No, not even close.
They’re pretty low down, but not by such a huge margin that action needs to be taken. Currently ranged specs (minus rogue) are dominating the meters; some fights are much more friendly to ranged classes though.
I doubt that. The content is easy, but it’s tuned for players with 2k DPS, not 700.
I really don’t think warrior is as bad as people are making it out to be.
Without sounding too much like an elitist, warrior just has a pretty huge skill gap compared to many other classes and involves a lot of set up.
Also just taking the rankings in order at face value isn’t a great way to tell how a class is, look at it a bit closer and you will realise than a top performing warrior out dps 95% of the player base and the very top performing warriors are outperforming the top players of other classes that technically rank above them.
Some people pick up warriors then don’t use macros, don’t use Weak Aura / Tell Me When to track ability CDs, Rage Thresholds, CD and Buff up times. If you play like this you will probably be in the lower 50% of warrior players and it will feel bad.
Every button on my bar is a macro to help reduce wasting weapon swings, using 1 button to use 2 ability to reduce how many buttons I need to press. I used Tell Me When to track my Core Forged Stance Dance buff uptime to make sure I was always 90%+ uptime.
Using all this extra stuff and understanding how swing timers work, knowing and tracking your rage thresholds for queuing heroic strike etc is just part of being a good warrior player (although I know some people hate this side of it).
The simple fact is, if you are a top 1% warrior player, you pretty much still a top 1% player overall.
It just sucks for Ally players that Wild Strikes is required so a Feral Druid is a must, horde have it a bit easier with also having Shamans Wind Fury so it is easier to access it. In SoD playing a warrior without Wild Strikes just feels bad and unfun to play, I wish they would give ally another way to access it because for some reason Feral Druids can be hard to find for Pugs (I only pug stuff like ZG or AQ10, but damn it feels bad if you can’t get a feral).
The problem is that you need to perform at elite lvl to get average resoults…
Meanwhile i press 2 buttons on my pala and does more dmg than that warrior doing a perfect rotation
Warriors also perform better on short fights, when our cooldowns and up. If a fight lasts 1 minute, we’ve had the full duration of Diamond Flask and half duration of Death Wish and Rampage.
If a fight lasts 2 minutes, 50% of it was with Diamond Flask, 25% was with Rampage and around 50% with Death Wish (25% if you don’t have t2.5).
As such, our numbers look MUCH higher in the shorter fights. The overall DPS goes down the longer the fight lasts.
To add to my earlier comment, one thing warriors suffer from is getting most of their power from external sources.
You won’t compete with out world buffs. Yes every class is better with them, but the effect it has on things like Rage Generation makes it hit warrior a bit harder, mostly it just feels bad to play without them.
Wild Strike is required, 2H Fury Warrior is a fun play style that I personally main, but without wild strikes it kinda feels like being tortured and plenty of DW warriors say the same.
Armor. Warriors are pretty much the only class in the game where almost all of their damage can be negated by high armor (Rogue poison abilities negate armor, Paladin holy spells etc). Yes Deep Wounds can be like 20-25% of your damage and does negate armor, but we generate rage mainly of crits and high armor makes it harder to crit.
Also High Armor bosses normally also have high avoidance so we get dodged.
All to say, you need a rogue in your group and hopefully they are running improved expose armor. If you are using Sunder Armor as a warrior in a Raid, you will be at the bottom of the DPS meter. Minimum requirement without a rogue is a Warrior Tank spamming devastate.
To make this worse, the top parsing warriors will also make sure they have a Warlock using Curse of Reck and a Druid keeping up Faerie Fire for more armor reduction. If you try and fight a boss in AQ40 with no armor reduction, you may as well go AFK.
I think all of these factors play into warriors being lower in the rankings. You need to not only play well, having all your macros set up, using addons to track everything, but even with that the minimum requirement is also a Feral Druid (Wild Strikes and Faerie Fire), a Rogue with Improved Expose Armor, a Warlock willing to use Curse of Recklessness, World Buffs, about 150g+ worth of consumables and a little bit of luck getting some procs to really compete. If you have everything, GG, you are probably in the top 0.1% of the player base, missing a 1 or 2 of these and you will be pretty average, missing all of them? You might as well come on your level 45 alt healer and you will be more useful.
Don’t worry, unless you plan on joining a parsing guild you may as well play whatever you want.
Ret DPS isn’t ranked high if I trust the DPS charts and yet I’m always on the top 5 DPS of my guild (and I’m just a blue parser since I don’t even play with an opti spec). It’s enough to clear AQ HM though.
It sure is better to play in a guild who at least farms a few additional WB through commendation in case you wipe cause DPS is not the same without them - especially as war - but it’s honestly not that bad.
In short, if your objective is to top the damage meter, play something else but if you just want to be able to clear the full content then nothing stops you from playing war.
My counter argument to this is nothing to do with DPS meter, but purely that if you are lacking World Buffs, Wild Strike, Decent Armor Reduction etc when fighting raid bosses, warrior just plays really badly.
We are the only class that has to generate our resource, so low damage output or waiting for weapon swings etc just feels really bad. Other classes rotations don’t change when you lack those things, yes you do less damage, but you can still cast spells / abilities, warriors can’t.
You don’t have to be a try hard or aim for 100 parses to enjoy warrior, but damn you need to have your raid team backing you up if you want to enjoy it, playing without Wild Strikes or playing without decent armor reduction (or even worse, needing to spam sunder armor yourself) makes it really unenjoyable to play because you will hit like a wet mop and send half the fight waiting for rage to press buttons.
This reminds me experience of unholy dk in retail, until u won’t get the whole raid supporting you, you won’t damage, and reverse in case of good supporting
is this the common warrior mindset? What skill is there from doing your normal rotation which isn’t difficult at all compared to retributions and ferals.
Because our rotation is rage, proc and CD dependant and we have the initial set-up that many other classes dont require.
Take a standard 2H rotation in the current phase:
Rend → Heroic Strike Queue → Blood Thirst → Overpower → Slam → Quick Strike → Hamstring
But it’s not as simple as pressing buttons in that order:
Open with any strength or attack power buffs (e.g. Diamond Flask) to snapshot Rend.
Heroic Strike should only queues above 30 rage or you risk burning rage and having down time.
Overpower (with improve OP talent) has higher prio than Slam, unless you have Recklessness is up, then Slam > OP, unless rend is close to expiring, then OP > Slam (with Draconic 2-set), if oyu let Rend drop off, you lose the Attack Power snap shot from your opening CDs.
Bloodthirst in CD, unless you are low on rage, in cases where you are less than 30 rage, you should instead focus on building rage quickly with Quick Strike and Hamstring for Wild Strike proc finish, then Bloodthirst once you are back up in rage.
Hamstring if you are under 10 rage for wild strike proc for hopefully quick rage gen.
So you are constantly tracking Rage and procs to alter your rotation and making sure you account for how your abilities prio change.
There can easily be a 2k dps difference between a warrior handling this perfectly and a warrior fumbling or burning rage and having down time etc.
Then you have the set-up, simply using macros correctly to handle swing timers is like 200-400dps difference.
It’s simple enough, but lots of warriors don’t macro all their abilities, or macros them wrong. All you have to do at a minimum is add /startattack to your abilities but some abilities you put it before the ability cast, some you put it after. This is because some abilities’ cancel your attack swing so you can have wasted swing time leading to less auto attacks → less rage. Some abilities can also use /stopattack as well, so lots of macro work to do (Yeah, you can find most of this online / on discord, but you would be surprised the number of warriors not using macros at all).
If you are Duel Wielding, you also need to be maintaining you weapon swing desync to improve rage gain consistency, you can use desync macros to set it up, but then you need to keep an eye on swing timers as you use abilities to make sure you don’t sync your weapon attacks.
There was even more to do last phase with constantly stance dancing and managing rage dumping.
You also have to at least understand some little bits about how abilities work. The most simple example is seeing warriors in AQ40 gear using Execute. If you have over 2k Attack Power, Bloodthirst and Quick Strike are almost always better than Execute (the more attack power over 2K , the better they scale). But you will still see warriors with almost 3K attack power using execute because it’s the “execute phase”.
When you see a warrior getting 100 parses, they not only have everything external they need (World buffs, Improved Expose Armor, Wild Strikes etc), but they are also doing all this other stuff to do that higher level of dps.
Lots of players just want to put their abilities on their bar and press them. You can do this with a warrior but you won’t compete on DPS with other warriors.
Not saying other classes don’t have their own stuff like this to do, I know Seal Twisting paladins have to be pretty damn precise with timing abilities and using macros to control weapon swings as well!
But there is definitely a big difference between warriors dps even in BiS gear compared to someone doing all of this vs someone doing none of it.