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Gladiator spec was the most fun I had with my warrior. Doing good DPS and saving us from wipes when the tanks died because I was there and ready to pick it up. It was usually only viable tanking in LFR but it was still badass and felt very on brand for the class.
Same - Gladiator fulfilled a class fantasy for me and I loved WOD because of it. Seeing it go stopped me playing my warrior for several expansions until I tried fury and accepted it as “okay” - but I still want Gladiator.
Another edition - Survival Hunters doing trapweaving in Wrath. All expansion we were told "next phase you'll fall off and Marksman will take over" and each new patch Survival stayed ahead purely because of trapweaving. The fact Explosive Trap, for some reason, did more single target damage then Black Arrow despite it being an AoE ability while also having a longer duration (meaning even more damage AND more lock and load procs) and sharing a cooldown with Black Arrow meant we just always did the trapweave whenever possible. Even playing absolutely insane strats on certain bosses - like on Kolagarn in Ulduar where we had to jump over the edge of the pit, drop the trap mid-air and disengage back onto the platform in order to set the trap off (and inevitably fall to our deaths more then once if there was any lag at all). And bitterly complaining non-stop on bosses that hovered and thus couldn't set off traps - such as Twin Valks. Good times, if also very exhausting at times. Once Blizzard gave us trap launcher in ICC things got much easier, and now in Cata Black Arrow actually does decent damage and Explosive Trap was nerfed into the ground (to the point its actually pretty bad AoE).
Also - Sunfire Druids. Where a Balance Druid would max out their Mastery stat above all else - even wearing inappropriate gear like tanking rings and trinkets and cloth items - purely so they could stay in Solar Eclipse the entire fight while spamming Sunfire, Insect Swarm and Wild Mushrooms and never, ever, ever using Wrath so they never moved out of Eclipse and actually did respectable damage and were absolutely broken on sustained AoE and cleave. This was a thing during early Cata Classic before falling off really hard as other classes just launched into orbit past them.
Maybe this is just me finding common naming annoying, but "a trap being in my rotation" doesn't sound much lIke trapweaving, it sounds like doing your rotation that includes a trap being a damage ability as a powerful cooldown I do get that literally any tech being x-weaving is a community meme but still
@@Tojozomi it's because the trap is the odd one out. It's not supposed to be in the rotation. So it's being weaved into what is normally the rotation.
Speaking of warlock tank, my brothers guild in Wotlk used a Voidwalker and buffed it to 120k HP to tank Sartharion 3D, and used a hunters Misdirect to get Sartharion to the voidwalkers position. Cool tactic
In phase 2 of SoD with the new chimera shot ability hunters got in phase 1 ranged hunters would stack spellpower to boost their serpent stings damage and since chimera shot scales off of serpent sting it was a viable spec competing with normal ranged hunters. All loot is hunter loot
Yeah, especially when with a shield you can be more aggressive and historically two-handed weapons were used with crowd control in mind. Using momenten to keep the sword moving and using it's reach to threaten all oponents around you.
Despite what you'd think, Glad rune is meta for Prot Warriors in SoD. A tank being able to swap to a more DPS focused stance when not needing to tank is actually been huge in SoD.
Since shaman gained mail use at level 40 in vanilla, it made shammy tanks entirely viable (and fairly common) in that Scarlet Monastery stretch of levels, thanks to Rockbiter Weapon's increased threat generation.
A geared prot warrior in WOTLK could wreck pvp as well, even without the gladiator spec. Shield slam and revenge dealt the damage, and shockwave and concussion blow provided tons of cc 🛡
@@pun15h3r. Yea, that was only for a few patches but who in there right mind at Blizzard was thinking, lets give protpaladin a talent thats make stamina spellpower 😂 they nerfed it and made it scale with str instead 😂
Pomfrost mage was way more fun than Pompyro with the 100 % bonus crit damage and + 50 % crit chance to frozen targets. You didn’t even need to instant cast anything, you just frostbolt + ice lance, fire blast if needed and bye bye players :D
For Druids talking about Manual Crowd Pummeler is very disappointing considering this is not a spec, and has been discussed so much already. What about moonkin tanks in TBC or other options?
One of the best dungeon runs I've been to in Classic was a Scholo with a boomkin tank and no healer. We just blasted everything down by precasting and outright murdering the first mob on each pack before they all aggroed 😄
3:45 Yeah, when you're only looking at the Top 5% of players, sure. In reality, for *most* players, Gladiator warrior players were committed warrior players and often were near top of the charts in their raid. I raided Mythic in WoD as Glad spec until near the end of progression in HFC, when I swapped back to Arms. I never had any issues with the spec until then. Besides all that, quoting the numbers being bad is a pretty weak argument for why a spec was killed, as numbers can be quite easily tweaked, as we've seen plenty of times. The other main quoted reason they buried Glad Stance was because Bonus Armor items gave AP to Glad warriors, which some people (main tanks) saw as a problem. This argument completely discounts the fact that after the tanks get that gear (which had the same drop chance as any other piece on a boss), that it was getting sharded or otherwise going to waste and that this was a way to get more use out of tank items in the game. Glad stance for 12.0. It should have been a Hero spec. P.S. - I thought the title was "When Weird Specs WORKED in WoW", not "When Weird Specs EXISTED in WoW". Kind of weird to use Glad warr as this class' example and then say it was utter dogsh!t numerically. That kinda means it didn't really work, no?
Funny thing about gladiator is that at the very beginning of WoD it was actually the strongest warrior DPS spec in the game. The other two were very undertuned. Before they even bothered to fixed the undertuned specs they took a massive nerf hammer to gladiator to force people into the "actual" dps specs and never ever bothered to fix it. Then it got removed because no one was playing it. Shocker.
a Long Lost Spec from WotLK would be for Deathknights. the Duel Wield Frost DK Tank. i was Frost DK Sectank in a Guild around WotK and was Frostskilled it was Freaky how much you vould Take when you Parry all the Attacks that come in. Saw the Big Hitter Drop from Arthas and was the only DK who had no Need for it.
I was looking for this comment, thank you! That frost parry chance per hand was NUTTY. You just let the target beat itself at that point. DK was just built different when it was first dropped lol
Problem in WoW is that Blizzard is too afraid of experimenting and/or letting player have too much freedom. You have to play specific play style and your choices are limited at best. And midmaxing culture don't help at all. Like,back in MoP(and Warlords if I'm not mistaken)DemonLocks had a glyph that turns them into tanks,but you were at best,panic tank if your tank dies in a dungeon. Even in Cata,Enhancement had tanking talents and abilities,but could you possibly tank?No. Resto Druids have a dps rotation in Cata despite the fact that they hit like a wet noodle...
21:55 You skipped a LOT: before Leotheras the Blind, you could use a mage OR warlock tank on one of the council members in Gruul's Lair and, right before SSC, one of Kael'thas' advisors needed a warlock tank (preferably two, as her mechanics could be wonky and a backup was good).
@@Daocpwnswow Oh, yeah, definitely. I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive list, I was just pointing out it was useful in a few other situations as well! =0)
Smite priest did have some interesting bugs with the Tier 5 set. Where if you had Surge of Light procc'd, and used Smite while the -150 mana cost proc from the Avatar Regalia was up, your non-smite spells would not consume the -150 mana buff. Which let you spam Holy Nova on aoe pacs. This combined with the Blade of Eternal Darkness having a chance to proc on each enemy hit with Holy Nova resulted in positive mana gains on downranked Holy Nova's. All this together let you basically spam holy nova infinitely on trash packs in Mount Hyjal or in big pulls in heroic dungeons. Smite was pretty cool and I am glad I mained it during TBC Classic. Other than AoE, the mana issues never really went away sadly. Too bad it wasn't a spec in SoD.
Smite priest combined with a ret pally also did some insane burst, it was just never worth a debuff slot and 2 dps slots when you could bring 2 warriors - but the damage was there. If your raid let you play for fun, a smite priest could work, better than most 'memes'. (Vanilla PoV here).
@@antoineguerrier2965 I am still very very surprised they didn't add it or any support for it. Its one of those iconic meme specs from classic that really could have been something. -_-
there was also in Mists where Warlocks got another "Tanking" ability that gave them damage reduction, changed some spells and gave threat gen. It was basically the SoD one but you only gained demon wings instead of Metamorph
i can think of a few more interesting rogue iterations: Hemo-Sub/Combat during Sunwell, leveraging the raid consuming the hemo debuff to pull equal with traditional combat, HaT rogue during Naxx/Ulduar, just completely breaking the rotation via infinite Combo Points Snake Eyes in BfA, doing kinda the opposite and forgoing damage finishers in lieu of supercharging Sinister Strike with the Azerite Trait
I'm shocked glad spec wasn't a hero talent option in war within. But the nice thing about hero talents is introducing more options is plenty plausible! Things I'd love to see - Rogue Tank. I think outlaw has been the odd child for a while and could support a tanking playstyle option. - Warlock tank. Same pet mechanic as below. Demonology tank where your pets are constantly dying to the boss would be so funny. - Hunter Tank. Having your pet stick right to your side and being able to shift which has threat you or the pet - Mage Support like augmentation, but a full on support with time magic. - Glad warrior dps Tank hybrid - An inquisitor style paladin heal dps hybrid. Like disc, but a dps first and heal second. - Evoker melee tank where they turn into an actual dragon on a CD. Kind of like an off tank. - Shaman summoner like demonology.
I remember Death Knights being ridiculous with the Blood Spec, specifically the Blood Boil spell. You had an AoE spell that could outdamage literally any other part of your usual routine, so you would legit ignore any other spell in favor of bloodboil because it deals the most damage, is an aoe, and also taunts, since you're Blood Spec and therefore are the tank. OP in dungeons, raids, and PVP because you just had one button to press because the high damage ensured your presence in pvp, and the high damage ensured you would never slip any aggro to hit any other party members
Another wacky hybrid build that worked in WoTLK was pvp prot/holy paladin. the build got you insanely huge amounts of spell power through the prot talent that converted stamina to SP, you were insanely tanky due to having all the prot CDs and damage reduction, you got more CC than holy because of avenger shield, and you never ran out of mana. The main weakness of the build is that you had no instant heals so a good team comp could CC you while bursting your arena partners down. but the build was hilariously broken vs mid/low teir team comps. you could faceroll all the way to 2000 arena MMR but it was tough getting any higher because almost every team after that had dispells and lots of CC
Being the warlock leader in my guild in Vanilla, I had a lot of fun tanking the Twin Emperors fight in AQ40. This, alongside the unmentioned moonkin tanking spec for Balance druids in TBC, are ultimately what lead to my love for playing tanks in MMOs, going so far as to main a Guardian druid all the way from WotLK to present day retail WoW.
Gladiator Stance during the beginning was actually damn good, it was one of the top specs people went. Most people stuck to what the knew best and didn’t even know that spec was in the Tank Tree because hardly anyone goes tank. The devs dropped it cause trying to tune a spec within a spec without destroying it completely on top of taking too much time away from other pressing issues the expansion had is the biggest reason why it wasn’t too dps throughout the expansion after the nerf and completely removed afterwards.
Gladiator is something I never played, such a great class fantasy, and as for dps, it was just a tunning (numbers) problem, like most simple specs nowdays.
As a feral druid during vanilla I remember getting all the PvP leather gear (and the staff) because leather gear with the stats required for tanks was non existent.
In vanilla we had a paladin with nightfall keeping up its buff and he would use a judgment to give us a bit of mana back or healing. He off healed most fights so ran 40 in holy and 21 in ret. When a healer went down or oom he dropped back to heal.
For mage there's two others I'd mention; Elementalist mage in Vanilla which completely ignored the arcane tree, which for most of Vanilla was an unheard of thing to do. Before the vanilla mage rework you'd lose a ton of stuff by not going into arcane, but you'd get some high crit chances and tons of instant casts that allowed for more mobility and control in PVP. (You'd lose instant arcane explosion and evocate, mostly) After the rework, you didn't need to talent to get evocate or instant Arcane explosion, and they changed shatter to allow *all* spells to benefit from additional 50% crit rate, not just frost- so you'd run around with a bunch of instant cast aoe spells that had massive crit chances and high snares. The drawback being you were made of paper, but just git gud lol (/j) The other one was never live, but in TBC beta there was a dagger that was bugged and it's melee damage scaled with spell power, so you could stab people for huge amounts of damage. Sad this never saw a live iteration.
I loved the Elementalist Mage back in the day. Being made of paper didn't matter when you could deadzone hunters, counterspell casters, and just make it impossible for anyone to melee you. Warlocks were really the only problems, everyone else just died before they could do anything to you.
Late to the party here but one off-meta spec that should be known is the DPS Mistweaver monk in the current expac (The War Within). My friend and I (He is a Fistweaver OTP and was has like a 99.9 avg. Parse in normal and heroic raid) cooked up a build that utilizes all of mistweavers damage talents but drops the most important fistweaving healing talents. The best we've seen from ourselves as well as other Fistweaving enjoyers is around 1mil DPS single target on Heroic Sikhran (3rd boss of the current raid). I strongly suggest people to look up some of the logs, it's pretty insane stuff.
There was a glyph that you could socket for warriors at the same time gladiator was out that basically turned a lower level prot warrior into gladiator and it was an absolute menace in dungeons. Had a pally in one group that couldn't figure out how he was being out dpsed by a DPS prot warrior.
Only other specs or build that i've heard of that you didn't mention are holy shock paladin, spellpower poison rouge (which i think only worked on pservers), resto/boomy with 3% hit FF in tbc, and frostfire mage (which wasn't the best, similar to glad stance).
Shockadin was a blast to play in Wrath. Building it out with PvP gear made it utterly crazy for being both the off-tank in ICC, as well as being the MT healer, all thanks to the fact that +Resilience gear also affected PvE damage taken and that Beacon of Light 100% copied healing onto the beacon target. Getting a full set of PvP gear made you virtually unkillable in PvE, and Beaconing the main tank or yourself, and then just healing back and forth, toggling Righteous Fury when you needed to hold aggro (through healing threat as well as Holy Shock and Exorcism spam), made it an incredibly fun way to go through ICC 25.
Warrior Gladiator stance is cool, sure, but at the time it was very much meta. - One Warrior build that's off-meta, less known, but I personally played and had great fun with was Fury-Prot with a 2h and shield. WotLK specific, suffice to say. It's primarily a PvP spec. Fury warriors usually go in Arms as their secondary tree, this spec went into Prot tree instead, after getting Titan's Grip from fury. You'd want gear with a lot of stamina and resilience, stack stamina gems, ideally with jewelcrafting and mining. - It's a beast against melee classes, and against casters you get to be tanky and use spell reflect on key spells to get an edge, like a pvp prot, while having a 2h sword for hard hits, and especially Revenge procs that would hit for 12k damage easily. Plus you also have the benefit of being able to tank dungeons, while still dealing decent damage, so it's nice to run Heroics with, all in one spec, so you could use your 2nd talent set for a more dedicated PvE damage build for raids. It has a lot of self-sustain too, you get to pair Last Stand from prot with Bloodlust that makes you heal percentages of your HP as you attack, which is why you want a lot of HP.
Cata and MoP was also a great time for rogues and warlocks. Evasion tanking was back for rogues and very viable in dungeon content, and warlocks had Metamorphosis and a taunt and high threat melee skills. It was very pricy to get into but it absolutely worked, and a skilled warlock often outtanked actual tanks.
I (and many others) ran as a healer paladin in OG WOTLK for arenas but as deep protection. There was a talent that would give you spell power relative to your stamina. You would gem and enchant solely stamina. Additionally, you would get avenger's shield and use the increase damage glyph. Blizz added a silencing effect to this spell too which made it useful in this build. I think it was nerfed come the following season but it was super tanky, offered more utility with the silence rather than just having HOJ, and uber strong heals. The only con of this spec was no instant casts from holy shock or beacon so you had to juke interrupts and LOS ccs better than the average joe.
From more or less known non-standard specs we can mention: resto-balance, frostfire, tanking shamans, tanking in all 3 specs of DK in wotlk, exorcist paladin(holy dps, not holy-ret mix).
A few other, unmentioned specs that I personally utilized are: moonkin tanks for Balance druids in TBC; dual-wielding tanks for Frost death knights in Wrath; and Enhancement shaman tanks all the way from Vanilla to Cataclysm. And while not particularly viable for endgame, melee Survival hunter twinks were fantastic for lower-level PvP and dungeon carries in TBC and Wrath, being able to deal some pretty remarkable damage and reliably tank using their pet.
Great vid, since you offered I'd love to see a part 2! Here's a few examples I can think of. I tanked heroic dungeons for funsies on my warlock (admittedly only the bosses was viable, not really the trash) in late OG WotLK when my guild had 90% of ICC hc on farm and I could get some high defense rating jewellry for 1dkp. I had a mix of defense gear/enchants with resilience everywhere else, and a guardian druid staff, demon form was my big cooldown for I think it was 600% armor for it's duration, and searing pain to maintain threat. It was only a fun little project that I thought of myself at the time. Secondly I was surprised you mentioned a WotLK hybrid paladin build, and that it wasn't Prot healers in pvp! They'd use Divine Plea for near infinite mana regen and wear intellect gear. Thirdly, something I saw some fun videos of and tried for myself without investing a great amount of time getting a full set ready for it, I think it was during Cata or Cata-pre-patch, was dps prot warrior pvp, specialising in enormous, if not one-shot shield slams. At the time shield slam scaled off of Block Value I think it was, so stacking a full BV set with some obscure dps trinkets, plus previous tier 2-set which gave +20% dam to shield slam.
The dual wield icy touch/howling blast spam dk spec, at the beginning of wotlk, was one of my favorite play styles in wow. It's unfortunate it had such a short life span.
Warlocks had a proper tank subspec in pandaria. Demo could use grimoire of sacrifice on their voidwalker and that would add the tanking abilities to the toggleable demon form. I used to run panda heroics as a lock tank. Kinda like a scuffed version of vengence DH
Gladiator spec was the top warrior spec for a short time in WoD, while Highmaul was out. It was subsequently nerfed. Arms was always in play because of the cleave, and the way raid encounters were designed at the time. Fury was losing to glad stance though, and I guess Blizzard didn't like that.
At various times, a Holy Nova Spirit Tap hybrid build worked for dungeons. At least for dungeons with a lot of small adds. If the priest could reliably get kills, spirit tap would double their spirit and allow full spirit mana recovery. It worked because holy nova was a zero threat spell, so the priest could start dpsing the instant the tank had body odor aggro on the mobs. It was one of the many specs that really only takes off when you outgear the content, but it was good for speed levelling. Unfortunately, holy nova stopped scaling well at TBC content.
I remember during Wrath and ICC, Shadow Priests could turn support healer if they got the Althors Abacus trinket from the Lootship. Though it was almost impossible to get your hands on it since no one in a raid would want to give a healing trinket to a dps, I managed to do so and while it didn't fully replace a healer position Vampires Embrace made the trinket constantly be on CD shooting minor heals all over the place making it easier for the other healers. I wish Blizzard delved further into hybrid dps/healing.
Gladiator Warrior was top dps at start of WoD because it was front scaled spec(basically it had two stats that worked at main stat), awesome on two target fights. It was still decent for rest of WoD on two target fights but arms overtook it in execute phase, and it worked great as backup tank on Archimonde for instance where you gradually sacrificed tanks, it had excellent avoidance, better than regular tanks, but no crushing blow protection, so hard hitting boss could still slap your head off with lucky strike.
Healhance in Wrath was particularly effective on fights that targetted healers, specifically Sindragosa and Vezax. Healers on Vezax would get hit by a special debuff that prevented their mana from regenning and Enhance Shaman actually got a unique debuff that gave them double mana regen whenever they used Shamanistic Rage but killing their healing by 95%...However this debuff was only applied if you had Shamanistic Rage talented, if instead you skipped this talent and grabbed the talent that refunded 5% of your mana pool everytime you used Stormstrike, grabbed the trinket from Culling of Stratholme that occasionally reduced the mana cost of your spells to effectively free and grabbed the season 6 pvp 4 set that reduced the cooldown of Stormstrike from 8 seconds to 6 seconds Enhancement Shamans legitimately had infinite mana on a fight where you didn't have mana and Enhancement Shamans were able to carry 90% of the healing on a fight all about healing management, Enhancement Shamans at the beginning of the tier actually outhealed Restoration Shamans by the end of Ulduar even though they were using last tier PVP gear. On Sindragosa Healhance Shamans don't have to build anything special unlike with Vezax, instead Enhancement Shamans are classified as a melee DPS spec in a fight that makes caster dps and healers be unable to cast for minutes at a time. Enhancement Shamans could even use the Restoration tier set to benefit from the absurdly powerful 4 set bonus this time exploiting Shamanistic Rage for infinite mana and having a healer that had 100% uptime on a fight where most healers didn't even have 50% uptime. On a fight where some people would choose to 8 heal this fight because if their healers got targtted, guilds that used a Healhance Shaman were able to keep their standard 4/5 healer team and just have their healhancer swap in for this fight, being a pretty mediocre DPS but a pretty monsterous throughput machine. Also Holy DPS was most viable in the first tier of MoP, Chakra:Chastise or Red Chakra got a pretty massive buff in MoP compared to its basically uselessness of Cata that increases the damage of Holy Fire and Smite and smashes their mana cost to basically free. This spec also gets perfect hit from glyphs for their damage spells with no need to itemize for it. It wasn't the best DPS in Heart of Fear but it was a decidedly middle of the road DPS spec, outpreforming some and on par with others, beyond playable, moreso than most other specs including Shadow which was struggling in Heart of Fear making Smite Priest the defacto DPS Priest for exactly 1 tier in the game's history. As more gear and stats came out, Holy Priest only benefitting from 2 stats as a dps spec out of 5 really started to hurt and by Throne of Thunder they were back on the Healing team. Smite Priest could still be used in Trivial content like dungeons and notably open world content which was very convenient for farming Timeless Isle and not having to learn Shadow to kill things today. Morb DK or Dual Wield Unholy probably deserves mention because of how just, purely dominating it and could have been if it wasn't targetted nerfed. If Morb DK didn't get kneecapped by Blizzard imagine how insane a Deathbringers Will Garg would have been and how this spec always existed in Wrath but was never truly discovered. I genuinely believe if there's a world where Garg snapshot didn't get nerfed Unholy would have been doubling the 2nd best spec in the game's damage by ICC.
Vanilla specs- Rogue tanks that specced heavy in Combat, DW swords and had so much agi the bosses couldn't hit them. And the Shockadin that was both a tank and DPS and were terrifying in PvP.
Something I did while leveling that not many people knew of was holy paladin. they had a spell similar to smite, but for some reason, in heavy int gear, it just did MASSIVE damage
a little known fact in real vanilla and when classic launched as vanilla (although I think not any more since patches fixed it), the shaman enhancement talent to increase flametongue weapon damage (cos reasons) also increased the hidden spell co-efficiency of all (?) spells - in vanilla wow I did more damage as ele taking this talent, it was a strange time (if you have access to a true vanilla client, you can test this with lightning shield for example, since it's a fixed amount of damage) - I learned about this back in the OG vanilla days from some class guide somewhere
Back in Wrath, I switched my main from Priest to Druid. I ended up bear tanking, so all my gear was for that. Since cat and bear forms were the same tree, I developed a hybrid tank/DPS spec that did good DPS in cat form, yet still had good survivability in bear form. (Good enough to off tank in raids.) That was a phenomenal spec for PvP, and I had a blast in Wintergrasp.
Smite priest in wrath was insane as a tank healer. It healed allies near the target and was disc talented, which also boosted shield. Just shield tank, renew as needed, and smite the boss. I assure you, tank survives, and mana is golden.
Actually, in bosses I would still need a couple mana potions. But still, when buffed I could tank heal and still do about 75% of the lowest DPS numbers.
You forgot feral healer in shadowlands, back then we had a legendary that gives HotW when we shift to caster on every minute, combining this with the 1min convoke legendary and HotW talent itself, feral could burst heal more than regular healers with no mana cost, and have a very good considerable heal uptime while dpsing, i did healed some respect level M+ and even heroic raid on some farm bosses and did more hps than healers due to that strong burst healing combining HotW and caster convoke.
There was an early bug in which unholy dks wore holy pala gear (or any gear with int/spell power) and got ridiculous damage from their shadow magic abilities. Also, there were holyprot palas - they utilized a talent that gave spd based on one’s stamina, so in this build, people literally used every enchant and gem with stamina on it - as a result, they got a ton of stam, as well as a ton of SPD, being almost unkillable in pvp scenarios. Holy priest dps was somewhat working on MoP - hirumadx made a video about it.
Back in Cataclysm I played a frost mage spec that included ignite and impact. Blizzard would proc brain freeze, giving instant cast frostfire bolts, which then stacked a big ignite tick on the main target, which could then be spread using fire blast for massive AOE. I think I had 9 points in fire for it. People tended not to believe that it worked, but it was a great AOE spec in Firelands. Not really a spec, but in in WoTLK, my favorite weapon was Nibelung. Frost AOE would often spawn a lot of Valk'yr companions that did a very decent amount of damage. Lots of fun in PvP as well. I think the chilling effects from blizzard counted as a spell and increased the chance to proc the staff.
Towards the end of TBC and into WotLK I had a warrior alt I was playing as a Prot/Fury hybrid. As an alt it wasn't really a raiding spec, but it was incredible for open world farming. I would wear tank gear but dual-wield weapons; I was killing mobs only a little bit slower than full Fury, but with all the armor I almost never had to stop. I could chain pulls all day long with nothing more than a bandage now and then. One time a rogue ambushed me and I was able to stun-lock *him* to death with Concussion Blow and Revenge stuns. Didn't see that coming.
For evoker, when aug first was available, it was a damn good PvP tank, specialy on flag cary map. On team fight map he switched some talents around and became a fourth healer in RBG. Monk had a few brewmasyer dps (doing similar dps then windwalker if not more, in PvP)
There was a time in cata when disc smite/hf priest was actually used by top guilds to squeeze out extra dps while keeping some proc healing. Maybe on spine of deathwing or something but i don't really remember which bosses. I don't know if it was ever used after that because I stopped playing before mop.
I leveled a Enhanced Shammy in LK, and in the few group quest in the xpac, that I was invited too, I was accused of killing the mobs too fast, but with most of the group quest, I had no problem soloing them.
I raided as holy dps priest during wrath. I was an backup healer if one died or an extra dps when needed and sometimes both. Dots, hots, instant free smites that triggered off heal crits... it was fun.
I liked vanilla where we coudl create our own specs as well - retail right now has a pretty good system, but I'll always remember vanilla where you had 3 trees and could jam them together in some odd ways; 99% of druids went with the feral+resto or resto+feral, but I sure liked to dabble in feral+balance or balance+feral ... as a pvper, dieing while haviung maan seemed wrong, a waste of a third of your resources... health, energy/rage, mana .. so balance feral let you use up all 3 before you went down. Good times :)
Glad Warrior could keep up with Fury and Arms on some fights in Highmaul, but the APM was like playing DDR on the keyboard so it usually did not feel too good 2-3h into a raidnight. Add ontop of that, sure you did reduced threat but still more than typical DPS specs early on so you could rip aggro randomly if your tanks were not that good, and since Glad Stance replaced most of your defensives, you got absolutely annihilated if that happened.
I actually created a special hybrid semi-ranged paladin spec in MoP, before it was nerfed one month into that expansion. I was so pissed, I quit wow until LEGION! They also forced you to rep grind to spend badges of justice from heroics and I didn't want to raid, so that literally stopped me from having any fun in the content I wanted to play. It was INCREDIDBLY powerful! Hence the quick nerf to completely remove harsh words from ret! It made use of 40 yd judgment that gave 1 holy power, holy prism on 45s cd that could be used to heal and damage at the same time, harsh words to spend your holy power and hit from range and a talent that would proc free holy power spenders whenever you used one. I dominated all the classes that tried to kite me like they had been doing for every expansion up to that point. It was so cathartic. Fun was detected and quickly removed.
There's a spec I never see anyone talking about for DK in early Wrath that was a combo of Frost and Unholy, using dual weilding, did a ton of damage with low end gear, like I was topping the charts in raids with basic blue items, relied a lot on procs of Rime for Howling Blast and disease damage
The Arcane/Frost mage raiding spec in TBC was my all-time favorite. Spamming arcane blast while weaving in some frost bolts for mana conservation felt great.
This was a decade ago but IIRC Gladiator Stance in PvP was actually very good at least in Ashran at the time because you got most of the benefits of being Prot while also dealing decent enough damage and you would still get the benefits of the bonus armor secondary stat. You would dodge. block, or parry many hits you had prot defensives like shield block and you could still pop a bladestorm and kill most non plate wearers.
I run a DPS Prot Warrior and it's great for PvE and for soloing content. I might not dish out damage as quickly as Fury or Arms Warriors, but I'm a whole lot sturdier and die less often. It's a lot of fun!
I had a shaman in my WoW Classic guild who was a tank. She would tank MC bosses and the post Twin Emps trash like a pro. Honestly, shaman tanks was so optimal for wrangling those post-twin emps trash mobs that would drop aggro. Earth Shock has amazing snap threat.
I played as a shadow priest up to AQ40. Started to experience with the smite pries in pvp then and it became a wrecking ball. Open up with power infusion, fire up a holy fire from 40 yards and follow up with smite. Usually the target was dead after this. It was a lot of fun!
WOTLK was a fun expansion for priests and paladins, on my priest I had spent talent points down to Surge of Light and still had enough to get Power Infusion and some mana efficient talens in the discipline tree, so I could 1v1 anyone, spam Holy Nova and use Smite/Flash Heal according to mine or my enemys healthbar. On my paladin I would have mostly prot talents, but holy gear and be an immortal healer.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Dark Apotheosis warlock “tank” spec in MOP. I remember stumbling upon it on my own back then and thinking it was some secret tech. No one at that time knew what I was doing when I was literally unkillable in BGs and duels. The damage was pretty good and the survival ability was insane, especially with the amount of CDs at your disposal. If MOP remix comes out I am 100% blasting that build in BGs.
Also tried some Rockbiter enhance shaman builds in cata. Same issue as rogue tank- no taunt, but the rockbiter shaman enchant did have built in threat gen I believe and earth shock helped out with that too if I’m recalling correctly.
Strength Hunter! Early hunters gained dmg from strength, and it was converted to agility. But it was patch doing vanilla. Full on str/agi, a pure glass cannon marksmand hunter.
I tried out Enhancement shaman tank in tbc at around lvl 45-55 (in Uldaman and Maraudon). It was very doable even with dual wielding and windfury. Fire Nova Totem, Earthbind and Taunt Totem for aoe pulls and high dps and Frost Shock for 1-3 enemy groups. My talents weren't even built around tanking, so it could have worked even better with them. (l often had infinite mana because of shamanistic rage and shock cost reductions) I even had the Spirit weapons talent, which reduced the threat generation of my melee attacks by 30%.
I still remember the weird updates that messed up spells that could heal and do damage. So instantly Penance priest and Holy shock paladin became the most powerful in battle grounds overnight. Not really a legit spec, but I thought it was amusing at the time.
Im one of those people that did feral dps, enhance, elemental and boomkin when classic released. 99 parsed on all except the boomie who I deemed too rng and gear dependent. MCP farming and trollsblood chugging. Tough experience but 700dps on all bosses in MC with MCP use and full prebis is a huge shock to most players.
Tbh pvp in wrath was absolutely broken. With full ICC heroic gear u could Solo kill a lot of players with less Gear score. Kinda felt bad because with a healer on you. You were absolutely invincible 😂❤
Enhance Shaman off-tanking worked to a degree in vanilla. You weren't as durable as a warrior, but with a shield you were durable enough for some content, while generating a lot more threat, gear for gear. It was a very aggressive option. I had a lot of fun enhance tanking dungeons, and there was some early raid content that could be Shaman off-tanked. There have also been periods where you could bear-cat as feral. Enough crossover in talents that you could bear tank, and at any point in the fight you weren't actively tanking, you could go cat and meaningfully contribute to DPS. Worked well in TBC, Wrath, and Cata. Of course, that's not really that weird, but it largely went away with the removal of talent trees. It seems like it might be viable again, though, with the new hero talents.
Where's the shockadin mention? I think it's in MoP where Holy shock scaled so hard that you one shot other players in BG's while levelign untill it was fixed. God it was a blast. The only other class you feared was other other holy paladins.
NGL in Classic WoW, Smite priest was the best magic DPS. I would easily do like 3,000 Holy crit and in vanilla, there is no Holy resistance besides the baseline magical resistance. The only issues are: a) the party has to wait for you to get mana between fights, and b) you have to get LOTS of crit gear. But you could get +8% crit just from talents
@@ixplain Okay but my Recount logs spoke for themselves. I was pretty popular on my realm too, as a meme that kind of worked. The title of the video is "When weird specs worked in WoW", after all.
One of my favorite times was rogue tanking content I had no business doing or solo'n. I started at the end of vanilla, did in TBC when I had BiS in tbc, and then again in wotlk. Solo'n old raid bosses was very challenging and way different than these days where we just destroy them.
I absolutely loved prot pally in season 3 of wrath , I believe I was one of the first people to play it stacking shield block rating and it was definetly overpowered. You could run double healer prot on 3s till 2500 ish rating
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Gladiator spec was the most fun I had with my warrior. Doing good DPS and saving us from wipes when the tanks died because I was there and ready to pick it up. It was usually only viable tanking in LFR but it was still badass and felt very on brand for the class.
Same - Gladiator fulfilled a class fantasy for me and I loved WOD because of it. Seeing it go stopped me playing my warrior for several expansions until I tried fury and accepted it as “okay” - but I still want Gladiator.
Gladiator spec was one of the best things in WoD honestly loved it so much.
literally all they had to do was make it swappable in combat, so you could swap tanks and have the off-tank pick up the slack as dps.
I loved the Sword and Board DPS!
Another edition - Survival Hunters doing trapweaving in Wrath. All expansion we were told "next phase you'll fall off and Marksman will take over" and each new patch Survival stayed ahead purely because of trapweaving. The fact Explosive Trap, for some reason, did more single target damage then Black Arrow despite it being an AoE ability while also having a longer duration (meaning even more damage AND more lock and load procs) and sharing a cooldown with Black Arrow meant we just always did the trapweave whenever possible. Even playing absolutely insane strats on certain bosses - like on Kolagarn in Ulduar where we had to jump over the edge of the pit, drop the trap mid-air and disengage back onto the platform in order to set the trap off (and inevitably fall to our deaths more then once if there was any lag at all). And bitterly complaining non-stop on bosses that hovered and thus couldn't set off traps - such as Twin Valks.
Good times, if also very exhausting at times. Once Blizzard gave us trap launcher in ICC things got much easier, and now in Cata Black Arrow actually does decent damage and Explosive Trap was nerfed into the ground (to the point its actually pretty bad AoE).
Also - Sunfire Druids. Where a Balance Druid would max out their Mastery stat above all else - even wearing inappropriate gear like tanking rings and trinkets and cloth items - purely so they could stay in Solar Eclipse the entire fight while spamming Sunfire, Insect Swarm and Wild Mushrooms and never, ever, ever using Wrath so they never moved out of Eclipse and actually did respectable damage and were absolutely broken on sustained AoE and cleave. This was a thing during early Cata Classic before falling off really hard as other classes just launched into orbit past them.
Maybe this is just me finding common naming annoying, but "a trap being in my rotation" doesn't sound much lIke trapweaving, it sounds like doing your rotation that includes a trap being a damage ability as a powerful cooldown
I do get that literally any tech being x-weaving is a community meme but still
@@Tojozomi it's because the trap is the odd one out.
It's not supposed to be in the rotation. So it's being weaved into what is normally the rotation.
At this point of cheesing, it is bad class design
Speaking of warlock tank, my brothers guild in Wotlk used a Voidwalker and buffed it to 120k HP to tank Sartharion 3D, and used a hunters Misdirect to get Sartharion to the voidwalkers position. Cool tactic
You forgot about spell hunter and spell rogue that used Spellpower gear during vanilla to increase dmg of their arcane shot/Poison.
In phase 2 of SoD with the new chimera shot ability hunters got in phase 1 ranged hunters would stack spellpower to boost their serpent stings damage and since chimera shot scales off of serpent sting it was a viable spec competing with normal ranged hunters. All loot is hunter loot
When Hunter used the Light's Hope trinket and stacked Spirit and had endless mana.
As far as i know spellrogue was Pserver only. Spelldamage didnt affect poisons in blizzard iterations of wow
The good ol spellpen dk.. 😅
And also for healing pets, for insane tanking.
I loved gladiator stance. I find it so lame that in almost all games shield +1h is tank by default.
Yeah, especially when with a shield you can be more aggressive and historically two-handed weapons were used with crowd control in mind. Using momenten to keep the sword moving and using it's reach to threaten all oponents around you.
Dpsing with a shield is silly. It makes zero sense in the context of wow. It makes sense for pvp however.
@@TheStygian *Game needs to be more realistic, that makes it better*
Despite what you'd think, Glad rune is meta for Prot Warriors in SoD. A tank being able to swap to a more DPS focused stance when not needing to tank is actually been huge in SoD.
And then there's Ele sham in retail, the only DPS that uses a shield.... and they're a caster
I loved tanking on my shaman during BC. Even used the taunt they had for specific things up through Cata.
Since shaman gained mail use at level 40 in vanilla, it made shammy tanks entirely viable (and fairly common) in that Scarlet Monastery stretch of levels, thanks to Rockbiter Weapon's increased threat generation.
@@Maria_Erias Yeah, I remember main tanking Scarlet Monastery from 35-42 or so as a Shaman tank. Even in leather it was doable if you were smart.
Fake news
Watched a shammy try to "tank" mag gruul and kara and fail every time
@@danmoore1427yeah but it was dope in low inis.
With a supporting group it worked fine!
And was fun!
A geared prot warrior in WOTLK could wreck pvp as well, even without the gladiator spec. Shield slam and revenge dealt the damage, and shockwave and concussion blow provided tons of cc 🛡
... there was no gladiator in WOTLK
@@godlygamer911that was exactly his point
Ah yes.
And the healpalas that specced tank and were almost unkillable.
@@pun15h3r. Yea, that was only for a few patches but who in there right mind at Blizzard was thinking, lets give protpaladin a talent thats make stamina spellpower 😂 they nerfed it and made it scale with str instead 😂
Prot warrior in Bg's was pretty meme but had it moments, but lets not forget about how busted the Revenge PvE spec was for 5 mans xD
All 3 DK Specs being DPS and/or Tank in Wrath was so cool. I remember DW Frost DKs Parrying everything.
Pomfrost mage was way more fun than Pompyro with the 100 % bonus crit damage and + 50 % crit chance to frozen targets. You didn’t even need to instant cast anything, you just frostbolt + ice lance, fire blast if needed and bye bye players :D
For Druids talking about Manual Crowd Pummeler is very disappointing considering this is not a spec, and has been discussed so much already.
What about moonkin tanks in TBC or other options?
tanking rogue at TBC work
druid had so many weird hybrids he could have discussed- the restokin that owned pvp in TBC, the resto/feral that raided vanilla, dreamstate etc
One of the best dungeon runs I've been to in Classic was a Scholo with a boomkin tank and no healer. We just blasted everything down by precasting and outright murdering the first mob on each pack before they all aggroed 😄
I LOVED tanking as a Moonkin. It was such a surreal but funny experience.
3:45 Yeah, when you're only looking at the Top 5% of players, sure. In reality, for *most* players, Gladiator warrior players were committed warrior players and often were near top of the charts in their raid. I raided Mythic in WoD as Glad spec until near the end of progression in HFC, when I swapped back to Arms. I never had any issues with the spec until then.
Besides all that, quoting the numbers being bad is a pretty weak argument for why a spec was killed, as numbers can be quite easily tweaked, as we've seen plenty of times. The other main quoted reason they buried Glad Stance was because Bonus Armor items gave AP to Glad warriors, which some people (main tanks) saw as a problem. This argument completely discounts the fact that after the tanks get that gear (which had the same drop chance as any other piece on a boss), that it was getting sharded or otherwise going to waste and that this was a way to get more use out of tank items in the game.
Glad stance for 12.0. It should have been a Hero spec.
P.S. - I thought the title was "When Weird Specs WORKED in WoW", not "When Weird Specs EXISTED in WoW". Kind of weird to use Glad warr as this class' example and then say it was utter dogsh!t numerically. That kinda means it didn't really work, no?
Funny thing about gladiator is that at the very beginning of WoD it was actually the strongest warrior DPS spec in the game. The other two were very undertuned. Before they even bothered to fixed the undertuned specs they took a massive nerf hammer to gladiator to force people into the "actual" dps specs and never ever bothered to fix it. Then it got removed because no one was playing it. Shocker.
a Long Lost Spec from WotLK would be for Deathknights.
the Duel Wield Frost DK Tank.
i was Frost DK Sectank in a Guild around WotK and was Frostskilled it was Freaky how much you vould Take when you Parry all the Attacks that come in.
Saw the Big Hitter Drop from Arthas and was the only DK who had no Need for it.
I was looking for this comment, thank you! That frost parry chance per hand was NUTTY. You just let the target beat itself at that point. DK was just built different when it was first dropped lol
Tell me you’re German without telling me you’re German
I did this too, was a great heroic tank/BG spec
I had so much fun with this spec.
Problem in WoW is that Blizzard is too afraid of experimenting and/or letting player have too much freedom. You have to play specific play style and your choices are limited at best. And midmaxing culture don't help at all. Like,back in MoP(and Warlords if I'm not mistaken)DemonLocks had a glyph that turns them into tanks,but you were at best,panic tank if your tank dies in a dungeon. Even in Cata,Enhancement had tanking talents and abilities,but could you possibly tank?No. Resto Druids have a dps rotation in Cata despite the fact that they hit like a wet noodle...
Yeah, it's called balancing. Why would you bring a melee tank if a Warlock is as efficient from range?
21:55 You skipped a LOT: before Leotheras the Blind, you could use a mage OR warlock tank on one of the council members in Gruul's Lair and, right before SSC, one of Kael'thas' advisors needed a warlock tank (preferably two, as her mechanics could be wonky and a backup was good).
Same with Ulduar's Mimiron's head (:
Didn't you use Warlock tanks in Karazhan, or Hellfire Ramparts even (Omor?)
@@Daocpwnswow Oh, yeah, definitely. I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive list, I was just pointing out it was useful in a few other situations as well! =0)
Gladiator stance needs to come back. Like. That was just the coolest stuff ever.
It's pretty solid in SoD, having a ton of fun with it in PvP and PvE.
Smite priest did have some interesting bugs with the Tier 5 set. Where if you had Surge of Light procc'd, and used Smite while the -150 mana cost proc from the Avatar Regalia was up, your non-smite spells would not consume the -150 mana buff. Which let you spam Holy Nova on aoe pacs. This combined with the Blade of Eternal Darkness having a chance to proc on each enemy hit with Holy Nova resulted in positive mana gains on downranked Holy Nova's. All this together let you basically spam holy nova infinitely on trash packs in Mount Hyjal or in big pulls in heroic dungeons.
Smite was pretty cool and I am glad I mained it during TBC Classic. Other than AoE, the mana issues never really went away sadly.
Too bad it wasn't a spec in SoD.
Smite priest was possible in cata. Just only against pure dps 1v1.
Smite priest combined with a ret pally also did some insane burst, it was just never worth a debuff slot and 2 dps slots when you could bring 2 warriors - but the damage was there. If your raid let you play for fun, a smite priest could work, better than most 'memes'. (Vanilla PoV here).
I wanted a inner fire dagger spec
Had it been a spec in SoD, I would have played past the first phase.
I checked the new runes with every season, but the dream was never to be.
@@antoineguerrier2965 I am still very very surprised they didn't add it or any support for it. Its one of those iconic meme specs from classic that really could have been something. -_-
there was also in Mists where Warlocks got another "Tanking" ability that gave them damage reduction, changed some spells and gave threat gen. It was basically the SoD one but you only gained demon wings instead of Metamorph
i can think of a few more interesting rogue iterations:
Hemo-Sub/Combat during Sunwell, leveraging the raid consuming the hemo debuff to pull equal with traditional combat,
HaT rogue during Naxx/Ulduar, just completely breaking the rotation via infinite Combo Points
Snake Eyes in BfA, doing kinda the opposite and forgoing damage finishers in lieu of supercharging Sinister Strike with the Azerite Trait
I'm shocked glad spec wasn't a hero talent option in war within. But the nice thing about hero talents is introducing more options is plenty plausible! Things I'd love to see
- Rogue Tank. I think outlaw has been the odd child for a while and could support a tanking playstyle option.
- Warlock tank. Same pet mechanic as below. Demonology tank where your pets are constantly dying to the boss would be so funny.
- Hunter Tank. Having your pet stick right to your side and being able to shift which has threat you or the pet
- Mage Support like augmentation, but a full on support with time magic.
- Glad warrior dps Tank hybrid
- An inquisitor style paladin heal dps hybrid. Like disc, but a dps first and heal second.
- Evoker melee tank where they turn into an actual dragon on a CD. Kind of like an off tank.
- Shaman summoner like demonology.
I remember Death Knights being ridiculous with the Blood Spec, specifically the Blood Boil spell. You had an AoE spell that could outdamage literally any other part of your usual routine, so you would legit ignore any other spell in favor of bloodboil because it deals the most damage, is an aoe, and also taunts, since you're Blood Spec and therefore are the tank.
OP in dungeons, raids, and PVP because you just had one button to press because the high damage ensured your presence in pvp, and the high damage ensured you would never slip any aggro to hit any other party members
Another wacky hybrid build that worked in WoTLK was pvp prot/holy paladin. the build got you insanely huge amounts of spell power through the prot talent that converted stamina to SP, you were insanely tanky due to having all the prot CDs and damage reduction, you got more CC than holy because of avenger shield, and you never ran out of mana. The main weakness of the build is that you had no instant heals so a good team comp could CC you while bursting your arena partners down. but the build was hilariously broken vs mid/low teir team comps. you could faceroll all the way to 2000 arena MMR but it was tough getting any higher because almost every team after that had dispells and lots of CC
Being the warlock leader in my guild in Vanilla, I had a lot of fun tanking the Twin Emperors fight in AQ40. This, alongside the unmentioned moonkin tanking spec for Balance druids in TBC, are ultimately what lead to my love for playing tanks in MMOs, going so far as to main a Guardian druid all the way from WotLK to present day retail WoW.
Gladiator Stance during the beginning was actually damn good, it was one of the top specs people went. Most people stuck to what the knew best and didn’t even know that spec was in the Tank Tree because hardly anyone goes tank. The devs dropped it cause trying to tune a spec within a spec without destroying it completely on top of taking too much time away from other pressing issues the expansion had is the biggest reason why it wasn’t too dps throughout the expansion after the nerf and completely removed afterwards.
They should've just gave warriors a fourth spec
Gladiator is something I never played, such a great class fantasy, and as for dps, it was just a tunning (numbers) problem, like most simple specs nowdays.
As a feral druid during vanilla I remember getting all the PvP leather gear (and the staff) because leather gear with the stats required for tanks was non existent.
Never forget the warlock tank. Beautiful times. Right there with shockadin dps
Yep during BC I made it a goal to tank every dungeon. I did the last one on my list just before the end of the xpac
In vanilla we had a paladin with nightfall keeping up its buff and he would use a judgment to give us a bit of mana back or healing. He off healed most fights so ran 40 in holy and 21 in ret. When a healer went down or oom he dropped back to heal.
not choosing tank shaman from vanilla, warlock demo tank from mists, warrior healer from the olden days, is a real shame
For mage there's two others I'd mention; Elementalist mage in Vanilla which completely ignored the arcane tree, which for most of Vanilla was an unheard of thing to do. Before the vanilla mage rework you'd lose a ton of stuff by not going into arcane, but you'd get some high crit chances and tons of instant casts that allowed for more mobility and control in PVP. (You'd lose instant arcane explosion and evocate, mostly) After the rework, you didn't need to talent to get evocate or instant Arcane explosion, and they changed shatter to allow *all* spells to benefit from additional 50% crit rate, not just frost- so you'd run around with a bunch of instant cast aoe spells that had massive crit chances and high snares. The drawback being you were made of paper, but just git gud lol (/j)
The other one was never live, but in TBC beta there was a dagger that was bugged and it's melee damage scaled with spell power, so you could stab people for huge amounts of damage. Sad this never saw a live iteration.
I loved the Elementalist Mage back in the day. Being made of paper didn't matter when you could deadzone hunters, counterspell casters, and just make it impossible for anyone to melee you. Warlocks were really the only problems, everyone else just died before they could do anything to you.
Late to the party here but one off-meta spec that should be known is the DPS Mistweaver monk in the current expac (The War Within). My friend and I (He is a Fistweaver OTP and was has like a 99.9 avg. Parse in normal and heroic raid) cooked up a build that utilizes all of mistweavers damage talents but drops the most important fistweaving healing talents. The best we've seen from ourselves as well as other Fistweaving enjoyers is around 1mil DPS single target on Heroic Sikhran (3rd boss of the current raid). I strongly suggest people to look up some of the logs, it's pretty insane stuff.
1:17 on launch Tank DH use to do as much dmg as Dps DH.
There was a glyph that you could socket for warriors at the same time gladiator was out that basically turned a lower level prot warrior into gladiator and it was an absolute menace in dungeons. Had a pally in one group that couldn't figure out how he was being out dpsed by a DPS prot warrior.
Only other specs or build that i've heard of that you didn't mention are holy shock paladin, spellpower poison rouge (which i think only worked on pservers), resto/boomy with 3% hit FF in tbc, and frostfire mage (which wasn't the best, similar to glad stance).
Shockadin was a blast to play in Wrath. Building it out with PvP gear made it utterly crazy for being both the off-tank in ICC, as well as being the MT healer, all thanks to the fact that +Resilience gear also affected PvE damage taken and that Beacon of Light 100% copied healing onto the beacon target. Getting a full set of PvP gear made you virtually unkillable in PvE, and Beaconing the main tank or yourself, and then just healing back and forth, toggling Righteous Fury when you needed to hold aggro (through healing threat as well as Holy Shock and Exorcism spam), made it an incredibly fun way to go through ICC 25.
Dreamstate was great! Especially because Moonkin damage was... not great.
As Shockadin I would often 1v2 classes with no heal, like war/rogue, a decade has already passed damn...
Spellpower Rogue was indeed private server only. Poisons did not scale with SP on Retail at any point.
Warrior Gladiator stance is cool, sure, but at the time it was very much meta. - One Warrior build that's off-meta, less known, but I personally played and had great fun with was Fury-Prot with a 2h and shield.
WotLK specific, suffice to say. It's primarily a PvP spec. Fury warriors usually go in Arms as their secondary tree, this spec went into Prot tree instead, after getting Titan's Grip from fury.
You'd want gear with a lot of stamina and resilience, stack stamina gems, ideally with jewelcrafting and mining. - It's a beast against melee classes, and against casters you get to be tanky and use spell reflect on key spells to get an edge, like a pvp prot, while having a 2h sword for hard hits, and especially Revenge procs that would hit for 12k damage easily.
Plus you also have the benefit of being able to tank dungeons, while still dealing decent damage, so it's nice to run Heroics with, all in one spec, so you could use your 2nd talent set for a more dedicated PvE damage build for raids.
It has a lot of self-sustain too, you get to pair Last Stand from prot with Bloodlust that makes you heal percentages of your HP as you attack, which is why you want a lot of HP.
Cata and MoP was also a great time for rogues and warlocks. Evasion tanking was back for rogues and very viable in dungeon content, and warlocks had Metamorphosis and a taunt and high threat melee skills. It was very pricy to get into but it absolutely worked, and a skilled warlock often outtanked actual tanks.
I (and many others) ran as a healer paladin in OG WOTLK for arenas but as deep protection. There was a talent that would give you spell power relative to your stamina. You would gem and enchant solely stamina. Additionally, you would get avenger's shield and use the increase damage glyph. Blizz added a silencing effect to this spell too which made it useful in this build. I think it was nerfed come the following season but it was super tanky, offered more utility with the silence rather than just having HOJ, and uber strong heals. The only con of this spec was no instant casts from holy shock or beacon so you had to juke interrupts and LOS ccs better than the average joe.
Yeah the nerf was by changing the spell power scaling for Prot to come from Strength rather than Stamina.
From more or less known non-standard specs we can mention: resto-balance, frostfire, tanking shamans, tanking in all 3 specs of DK in wotlk, exorcist paladin(holy dps, not holy-ret mix).
Boosters in BFA would sometimes play havoc DH in low mythic keys in place of a tank because the leech and DPS were so insane they just wouldn't die
In Nyalotha, in the 30/20 man tank only raids, you'd sometimes see a gigachad prot pally weilding a Devastation's Hour and just autoattacking. Based.
A few other, unmentioned specs that I personally utilized are: moonkin tanks for Balance druids in TBC; dual-wielding tanks for Frost death knights in Wrath; and Enhancement shaman tanks all the way from Vanilla to Cataclysm. And while not particularly viable for endgame, melee Survival hunter twinks were fantastic for lower-level PvP and dungeon carries in TBC and Wrath, being able to deal some pretty remarkable damage and reliably tank using their pet.
Great vid, since you offered I'd love to see a part 2!
Here's a few examples I can think of. I tanked heroic dungeons for funsies on my warlock (admittedly only the bosses was viable, not really the trash) in late OG WotLK when my guild had 90% of ICC hc on farm and I could get some high defense rating jewellry for 1dkp. I had a mix of defense gear/enchants with resilience everywhere else, and a guardian druid staff, demon form was my big cooldown for I think it was 600% armor for it's duration, and searing pain to maintain threat. It was only a fun little project that I thought of myself at the time. Secondly I was surprised you mentioned a WotLK hybrid paladin build, and that it wasn't Prot healers in pvp! They'd use Divine Plea for near infinite mana regen and wear intellect gear. Thirdly, something I saw some fun videos of and tried for myself without investing a great amount of time getting a full set ready for it, I think it was during Cata or Cata-pre-patch, was dps prot warrior pvp, specialising in enormous, if not one-shot shield slams. At the time shield slam scaled off of Block Value I think it was, so stacking a full BV set with some obscure dps trinkets, plus previous tier 2-set which gave +20% dam to shield slam.
The dual wield icy touch/howling blast spam dk spec, at the beginning of wotlk, was one of my favorite play styles in wow. It's unfortunate it had such a short life span.
Warlock tank on Twin Emps, Ogre Council in Gruuls Lair, Illidan demon phase, and on Twin Eredars (in pvp gear) is what I remember doing.
2:50 Gladiator Stance my beloved, it reminded me of MoP TG Fury in its style and I loved it for it.
Warlocks had a proper tank subspec in pandaria. Demo could use grimoire of sacrifice on their voidwalker and that would add the tanking abilities to the toggleable demon form. I used to run panda heroics as a lock tank. Kinda like a scuffed version of vengence DH
Gladiator spec was the top warrior spec for a short time in WoD, while Highmaul was out. It was subsequently nerfed. Arms was always in play because of the cleave, and the way raid encounters were designed at the time. Fury was losing to glad stance though, and I guess Blizzard didn't like that.
At various times, a Holy Nova Spirit Tap hybrid build worked for dungeons. At least for dungeons with a lot of small adds. If the priest could reliably get kills, spirit tap would double their spirit and allow full spirit mana recovery. It worked because holy nova was a zero threat spell, so the priest could start dpsing the instant the tank had body odor aggro on the mobs. It was one of the many specs that really only takes off when you outgear the content, but it was good for speed levelling. Unfortunately, holy nova stopped scaling well at TBC content.
Sword & Board for any plate user would be a brilliant DPS option. Really would love to see Gladiator back!
I remember during Wrath and ICC, Shadow Priests could turn support healer if they got the Althors Abacus trinket from the Lootship. Though it was almost impossible to get your hands on it since no one in a raid would want to give a healing trinket to a dps, I managed to do so and while it didn't fully replace a healer position Vampires Embrace made the trinket constantly be on CD shooting minor heals all over the place making it easier for the other healers. I wish Blizzard delved further into hybrid dps/healing.
Gladiator Warrior was top dps at start of WoD because it was front scaled spec(basically it had two stats that worked at main stat), awesome on two target fights. It was still decent for rest of WoD on two target fights but arms overtook it in execute phase, and it worked great as backup tank on Archimonde for instance where you gradually sacrificed tanks, it had excellent avoidance, better than regular tanks, but no crushing blow protection, so hard hitting boss could still slap your head off with lucky strike.
the fact that presence of mind used to effect any spell was so cool. PoM Sheep was just so glorious
Healhance in Wrath was particularly effective on fights that targetted healers, specifically Sindragosa and Vezax. Healers on Vezax would get hit by a special debuff that prevented their mana from regenning and Enhance Shaman actually got a unique debuff that gave them double mana regen whenever they used Shamanistic Rage but killing their healing by 95%...However this debuff was only applied if you had Shamanistic Rage talented, if instead you skipped this talent and grabbed the talent that refunded 5% of your mana pool everytime you used Stormstrike, grabbed the trinket from Culling of Stratholme that occasionally reduced the mana cost of your spells to effectively free and grabbed the season 6 pvp 4 set that reduced the cooldown of Stormstrike from 8 seconds to 6 seconds Enhancement Shamans legitimately had infinite mana on a fight where you didn't have mana and Enhancement Shamans were able to carry 90% of the healing on a fight all about healing management, Enhancement Shamans at the beginning of the tier actually outhealed Restoration Shamans by the end of Ulduar even though they were using last tier PVP gear.
On Sindragosa Healhance Shamans don't have to build anything special unlike with Vezax, instead Enhancement Shamans are classified as a melee DPS spec in a fight that makes caster dps and healers be unable to cast for minutes at a time. Enhancement Shamans could even use the Restoration tier set to benefit from the absurdly powerful 4 set bonus this time exploiting Shamanistic Rage for infinite mana and having a healer that had 100% uptime on a fight where most healers didn't even have 50% uptime. On a fight where some people would choose to 8 heal this fight because if their healers got targtted, guilds that used a Healhance Shaman were able to keep their standard 4/5 healer team and just have their healhancer swap in for this fight, being a pretty mediocre DPS but a pretty monsterous throughput machine.
Also Holy DPS was most viable in the first tier of MoP, Chakra:Chastise or Red Chakra got a pretty massive buff in MoP compared to its basically uselessness of Cata that increases the damage of Holy Fire and Smite and smashes their mana cost to basically free. This spec also gets perfect hit from glyphs for their damage spells with no need to itemize for it. It wasn't the best DPS in Heart of Fear but it was a decidedly middle of the road DPS spec, outpreforming some and on par with others, beyond playable, moreso than most other specs including Shadow which was struggling in Heart of Fear making Smite Priest the defacto DPS Priest for exactly 1 tier in the game's history. As more gear and stats came out, Holy Priest only benefitting from 2 stats as a dps spec out of 5 really started to hurt and by Throne of Thunder they were back on the Healing team. Smite Priest could still be used in Trivial content like dungeons and notably open world content which was very convenient for farming Timeless Isle and not having to learn Shadow to kill things today.
Morb DK or Dual Wield Unholy probably deserves mention because of how just, purely dominating it and could have been if it wasn't targetted nerfed. If Morb DK didn't get kneecapped by Blizzard imagine how insane a Deathbringers Will Garg would have been and how this spec always existed in Wrath but was never truly discovered. I genuinely believe if there's a world where Garg snapshot didn't get nerfed Unholy would have been doubling the 2nd best spec in the game's damage by ICC.
Vanilla specs- Rogue tanks that specced heavy in Combat, DW swords and had so much agi the bosses couldn't hit them.
And the Shockadin that was both a tank and DPS and were terrifying in PvP.
Something I did while leveling that not many people knew of was holy paladin. they had a spell similar to smite, but for some reason, in heavy int gear, it just did MASSIVE damage
a little known fact in real vanilla and when classic launched as vanilla (although I think not any more since patches fixed it), the shaman enhancement talent to increase flametongue weapon damage (cos reasons) also increased the hidden spell co-efficiency of all (?) spells - in vanilla wow I did more damage as ele taking this talent, it was a strange time (if you have access to a true vanilla client, you can test this with lightning shield for example, since it's a fixed amount of damage) - I learned about this back in the OG vanilla days from some class guide somewhere
Every time I think there can't be anything new you can tell us but you don't let your viewers down. Good job!
Back in Wrath, I switched my main from Priest to Druid. I ended up bear tanking, so all my gear was for that. Since cat and bear forms were the same tree, I developed a hybrid tank/DPS spec that did good DPS in cat form, yet still had good survivability in bear form. (Good enough to off tank in raids.) That was a phenomenal spec for PvP, and I had a blast in Wintergrasp.
Smite priest in wrath was insane as a tank healer. It healed allies near the target and was disc talented, which also boosted shield. Just shield tank, renew as needed, and smite the boss. I assure you, tank survives, and mana is golden.
Actually, in bosses I would still need a couple mana potions. But still, when buffed I could tank heal and still do about 75% of the lowest DPS numbers.
You forgot feral healer in shadowlands, back then we had a legendary that gives HotW when we shift to caster on every minute, combining this with the 1min convoke legendary and HotW talent itself, feral could burst heal more than regular healers with no mana cost, and have a very good considerable heal uptime while dpsing, i did healed some respect level M+ and even heroic raid on some farm bosses and did more hps than healers due to that strong burst healing combining HotW and caster convoke.
There was an early bug in which unholy dks wore holy pala gear (or any gear with int/spell power) and got ridiculous damage from their shadow magic abilities.
Also, there were holyprot palas - they utilized a talent that gave spd based on one’s stamina, so in this build, people literally used every enchant and gem with stamina on it - as a result, they got a ton of stam, as well as a ton of SPD, being almost unkillable in pvp scenarios.
Holy priest dps was somewhat working on MoP - hirumadx made a video about it.
Back in Cataclysm I played a frost mage spec that included ignite and impact. Blizzard would proc brain freeze, giving instant cast frostfire bolts, which then stacked a big ignite tick on the main target, which could then be spread using fire blast for massive AOE. I think I had 9 points in fire for it. People tended not to believe that it worked, but it was a great AOE spec in Firelands.
Not really a spec, but in in WoTLK, my favorite weapon was Nibelung. Frost AOE would often spawn a lot of Valk'yr companions that did a very decent amount of damage. Lots of fun in PvP as well. I think the chilling effects from blizzard counted as a spell and increased the chance to proc the staff.
Towards the end of TBC and into WotLK I had a warrior alt I was playing as a Prot/Fury hybrid. As an alt it wasn't really a raiding spec, but it was incredible for open world farming. I would wear tank gear but dual-wield weapons; I was killing mobs only a little bit slower than full Fury, but with all the armor I almost never had to stop. I could chain pulls all day long with nothing more than a bandage now and then.
One time a rogue ambushed me and I was able to stun-lock *him* to death with Concussion Blow and Revenge stuns. Didn't see that coming.
For evoker, when aug first was available, it was a damn good PvP tank, specialy on flag cary map. On team fight map he switched some talents around and became a fourth healer in RBG.
Monk had a few brewmasyer dps (doing similar dps then windwalker if not more, in PvP)
There was a time in cata when disc smite/hf priest was actually used by top guilds to squeeze out extra dps while keeping some proc healing. Maybe on spine of deathwing or something but i don't really remember which bosses. I don't know if it was ever used after that because I stopped playing before mop.
I leveled a Enhanced Shammy in LK, and in the few group quest in the xpac, that I was invited too, I was accused of killing the mobs too fast, but with most of the group quest, I had no problem soloing them.
A rogue spec you missed: bandaid rogue. Used during enounters where being in melee was too dangerous.
I raided as holy dps priest during wrath. I was an backup healer if one died or an extra dps when needed and sometimes both. Dots, hots, instant free smites that triggered off heal crits... it was fun.
I liked vanilla where we coudl create our own specs as well - retail right now has a pretty good system, but I'll always remember vanilla where you had 3 trees and could jam them together in some odd ways; 99% of druids went with the feral+resto or resto+feral, but I sure liked to dabble in feral+balance or balance+feral ... as a pvper, dieing while haviung maan seemed wrong, a waste of a third of your resources... health, energy/rage, mana .. so balance feral let you use up all 3 before you went down. Good times :)
In BC I ran a 31 Disc / 30 Holy It was disgustingly good.
2x Prot Paladins in WotlK with health stacking and SP weapon in Arena to just one tap anything in their sight for an entire patch was fun.
There was a point where windwalker was so bad, that it was recommended to taunt the boss and use Touch of Karma as a DPS boost.
Glad Warrior could keep up with Fury and Arms on some fights in Highmaul, but the APM was like playing DDR on the keyboard so it usually did not feel too good 2-3h into a raidnight. Add ontop of that, sure you did reduced threat but still more than typical DPS specs early on so you could rip aggro randomly if your tanks were not that good, and since Glad Stance replaced most of your defensives, you got absolutely annihilated if that happened.
Some of the most fun times I had in WoW was during Pandaria and tanking heroic dungeons as fury, was so fun and threw pugs off.
I actually created a special hybrid semi-ranged paladin spec in MoP, before it was nerfed one month into that expansion. I was so pissed, I quit wow until LEGION! They also forced you to rep grind to spend badges of justice from heroics and I didn't want to raid, so that literally stopped me from having any fun in the content I wanted to play.
It was INCREDIDBLY powerful! Hence the quick nerf to completely remove harsh words from ret! It made use of 40 yd judgment that gave 1 holy power, holy prism on 45s cd that could be used to heal and damage at the same time, harsh words to spend your holy power and hit from range and a talent that would proc free holy power spenders whenever you used one. I dominated all the classes that tried to kite me like they had been doing for every expansion up to that point. It was so cathartic. Fun was detected and quickly removed.
This definately needs a part2 with the 2-h prot pala stacking up 5 crits and unleashing them to 1 shot (or close to 1-shot) rogues and cloth users
There's a spec I never see anyone talking about for DK in early Wrath that was a combo of Frost and Unholy, using dual weilding, did a ton of damage with low end gear, like I was topping the charts in raids with basic blue items, relied a lot on procs of Rime for Howling Blast and disease damage
The Arcane/Frost mage raiding spec in TBC was my all-time favorite. Spamming arcane blast while weaving in some frost bolts for mana conservation felt great.
This was a decade ago but IIRC Gladiator Stance in PvP was actually very good at least in Ashran at the time because you got most of the benefits of being Prot while also dealing decent enough damage and you would still get the benefits of the bonus armor secondary stat. You would dodge. block, or parry many hits you had prot defensives like shield block and you could still pop a bladestorm and kill most non plate wearers.
I run a DPS Prot Warrior and it's great for PvE and for soloing content. I might not dish out damage as quickly as Fury or Arms Warriors, but I'm a whole lot sturdier and die less often. It's a lot of fun!
I had a shaman in my WoW Classic guild who was a tank. She would tank MC bosses and the post Twin Emps trash like a pro. Honestly, shaman tanks was so optimal for wrangling those post-twin emps trash mobs that would drop aggro. Earth Shock has amazing snap threat.
For warlock tanking, I'm surprised you did bring up the glyph to give them a tank spec.
23:00 Tell me you're just going to say "Holy" here. XD XD XD
I played as a shadow priest up to AQ40. Started to experience with the smite pries in pvp then and it became a wrecking ball. Open up with power infusion, fire up a holy fire from 40 yards and follow up with smite. Usually the target was dead after this. It was a lot of fun!
WOTLK was a fun expansion for priests and paladins, on my priest I had spent talent points down to Surge of Light and still had enough to get Power Infusion and some mana efficient talens in the discipline tree, so I could 1v1 anyone, spam Holy Nova and use Smite/Flash Heal according to mine or my enemys healthbar. On my paladin I would have mostly prot talents, but holy gear and be an immortal healer.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Dark Apotheosis warlock “tank” spec in MOP.
I remember stumbling upon it on my own back then and thinking it was some secret tech. No one at that time knew what I was doing when I was literally unkillable in BGs and duels.
The damage was pretty good and the survival ability was insane, especially with the amount of CDs at your disposal.
If MOP remix comes out I am 100% blasting that build in BGs.
Also tried some Rockbiter enhance shaman builds in cata. Same issue as rogue tank- no taunt, but the rockbiter shaman enchant did have built in threat gen I believe and earth shock helped out with that too if I’m recalling correctly.
Strength Hunter! Early hunters gained dmg from strength, and it was converted to agility. But it was patch doing vanilla. Full on str/agi, a pure glass cannon marksmand hunter.
I tried out Enhancement shaman tank in tbc at around lvl 45-55 (in Uldaman and Maraudon).
It was very doable even with dual wielding and windfury. Fire Nova Totem, Earthbind and Taunt Totem for aoe pulls and high dps and Frost Shock for 1-3 enemy groups.
My talents weren't even built around tanking, so it could have worked even better with them. (l often had infinite mana because of shamanistic rage and shock cost reductions)
I even had the Spirit weapons talent, which reduced the threat generation of my melee attacks by 30%.
I love the enhancement shaman version in WotLK, the Lightning Bolt weaving, Fire Elemental snapshotting etc.
Prot pala as a healer in shadowlands worked really good in Arena and a bit in m+. Havoc dh as a tank works also really good outside of raid and m+
I still remember the weird updates that messed up spells that could heal and do damage. So instantly Penance priest and Holy shock paladin became the most powerful in battle grounds overnight. Not really a legit spec, but I thought it was amusing at the time.
Im one of those people that did feral dps, enhance, elemental and boomkin when classic released. 99 parsed on all except the boomie who I deemed too rng and gear dependent. MCP farming and trollsblood chugging. Tough experience but 700dps on all bosses in MC with MCP use and full prebis is a huge shock to most players.
Mostly I played DK in wrath, with shadowmourne I destroyed everything in 1 or 2 or 3 hits. It was so much fun 🤩
Tbh pvp in wrath was absolutely broken. With full ICC heroic gear u could Solo kill a lot of players with less Gear score. Kinda felt bad because with a healer on you. You were absolutely invincible 😂❤
Enhance Shaman off-tanking worked to a degree in vanilla. You weren't as durable as a warrior, but with a shield you were durable enough for some content, while generating a lot more threat, gear for gear. It was a very aggressive option. I had a lot of fun enhance tanking dungeons, and there was some early raid content that could be Shaman off-tanked.
There have also been periods where you could bear-cat as feral. Enough crossover in talents that you could bear tank, and at any point in the fight you weren't actively tanking, you could go cat and meaningfully contribute to DPS. Worked well in TBC, Wrath, and Cata. Of course, that's not really that weird, but it largely went away with the removal of talent trees. It seems like it might be viable again, though, with the new hero talents.
Shaman could tank icc in wotlk. Took a lot of gear and threat management but it was possible
Where's the shockadin mention? I think it's in MoP where Holy shock scaled so hard that you one shot other players in BG's while levelign untill it was fixed. God it was a blast. The only other class you feared was other other holy paladins.
NGL in Classic WoW, Smite priest was the best magic DPS. I would easily do like 3,000 Holy crit and in vanilla, there is no Holy resistance besides the baseline magical resistance. The only issues are: a) the party has to wait for you to get mana between fights, and b) you have to get LOTS of crit gear. But you could get +8% crit just from talents
No
@@ixplain Okay but my Recount logs spoke for themselves. I was pretty popular on my realm too, as a meme that kind of worked. The title of the video is "When weird specs worked in WoW", after all.
I remember doing dungeons during lich king without a tank. Just 2 hunters, 1 warlock, 1 mage and a resto druid. Good times
One of my favorite times was rogue tanking content I had no business doing or solo'n. I started at the end of vanilla, did in TBC when I had BiS in tbc, and then again in wotlk. Solo'n old raid bosses was very challenging and way different than these days where we just destroy them.
I absolutely loved prot pally in season 3 of wrath , I believe I was one of the first people to play it stacking shield block rating and it was definetly overpowered. You could run double healer prot on 3s till 2500 ish rating
I love fistweaver monk where they heal through their damage abilities more then their casts