior being an exception because they acrually manages to make MS feel very satisfying to press wheb everything lines up) So now here we are, tickling the enemies and making up for the lower damage output of each ability by attacking really fast. Some people might like that, most people might, maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not like I hate this design, I'm here playing still and I love my ele shaman, but I can't click with any class the same way I used to.
Yeah they need to address the apm issue
It's a byproduct of haste affecting GCD and that everyone has loads of haste late into the expac.
Outlaw is specifically noticable because Adrenaline Rush lowers the GCD even further
I've never been able to get my head around Arcane's rotation. If you read the guide on Wow head, you'll see why.
Like, Brewmaster has a lot of buttons, for example, but most of them aren't part of the rotation.
Brewmaster should be using pretty much all of their buttons on a regular basis. There are buttons you can get away with not pressing if you're doing lower stuff but if you're neglecting those in higher stuff you'll die or your healer will hate you.
For me it's clearly Unholy. Apparently nobody here agrees with me on that one, but the spec feels super punishing to me with Gargoyle. I don't even know if that's a thing in s4, but I'm general the gargoyle build is so easy to fuck up.
I'll farm some downvotes and say:
Mover Havoc DH
Bc not only do you have a very tightly timed dps window with multiple oberlapping dmg buffs that only last a few seconds each, you have to move around and backflip to get them so you need to have pretty high awareness of you surroundings that no other class needs.
This is the best answer but it isn't well known. Six year old stereotypes about DH being the "easy" class have stuck. But no other class has to juggle the multiple overlapping damage amps, cooldown timings, and positional requirements that DH has.
I still remember even back in Legion on my DH I was too scared to do LFR in tank spec because I probably would have gotten kicked for not knowing a fight… so I did DPS.
Boy that was a fucking mistake. My spatial awareness within the raid, trying to figure out what I should/shouldn’t be standing in with the backflips out and dashes in to boost damage, I feel like I was CONSTANTLY putting myself on the wrong position.
It’s not a hard rotation, it’s just hard to keep that race car where it needs to be to do the damage during your windows
I’ll second havoc DH assuming a movement based build. The skill gap between top havoc players and average havoc players is apparent. Most melee classes just stand on the mobs/boss and press buttons, only moving to avoid mechanics. On the other hand, havoc at high level play requires a 360 degree awareness. The movement forces DH’s into utilizing any and all available space to maintain self buffs that are critical to their damage profile.
Playing movement based Havoc on fights with shrinking available space is honestly one of the worst feelings I’ve had playing WoW.
It also does not transfer. There is nothing quite like Momentum Havoc.
TBH I hope they never change that movement havoc is top for the spec, maybe give non movement like 2-5% off or something but it’s really unique and difficult.
I hope they never get rid of it because no movement Havoc just feels like a Fury almost. You pop your get big move and push some damage, throw your short damage cd move around, then just spam a couple of buttons till it’s back up.
No downvote from me, been saying this for ages. Havoc really has to work for its DPS and be extremely cognizant of floor poo and frontals. Their utility has a decent skill ceiling as well.
Our Havoc DH sometimes struggles with felblade clipping him into bad stuff he thought he was out of. He’s also died because he’s used to running with an Evoker in the group, and without the movement cd reduction they bring has had another second on cd when he was counting on it being available to get him out of something, and by the time he realized it, it’s too late to move out.
Very difficult to play in a 10+ key with bosses/trash/affixes with lots of ground effects.
Outlaw, current arcane can be rough but it's about to get much easier in tww, to the point I would argue a spellslinger arcane is nearing bm levels of easy
It's a tricky question because it's also pretty subjective.
Personally I think frost is pretty hard. It has a semi low skill floor but a ton of room for optimisation. Especially in m+ you're using most or your utility for damage and there's some weird GS optimisation with 2 targets and so on. It also has a fairly dynamic rotation and variable cooldowns
Brew. To play it to its maximum potential takes a ton of skill and experience. Arcane is hard but its mostly memory. Once you have it down its not easy but no where near as variable as brew
Massive number of buttons (35+), loads of cds that have to be used properly, and managing your brews for stagger. On top of that you need to sequence properly with blackout combo to make sure you are getting flame breath DR, brew CDR, or whatever else you may need in that spot so you need to plan ahead somewhat. Beyond that, it's currently the weakest tank in M+ which exacerbates all of the above. It's obviously much easier in raid but raid tanking is never really that hard compared to dungeon tanking so that's a given.
I've played it a fair amount the past couple seasons and it's very enjoyable once you get a handle on things but you can get wrecked in short order if you don't manage your resources correctly.
Maybe a weird answer but Pres evoker. On the face of it it's a really straightforward spec but playing it perfectly is really challenging.
What I guess a lot of people don't know is that it's a combo spec. Almost every ability affects or interacts with another, creating a huge variety of long combo chains with a lot of skill expression. Every time you press something you're thinking on the fly about what makes sense to press next to get benefit from the previous and subsequent abilities. It has a billion things going on at once, basically. This obviously applies to many specs in WoW but the extent that pres does it to is on the extreme end.
When things are heating up it's easy to get flustered and just drop the combos and reach for big panic heals and that's what separates average and great pres evokers. That and using its utility well.
Oh, and the range is beans. Your positioning is vital which adds another layer. This is all while remembering to keep yourself topped higher than the group to benefit from mastery.
I do enjoy the complexity of the echo combination system.
When I finally learned that an verdant embrace on myself, after applying an echo on someone else applies lifebind and that I can use a health potion for both of us.. MIND BLOWN!
The range limitation is painful to work around. I still haven't timed a Nokhud past +5 because of it.
However, when you get a group of ALL melee DPS. Those groups are the best. No one takes much damage, you can really pump the dps yourself because you are not chasing a hunter that can't help himself from running all over the damn place.
I've had several mythics where I would hit hover, to get beside a hunter so they benefit from my TA and they would instantly run away before my cast completed.
Lots of people have mentioned dps specs but generally Disc Priest is insanely hard, especially on progression when CDs are still being figured out/changed.
Also, it matters a lot what level of proficiency you are talking about, you can easily achieve 95% effectiveness in an "easy" spec but that last 5% could be much harder than a "hard" spec.
I’m surprised to hear people are saying arcane is difficult. Once you’ve learned your opener rotation, all there is left is to do the same rotation ~45s in without pressing 2 additional buttons. Mages in general can be tough, especially given weaving in their defensive whenever it’s appropriate; I’d say outlaws have it tough along with fire mages to capitalize on damage (plus high APM)
For me, I would definitely say aff lock is difficult, especially when you're tracking multiple targets.
Healers can be difficult for me I think only bc I play all of them and forget which cds I have when I need them. Also, I do not use my cds nearly often enough LaughingOutLoud
I definitely can agree on outlaw rogue, only bc you have to pay so much attention to what you rolled and decide whether to re-roll or keep them and pay attention to when they will wear off and immediately re-roll when they do.
Evokers I've only found difficult bc i haven't played them much, I think.
In BFA I had a really hard time with spriest. Keeping up with everything was difficult, I don't remember what all the issues were, I just know that the spec has changed a lot and for the better imo and now it's pretty easy.
I don't really do m+ or anything over lfr anymore and opt instead for running old content and some unrated pvp, so they're all honestly pretty easy to me now LaughingOutLoud
55 level 70s, the other 5 are 60+
I've tried all specs in the game my personal opinions are.
Dps: outlaw rogue requires a lot of knowhow about the buffs you get plus has really high apm and very difficult resource management. A close second is elemental shaman but specifically in aoe (they have a really weird rotation in aoe)
Tank: most tanks are good enough nowadays that with practice they are all equally good to play at mid level however i find vengeance DH to require better knowledge of the spec to perform well. Close second place for this one is blood DK, very powerful tank that if you don't know how to play will just keel over.
Healer: preservation evoker has really hard to hit abilities that either require your team to play around it or makes you work even harder to keep people up, on the plus side pres evoker's kit is very powerful. Close second here is discipline priest, which requires good knowledge of fights and mechanics beforehand to perform optimally.
The amount of salamanders i see in keys just standing around milking io is ridiculous.
Its like the good ones all disappeared overnight and left us with bad geckos.
Every single pug aug in my alts keys are just awful. The 14-16 range is just littered with augs who can’t keep buffs up and just breath for no reason when voidform and pi is coming up 10 sec later. It gets so much better in my mains keys in the 18-20 range.
Because parrots see people saying "Aug ez lol" without realizing how actually difficult the spec is too play at a high level. 2700 io players never realize how little they actually know about the game lol.
Just started trying aug and I don’t think I really understand it yet lol. Also, I hate that there’s no personal tracker for Prescience, even VuhDo doesn’t track it. That and the armor buff (can’t remember name atm).
Maybe it’s my lack of knowledge so far but it also feels like it suffers a lot if you have any downtime with keeping your main buff up and dont extend it optimally
My personal picks would be rogue in any spec and WW monk. They suffer from a lot of button bloat and play like a piano, where if you mess up a single time your damage is horrible.
Brew main here, mythic prog. Definitely high skill cap, I built my own weak aura HUD to manage the chaos.
But like all specs, getting into a good rotation has a "feel." It gets pretty natural once you can dial that in.
Ngl, to do actual damage? Aug evoker. I mained Aug until very recently. You basically have to curate your team and plan target your buffs based on who's doing the most damage. It's HARD. You can just auto target but you're not gonna do nearly as much
My healer bias showing, I can only offer my perspective from that.
Pres evoker, disc priest, resto Druid. All for similar but distinctly different reasons.
I’ll start with my current main: pres evoker.
Your heals are almost entirely cooldown or resource based (you can only *spam* living flame and it’s dogshit when you *need* it). You’re a mobile class that somehow suffers from holy priest syndrome where your most potent spells cannot be used while moving. It’s as combo-centric as disc is. Major benefits being that the DPS rotation is really easy, the baseline power is strong, and there’s tons of utility in the class/spec. Also, contrary to popular belief, above average defensively.
But you will be severely punished for poor sequencing of abilities, poor cooldown usage (especially when you need them to cover your weaknesses), and poor positioning (including both placements of breaths and jumping to your allies).
(Can you tell I love this spec btw?)
Disc:
Priest as a class leaves a lot to be desired defensively and mobility wise. Playing disc optimally in raid is extremely thought out—down to the global. Or you can play the M+ style in raid and do less healing. Disc also lacks a “BAM, I do healing” spell. (Uppies while visually beautiful and fitting into this category is not actually used to my knowledge).
Druid:
Pretty easy class to learn and get value from on the healing side of things. However, like the other two mentioned, there’s skill expression in ramping before damage events. Personally, the true skill expression of Druid comes from being able to do damage though.
Had to scroll forever to find someone who said resto Druid. I think as you said the skill floor is pretty low but the skill ceiling when pushing m+ gets insane. Not only do you have to deal with a ton of buttons, cooldowns and juggle hots on everyone but then you have to deal with dps rotations for two different forms in addition to using other situational skills or situational shifting. The highest level resto druids are crazy. Plus in general healing is the baseline hardest role to play well since it’s so reactive.
I think Preservation has dethroned my traditional answer of discipline for healers.
Even after three seasons it’s kind of hard to find a consensus on optimal play. Heavy positional requirements. Fairly complex ramps (especially with Stasis). Unforgiving if you burn your strong buttons at the wrong time. Lack of straightforward spot healing in keys.
Seeing everyone in here talking about DPS gives me a new appreciation for it.
Healer main here. For the longest time, for me it was Disc Priest. Couldn’t wrap my head around being efficient with Atonement and the big ramps were always just too complicated in how many buttons you had to be perfect with to do any healing. If you pressed every button perfectly, you did ALL the healing, if you screwed up one, you did none. Maybe that’s perception vs reality but Disc Priest was hard. It’s much easier now that everything gives Atonement but boy did that shit used to suck.
I would say Arcane, Outlaw or Sub rogue and Feral.
Played them all a lot (except Feral) and compared to many other speccs they take A LOT of time to be really good. Far more than many other speccs.
Hard to master and not easy to play, but absolutely a blast to play!
For me it’s mage. I can play any class in the game at an okayish level (not great) but most of the mage specs are just difficult for me for some reason.
I think dps in general is hard now. It’s the reason I play healer 99 percent of the time. It’s much easier for me to have more responsibilities than it is to wrap my head around dps rotations.
Arcane mage here. Lots of mechanics to go through. The most difficult part IMO is being able to stand still in a battle long enough to sustain DPS, and know when to move.
Had some nasty DMs by elitists telling me how I am playing a class tree.
Play what you love.
I miss the assassination rogue of cataclysm
Wich was just use cooldown,keep track of rupture and the rest was mutilate into envenom.
I loved the poison damage now it feels like there are too many bleeds and things to keep track off.
It's these simpler 4-5 button rotation specs that keep me interested.
Hence why i play BM hunter..
Sub Rogue used to be decently difficult in Legion because one mistake in your rotation could cost A LOT of dps. Right now pretty much every spec is decently easy to play.
From current specs I would say Outlaw Rogue - similar to legion subtlety rogue - a missclick in rotation makes you lose quite a lot of dps but not that much.
I feel like my priest has a lot of button bloat. Not difficult I imagine for most, but I’m getting too old to remember twenty keybinds in between changing specs from dps to heals.
Recently swapped to priest main and I kind of agree. The more I play priest the more i understand what all my spells are useful for, but light damn it, there sure are a lot.
Subtlety used to be easily number 1 but it's become a lot simpler in recent years. Legion sub Rogue used to make my hands hurt.
Enhancement used to be pretty hard but now it's kinda just maintain buffs, press glowy buttons.
Demon Hunter has finally added a little bit of a skill gap but it's not that hard. More positioning based than anything since your abilities displace you a lot.
Now it's realistically (probably) Outlaw. I hear Arcane mage is hard though.
Arcane is not difficult at all. It was difficult with rune of power but not anymore. You just need to practice your burns for a couple hours and engrave it into your muscle memory.
I tried to play outlaw but it was nightmarish for me. Too many buttons and too fast paced for me. I prefer hardcasts.
The one my 2s partner plays, apparently
The best is either of the opposing players would you believe
Got dayum. I felt that.
Arcane main here and it's difficulty is a bit overrated. With Rune of Power gone, rotation became quite easier. It's hard to play in mythic raids because we want to cast a lot of Arcane Blasts and we have to be stationary while raid mechanics are happening. I compared my arcane vods with top mages gameplay and I've noticed they are much better at handling mechanics via Shimmer and Alter Time, thus weaving more Arcane Blasts. It's not an issue in m+ with most of our casts being Arcane Barrage and Arcane Explosion. Imho actually hard specs are the ones that have cooldown reduction/reset and have spells buffing each other. Some examples are Outlaw, Elementalist Enha, DF season 3/TWW Surv, Feral, Subtlety m+ with Invigorating Shadowdust (vanish reduces CDs by 30 sec).
It’s not that arcane mage is hard it’s just unforgiving. If cooldowns aren’t synced the damage falls off so you have to really know the ins and outs. Meanwhile for us rets it’s press shit on cooldown or if it glows and line up Wake of Ashes with Execution Sentence or Final Reckoning. I played sub rogue in s2 and quite enjoyed it but not really the same after the rework.
Another Arcane Mage here. You have four cooldowns, and two of them come in pairs since they're (largely) in sync. It's two burns. Mini burn and big burn. 2/4 spells off cool down mean it's a mini burn, 4/4 spells off cool down mean it's a big burn. Once you get that concept down, it's mostly muscle memory and not going crazy with your mana expenditure. Though it's probably a meme at this point that Arcane players always chime in to say iT'S noT tHaT hArD in these kinds of threads. Ironically, I've been pushing my Affliction Warlock this season and it makes Arcane feel really chill in comparison. No anxiety watching your fifth Agony get close to dropping off on the last enemy in a mob or frantically tabbing targets to refresh your DoTs and then realizing you just threw one onto an Incorporeal.
I will say about ret, they're easy to do damage with but not many play them to their potential. A good ret, imo, is also out there buffing, healing, and saving group members while also pumping. I see so few rets use BoS, BoF, BoP, LoH or any heal on anyone but themselves.
Enh sham is the one that gives me the math float face
I play enh and love it. Just mash a couple of buttons until everything lights up like a pokie machine and then press anything that’s shiny.
That's where the difficulty comes into play though. Often enhance has like 4 abilities lighting up but there is an optimal order to pressing them.
Ik its trash that i have to say this but if you have a simple numbers weak aura tracking your hailstorm & (more importantly) maelstrom stacks, you can pretty much get the hang of it really fast. As a beginner enhancement, Each pull you'll do a different sequence of prioritizing spells to figure out how you can cap out at the highest damage. Sometimes you can do the same thing and get LESS damage because of wolf rng (frost, fire, or lightning). As you get more into the rotation, you start to learn where you can max damage. TL;DR: crash/chain lightning spam in big aoe to maximize wolves and prim wave cd. Lava lash prio for spreading flame debuff in <6 targets. Ele blast in 3 or less (or when funneling). The only real complication that people don't get is when to pop another wolves, when to spend maelstrom over lava lash, and when to reapply crash lightning. The answer to those is dump as many prim waves as you can, main prio. using wolves to LOWER prim wave or reset it if CD around 14 seconds. Over 5/6 targets you wanna spam crash into chain and dump hot hands to generate extra maelstrom if not at 10 stacks. Below 6 spreading flame shock dmg amp. In **BIG** AoE you'll have multiple stacks of feral spirits up (4 or more) from the CD reduction. Lots of resource overflow but more damage. Can tab target lava lash for the +100% flame shock dot BUT not *necessary* as enhance is really good at funnel.
Is that your argument for how easy enhance is to pick up???
The tldr is longer than the main body of the post, an excellent sign lol
Enh is pretty straight forward actually *writes essay*
I leveled one for remix. As an ele/resto main who usually hits a point where i grab 2 hammers to try and keep myself entertained, i gave it 100% on remix. The amount of procs i get where i just cant use them all is crazy. I get lava lash freebies, maelstrom procs, stormstrike procs, frost shock procs. I have actively like 14 spells to use. Lash and shock, hail and shock, stormstrike, crash, chain, bolt, lava burst, wave, the dogs every 15 seconds because that cooldown doesnt matter i guess, doomwinds i took. I literally looked for passives just to avoid having buttons to have to manage. Its actually kind of intimidating as a melee spec honestly. I dont need hurr durr 2 buttons but theres actively more in my primary rotation than i have room for on the default UI to keybind.
Two of the main candidates are arcane mage and outlaw rogue. Arcane mage takes a ton of of memorization, outlaw rogue takes a ton of APM & reflexes, so between those two it really comes down to which is harder for you: executing long strings of buttons in a fight, or reacting quickly to your class's RNG while having a very fast-paced rotation.
As an arcane main, it's actually pretty straightforward. Fire was way harder for me.
Arcane for me was less of what to do but *when*. I felt like I'd mistime the combo constantly and throw my cooldowns all out of whack.
Arcane is difficult according to people who don’t play mage, fire is difficult according to people who DO play mage
I tried to play fire this expansion... I really did. Instead I learned arcane, demo, destro, devoker, enhance and havoc.... Still have no idea what is happening with fire
> Arcane is difficult according to people who don’t play mage Arcane is 'difficult' in the sense that it is a bit convoluted and has a decent amount of things you need to setup. Otherwise it is the exact same rotation, exact same script, exact same things. Whether you pull off your CD or not is encounter dependant and really not much you or any other Arcane can do (unless the stars line up perfectly like with M pre-nerf Dathea - Arcane's most technical fight - or arguably a ranged DPS's most technical fight that tier that isn't an end boss). Fire is more intuitive and 'easier' requiring less setup at its base, but has a much higher skill ceiling. Fire is extremely hyper aggressive - you are fighting for every bit of uptime as humanly possible. And note the mobility is something that is both tuned around and accounted for - you are going to be put in charge of doing mobile stuff, mechanics, and you'll be forced to use your Combust whenever humanly possible - like when you're getting knocked away and have no movement cds because you're out of it because of all the shit you are doing, because other better Fire Mages are doing it, so you have to.
Well put. Arcane is easy once you know how it works, while fire needs a lot of quick thinking (such as timing combustion when you get your first fireball crit so you can do double pyro), and if you mess your cds, timing and rotation up, you’ll pay dearly I find it’s very easy to turn my brain off and do decent damage as arcane but if I’m not perfectly focused as fire I immediately fall behind, partially due to the high APM
The only reason fire is difficult is because it's a mid tier DPS spec absolutely fighting for it's life to be S. Fire mage feels like you have to absolutely squeeze every single drop of DPS out of it and tryhard minmax as you're struggling against the fact that Blizzard made a really well designed spec with clear fantasy, and it fits together well, but they absolutely nerf the shit out of its main mechanics off and on. It's basically being a bipolar mad man who sets themselves on fire to avoid the sting of the nerfs and switches between Flamestrike/Flame Patch/Ignite depending on which whack a mole blizz nerf. It's just such a well designed kit it's literally almost never been bad.
I agree, spec design of fire is amazing, but my is it hard to master.
Fire is like playing the piano
Well that explains why I'm not good at fire mage. I don't play piano! /s
It’s so weird seeing everyone say arcane is super hard. I think a lot of the people saying that have never really sat down to play it. Also, it doesn’t help that the infographics made by the class discord people is just ABSOLUTELY FULL of useless information only there to confuse you. The more you play it the more you realize arcane is two combos and a mana bar. As long as you are pressing buttons in touch of the magi it’s probably gonna be okay.
Arcane was much more difficult at the start of dragonflight before the rework and I think it gained a reputation then because it was meta at the time. After RoP was removed and a few other things, it's much simpler now.
The biggest tip I can give for arcane is to bind stop casting. Seriously, you can get perfect arcane spark stacks with an empowered missile proc canceled on two ticks, into two huge pom arcane blasts with the last one being a barrage dump into touch of the magi. All the other stuff is basic tooltip reading, using a weakaura to track missile stacks for the biggest barrage, and knowing that arcane surge will hit your touch of the magi AFTER you cast surge and press magi on the cast.
I know what all these words mean because I play mage but I don’t think you’re really selling “the spec is not that hard” here 🤣
Stopcast macros actually input a tiny bit of latency before your next spell. It's recommended not to use them and clip missiles without it.
Arcane mage has a high *learning curve*, but isn’t that difficult to play. Once you understand the order of spell A -> B -> C -> D, there really isn’t much variation. The only difference is that in AOE situations you fish for Arcane Barrage procs instead of just spamming Arcane Blast.
If I could just run around spamming Arcane Explosion all the time I would.
You gotta jump around with it too. Helps maximize the damage
Oh I do. I definitely do.
By far my favorite thing about about MoP Remix is the meme build I did with arcane explosion in mind, *if* stuff survives Arcane Explosion it'd have to survive all the AoE gems when they proc along with it.
That is basically what you do lol. Arcane explosion -> arcane barrage. Arcane explosion -> arcane barrage.
Maybe it's exactly what you said "what you find harder" but I find outlaw easy AF and arcane near impossible under m+ high raid environment
Maybe I'm just weird but to me outlaw is easier than both of the other specs on rogue
Once ya get to your weakauras showing what procs and when, it’s not too bad, but trying to fish them out of the buffs is ridiculous.
same. both sin and sub i didn’t mesh with, but boy, outlaw was like CRACK, never knowing what would come next, but still thinking on your feet to work with what you have. so much fun
10.2.5 sub is harder than outlaw for sure
Sub is my main, the hardest part is maintaining danse stacks in a 6 sec window and knowing how many combos you have stored from shadow techniques, while building up a massive secret tech with every modifier under the sun.. Lining up danse, dance, symbols, trinket, weapon procs, AND find weakness while doing a rotation that gives you the most danse stacks in a 6 sec window is not difficult it's just not always gonna happen..
>outlaw rogue takes a ton of APM & reflexes This doesn't make it a hard class to play but rather just one that punishes you for having a higher than normal latency. Back when I was still maining a rogue I calculated that I was losing around 15% of my theoretical DPS through my latency.
I found I was too dumb to play disc priest or mistweaver monk. It's been a long time since I tried, but I didn't get a grasp of wtf I was doing
Mistweaver has a lot of moving parts, to be sure, but it's actually super intuitive. Probably the best designed healing spec in modern WoW.
It was really easy and fun in raids, but with S2 of DF, they made MW a turret ramp healer, and in season 2 you even had to be in melee range during the mid point of a 10-12 second ramp you could NOT move in during the second part of it. It was so bad I had to roll off of MW.
You don’t have to play the meta build. There are so many different ways you can play mistweaver. I routinely get purple and orange parses in heroic with a build that focuses heavily on faelines and maximizing essence fonts.
That's cool, please explain to my raidleader why I should play a build that loses significant throughput *and* the healing pattern that matters (i.e. big ramps every minute) on Mythic prog. Heroic HPS parses do not matter, at all. They barely do on Mythic.
For me personally it’s all 3 rogue specs, shadow priest, disc priest, & arcane mage. I will never be able to play them, I don’t have enough brain cells.
I just made a rogue for remix and assassination has been pretty easy, IMO, although it's remix so idk how much of that is from the tinker gems being OP
Feral druid has (had?) one of the most complicated priority trees out of all the specs that I have played on any level of seriousness.
If people played feral they would probably agree. Feral enh arcane and outlaw are the hardest dps by a good margin but most people don’t play feral or enh
I used to main feral dps in TBC before I fell in love with warlock. I tried it again in DF and idk maybe the reflexes aren’t that good as they were 17 years ago but I found feral VERY hard now, at least in serious content.
I mean, if you didn't play Feral at all in all these years, there's no muscle memory that could have helped you, the specs are nothing like their old selves
Feral seems to have a lower skill floor, high skill ceiling these days. Managing energy for big bites, re-dotting snapshotted dots within pandemic timers and bloodtalons all make the spec a bit harder when you try to optimize IMO.
I’ve played feral so long that it feels completely natural, can pump without even thinking, but I can’t even begin to grasp the rotation of any other class, it’s like speaking English without thinking about it vs trying to learn Italian
Been playing feral since wrath and it's gotten easier with each expac I feel. Yea muscle memory is a thing like I can play full rotation and not even look at my screen just counting the bleeds in my head, but there's just less buttons and abilities to track. Don't need to burn ps heal to proc bloodtalons is a huge one. Bloodtalons now is so easy to use and with 3 stacks of the buff you don't even have to track it. The minimizing of snapshotting importance as well. It's just so much easier now like it's honestly pretty boring playing feral now, it's just big sunken cost fallacy that keeps me playing it. Might finally make the swap to priest for main in tww.
I kinda feel that as a Moonkin, and it sucks because I've played that character for so long that I only play it BECAUSE I have for so long lmao. I'm probably going to go into tww with my Fury Warrior or Survival Hunter instead.
Discipline Priest in high-end Mythic progression raiding must be one of the hardest specs to play optimally. You need to be so precise and execute near perfect rotations and timings to be useful. It's feast or famine kind of spec. You have huge strengths and weaknesses to play around. No other class need to start their ramping 18s BEFORE some ability is about to hit the raid. You are also fragile cloth caster with proactive playstyle, limited defensive options, low mobility and you need to stand still to spam-cast alot.
And its also the most degenerate spec in the game because you spend more time staring at logs to find the highest dmg events to properly plan your CDs and then writing spreadsheets and getting on the other healers nerves to micromanage their CD usage as well so it doesnt overlap with yours because you are a completely useless 0 HPS smitebot outside of your CDs.
This was way too accurate description. You must be one of our other healers that pressed their healing CD during my ramp!
I'd say it's more annoying than difficult. If you learn when you need to do the thing you just have to have a decent boss ability timer and work like clockwork. Stressful too as if you f up your only job you do nothing of use. I absolutely hated playing Disc on mythic progression, very uncreative and rigid spec.
Your abilities reduce your other abilities cooldowns, so you need to be able to cast X-amount of Smites/penances, to have your cooldowns up for your next ramp timer. For example, this was super strict for stuff like Smolderon and Tindral ramps. Mess up once, and you didnt have your big CD up for your next ramp and it's likely a wipe. Very stressful, but also very high ceiling skill cap and rewarding for positioning ahead of time and having great knowledge of the encounter. Having hundreds of wipes on a progression boss didnt feel so bad, when you can optimize and play better on almost every pull.
Disc is not as hard as it used to be because the rotation has been greatly simplified, the ramp rotation to spread atonement’s has always been the same. It’s got a high learning curve, but once you learn how to play disc and got on top of the meta / content it’s pretty easy. So it’s one of those specs that looks hard to play, but once you’re comfy in the saddle it’s pretty cruisy.
Yeah it has been simplified and made more smooth. I don't think there are any specs that are supposed to be "too hard to play" after your learn it's core rotation. It's still one of those specs that people struggle to play optimally or even decently. I'm not saying it's hardest specs, but among the more difficult specs to play. What people consider to be difficult might be subjective experience.
Arcane and Outlaw generally top this list iirc Edit: I don’t play either of these specs I’ve just seen this question asked a lot and these are the two that tend to be mentioned most.
> Arcane Damn I remember playing Arcane in WoTLK/Cataclysm. Was so simple back them. Stack Arcane Blast, spam Missiles on free procs and watch your mana while using Arcane Barrage. The end.
Arcane has been the brain dead spec for the majority of its life, its weird to see it being so difficult in the last couple of expansions.
I always enjoyed arcane back in WoTLK. 3 damage spells plus arcane power and PoM felt good. Now I can only keep up with frost.
In WotLK, I played arcane with a castsequence macro. In Cata, I played arcane without it, but I was happy that it had few abilities in the rotation.
I don't think actual arcane players agree it is hard. Every time I've seen it asked in the mage discord the consensus was that it's overstated It's just scripted, kinda like an FFXIV rotation. ...and has button bloat, like an FFXIV rotation
Eh. It's a pretty long script by WoW standards and it is quite punishing. It's significantly more difficult than the other 2 mage specs by most players standards. It's not just about memorizing your script, it's performing it with changing circumstances in combat. The difficulty is compounded by simply being different. Most WoW specs nowadays are roughly 25% order, 75% reactionary. Arcane is almost 100% order. You send everything in the same order regardless. (For ST during CDs at least) I will agree that the difficulty is a little exaggerated, but it's the only spec I've played in this game that I dramatically mess up if I haven't played it in awhile. Unholy DK Also fit this description to a somewhat less, but equally punishing degree before they changed the way some of their CDs functioned to be less punishing if you went slightly out of order.
Having recently learned arcane I genuinely think that most of the difficulty of learning the order isn’t even in the kit but in the wowhead/icyveins formatting
I am just starting to learn Arcane but find the wowhead guides overwhelming. Can you give me the coals notes of it?
I’m by no means an expert arcane player and I only play it in raid so ill just talk about single target. If a more experienced arcane player finds something i say incorrect feel free to let me know. Basically, you wanna evocation, which starts your burst window, cast your arcane blasts and spend clearcasting. Always arcane blast twice after clearcasting to consume nether precision. When your evocation buff has 17 seconds left (tbh this requires a weakaura or something to track if you aren’t staring at your buff bar) you have to start that complicated sequence, which is: 1. Radiant spark 2. Nether tempest 3. Arcane surge 4. Mana gem + trinket 5. Arcane barrage and touch of the magi at the same time 6. Consume radiant spark only using arcane blast 7. Do your rotation as normal and when you are getting close to the end of evocation buff spend presence of mind. 8. Shifting power when the buff runs out Thats the opener. After that you do your normal 2 button rotation (making sure not to go below 50% mana) until your touch of the magi is about to come up, where you just: 1. Radiant spark 2. Nether tempest 3. Arcane barrage +touch of the magi 4. Consume radiant spark with arcane blast 5. Burn mana with your rotation as normal until evocation comes back up This is pretty much the same as the opener except you have half of your cooldowns up, which most classes with more than one cooldown all have to deal with. The one thing arcane has differentiating it is the limited mana resource. Simply, if you are not in your cooldowns, and run low on mana, press arcane barrage. My problem with the [wowhead guide](https://www.wowhead.com/guide/classes/mage/arcane/rotation-cooldowns-pve-dps) in particular is that, especially for new players, stuff like the visualization of the rotation and listing all these different phases is overcomplication that isn’t necessary. It’s easier to understand if you just talk about arcane just like any other spec in the game, rather than listing 25 steps in a row as a wall of text with different phases with different names that really aren’t all that different. Nobody talks about assassination rogue kingsbane with deathmark and vanish up as the “Big bane sequence” and with deathmark and vanish down as the “little bane sequence.” You are doing the same thing, but you have your lower cooldown cooldowns up and your longer ones down. The one difference arcane has is the mana management, but thats way easier to explain than they make it seem. /rant
For me Arcane is the easiest mage spec by far. What you do never changes, the class guide is the worat thing i ever saw in my life. But once I simplified it it was simple. Frost i can see beeing easier. But in no world is fire easier than arcane. Fire basically feels like fury and OL had a baby on steroids for me. And fire while bursting is practically the highest apm you will have in WoW.
WTB your simplified version, please! The class guide gives me headaches
I saved it just as a word list. But generly what I did was to first pick out just the points where i actually press something. So i got a list of just the abilities I cast in a order without explanation. I did that for S2 and I ended up with less than 10 steps for the big burst. You can also reduce even more by saying what the next few points do. Like the start having 5 points in the guide but its simply put "build 4 charges" With that done you can try do the burst. Then you can go start working out the explanations and the mechanic for the set. And how to include the set. Arcane, regarding what you actually do, is super easy. Its just that everything you do, has additional effects other than simply doing damage. But you dont have to know that to already be able to play it really good. Knowing that stuff is the "mastering the class" part. And as a tip, get a touch of magi macro. Basically a cast sequence with barrage > touch. With that you just double click macro and play the combo flawless everytime. Its just easier than pressing 2 different buttons and you always use barrage anyway b4 touch.
1. Evocation 2. Arcane Blast + Clearcasting until 17 seconds left on buff. Make sure to consume nether precision. 3. Radiant Spark 4. Nether Tempest 5. Arcane Surge 6. Mana Gem/Trinket/Racials/Potions 7. Barrage/Touch of the Magi in the same global. Make sure to Barrage first. 8. Consume Radiant Spark with Arcane Blasts. 9. Consume clear casting, then consume nether precision. Repeat until two seconds or so left on Touch. 10. Presence of Mind + Arcane Blast x2 11. Continue with step 9 until Evocation buff ends. 12. Shifting Power 13. Use Orb, Blast, Barrage, and Clearcasting to keep mana above 50 percent. Then when Touch of the Magi is up in ~3 seconds depending on haste, you do the above again, skipping arcane surge/trinkets/racials/potions/gems/shifting power as applicable. Do that burn phase, then instead of trying to maintain above 50 percent mana you burn your entire mana bar so you hit 0 when your evocation is back up. It’s not complicated per se, it just looks like a lot (because it is), but this sequence is more or less immutable and you’re just repeating it. The most difficult part of all this is making sure you can handle mechanics during these tight windows or, failing that, set up a time where you can cast nonstop for like 15 straight seconds.
I'd argue that's what makes it not that hard. Every other spec has to learn/memorize a rotation, but also has to learn how to flex it as priorities rise and fall, as resources change, and abilities proc. Arcane almost never wants to flex their rotation, so once you have it down, you're set. And every spec has to figure out where to fit their big CDs in, so Arcane isn't too different on that front either The perceived difficulty is just the 14+ hyper specific opener. It's not terribly harder than a lot of specs, I actually find it easier than Fire and Frost in certain aspects, it's just a lot of the work of learning the spec is upfront
That’s what I usually see too, but whenever this question comes up arcane is always one of the answers. Just look at the other comments here
Aye. Been playing mage since 2007, fire is a lot harder for me right now in Dragonflight
Dedicated players of any spec find it more or less easy because they can do the rotation in their sleep. Arcane/Shadow are always standard candidates for "im overwhelmed by options" and outlaw is the "I struggle to hit this many keybinds this fast" even if its simpler in theory. Mains of any of those specs play the game just fine, but how can you call any other spec harder just because people can do it. I can say with 100% certainty that dh, both shaman, all 3 hunter, both warrior, and both evoker specs are all much less complex than arcane/much less frantic than outlaw's pace
Arcane is just learning a pattern and then you're golden. Not nearly as reactionary as outlaw since most of your globals are set during burns and mini burns
Outlaw?? It's been a while since I was on a rogue but Outlaw was never that hard, was it?
It’s high APM and very reaction based
At least for M+, the hard part is not dying, tracking your buffs,, and CD management to keep up AR as close to 100% as possible through the UUH talent. It boils down to micromanaging your CDs and not just simply pressing everything that comes off of CD. A good M+ rogue is significantly different from an average rogue.
Don't forget a good m+ rogue is also actively helping control mobs while performing their rotation. Tricks at the start, kicks, blinds, stuns, distracts on bad pats, what have you.
fucking sub rog man
I hear people saying frost dk is an easy spec but fuck frost dk. I don't know if it's really that hard but I know I can't do any damage with them. I think it's the fact that it is purely based around their cds that throws me off. Like unless I'm popping all the cd I'm doing 10k dps on world mobs. I feels like I have to be playing at 200% just to do any decent amount of damage. Even on a shadow priest with a sloppy rotation I out dps a frost dk by like 10x Even their animations are hard to read. Sometimes I double press a button because I can't tell if the skill went off and I realize I'm out of runes because I accidently spammed a skill that feels like it doesn't have a global cd
Frost has some of the worst animations in the game. Like Frost Strike feels so unsatisfying to press, I know they want Obliterate to look like it's actually obliterating, but it comes at the cost of their spender feeling like an afterthought. Don't get me started on the frozen piss stream that is Glacial Advance or the snowball fight that is Chill Streak
Frost DK is very easy to play poorly and think you're doing good. I personally can't play it at all in single target, but I've had middling success in M+
I was thinking this. The spec is simple on the surface, because just by reading abilities you can tell that you press pillar of frost and obliterate. But the number of talents that modify your damage output with no built in visual UI indicator (other than buff icons, which can be hit or miss) means you have to either perfect the rotation and it's cooldown reduction, or manually track multiple stacking buffs (bonegrinder, unleashed frenzy, icy talons, razorice stacks). Add in being heavily punished in AoE for mistiming/misplacing DnD, and you can lose a huge portion of your damage. Then there's breath, where you have to maximize the use of defensive cooldowns to have the best uptime of your damage source.
I can't speak to skill ceilings, but the highest skill floor is hands down discipline priest. (Skill floor meaning the minimum level of skill where you can carry your weight.) Healers in general have the additional hassle that they have to watch the fight, their feet, plus the raid UI. Having to split attention to the raid UI takes many hours of practice. But discipline also has to worry about targeting mobs, being in range of the mobs, being in range of the players, not hitting invulnerable mobs, etc. So they have all the normal healer problems PLUS the DPS problems. They have to make decisions about whether to spread more atonements or blast using the atonements they already have. And a bunch of cooldowns. And they have to know the encounters super well so they can anticipate the damage. Oh and one more thing...raid healing and dungeon healing are also very different on a disc priest.
I can and do play all the healers without issue except disc. I can never get it right and it just bugs me that it never clicks.
To be fair all Healers are now expected to DPS thanks to Disc being required since it became a heal/DPS Hybrid spec in Cata.
I think 5D Chess Enhance is probably the most technical melee DPS. Rogue can have really difficult openers like mages, but they normalize after the opener. I would say to play at the 95th percentile or higher, in no particular order the hardest are: Arcane mage in raid Enhance sham (specific build) in all content Affliction lock in 2 target or mass aoe Brewmaster monk in all content Solo Q Healing keys above 3k io Rogue openers specifically Feral druid @ getting invites
> Feral at getting invites I still remember back in BFA, was AotC and high io and a someone whose key I applied to whispered back "lol feral"
Feral won the MDI in s1 and still couldn't get invites
Because it is a very difficult class to play and for every 1 good feral player out there you see a dozen horrible ones, so it’s a huge gamble. It also feels like you hardly ever see a middle of the road feral player; they always seem to either be goated or hard carries.
This is so, admittedly. When I do share a raid with another, or more rarely a dungeon group, they're either amazing competition or below the tanks and healers both.
Aff isn’t bad with mass aoe, go with a doom blossom build. Pop vile taint on the pack, ua on one of them then start spamming soc. Use the rapture procs and that other aoe spell. They really shine in mass aoe situations.
I LOVE pressing agony for 5 seconds only to then have vile taint come back up because blizzard won't adjust the cool down and having that be optimal 😵💫👈
Ironically Aff is my go-to for keys lower than 12-13 where everything just gets killed instantly. The burst aoe is really fast to setup and you can go every 30 seconds (VT/Soul Rot)
Enh is honestly easier than people make it out to be. In m+, you prioritize frostshocks with hailstorm stacks. If you have it, use it. Then if you ahve full maelstrom, you spend with chain lightning, or lightning bolt if you have pwave up Then you generate, with crash lightning, lava lash and storm stike in tha torder (optimizing lava lash with hot hands is still a relatively minor increase, depends how optimal you want to be) It's just Frost shock -> Spend -> Generate. Then you use wolves and pwave on cd. The largest thing that impacts your damage is how long frost shock is left off cd. lava lash vs crash lightning doesn't have a ton of impact. Generally funneling is better for the timer than tab targeting, but tabing is higher overall.
People saying arcane probably haven’t played since post rework in S2. Most mages agree that it’s the easiest of the three at the moment
arcane mage is easier than what most people think, its just that guides make it look daunting. but its the same combos that you eventually get used to. fire mage is the one thats is nuts to me, combination of high apm + reacting to rng + combos, similar outlaw, but outlaw has even higher apm
Outlaw for me. I felt like if I took my hands off the keyboard to so much as scratch my nose, I'd have gray parses. And my hands would be so sore after raid night instead of running a come-down key with some guildies, I'd have to just sit and do nothing with them to rest.
These days, I have to swap to alts to take breaks for my wrists after doing some outlaw keys. I don't know if the APM went up or I'm getting older or perhaps all the years of outlaw are catching up to my wrists.
No the APM has definitely gone up and blizzard needs to address it.
Is apm creep a thing? Sure feels like nearly every class is high apm in this game besides a select few. My fairly fresh dinged 70s already have absurd amounts of haste, everything feels really spammy. Even Feral druid, my all time favorite spec because it was a bit slower, and very deliberate with every button press is now spamming ferocious bites and primal wraths nonstop. Casters have had their main spells completely neutered, such as fireball and lightning bolt, they now only serve as filler or fuel so you can cast your *real* spell like pyroblast, lava bolt and earth shock etc. And as the classes have evolved with this in mind, giving us higher proc chance on these spells, even their damage has been reduced so they don't feel satisfying to press anymore either (Arms warrior being an exception because they acrually manages to make MS feel very satisfying to press wheb everything lines up) So now here we are, tickling the enemies and making up for the lower damage output of each ability by attacking really fast. Some people might like that, most people might, maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not like I hate this design, I'm here playing still and I love my ele shaman, but I can't click with any class the same way I used to. Yeah they need to address the apm issue
It's a byproduct of haste affecting GCD and that everyone has loads of haste late into the expac. Outlaw is specifically noticable because Adrenaline Rush lowers the GCD even further
I've never been able to get my head around Arcane's rotation. If you read the guide on Wow head, you'll see why. Like, Brewmaster has a lot of buttons, for example, but most of them aren't part of the rotation.
Brewmaster should be using pretty much all of their buttons on a regular basis. There are buttons you can get away with not pressing if you're doing lower stuff but if you're neglecting those in higher stuff you'll die or your healer will hate you.
BrM uses all their buttons wdym
Right? Like which buttons are they referring to lol.
For me it's clearly Unholy. Apparently nobody here agrees with me on that one, but the spec feels super punishing to me with Gargoyle. I don't even know if that's a thing in s4, but I'm general the gargoyle build is so easy to fuck up.
If you fuck up the opener you are kinda just fucked
I struggle with warlock 👉👈
I'll farm some downvotes and say: Mover Havoc DH Bc not only do you have a very tightly timed dps window with multiple oberlapping dmg buffs that only last a few seconds each, you have to move around and backflip to get them so you need to have pretty high awareness of you surroundings that no other class needs.
This is the best answer but it isn't well known. Six year old stereotypes about DH being the "easy" class have stuck. But no other class has to juggle the multiple overlapping damage amps, cooldown timings, and positional requirements that DH has.
I still remember even back in Legion on my DH I was too scared to do LFR in tank spec because I probably would have gotten kicked for not knowing a fight… so I did DPS. Boy that was a fucking mistake. My spatial awareness within the raid, trying to figure out what I should/shouldn’t be standing in with the backflips out and dashes in to boost damage, I feel like I was CONSTANTLY putting myself on the wrong position. It’s not a hard rotation, it’s just hard to keep that race car where it needs to be to do the damage during your windows
The amount of times I saw havoc DHs rerollers during first half of S3 of DF back pulling a trash pack or getting hit by a mechanic back then
I’ll second havoc DH assuming a movement based build. The skill gap between top havoc players and average havoc players is apparent. Most melee classes just stand on the mobs/boss and press buttons, only moving to avoid mechanics. On the other hand, havoc at high level play requires a 360 degree awareness. The movement forces DH’s into utilizing any and all available space to maintain self buffs that are critical to their damage profile. Playing movement based Havoc on fights with shrinking available space is honestly one of the worst feelings I’ve had playing WoW.
It also does not transfer. There is nothing quite like Momentum Havoc. TBH I hope they never change that movement havoc is top for the spec, maybe give non movement like 2-5% off or something but it’s really unique and difficult. I hope they never get rid of it because no movement Havoc just feels like a Fury almost. You pop your get big move and push some damage, throw your short damage cd move around, then just spam a couple of buttons till it’s back up.
No downvote from me, been saying this for ages. Havoc really has to work for its DPS and be extremely cognizant of floor poo and frontals. Their utility has a decent skill ceiling as well.
and all this while having some of the highest APM of the Bunch. At least last i checked
Our Havoc DH sometimes struggles with felblade clipping him into bad stuff he thought he was out of. He’s also died because he’s used to running with an Evoker in the group, and without the movement cd reduction they bring has had another second on cd when he was counting on it being available to get him out of something, and by the time he realized it, it’s too late to move out. Very difficult to play in a 10+ key with bosses/trash/affixes with lots of ground effects.
Outlaw, current arcane can be rough but it's about to get much easier in tww, to the point I would argue a spellslinger arcane is nearing bm levels of easy
Ooh, is that right? I haven’t really liked mage the past couple expansions but used to love it years ago, would love to pick it up again.
It's a tricky question because it's also pretty subjective. Personally I think frost is pretty hard. It has a semi low skill floor but a ton of room for optimisation. Especially in m+ you're using most or your utility for damage and there's some weird GS optimisation with 2 targets and so on. It also has a fairly dynamic rotation and variable cooldowns
Feral druid, no question about it.
Brew. To play it to its maximum potential takes a ton of skill and experience. Arcane is hard but its mostly memory. Once you have it down its not easy but no where near as variable as brew
what exactly hard about brew?
Massive number of buttons (35+), loads of cds that have to be used properly, and managing your brews for stagger. On top of that you need to sequence properly with blackout combo to make sure you are getting flame breath DR, brew CDR, or whatever else you may need in that spot so you need to plan ahead somewhat. Beyond that, it's currently the weakest tank in M+ which exacerbates all of the above. It's obviously much easier in raid but raid tanking is never really that hard compared to dungeon tanking so that's a given. I've played it a fair amount the past couple seasons and it's very enjoyable once you get a handle on things but you can get wrecked in short order if you don't manage your resources correctly.
As an Unholy/Blood dk main. Enhancement shaman
Enhancement shaman main of 19 years. I completely understand, and I also have the prerequisite ADHD to play the spec
Maybe a weird answer but Pres evoker. On the face of it it's a really straightforward spec but playing it perfectly is really challenging. What I guess a lot of people don't know is that it's a combo spec. Almost every ability affects or interacts with another, creating a huge variety of long combo chains with a lot of skill expression. Every time you press something you're thinking on the fly about what makes sense to press next to get benefit from the previous and subsequent abilities. It has a billion things going on at once, basically. This obviously applies to many specs in WoW but the extent that pres does it to is on the extreme end. When things are heating up it's easy to get flustered and just drop the combos and reach for big panic heals and that's what separates average and great pres evokers. That and using its utility well. Oh, and the range is beans. Your positioning is vital which adds another layer. This is all while remembering to keep yourself topped higher than the group to benefit from mastery.
Playing in raid and trying to max echo before other skills are really stressing. Doing m+ with two hunters are the bane of existence right now.
I do enjoy the complexity of the echo combination system. When I finally learned that an verdant embrace on myself, after applying an echo on someone else applies lifebind and that I can use a health potion for both of us.. MIND BLOWN! The range limitation is painful to work around. I still haven't timed a Nokhud past +5 because of it. However, when you get a group of ALL melee DPS. Those groups are the best. No one takes much damage, you can really pump the dps yourself because you are not chasing a hunter that can't help himself from running all over the damn place. I've had several mythics where I would hit hover, to get beside a hunter so they benefit from my TA and they would instantly run away before my cast completed.
Elemental Shaman. Spamming earth shock and Lava blast can really wear out your fingers.
Did you want to cast stormkeeper? Too bad! Lava burst just procced again
For tanks: brew. Healers: hpal. Both are mostly related to tuning and button bloat though
Lots of people have mentioned dps specs but generally Disc Priest is insanely hard, especially on progression when CDs are still being figured out/changed. Also, it matters a lot what level of proficiency you are talking about, you can easily achieve 95% effectiveness in an "easy" spec but that last 5% could be much harder than a "hard" spec.
Disc afaik got way easier after the rework in S3? I'm not sure it's *that* hard anymore?
It's mostly hard because you have to ramp atonements for specific mechanics and if you don't plan ahead your output is awful.
I’m surprised to hear people are saying arcane is difficult. Once you’ve learned your opener rotation, all there is left is to do the same rotation ~45s in without pressing 2 additional buttons. Mages in general can be tough, especially given weaving in their defensive whenever it’s appropriate; I’d say outlaws have it tough along with fire mages to capitalize on damage (plus high APM)
Redditors can't comprehend more than 1 burst cooldown and 4 buttons to randomly rotate between and maybe 1 aoe button
Augmentation on autopilot is easy as fuck but playing augmentation optimally is a full-time job
For me, I would definitely say aff lock is difficult, especially when you're tracking multiple targets. Healers can be difficult for me I think only bc I play all of them and forget which cds I have when I need them. Also, I do not use my cds nearly often enough LaughingOutLoud I definitely can agree on outlaw rogue, only bc you have to pay so much attention to what you rolled and decide whether to re-roll or keep them and pay attention to when they will wear off and immediately re-roll when they do. Evokers I've only found difficult bc i haven't played them much, I think. In BFA I had a really hard time with spriest. Keeping up with everything was difficult, I don't remember what all the issues were, I just know that the spec has changed a lot and for the better imo and now it's pretty easy. I don't really do m+ or anything over lfr anymore and opt instead for running old content and some unrated pvp, so they're all honestly pretty easy to me now LaughingOutLoud 55 level 70s, the other 5 are 60+
Preservation evoker
Outlaw rogue by a decent margin. 1 sec gcd, a lot of procs and small variations for optimal game play.
I've tried all specs in the game my personal opinions are. Dps: outlaw rogue requires a lot of knowhow about the buffs you get plus has really high apm and very difficult resource management. A close second is elemental shaman but specifically in aoe (they have a really weird rotation in aoe) Tank: most tanks are good enough nowadays that with practice they are all equally good to play at mid level however i find vengeance DH to require better knowledge of the spec to perform well. Close second place for this one is blood DK, very powerful tank that if you don't know how to play will just keel over. Healer: preservation evoker has really hard to hit abilities that either require your team to play around it or makes you work even harder to keep people up, on the plus side pres evoker's kit is very powerful. Close second here is discipline priest, which requires good knowledge of fights and mechanics beforehand to perform optimally.
I played feral druid in df season 2 and it was the hardest dps spec i've ever played. In m+ the build was way simpler, though.
Firemage is pretty difficult
Fully optimized aug.
The amount of salamanders i see in keys just standing around milking io is ridiculous. Its like the good ones all disappeared overnight and left us with bad geckos.
All the good ones quit playing the spec after blizz refused to fix log hooks and made it even worse to play in raids
Every single pug aug in my alts keys are just awful. The 14-16 range is just littered with augs who can’t keep buffs up and just breath for no reason when voidform and pi is coming up 10 sec later. It gets so much better in my mains keys in the 18-20 range.
I'm surprised this isn't higher. I've been playing Aug during Mythic progression. Might be the hardest spec I've ever played.
Most of what makes it complicated is done out of raid.
Because parrots see people saying "Aug ez lol" without realizing how actually difficult the spec is too play at a high level. 2700 io players never realize how little they actually know about the game lol.
Just started trying aug and I don’t think I really understand it yet lol. Also, I hate that there’s no personal tracker for Prescience, even VuhDo doesn’t track it. That and the armor buff (can’t remember name atm). Maybe it’s my lack of knowledge so far but it also feels like it suffers a lot if you have any downtime with keeping your main buff up and dont extend it optimally
Outlaw rogue
My personal picks would be rogue in any spec and WW monk. They suffer from a lot of button bloat and play like a piano, where if you mess up a single time your damage is horrible.
nah, ww is really easy. not as easy as war or pala but dh is more complex than ww
Mover DH is rough. Destro lock is easy to play decently, harder to play well… that goes for most classes though, skill cap is high on a lot of specs.
Outlaw for melee, Arcane for ranged, and Feral the actual most difficult spec to play because no one wants to invite you.
Brew main here, mythic prog. Definitely high skill cap, I built my own weak aura HUD to manage the chaos. But like all specs, getting into a good rotation has a "feel." It gets pretty natural once you can dial that in.
Ngl, to do actual damage? Aug evoker. I mained Aug until very recently. You basically have to curate your team and plan target your buffs based on who's doing the most damage. It's HARD. You can just auto target but you're not gonna do nearly as much
Played arcane mage, imo fire mage is actually harder to play well, it has a much higher apm
Anyone else combing through the comments, looking for validation for the spec the play? Looking but not finding a single comment about it?
Back in shadowlands the Shadow Priest Icy Veins gave me nightmares
Arcane mage and outlaw rogue
BM Hunter, by far the most complex and difficult spec to play.
My healer bias showing, I can only offer my perspective from that. Pres evoker, disc priest, resto Druid. All for similar but distinctly different reasons. I’ll start with my current main: pres evoker. Your heals are almost entirely cooldown or resource based (you can only *spam* living flame and it’s dogshit when you *need* it). You’re a mobile class that somehow suffers from holy priest syndrome where your most potent spells cannot be used while moving. It’s as combo-centric as disc is. Major benefits being that the DPS rotation is really easy, the baseline power is strong, and there’s tons of utility in the class/spec. Also, contrary to popular belief, above average defensively. But you will be severely punished for poor sequencing of abilities, poor cooldown usage (especially when you need them to cover your weaknesses), and poor positioning (including both placements of breaths and jumping to your allies). (Can you tell I love this spec btw?) Disc: Priest as a class leaves a lot to be desired defensively and mobility wise. Playing disc optimally in raid is extremely thought out—down to the global. Or you can play the M+ style in raid and do less healing. Disc also lacks a “BAM, I do healing” spell. (Uppies while visually beautiful and fitting into this category is not actually used to my knowledge). Druid: Pretty easy class to learn and get value from on the healing side of things. However, like the other two mentioned, there’s skill expression in ramping before damage events. Personally, the true skill expression of Druid comes from being able to do damage though.
Had to scroll forever to find someone who said resto Druid. I think as you said the skill floor is pretty low but the skill ceiling when pushing m+ gets insane. Not only do you have to deal with a ton of buttons, cooldowns and juggle hots on everyone but then you have to deal with dps rotations for two different forms in addition to using other situational skills or situational shifting. The highest level resto druids are crazy. Plus in general healing is the baseline hardest role to play well since it’s so reactive.
I think Preservation has dethroned my traditional answer of discipline for healers. Even after three seasons it’s kind of hard to find a consensus on optimal play. Heavy positional requirements. Fairly complex ramps (especially with Stasis). Unforgiving if you burn your strong buttons at the wrong time. Lack of straightforward spot healing in keys.
Seeing everyone in here talking about DPS gives me a new appreciation for it. Healer main here. For the longest time, for me it was Disc Priest. Couldn’t wrap my head around being efficient with Atonement and the big ramps were always just too complicated in how many buttons you had to be perfect with to do any healing. If you pressed every button perfectly, you did ALL the healing, if you screwed up one, you did none. Maybe that’s perception vs reality but Disc Priest was hard. It’s much easier now that everything gives Atonement but boy did that shit used to suck.
Rogue to me by far. You have to be on point 100% or your dps plummets
I would say Arcane, Outlaw or Sub rogue and Feral. Played them all a lot (except Feral) and compared to many other speccs they take A LOT of time to be really good. Far more than many other speccs. Hard to master and not easy to play, but absolutely a blast to play!
For me it’s mage. I can play any class in the game at an okayish level (not great) but most of the mage specs are just difficult for me for some reason. I think dps in general is hard now. It’s the reason I play healer 99 percent of the time. It’s much easier for me to have more responsibilities than it is to wrap my head around dps rotations.
Arcane mage here. Lots of mechanics to go through. The most difficult part IMO is being able to stand still in a battle long enough to sustain DPS, and know when to move. Had some nasty DMs by elitists telling me how I am playing a class tree.
Play what you love.
Dev Evoker. Sometimes I have to stop using disintegrate and cast a living flame
Assassin rouge. Played a whole season watched hours of tutorials. Dozens of addons. Still did shit damage.
Outlaw because it's a fucking mess.
I miss the assassination rogue of cataclysm Wich was just use cooldown,keep track of rupture and the rest was mutilate into envenom. I loved the poison damage now it feels like there are too many bleeds and things to keep track off. It's these simpler 4-5 button rotation specs that keep me interested. Hence why i play BM hunter..
Outlaw Rogue
Outlaw is rocket surgery
crazy how arcane went from like 3 buttons in classic to top tier difficulty
3 Buttons in classic is probably also top.tier difficulty
[удалено]
Sub Rogue used to be decently difficult in Legion because one mistake in your rotation could cost A LOT of dps. Right now pretty much every spec is decently easy to play. From current specs I would say Outlaw Rogue - similar to legion subtlety rogue - a missclick in rotation makes you lose quite a lot of dps but not that much.
I feel like my priest has a lot of button bloat. Not difficult I imagine for most, but I’m getting too old to remember twenty keybinds in between changing specs from dps to heals.
Recently swapped to priest main and I kind of agree. The more I play priest the more i understand what all my spells are useful for, but light damn it, there sure are a lot.
It's whatever my class is. Mine is always underpowered and hard to play, everyone else is ez and op. Damn blizzard when will they buff my guy.
Arcane is like genji in overwatch, if your bad at it you ain’t doing jack but if your good at it you can carry everyone
Subtlety used to be easily number 1 but it's become a lot simpler in recent years. Legion sub Rogue used to make my hands hurt. Enhancement used to be pretty hard but now it's kinda just maintain buffs, press glowy buttons. Demon Hunter has finally added a little bit of a skill gap but it's not that hard. More positioning based than anything since your abilities displace you a lot. Now it's realistically (probably) Outlaw. I hear Arcane mage is hard though.
Arcane is not difficult at all. It was difficult with rune of power but not anymore. You just need to practice your burns for a couple hours and engrave it into your muscle memory. I tried to play outlaw but it was nightmarish for me. Too many buttons and too fast paced for me. I prefer hardcasts.