Sorry in advance for the “which class best” topic, I am aware these are ubiquitous.
I am going to try retail after a very long time - my first expansion after Cata, and plan to play 80% of the time on controller, mainly Battlegrounds. I would prefer to be a healer, and trying to think about class that would be easiest to manage in this regard. For now it is hard to imagine what can be the donwsides of the controller (apart from the general disadvantage over the mouse), but I can think of:
slower due to missing mouseover casting
can’t use as many spells, at least not conveniently (and thus fast enough)
less mobile
Mind all of these are possibly subjective, but I am fairly new to the console controller as such.
From what I have read, hpala was the “beginner friendly” class and S-tier (whatever it means), but mainly due to its support spells such as BOP - however I am afraid that this advantage will be diminished due to the missing mouseover, as well as my novelty in the game and thus being prone to be silenced every 5 seconds as a hard caster.
Is it possible that resto druid would be a better choice? Or, maybe even better, shaman, which is according to some articles mix of healer and dps?
Thank you, and please restrain from the sarcastic comments such as “just play XY, you will downplay everyone with one spell”, I am aware that the game is currently unballanced, but I am concerned more about the playability than “overpower-ness”.
I’ve been playing a resto druid but please take all my experience with the subjectivity it deserves.
I am not well geared yet and am for this week stuck on a 13" monitor so it has its trials. It is a slog, and there are a lot of buttons that you need to have to use. One for all of your standard heals, then your CC (Ursol’s vortex, roots, cyclone), then your emergency heals (NS, Flourish etc) and then your form switching. I imagine it will be very strong when I am geared but currently it’s a slog to learn and lack of gear is very painful.
I play wow with a controller for some years and it’s ok for a dps role in casual content.
You can use all the spells thanks to alt, ctrl, alt+ctrl combination.
You can play healer with addon ConsolePort. There’s a function called raid cursor.
But it’s way to slow to select players with raid cursor. Can’t compare with mouseover.
Having tested evoked, priest, shaman and Paladin in pvp healing. My advice would be the following:
Instead of a controller, have you considered using a healing add on to accomplish easing you into healing - I would recommend “healbot” as a beginner friendly healing add on and raid UI replacement. It is highly customisable but is memory intensive.
Healing wise, don’t choose a healer that is easy, choose a healing that offers a healing style that suits your gameplay.
Personally I find holy priest to be an easy healer to pick up and one that offers so many possibilities in both casual pvp and ranked gameplay.
Disc is genuinely harder to play because to be great at playing disco you need to learn how to effectively “predictive” heal and dps for those big numbers. Also the action bar bloat can put some people off- but disc by far is my favourite healing spec.
Holy paladin whilst easy to learn is difficult to master, that said you can easily cheese your way to 1600/1800 on a holy paladin without much effort.
Evoker is very powerful at the moment and offers control, support, healing and damage, it’s uniquely positioned to be what DKs were to WOTLK when it comes to pvp healing.
Monks and druids are always going to be great in pvp, coming to shamans, great healing medium level of support, good group utility, some big throughput healing with the right talents and mobility.
Ultimately pick what you prefer, that said if your heart is set on playing holy paladin in PVP this expansion please consider visiting the Hammer of Wrath discord for detailed advice on h.pal in pvp.
Hope this helped you, have a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year. See you in the Dragonlands
