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Thanks for making this, I love seeing off meta specs given some shine. It's so hard to find guides for them

The Runeblade on Warcraft Logs is likely counting a lot of Blood tanks who just didn't tank for a certain fight as they weren't needed, but they didn't bother switching to a dps spec.

What a bummer! I was looking forward to a video about Shaman/Rogue tanks, Smite Priests, Shockadins, and Warriors, and instead all we got were genuine specs built into the game.

I remember "Dry Blood" (blood dps that didn't use diseases) being super good with lots of arpen, just pumping huge oblits. I guess in the classic release they killed that because the internet seems to have memory holed it

good to see all these memes specs do better than arms warrior! very nice! buff feral and ret!

Raiding as Subtley is fantastic in ulduar. 15 second CD on an instant reposition, double cloak of shadows and cheat death. As someone who raided BFA and SL as sub (before it was good) it feels natural. Retail raiding had a lot of movement at times and shadowstep kept me doing melee dmg!

This is splitting hairs a bit, but you probably only want one point in go for the throat, even as BM. There's only so much focus your pet can spend, so the second point doesn't add much value.

Wrath was a really fun expansion for my hunter when it was live. At the beginning BM was so powerful the BiS shoulder piece was from Mount Hyjal. Then survival took over and explosive shot was a killer. Finally armor penetration became important enough that marksman became the best by far. Minmax hunters got to experience all three specs. I can't wait to see how marksman vs survival will shape up in classic wrath

I used to do this in vanilla 15 years ago. Played a moonkin before boomkin form existed and a BM hunter. The hunter was fun since your pet could live through fights while with MM you wouldn't do the trouble of having it active. Since your pet was important, it was also way more important to learn proper pet control so that you didn't pull half of molten core on your raid when teleporting or jumping shortcuts. The moonkin was also fun because it made a bigger challenge to gear your char. lvl40 boe greens, having to get people together for the magi staff from dm north, getting the lucifron neck for cheap dkp because all casters had it already. It's not something you can do in struggling raids. But in raids of 40man where most of the dps are drooling on their keyboard, you can come out at top5 by just putting in the effort. And then when TBC came along, those specs were suddenly good and you already had them in your muscle memory. MM hunters struggling with pets while you had the experience in pet control to let your pet tank heroic dungeons and rush is with 4 dps and a healer that got bored because hunter healing pets was so crazy OP under the new mechanics.

Back in original wrath, it was not entirely uncommon for DK's to be blood dps if they were going for shadowmourne. I know how silly this sounds in the current day, but I was there and remember it distinctly haha

Frost is fun to play in PVE, Deep Freeze does MASSIVE damage on targets it can't freeze. I remember doing 80-85k crits with it back in retail days in ICC

Consistently one of the best WoW content creators! Been watching for years now. Keep it up!

>Very nice, patient guild. Scene transition to Thanks for that, I giggled.

I made a Rogue to have an Inscription alt and I decided to try leveling in Subtlety. It's actually really really good when doing solo questing content, though once you reach the mid 50s and start heading to Outlands it basically drops into a pit. Like, I reached Outland, started a fight with an Infernal for a Hellfire Peninsula quest, and quickly realized how cheeks Sub is once mobs actually have more than 2000 HP

What a cool niche and different style video, thank you for the awesome unique content!

As a God-fearing rules-compliant multiboxer who pretty much only does 5-mans I love frost mage and BM hunter because they bring a lot of utility and passable damage in relatively few button presses. I can frostbolt or steady shot all day while healing and keeping threat.

When Arpen starts to stack, blood dps becomes a monster just like Fury Warriors.

Ahh the times when a game could be played with the fun in mind and not everything min maxed at mind

This was a great video! I was actually wondering this myself earlier today

I hope there will be a 2nd part follow up with showing up more Meme Specs.. i mean i have literally never heard about Gladiator warrior.

Blood DPS isnt as bad as people make out, the real issue is that it has no visibility on things like warcraft logs and wowhead so people assume its awful.

Would love a follow up video on this to see which boss fights off meta specs parse (pad) the best on due to them being able to abuse some burst phase or other mechanic with their special talent setup

Yo, I'm just saying, if you don't move for kologarns eye beam, that's more uptime for you as a DPS, which means faster kill times, which makes everybody happy. Don't pay attention to the healer parse, everyone knows we healers don't look at, nor do we care about that. Trust me bro, we're doing it all for you

There are some odd specs that can be played (hybrids) that show off on the logs as being one spec or another but are not as they seem. Rogue and Shaman Builds can be miscategoried this way (and there is also the use of switch hitters, characters that literally change spec between trash and boss fights depending on what a guild needs, a lot of Healer/DPS switchers exist as do DPS/Tank switchers).

Eating lunch and watching Willie, best way to enjoy one's break at work.

Cool video. In this vein I am reminded of Vanguards who was a gladiator ranked ret paladin in late wrath who was like the only ret to break 3k rating as far as I can remember. Very cool stuff.

@WillE Back in Wotlk I played a Druid Group Healer. Using the T1 set, which reduced the cooldown of tranquility by 50%. This setbonus stacked with the Talent bonus wich reduced the cooldown by another 50%. So tranquility could be spammed instantly, it was quite a simple time as an Dungeonhealer, because I build the set around Manaregeneration and +heal. This would definitely make an interesting part of an video.

When I still played WoW back in the day, I was a Sub Rogue. Always was Sub, always would be with that character. Other two specs just didn't fit what I had in mind for how my character was is all.

if I remember correctly, the 5% crit debuff on frost mage stacks with blizzard as well so it's good for AOE fights

I know it's minor, but typically you wouldn't bother as a blood dk taking the plague strike talent, instead you put those points into having stronger pets... and then you can also use glyph of the ghoul, ghoul is a great dps cooldown, even if it isn't permanent.

TL;DR - unpopular specs are made to seem significantly worse than their actual potential because most "high end" players will play the popular specs and a couple of other factors. One issue with leaning too heavily on Warcraft Log stats is the numbers game. Taking hunters for example, as you pointed out there is literally 1% of people playing BM, and 80% playing Survival. While Survival is indeed ahead of BM on sims, it's by far less than WCL stats suggest - about 10% or 1k dps on a "target dummy" fight. Most "good" or minmaxing hunters gravitate towards survival, as may be expected of them in a higher performance guild. Even though it's only ahead of MM by an even smaller margin on sims (~5%) it is by far the most dominant spec. Another factor is that looking at overall dps on Ulduar includes fights like Vezax which inflates specs with higher proportions of magic vs physical damage - surv is about 50/50, MM about 40/60, BM is like 90/10. This was definitely worse when hodir was included but Vezax still definitely skews the data. Also just to note - the BM spec in the video is pretty janky. Top BMs trapweave and use explosive trap glyph and run 53/10/8 with 8 points in survival for the tracking & trap talents. 2/2 in Go for the Throat is completely wasted as Bestial Discipline is enough to cap pet focus anyway, and it's worth saccing points in Mortal Shots for trap stuff.

I really thought you were going to look at some top parse for the spec and deep dive some special tricks. Like off meta trinkets, pets, or devices that would make the spec spike in dps.

I quite enjoy playing Frost on the two Ulduar fights where I get to play it. Mostly for the Improved Blizzard talent, but also because I genuinely enjoy Frost. Also, Ice Lance suuuucks even with the glyph. Then it crits for HALF of a Frostbolt crit. Sure, it's instant cast, but using Fingers of Frost (without Brain Freeze procs, or Deep Freeze off CD) means casting Frostbolt -> Frostbolt+Ice Lance anyway. And you will be doing far more Frostbolts during a fight, than Ice Lances, not to mention that most FoF procs will coincide with having Deep Freeze off CD, or having a Brain Freeze proc. My Guild doesn't have the collective DPS to let me stay Frost over Fire though. Oh well, guess I'll try to burn it all down.

classic/tbc/wrath content is easy enough you can clear any content as any spec, wish more people tried fun shit more often

Lol, im one of those few subs raiding. Been raiding as sub since forever. I just find it more fun! Damage is decent enough, loads of utility with keeping tricks threat up on tank every 20 seconds for only 5 energy. Get to spam finishers due to HAT, shadowstep helps with up time. Execute phase really helps with damage. Good on single target bosses, or ones with mobility.

I think you got a major part of BM Hunter wrong. They want to use Glyph of Explosive Trap and trapweave with it on CD.

I think you missed prot dps! They may only be relevant with arp hard cap, though. Nice video. For the next one, maybe a look at hybrid specs? 🤔 As in smite priest or holy shock pala for combining damage and healing with utility. A shaman in my guild ran some sort of enhancement/resto hybrid that he used in heroics, and it was fun to play with him doing that in that environment (but it requires a huge amount more of effort and attentiveness to get even decent performance compared to standard healer rotations).

Blood dk dps in icc is a pretty good dps, sadly bdk dps heavly relies on arp like warriors thus making unholy and frost better specs in previous raid tears. In Icc and RS it does a lot of damage, but it brings no utility to the raid.

Can’t imagine u would be able to distinguish them apart but 2h frost. Total dps loss but tons of fun and still viable.

Funny because I remember Frost DK being one of the meta DK tanks in ICC.

Frost Mages have 2 Benefits over other Classes that add the 5% Spell Crit Debuff: a) They can apply it through AoE. b) They don't lose DMG by applying it. Locks don't want to cast SB once they hit the Execute Phase and we don't need to talk about Fire Mages. Sub Rogues bring another (quite small) Benefit to Raids: Their Tricks of the Trade has a reduced Cooldown, which allows for more Uptime, boosting the Damage of another DPS more. In Regards to Non-Meta-Specs, there are also "alternative" Specs. 17/0/54 UH with focus on ArP would be an Example, although that would only become viable with T10.

Love this video. As I am playing BM hunter and Blood DPS (when I dont tank) and I’m leveling a Sub Rogue. I get alot of hate since I only pug my raids :( regardless of me not being dead last on dps :( And for Naxx patch my then main (hunter) was playing a homebrew MELEE spec (BM/Surv) which they broke when they fixed pet energy. I parsed around 70 percentile on the BM logs in subpar pugs. And even then did not end up last on DPS (except on Malygos cuz pets and traps cant damage flying disc bois)

I had a prot/fury hybrid warrior that I mainly used for open world farming, and it was so much fun to play. I didn't play him much at all until late, but I was going into Sholazar to farm mines at 72 and doing pretty well. I was geared as a Kara tank (because that's the last I had played him) but dual wielding with fury damage abilities. I didn't kill quite as fast, but I almost never had to stop. And I had 3 stuns with that spec, so people thinking they were getting an easy PvP kill got a nice surprise - I stunlocked rogues a few times, and one time (as level 72) stunned a level 80 who tried to swoop in and steal my titanium just long enough to mine it before he killed me.

You should do a video about speccs that "did it wrong" - like the achievement back in pandaland where you could get an achievement for doing it wrong. Like dealing damage as a healer etc. :D

not a dps build, but i remember using frenzied striker as a tank weapon as i was playing an off tank warrior that went with 2handers... and then changing it to a draconic avenger, when it dropped. to say that my guild was happy when it first dropped on BL it's an understatement.

Early wrath blood dps was amazing to play, and it's criminal that blizz deprived us all of properly reliving that version of blood with Wrath Classic. Still stuck it out all the way till when the MoP pre-patch hit and it was revamped into the DK tank only spec. And in time my options have become unsatisfying melee necromancer, or 2min CD mint breath damage window that constantly gets interrupted by fight mechanics. Thanks blizz...

I like how your opinion of destruction lock has changed lmao

I've actually done ok with BM hunter so far, Even not trap weaving I've done within 500 DPS of my Survival Setup, Granted on some fight like Vex Survival is just simply better, but BM isn't absolutely terrible.

Blood is actually huge however you do not take the last 2 stuff in the tree. And go bit into frost tree. Very high tanking and high threat snapping for "main" tanking blood is huge. For off-tanking should be frost tanking

I was beast master in wrath it was fun I mean hunting rare more powerful pets was always a pull for me anytime I reroll hunter I always go pick up the ghost car from the statues it's tedious it's extra but it's special and enjoyable

My main might be a disc priest but on alt raids I bring my bm hunter and will still be my fave spec this xpack and thankfully we have a ret pally for the buff so I'm able to bring my devilsaur

The top parsing player on Grobbulus is also a sub rogue, whos also the top parsing sub rogue in the game. Their name is Nxf, im surprised you didnt look at his logs

According to warcraft logs, the DPS of the top 10% of beastmastery players is only about 300 lower than the top 10% of marksmanship hunters... I bet if there were simply more high-level players playing these specs, they could move them up the DPS meters. This would in turn cause even more players to start playing those specs, etc. etc. (except for subtlety)

I played blood DPS for naxx and it was awesome. Moved to Druid as the guild needed a healer for the rest of the expansion

Raided high end and got Grand Marshal in Vanilla as a Retribution. 👌

If all the charges are being used on hemorrage, then that is basically +750 damage(or 1k-ish if glyphed) to that hemorrage ability. the fact that the entire raid benefits from it means that the damage increase is not reflected in the rogue's damage but it is instead a boost to the raid's damage. thankfully, it is super spammable so it can be up practially 100% of the fight. Same thing for the boosted recharge on tricks. You can practically have it up for 50% of a fight significantly boosting someone else's damage. So i'm not surprised that people are overlooking sub for PvE.

I've heard raptors are pretty good for bm with their self damage buff but not sure if they're just straight up worse than the wolf or maybe even worse than devilsaur

Mm, I do really enjoy playing frost mage/arms warr, but I tend to equate my self-worth in a raid of dungeon environment to whatever shows up on the meter. It goes without saying that those two specializations generally don’t beat the umpteenth affliction warlock/assassination rogue/frost DK. I’ve met far too many people in pugs who have no qualms about shit-talking me for subpar damage when I just want to play what makes sense and feels good. Yeah, go ahead and put me on blast for caring what internet people think, or for taking it all personally. I don’t like being told that I should be kicked out of a raid because I’m “not parsing” or that I’m “a burden to the group”- I can’t imagine you folks would, either. I just want to unwind after a long day of dealing with dumb shit and people IRL and can’t manage to escape either of those things- sometimes both at the same time when it’s people doing dumb shit in WoW. And there are so many harpies underneath this video who are looking to flame people for doing anything but sweating in every possible facet while playing. Damn shame, really. What’s up with that?

I absolutely loved the Frostfire spec in original WotLK. Fire and Frost talents with Frostfire Bolt as our main damage spell instead of Fireball was fun. Having to go Arcane when ICC released was a downer because that spec was too predictable.

What about hybrids? I remember i was running specs like that also other guild members. On private servers later aswell but that could not be accurate ofc (maybe is). Like 0/44/27 frost DK with 2 hander talenting into ghoult and stuff like that. And the 0/27/44 sub rogou just to get Honor and rest in combat.

I just started playing WOW. What addon makes your health bar and mana bar like that?

Part of the issue I fear for Blood dps though is that Warcraft logs doesn't like to count Hysteria properly for blood , or should I say Runeblade dps..So you need to factor that in aswell.

As the arp increases blood dk dps going to be more viable than you'd think

Always get ghostly strike… hemorrage helps you and raid for auto attacks so buff auto attack in combat. Evading gives you combo attacks and cleaves are a thing in this game

14:27 - Holy DK? Is it like a freshly woken up paladin without coffee?

One thing you can do with exotic pets is train a worm, they reduce armor for 30%

You forgot to give a shoutout to sub rogue in original wrath. In Naxxramas tier Honor Among Thieves had no internal cooldown so it was completely busted for a while.

I played bm hunter with worm for our naxx 10man guild fun runs. I would have the 20% sunder armor on boss and have my pet take dmg/hit from tank which was awesome. Horrible Dps but awesome to see the worm take a 15k hit from the tank and survive.

exotic pets provide some sick buffs, like Worm give Sunder Armor - which is big!

@530 how were you able to pull their talents from logs?

Does anybody remember Felguard/Emberstorm back in original WotLK? It seemed like such a big thing back then; but it's like it never even existed, now.

I vaguely recall playing Frost Mage in Wrath... although I think it was Frostfire focused?

could you do a warrior feature as they aren't top tank again and their dps specs are not that hot. Maybe help us out?

Where are casters at going melee range for fitting in some extra melee hits between casts?

Actually only played blood dps. Found it really fun to play. Big numbers, insane burst. Actually underrated af

Imagine playing a spec someone tells you to play instead of the one you want to play.

There are 2 procs frost mage has. 1 is fingers of frost that is used to cast ice lance and deep freeze and 2nd brain freeze used to cast frostfire bolt

You forgot to mention trapweave as beast mastery. Still the best option to push numbers :)

I shelled out the 1k gold back in Wrath to dual spec for a Blood Tank spec and a Blood DPS spec because I'm insane. Blood dps is pretty legit if you go pretty hard on it. Needs Armor Penn. I spent forever getting the Needle Encrusted Scorpion.

My guilds locks are mostly destruction and we are usually filling out the top 3 spots on meters 🎉

I remember blood DK using runic strike (the spell that the log's icon is) instead of DC though Used to play BDK dps in actual wrath, shit was amazing. With good gear and good arpen, you would oneshot fools with crits in PVP. Big death strike crit, bam, dead

Mained destro lock. Expected to see it here

Hey Blizzard, free game design tip: If Beastmaster sucks, hows about you buff the shit out of exotic pets? Kinda sucks that you have to play a bad specc AND make a "bad" decision within that specc to benefit from one of the coolest features in the game.

Ah of course he forgets about the Holy priests

I remembering min maxing necroblight in wod, was like top ten do on server it was neat 🐱

Runeblade cant be taken as any sort of info lol. A full dps frost dk, if he tanks the snaplasher and gets hit or something, suddenly hes a runeblade. Can happen to uh dks too. Therefore those parses are certain to be all over the place 😂

Another thing to note about BM hunter is their ability to bring a missing raid buff. They can grab worms for a subpar Sunder Armor if no rogue or warrior is in the raid or a Rhino with Stampede for more bleed damage. Could be decent for 10 mans, but the buff that you bring as BM might be better served just going survival and increasing your damage output.

Thankfully I never gave two tiny tosses about stupid bloody Raiding, so I played whatever I wanted to play in BGs and open world (11 years as a Sub Rogue).

Double big and red BM was awesome in OG wrath...

still do blood dk dps every now and then, just not in dungeons or anything lol. not usually allowed unless it's a normal

the fundemental problem with wow is itemization vs balance. the spectrum of potential gear that drops limits creativity. Wow was orginally designed off the diablo itemization but is watered down

I love playing BM! Chimera is the best pvp pet, even though the rest of the spec is just worse than MM. :Ρ Still, I like the gameplay and the looks, so I don't really care. I've got Nuramoc, King Krush and Lokue'nahak. I love them.

Every time I go to continue leveling my mage I get bummed that frost isn’t a real raid spec. It’s got a number of procs that make it fun.

sub rogue has always been my favorite spec in the game. in legion I think sub rogues were at their peak. could do pvp and over and you got the flex of saying I play one of the most confusing classes to play hahah

You didn't talk about healers, priest hybrid spec is a thing, meme spec too

- Metas tend to ruin games.

I remember clearing ICC 25HC without ever looking at a wowhead guide lol (class or raid). Times change I guess.

Runeblade seems like it has potential. 16k on Kologarn, 12k on Razorscale, 8k on Ignis and Algalon, 7k on Vezax, Mimiron etc. Blood DPS was a thing in ICC with ArP stacking, and they pulled respectable numbers, people just forgot, even WillE apparently ^^. WCL statistics drag it down by having legitimate tanks mixed in with them, you also have to consider that almost none of the best players are playing the spec, meaning it doesn't take a lot to get a 99% parse with the build. Runeblade true potential isn't even being shown. That's not to say it will ever be better than UH/Frost, but it's already in Fury/Ret ballpark.

I'm glad you mentioned that deep freeze comment that it's the highest individual hitting spell in the expansion, I'm sure I commented that on a previous video 😅 Frost brings nice utility too since as a lower dps they can be utilised for CC.