Listening to the latest Instance podcast yesterday, my ears perked up when the boys spoke about the infamous pre-rogue nerf, DPS chart from Festergut. For those of you who may have missed this chart, here it is.
DPS for Dummies also spoke about this today, but I want to add my own unique viewpoint to talk about the ramifications of these figures.
Now a cursary glance at this chart shows that out of the top 10 DPS, only five are pure DPS specs, and they come from only three of the pure DPS classes, rogues, hunters and mages. Retribution paladins swing in at number 4, Unholy Death Knights at number 5, Fury Warriors at number 6, and Feral Druids at number 7, before we stumble upon Arcane mages at a pitiful number 8. Survival Hunters and enhamcement Shamans round out the top 10.
The big losers in all of this, apart from mages, are Warlocks. Affliction Warlocks come in at a lowly number 12, just in front of Arms warriors and Shadow priests. The truly amazing thing on this graph is that Frost Death Knights come in at number 13. Keep in mind that Frost DK’s are the tanking spec, so we have a hybrid tank spec beating out pure DPS class specs. I can only imgaine what Warlocks are thinking right now. There must be spittle coming out of their mouths. The only thing they’re good for is creating portals, but we don’t even need those now due to the new LFG system. Scratch one class?
The core argument to come out of this is the question of pure classes over hybrids. Should pure DPS classes do more damage than hybrids? And if so, how much? If we put two specs from each pure DPS class in the top 8, that would still leave a lot of room for the hybrids to swing in. Pure DPS only gets invited along to damage stuff. Remember that crowd control doesn’t exist anymore and I’m not sure who really needs a buff to intelligence. If every other class is beating you on that then your reason for existing must be up there with Sarah Palins’.
But the most glaring example of fail for me in this chart is the figure lurking in 6th position – Fury Warriors. Warriors aren’t even a hybrid class, they are the traditional tank. The Fury spec is the warriors long forgotten cousin, the spec they pull out when an off-tank isn’t needed for example, or when you want to level them and not suck outrageously. For them to be beating mages and warlocks in every spec that they have is insane. This is insanity people! How can this be justified? To put it in perspective, rogues would need to have a healing spec and have it be more powerful than priests to give a similar comparison. How has this become so unbalanced? Is this something to do with the world of total fail that is Arenas?
Assasination rogues, and combat rogues also to a lesser extent, have been nerfed since this was published, but from what I understand they are both still at the top of the table. What can Blizzard do about this? Buff this, nerf that? They need to do something. And I need to re-examine my reasons for leveling a mage, goddamit.
January 19, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Thanks for the link love Adam. The one pure DPS class who is slipping under the radar here are Hunters. They are in a perfect spot. 3rd on the chart and they also provide some functionality with a few raid wide buffs. What I think Blizz might look at doing is seeing what they’ve done right with the Hunters and use that for a jumping point to get Mages and Warlocks a viable chance here.
Great Post!
January 19, 2010 at 6:07 pm
My pleasure, Leo. The serious players that I know who play a hunter are loving it at the moment. They are doing great DPS but flying under the radar whilst all hell breaks loose around them.
The main problem here is the balancing for Arena’s that has unwanted effects in PvE. I think that if Blizzard looked at Arena only realms with different grading scales they might solve a lot of their headaches, and conversely ours.
January 20, 2010 at 9:05 am
The real eye-opener is Ret in 4th place. They’ve been OP since the expansion opened and somehow escaped the nerfbat with every patch. At least ret was toned down for pvp. Hopefully Cataclysm will bring the correction.
January 20, 2010 at 9:28 am
I already wrote about this, this is unavoidable with the “casual-friendly” approach of WoW.
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/07/ghostcrawler-telling-nothing-at-all.html
In short: the classes are balanced for the “average player”. This means that classes are imbalanced for good players. The hard-to play classes must be stronger to give equal DPS in the hands of an “average player” (drooling retard). This automatically means that in the hand of a good player they are very powerful.
Please note that in the top half, the melee:ranged ratio is 7:3, in the bottom half 3:7. It’s obvious that playing melee is harder. If the warlock (the easiest class, see: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/08/omg-big-shadowboltz.html) would be equally strong as a rogue, than there would be a 20% DPS difference among the casual players, creating outrage.
January 20, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Gevlon,
I missed that post of yours, but an excellent one. If what you say is true, for the purposes of the undergeared project, it might be advantageous to have the majority of DPS playing the harder classes.
January 26, 2010 at 5:40 pm
I leveled a fire mage to 80, and then added arcane as a secondary spec hoping to undo the damage that Blizzard did to the class. But now I don’t even log on to him anymore.
It bothers me to see a toon that used to do massive damage not topping the DPS chart in raids.
This needs to be fixed or Blizzard is going to start bleeding players. I doubt they care. With 10 million subscribers or so, i guess a few mages are expendable.
February 5, 2010 at 9:52 pm
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April 7, 2010 at 6:32 pm
I will never agree to a pure DPS class being able to do more damage than a hybrid just because of that reason. If that were the case all classes should be either pure DPS, pure heals and/or pure tanks and be done with it. There should be no in-betweens! Because why bring in a hybrid to DPS when you can just bring all the mages, locks, rogues and hunters except for the tanks and healers? Give all the other raid buffs hybrid DPS give to the pure ones.
The way I see it is more like what your class can do. You want to tank heroics for faster queues, heal in raids or DPS in PVP? Level a Paladin or a druid. You hate tanking but prefer to heald or occasionally DPS, play a priest. They can do more than one role but not at the same time. So a tank spec trying to DPS will always be a terrible DPS no matter what. This would hold true for a mage trying to tank.
For the so-called “pure DPS” class, so their 3 trees wont be boring as hell, give them something fun for each spec. Rogues for example can have a spec wield 2-handers but only special ones made for them only. Think an assassin (ninja) in old Japan wielding a thin but deadly blade. Weren’t they a terrifying sight to behold? The problem with the “pure DPS” classes is that they become boring doing nothing else but just damage.