I’m trying to decide between maining WW Monk or Rogue in 10.2
I want something that’s going to be easy/needed in raids and ideally M+ as well, but raid bigger prior.
For pugs windwalker monk should be highest demand of these, because of physical damagen taken debuff, but rogue is getting a rework, so rogue might be OP soon. Additionally, windwalker suffers, if brewmaster or mistweaver is strong and gets invited
If you want a class though that is getting instant invites to almost every pug, even if undergeared: Go warlock
This is a thing. Brewmasters are often viable raid tanks, so if your group has one; that’s the only monk you need. WW’s single target is traditionally poor, and mistweaver… well, tbqh, MW can pump in raids. It legitimately can. Unfortunately they’ve made it increasingly hard to play such that for most people, it does not pump and instead falls flat. If you don’t have a regular raid group it is therefore unwanted because of a high chance of someone who can’t play their spec.
Rogue… I mean, they’re usually ok… on one spec or another. They just don’t typically bring much to a raid. There are some encounters they shine, maybe if mobility is required, and others where they’re just another dps. One that’s in melee and thus can’t often be assigned special mechanics.
Honestly, melee dps are pretty fungible. The most desirable one I can think of is probably enhancement shaman; windfury, windrush, and bloodlust are tools that can see use on nearly any fight. Arguably a demon hunter for that 5% magic buff - but even then, you only need one. Ret paladin can occasionally be wanted for BoP or freedom, but it’s situational.
Why is warlock so popular? It’s probably the only caster I’d consider.
Thanks for your input, one of the reasons I stay away from monk is because they only have 1 DPS spec.
Almost every raid pug I’ve been in was very desperate for warlocks. Especially fresh runs. The reason is that people constantly leave and a summon saves a ton of time, because otherwise your group needs to wait like 5-10 minutes before each boss. I remember once that we took a really undergeared warlock with no clear exp just for summon
2 Likes
Healthstones and summons. Gate also works out useful on some encounters.
Down side; new groups will summon you first, then expect you to run inside and summon everyone else. No hanging around Valdrakken for you! 
WW has a slight advantage in the physical debuff it brings, but has the disadvantage that if they have a monk, guilds generally avoid them. Rogues are not sought after but if you are good you will find a group.
This and again this.
Almost every guild searches for warlocks. The main reason is that you always want at least 1 for HS, portal, summon, and most of the times they are so well tuned and so defensive that you want to get as many as possible.
The option to summon people to the raid.
Healthstones are the free versions of health potions, and they heal a percentage of your HP (and they are on separate CD to health potions, so you have two emergency heals!)
Gateways. There are so many mechanics that a gateway makes so much more efficient to manage. On Magmorax every second knockback can be completely negated by a well placed gateway, which means more uptime for your DPS.
Soulstones. You can negate a lot of downtime of a wipe by simply soulstoning a healer, or combat ressing a hybrid DPS before everyone dies so they can then res a healer.
On top of that there is always one spec which does really well in the raid. The drawback is that you have a lot of busywork between wipes, on top of sometimes having mechanic handling to do, as warlocks are innately tanky so they can handle a lot of mechanics other, more fragile DPS cannot manage. You also often have some additional things to consider like swapping pets for specific mechanics (offensive dispel with Felhunter, or dispel with imp) or you have to make sure a specific curse is up on the boss or the adds.
Warlock is a really nice class to pick if you do not mind using your utility at times, but if all you plan to do is just zug zug then it may be better to play something else instead.
EDIT: I would like to say monk out of the two you mentioned (monk or rogue) but I cannot if you do not plan to flex into your off roles. WW can bring some nice utility to the table which are pretty nice to have (8% heal increase and 4% avoidance for the melee group) but generally if a group has a Brewmaster/Mistweaver monk then WW doesn’t really find its place in the group. Our damage isn’t extraordinary in AoE, it is pretty mediocre in single target, and the only unique niche we bring to the table is we can delete 4 mobs on low HP every 1:30 minutes.
Rogues do not tend to have any specialties, but they have the advantage of being able to cheese specific fight mechanics thanks to Cloak of Shadows.
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