Other Getting to stage 5 of vanilla grief.

[Gourmandises]

I play vanilla and retail at the same time, as both have their own merits.
However, my problem is that after a while of playing vanilla I hit a demoralizing wall that comes from how the classes are set up in the game.

I have gotten used to the design that all specs of all classes can do whatever they want in any part of the game and be fairly competitive against each other because of the closer balancing. I do know that there are still people who go for 1st place/min-max specs in retail even today (mythic raiding, gladiator stuff in pvp) but that's for the tip of the tower.


Intentional or not, specs are not balanced around that philosophy in vanilla; There are a lot of specs that are useless in different parts of the game.
I play a Ret Paladin on retail and I get sad that I can't play it here. My second choice is BM Hunter (the concept is cool) but I can't do that either apparently. All I hear is how Class X can only do Spec Y and it just disgruntles me.

My questions are as follows:
If applicable, how did you (hopefully leading to myself) come to terms with the imbalance (intentional or not) that results in specs being used for their roles instead of their flavor when you've grown accustomed to playing more on flavor? What are the needed steps to rewire your brain?

Is it just that the min-max content of vanilla is more widespread and the steps you have to take are more drastic? *Instead of reforging, which can be done in any spec, my answer is to respec* Or do I have to chalk it all up to stupid numbers?

Should I try to view specs, although difficult, as raiding, dungeon, questing, farming, pvp or wpvp specs instead of "Oh cool, I get to tank as a bear!", "I get to have a super cool pet fight with me!" or "I get to shoot giant fireballs at stuff. Awesome!"?

Question inside question.
People just say specs are terrible because they are behind other ones. Nobody ever tells me how far behind these bad specs are. If they are mathematically like 10% behind I can deal with that but the way people talk about them makes it seem like they are 30-50% inefficient. Where are the maths that can tell me exactly how far behind these "bad" specs are? Do I just have to do it myself?

 

[Aieris]

It's mostly up to your Raid leader, what he will allow in his raids and what not.

Taking your Bear example - Bear is not bad tank, he have taunt and more HP and armor than warrior, BUT - He lacks block -> will recieve more crushing blows than warrior (blocked attack can't be crushing) until he's def caped which is quite hard. He lacks good gear, warriors have much easyer time gearing up. He lacks Shield Wall, which is ass-saving ability, in certain encounters even necessary.

From this you can see, that Bear is not useless, but is not as good as warrior.

 

[Gourmandises]

From this you can see, that Bear is not useless, but is not as good as warrior.

Sometimes it's not even efficiency. I don't think paladins have a taunt, which is very important. Things like this made me sad. (I think I am assuming that there are a lot of swap fights or oh crap fights in things like raids)

 

[Figaro]

5 mans are.. lets say... "playable" for all tanks. Feral is fine and with paladin, you just should have a bit more dedicated group

 

[SgtFreakshow]

5 mans are.. lets say... "playable" for all tanks. Feral is fine and with paladin, you just should have a bit more dedicated group

I'd say 5 mans are not only playable for protadin / bear, both of those are vastly superior to warriors in 5 man dungeons, the problem is neither are valid raid tanks (bear does fine through MC/ZG, but when content requires epics, it runs into the problem that there is no epic gear made for druid tanks) and prot paladins run into mana problems as soon as fights take more than 1-2 minutes.

 

[Hagson]

The problem isn't usually that it's impossible, but that it's worse.
Why would I ever pick a bear tank when a warrior is better in every way?
I wouldn't, unless the alternative is raiding with an empty slot. In which case you'll most likely only stay until a warrior is found anyway.

Don't think about what class you want to play, and then try to cram it into a role it's not supposed to fill.
Instead think of waht you want to do, and then pick a class (and race) according to that.

 

[Hogger]

I look at classes from the perspective of someone who mainly loves PvP. From that vantage point, there is much more freedom to spec how you want. Like a Ret Pally is not exactly the ideal raid spec, but can still smash plenty of face in PvP.

By no means do I think Vanilla has a perfect class system, but I still prefer it over current WoW, where everything feels so homogeneous.

 

[Rerun]

I agree with Hogger.

It seems like you failed to mention wether you'll be a PvPer, Raider or a bit of both. I'll assume a bit of both...
How I dealt with it in Vanilla was very simple. I went for PvP.
Not only was it already my prefered thing in the game (lucky me) but like Hogger said; it has a LOT more freedom to spec in certain ways than End-game PvE.
So the answer is go PvP and master the spec/class/race YOU LIKE the most. Its very doable in a lot of situations.

If you don't want option #1, meaning you only wanna do (end-game) PvE, then its up to how advanced your guild is and your guild leaders. I mean being a fire mage is pretty useless in MC, theres almost no way around that.

tldr;
Either go PvP, or have an awesomely good guild who can afford 'secondary' specs.

 

[Gourmandises]

tldr;
Either go PvP, or have an awesomely good guild who can afford 'secondary' specs.

My answer might just be to have 1 60 for pvp and 1 for pve!
That might be it. I do know that i've been a one character sorta player for ages so the idea has never crossed my mind. You can understand, starting before all the achievements and non-soulbound stuff where I tried to mush all my awesomeness onto on character.

I thank everyone for their input, and for helping me!

 

[Rerun]

One more thing though.

On Kronos the gold cap for a respec's will be 10g.
So if you have a bit of gold to spend, you might just wanna respec a lot with 1 character.
Because I know what you mean, I was also all about 1 character

 

[evilpanda]

can relate a lot . I will probably roll feral giving me the ability to do 5/10 mans at most. its all about world pvp after that ;p (unless some super kind guild will ask for my awsome crit buff).

If you love pve my advice will be to pay 20g per raid. (honestly elixirs cost more)

 

[szsoulzek]

The funny thing is that min/maxing should be much less relevant in Vanilla than it is on retail:

1) Raids are so much bigger (40 man) that a single individual has less of an impact overall

2) Vanilla has no difficulty settings (heroic, mythic, etc) and all the fights are fully known at this point so it's fair to say they aren't terribly "difficult" which should allow for some leeway when it comes to min/maxing

3) On a server that will never progress, people are going to eventually overgear the content. Again, more margin for inefficiency when it comes to things like raid dps

 

[Magnifican]

I play vanilla and retail at the same time, as both have their own merits.
However, my problem is that after a while of playing vanilla I hit a demoralizing wall that comes from how the classes are set up in the game.

I have gotten used to the design that all specs of all classes can do whatever they want in any part of the game and be fairly competitive against each other because of the closer balancing. I do know that there are still people who go for 1st place/min-max specs in retail even today (mythic raiding, gladiator stuff in pvp) but that's for the tip of the tower.


Intentional or not, specs are not balanced around that philosophy in vanilla; There are a lot of specs that are useless in different parts of the game.
I play a Ret Paladin on retail and I get sad that I can't play it here. My second choice is BM Hunter (the concept is cool) but I can't do that either apparently. All I hear is how Class X can only do Spec Y and it just disgruntles me.

Oh, I feel you my friend! I love love love my dear paladin but I hate healing, hence I cannot play the class I love on Kronos basically. I made a post about it in the tank thread here: http://forum.twinstar.cz/showthread.php/92542-Tank-class?p=732827&viewfull=1#post732827

Granted my post was more of a hypotetical discussion, like how it could work, what are the benefits/downsides of increasing threat gen from a talent in Prot for example. Anyway, we can always use Retribution for pvp in vanilla. I love diversity and that the classes play different, thats not the issue. I also like the way blizz intended for hybrids to work, but it just didnt work that way as soon as minmaxing became a thing, ie when progression raiding started. For the raidleaders it all came down to, why use a retri pally that does less dps than a pure dps'er? Oh, he brings utility like buffs, auras, blessings and healing, well, the Holy paladins does the same thing and they dont fall behind on healing, so again, why pick a ret pally? It just didnt make sense and pallies got pigeonholed into healing, because of this stupid thing: http://www.wowwiki.com/Hybrid_Tax
Blizzard changed this in TBC and for good reason, class design was terrible in vanilla and its really sad for those of us that love vanilla content and dont want to play tbc/wrath etc. Tbc balance wasnt as good as it became in wrath but still, paladins could tank, dps heal, so could druids, and no spec were really as useless as they were in vanilla.