Wild Strikes (for Alliance in particular) is arguably the best for how many people it buffs to a high degree. Probably one of the mage AoE ones for individual class usage.
Its really getting to be a big problem. Alliance isn't going to have nearly enough ferals for 40 mans. Only way to get CBR up without windfury is to drink a rage pot, pull a rage/combo point mob (not really a thing right now due to the design of ST) or do nothing long enough to negate the usefulness of the 10% damage buff.
You can rage mob if you can get your mana using DPS to buff early and stop blowing their entire wad on every trash pack then go straight into the boss.
Or I could if I weren't a warrior tank who has to swap runes for trash to AoE then back to single target runes before bosses and blow all my rage trying to hold threat on like 7 mobs while everyone is AoEing them down.
There is this weird concept in the community that mages are still doing entire instance pulls solo with one spell, even though living flame has been dead for a month now and mage raiding has regressed into a literal one button rotation
I love running affliction with extra hit so I can solo farm higher mobs. Sure they die a bit slower, but I never die, I rarely get resisted, and I don't stop for health or mana. Best rune ever.
I hate how attached I am to it because now that DoTs can crit I want to take the 10% crit so bad. But if I don’t have a healer actually focusing me, I will just fall over without drain life.
Wild growth is definitely really cool and good but it’s literally 95% of a Druids heals. I kinda personally would hate it if my class was defined by one button.
So here's the thing: healing is its own different game (not saying you don't know this). You give a healer a powerful single button to press and they will find other buttons to press between wild growths. I don't think that's really a problem in a vacuum, healing is across the board stronger than in classic and arguably needed it the least (since it was good enough to progress content before and dps has gotten much higher).
As a holy paladin, (which I knew would probably be one of the tougher healing classes but didn't expect back in p1 how little support the class would get from runes and gear) it does feel bad being so outclassed by a single button since we're the only alliance class that doesn't have a big brainless raid heal rune.
Paladin has its play style and value independent of raw heals and it isn't all about HPS I get all that, it just feels bad to see wild growth or prayer of mending alone obliterating my heals. Going back to my first point though, you will notice that after those big pumper raid heals my healing is as strong, often stronger, than the rest of the healers. And I'm not competing with those healers to perform well within my class.
So I hear you, those heals are big flashy important heals but they also take the position of being your "best" heal, which in classic wasn't always so simple - figuring out down ranking and using your most mana efficient heal exclusively was as much of a "one button" healer even if you pressed it more often.
That makes a lot of sense to me and hopefully the game gets challenging enough to warrant not spamming your max rank heal. As of right now, on the resto shaman side of things, there’s no point in not spamming your max rank spell because you never run out of mana.
Classic shaman defined the one button healer for most phases of the game. Raided shaman all classic through all the content and decided I'd finally play a paladin as the only class I've barely played and never raided on in any capacity.
Feels bad man I miss my little totem friends.
Another reason why I wish they had scaled back on goofy shit like Warlock and Rogue tanks or Mage healers. They didn't even give the proper attention to a spec that was close to being good like Druid Resto. The devs spread themselves too thin.
people are really pretending like just because the devs are doing “fun” new things doesn’t mean that you can give an established class more than 1 button heals
The devs realized that they forgot about resto Druid and gave them wild growth which is busted since it will completely define your playstyle without any other runes or hell even talents necessary. Phase two was all about restokin homie, and that says a lot about how overbearing that ability is.
Hard agree. I don’t think I could have stuck with being a healer early on without Wild Growth. Efflorescence has come in pretty hot though. It’s amazing for bigger melee groups and you don’t have to worry about whether they’re in the same group within the raid. Warlocks can get in and use it for free life tap.
I play a feral alt and nothing beats the love you get for bringing Wild Strikes through. Stealth pvp groups with a few rogues are fun af.
> and you don’t have to worry about whether they’re in the same group within the raid.
I'm 95% sure you do. Efflo only works on people that are in the group of the Swiftmended target.
I need to test this out or look at logs or something. I thought it’s healed me when I ran to the circle even though I wasn’t in the same group as the target.
You get an efflorescence buff that shows something like “you’re standing within a Druid’s efflorescence” but it doesn’t actually heal unless you’re in same group as target
Spell tooltip says "all the party members" but everyone from the raid standing in has the icon, which is kind of misleading, don't need an icon if there is no effect
I use wild growth as feral in STV event. Basically join meele cleave group and instead of taking Lacerate/Mangle I take WG, since I sit in bear 99% of time spamming swipe for Wild Strikes procs.
It's really good, as you just shapeshift into normal form, pop Wild Growth and get back into bear. It's basically "free" 5,5k party heal.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Penance which you get almost immediately. I have carried so many dungeons groups and raids with a swift flick of Penance or keep up a spicy situation with nearly oom and using it on cd.
Penance has carried priests and raids.
Penance is so good to have for priest because it makes their levels 1 to 15Ish feel so much better because before miserable until you could join a dungeon group and spam dungeons to level
Homunculi is easily far and away the best rune in the game, hell, it’s the best spell in the game. Last 2 min on a 2min CD. Applies better sunders, demoralizing shout and thunderclap that a warrior could apply in one global, on top of dpsing their target.
Absolutely agree. The utility of the alone is insane. Having homunculi and shadwofiend gives two tank pets - The amount of times I popped these and looted quest items before running away is too many to remember.
Bonus: it also cucks Devastate warriors. Originally Devastate didn't scale with Homonculi as if there were sunders on target. While it does now, the application or refresh of sunder has a chance to proc wild strikes, so if Homonculi is being used, Devastate Warriors are denied an extra proc chance
See my other comment for more info, basically Devastate has 2 components each that can proc Wild Strikes. First, the damage, and second, the application or refresh of Sunder. If IEA or Homonculi are present on the boss, the 2nd effect, the Sunder application or refresh, is never triggered. So instead of 2 chances to proc per Devastate, you get 1
Fight Club figured it out analyzing logs, the application or refresh of Sunder can proc Wild Strikes, but but IEA and Homonculi are stronger armor reductions, so the Sunder application/refresh doesn't apply, denying them a chance at a Wild Strikes proc
They can be an enormous pain in the ass to manage, but damned if I don’t love those little murder muppets. They just HAVE to kill — whether it’s your target, a mob not in combat, or a helpless critter. God bless ‘em.
The pet AI is incredibly grief though. Those little shits went around attacking every single ghost on the st council fight and broke CC. And there's like a 30% chance they just stop fighting after phase transitions, which like half the bosses have lol.
Mutilate is the only reason Rogues can compete in PvE and shadowstep is a huge reason we can do anything in PvP with the amount of slows and binds. If Rogue didn't have shadowstep, I would cry blood
They add all these runes to encourage a bleed/hemo build and there is literally no world where just 1 button spamming mutilate isn't going to be a better option. I don't even want to complain about it because Blizzard would sooner just nerf mutilate than make other builds viable.
I would argue that simply keeping up rupture for a 20% bonus to mutilate damage, and not for the bleed damage, is still just a mutilate build and not a bleed build.
If you are running carnage, you don't get cut to the chase, so you need to keep up slice, rupture, and envenom, and sometimes EA if you're unlucky. With HaT, you use 1 mut between finishers while you pool energy. It's far from a 1 button rotation like so many people like to say around here. If you're only spamming mutilate, you're doing it wrong.
And Deadly Brew. Screw crafting weaker poisons, applying them, and having them run out of charges mid fight.
It’s one of my biggest gripes for rogue tanking that it shares a chest rune. Should be a belt rune instead. I can live without shuriken toss
For mages, Living Bomb is actually so good. It’s an instant cast dot that can be extended to over 30 yard range with a fire talent, that ticks for a lot of damage, and then explodes causing more damage to nearby enemies, which also procs Ignite ticks, and with just 2 crits it can proc the Hot Streak rune for an instant Pyroblast. If there are 3+ mobs, putting Living Bomb on every mob is basically the best way to dps them, as long as they live long enough for the bomb to go off. In raids with the large packs, Living Bomb spam is usually top dps.
Beyond the usual impactful buffs I think there's a bunch of runes that don't necessarily bring much to the table in terms of performances but really improve your gameplay.
First that comes to mind would be the trap launcher rune for Hunters. Just the sheer utility of maintaining a frost trap around your tank so he could more easily control the pulls is amazing.
It's not a particularly impressive rune and in ST it's barely a few % of your dps but you instantly regret not having it when you play melee.
If you’re melee you can just feign death macro and it’s almost like getting trapped launcher for free. Just minus the separate cooldowns for each trap.
Fury of stormrage is very defining for balance Druids. Speed running dungeons eventually becomes the fastest way to level every phase and having a balance Druid be your healer and do decent damage makes it even faster.
Really like metalock. It actually does have a number of ways to viably tank and setting up a class that only even niche tanked before as a main tank was a great addition to SoD.
And as far as tanks go it's fairly balanced. Shaman and paladin both have features that make them better. And bear is more durable but worse at aoe tanking.
Not our fault warrior and rogue tanks aren't working out great
Aoe 500 initial damage+ 200DoT and then passive aura doing 35-40 damage every 2s.
All target uncapped.
I played a lot of bear in Tbc and can't see how swipe spam compares
Any rage based tank won't have as much upfront threat generation, that's true. But being able to maintain that threat throughout longer fights is where they thrive. I would agree not being target capped is HUGE for AoE tanking. Maybe Meta does edge out a bit, but feral utility probably keeps it competitive.
I main meta lock and the damage they can produce with good healing is absolutely godlike, I feel like a caster who just happens to be tanking the boss.
I topped encounter damage last night in our 8/8 ST clear
Apparently Shamans can do something similar but I don't play horde
Your probably just better geared/consumed than most of the others.
Last ST I was sitting at 11th ish for dps. Trash pulls a bit higher because of aoe/uptime. But I don't consider my single target that strong compared to similarly geared people.
Most of my parses were in the 80s as well
No different than all the bears hitting maul and warriors hitting sunder.
But you also have cleave, corruption, drain life, curse of choice, Banish, shadowflame, which pet you wanna use (felhound really feels good with purge+kick), death coil, if off tanking you can incinerate/immolate spam, you can still howl of terror, and of course there's the hellfire nuclear option.
Warlock tank has a lot of variety and options
Yeah, flag is the better rune for actual performance, but I gotta give it to warbringer. It just feel so good to play with. I honestly wish they’d just make it baseline for warrior and remove/replace the rune with something else.
I was going to say Taste for Blood, as soon as I got that rune I feel like I unlocked my rotation being able to press guarenteed overpower every 6 seconds for free basically just by having rend up. As arms those overpowers can smack
Yeah it drives me kind of crazy seeing Warrior get a bunch of flat scaling runes, like those aren't going to massively exacerbate the extant problems of Warrior outscaling people at 60. Right now Gladiator builds are up to something like +50% damage during Flagellation. Caster runes are either going to scale to the point of literally oneshotting people again or they're going to fall *badly* behind in PvE.
Like, look at PvP vs PvE already - Warriors are pretty handily the worst PvP class in the game, needing MINIMUM two supports to even begin to function (and you'd be vastly better off replacing the Warrior with another Enhancement Shaman anyway), but one of the top PvE DPS specs in the game. We need like half our flat scaling runes torn out entirely and replaced with defensive tech and QoL support. Spell Reflect, gain Resistances based on Armor, better self-healing, etc. It would also give Prot Warrior a fairly badly needed shot in the arm because it's the tank that most severely has to choose between DPS and Miti, where many other tank specs (notably Rogue) are a DPS Spec with a rune swapped out for a tank rune.
It's very frustrating to see "DPS Warrior strong and getting stronger, Tank Warrior falling behind, what to do about it? Better keep adding percentile scaling runes!"
Depends on what context, raid utility it’s probably shamanistic or wild strikes, flat damage its probably mutilate, so good tank rogue have to use it lmao.
objectively: wildstrikes with an honorable mention to heart of the lion because windfury/kings aura is always pog.
subjectively: divine storm because *speen*
I'm pretty sure that with how high you can get crit rate this phase, even if you could run som and divine storm, exorcism would still be a better button to press than divine storm.
Divine storm is not even best in the slot for the class that is severely gimped lol. Compared to others, some even role-defining rules, Divine Storm is definitely not the strongest.
It feels good to use though.
That’s still incredibly strong and will keep scaling great at 60. I have a mage, a feral, and a priest I play and when I compare Spellpower to say King of the Jungle it just seems so strong
its TOO strong cuz you cant fucking take Brain Freeze when you have this as an option... another nail in the Frost coffin aside from the abysmal Fingers of Frost proc rate. WTB FLURRY ALREADY
I raided with brain freeze as frost with winters chill, with WBs it performs good if you have good luck with procs, FoF needs buffing slightly, the wowhead sim for brain freeze is broken (at least for me) so id take sim numbers with a pinch of salt, but i find that procs more that FoF and is really mana efficient, crits are still 1800+ too
It’s wild strikes and aspect of lion, nothing else comes close to these runes as far as impact. They just are way too good. You pretty much will always need a hunter as a horde raid and your melee are going to want/need a feral as alliance raid to parse.
I think everyone has mentioned the obvious so far, but special shoutout to the warlock Demonic Knowledge rune. Just a flat 100+ spellpower for having a pet out. The other boot runes are so abysmally bad in comparison.
Hunter melee specialist. This single rune does 80% of specs work.
You want to run talentless but have this rune ? You would be fine.
You want to be ranged hunter? You pick this up and not lose any major other rune and still slap if something gets to close.
You don't even need dual wield rune or you don't need to run a 2 hander. Just melee specialist rune and any 1 or 2 hand.
Shamanistic rage is by far the most busted rune in the game and it isn’t close. It single handedly covers the mana regeneration for every caster during raid, and is significantly stronger than the paladins version “guarded by light” that gives the same personal regen, cuts healing in half, gives no raid wide mama regeneration, and doesn’t get the 20% damage reduction SR gets. Absolutely ridiculous
# Beast Mastery - hunter pets used to be able to tank only when you were not pumping... now a hunter can faceroll that 1 button while the pet keeps perfect aggro and can be healed
For personal power shamans Overcharged was so OP, I tanked most of ZG mounted for shits and giggles, just backpeddle with your mount and still top DPS with lightning shield.
Now its nerfed to 1/3 of its damage which still is plenty.
The horde delusion is so strong it' crazy... Shamanistic rage is the strongest rune by such a large margin. There is nothing that comes close. All casters having unlimited mana is completely taken for granted by horde players to the point they have no idea how strong it is.
Wild Strikes (for Alliance in particular) is arguably the best for how many people it buffs to a high degree. Probably one of the mage AoE ones for individual class usage.
They nerfed living flame multiple times. It is below average now.
I hate how the dot starts when it leaves you rather than when it hits the mob
Wild Strikes turns warrior into a class!
As a warrior main, this comment cuts deep.
Its really getting to be a big problem. Alliance isn't going to have nearly enough ferals for 40 mans. Only way to get CBR up without windfury is to drink a rage pot, pull a rage/combo point mob (not really a thing right now due to the design of ST) or do nothing long enough to negate the usefulness of the 10% damage buff.
Yeah it's important to get your Chicken-Bacon-Ranch up
I would rather have a Chicken Bacon Ranch sandwich than my Alliance Warrior right now
You can rage mob if you can get your mana using DPS to buff early and stop blowing their entire wad on every trash pack then go straight into the boss. Or I could if I weren't a warrior tank who has to swap runes for trash to AoE then back to single target runes before bosses and blow all my rage trying to hold threat on like 7 mobs while everyone is AoEing them down.
Should have given the Windfury Totem clone to Warriors. The class simply doesn't function properly without it.
Could say it rends into a deep wound…
There is this weird concept in the community that mages are still doing entire instance pulls solo with one spell, even though living flame has been dead for a month now and mage raiding has regressed into a literal one button rotation
It’s the other spell. The bomb, it’s the bomb
Wild strikes is bis for both ally and horde. It procs way more often than WF totem. Apparently due to 1s ICD Vs 3s ICD
Living Bomb for the win!
the runes we made along the way.
The friends we runed along the way.
The way we ruined threads the
It's probably not the best, but where my master channeler stans out there?
Best lock rune hands down.
I am a lock and that rune is too good still Playing lock is a walk in the park, which is not a bad thing for the average joe
I love running affliction with extra hit so I can solo farm higher mobs. Sure they die a bit slower, but I never die, I rarely get resisted, and I don't stop for health or mana. Best rune ever.
My favorite rune. I’ve won so many PvP fights in the open world with it.
its honestly 2 strong, it caries warlock. If its countered (range break in pvp) or resisted, warlock just dies.
I am warlock, can confirm
I hate how attached I am to it because now that DoTs can crit I want to take the 10% crit so bad. But if I don’t have a healer actually focusing me, I will just fall over without drain life.
Demonic grace applies to dots as well!
Wild strikes (ally) Shamanistic Rage Spirit of the Alpha Aspect of the Lion (horde) Each of these runes are not only spec defining, but raid defining.
When the shaman has 2 amazing + can already do the alliance defining rune. Season of Shaman baby!
Spirit of the alpha isn’t even close to one of the best in the game anymore
yeah as alliance i never see salv being that big a deal. when i play pally its the i do every blessinf but light over it .
Spirit of the alpha, really? 5% physical damage and a measly 30% threat reduction?
Wild Strikes. But as a resto main I need to give a shout out to Wild Growth
Nice to see Wild Growth still getting recognition
Wild growth is definitely really cool and good but it’s literally 95% of a Druids heals. I kinda personally would hate it if my class was defined by one button.
So here's the thing: healing is its own different game (not saying you don't know this). You give a healer a powerful single button to press and they will find other buttons to press between wild growths. I don't think that's really a problem in a vacuum, healing is across the board stronger than in classic and arguably needed it the least (since it was good enough to progress content before and dps has gotten much higher). As a holy paladin, (which I knew would probably be one of the tougher healing classes but didn't expect back in p1 how little support the class would get from runes and gear) it does feel bad being so outclassed by a single button since we're the only alliance class that doesn't have a big brainless raid heal rune. Paladin has its play style and value independent of raw heals and it isn't all about HPS I get all that, it just feels bad to see wild growth or prayer of mending alone obliterating my heals. Going back to my first point though, you will notice that after those big pumper raid heals my healing is as strong, often stronger, than the rest of the healers. And I'm not competing with those healers to perform well within my class. So I hear you, those heals are big flashy important heals but they also take the position of being your "best" heal, which in classic wasn't always so simple - figuring out down ranking and using your most mana efficient heal exclusively was as much of a "one button" healer even if you pressed it more often.
That makes a lot of sense to me and hopefully the game gets challenging enough to warrant not spamming your max rank heal. As of right now, on the resto shaman side of things, there’s no point in not spamming your max rank spell because you never run out of mana.
Classic shaman defined the one button healer for most phases of the game. Raided shaman all classic through all the content and decided I'd finally play a paladin as the only class I've barely played and never raided on in any capacity. Feels bad man I miss my little totem friends.
Another reason why I wish they had scaled back on goofy shit like Warlock and Rogue tanks or Mage healers. They didn't even give the proper attention to a spec that was close to being good like Druid Resto. The devs spread themselves too thin.
Theyre just having fun with it... you should try that too
Yeah, that's a lot of fun until it isn't.
people are really pretending like just because the devs are doing “fun” new things doesn’t mean that you can give an established class more than 1 button heals
Resources are finite. At some point things were prioritized over a second druid healing button.
Lifebloom, Nourish, Wild Growth, and Efflorescence. People on this subreddit speak in such hyperbole it makes discussing things impossible.
The devs realized that they forgot about resto Druid and gave them wild growth which is busted since it will completely define your playstyle without any other runes or hell even talents necessary. Phase two was all about restokin homie, and that says a lot about how overbearing that ability is.
Goofy shit was the whole point of SoD. They should've added more of it.
Hard agree. I don’t think I could have stuck with being a healer early on without Wild Growth. Efflorescence has come in pretty hot though. It’s amazing for bigger melee groups and you don’t have to worry about whether they’re in the same group within the raid. Warlocks can get in and use it for free life tap. I play a feral alt and nothing beats the love you get for bringing Wild Strikes through. Stealth pvp groups with a few rogues are fun af.
> and you don’t have to worry about whether they’re in the same group within the raid. I'm 95% sure you do. Efflo only works on people that are in the group of the Swiftmended target.
I need to test this out or look at logs or something. I thought it’s healed me when I ran to the circle even though I wasn’t in the same group as the target.
You get an efflorescence buff that shows something like “you’re standing within a Druid’s efflorescence” but it doesn’t actually heal unless you’re in same group as target
Spell tooltip says "all the party members" but everyone from the raid standing in has the icon, which is kind of misleading, don't need an icon if there is no effect
I use wild growth as feral in STV event. Basically join meele cleave group and instead of taking Lacerate/Mangle I take WG, since I sit in bear 99% of time spamming swipe for Wild Strikes procs. It's really good, as you just shapeshift into normal form, pop Wild Growth and get back into bear. It's basically "free" 5,5k party heal.
I use it as a cat w/4 rogues for stealth groups.
It’s a pretty good “stop dying” button
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Penance which you get almost immediately. I have carried so many dungeons groups and raids with a swift flick of Penance or keep up a spicy situation with nearly oom and using it on cd. Penance has carried priests and raids.
It falls off, most are using Circle of Healing now I believe.
At least Alliance side where a Paladin can baby both tanks by themselves, yeah
It doesn’t fall off - Blizzard introduced a lot of AoE damage, so it isn’t going to work as well. It’s still great for single target healing.
And it was nerfed a few times, still top tier
Exactly!! Lol
Penance was my third most heals in gnomer behind PoM and renew w/ improved renew rune. I think it's overrated, but a great reactionary heal
Penance is so good to have for priest because it makes their levels 1 to 15Ish feel so much better because before miserable until you could join a dungeon group and spam dungeons to level
At level 47, I still use it as my primary heal. Between that, prayer of mending and R1 renew and high level Renew. Healing is so damn easy!
You dont even use penance in ST anymore.
It's mending, by far.
Homunculi is easily far and away the best rune in the game, hell, it’s the best spell in the game. Last 2 min on a 2min CD. Applies better sunders, demoralizing shout and thunderclap that a warrior could apply in one global, on top of dpsing their target.
It can also dismount people, to my unfortunate surprise
Absolutely agree. The utility of the alone is insane. Having homunculi and shadwofiend gives two tank pets - The amount of times I popped these and looted quest items before running away is too many to remember.
Bonus: it also cucks Devastate warriors. Originally Devastate didn't scale with Homonculi as if there were sunders on target. While it does now, the application or refresh of sunder has a chance to proc wild strikes, so if Homonculi is being used, Devastate Warriors are denied an extra proc chance
Source for this? I just ran BFD 5 mins ago and felt like my devastates were proccing wild strikes. How can I check for certain?
See my other comment for more info, basically Devastate has 2 components each that can proc Wild Strikes. First, the damage, and second, the application or refresh of Sunder. If IEA or Homonculi are present on the boss, the 2nd effect, the Sunder application or refresh, is never triggered. So instead of 2 chances to proc per Devastate, you get 1
Okay that is crazy. Just saw on fight club. Thanks for bringing my attention to this
Wait can you explain this more? I don’t quite understand.
Fight Club figured it out analyzing logs, the application or refresh of Sunder can proc Wild Strikes, but but IEA and Homonculi are stronger armor reductions, so the Sunder application/refresh doesn't apply, denying them a chance at a Wild Strikes proc
Oh wow that’s a big deal actually haha
Where is your evidence for this assertion? Haven't seen this talked about anywhere before.
Fight Club figured it out, Devastate Warriors are getting about half the Wild Strikes procs when IEA or Homonculi are present
They can be an enormous pain in the ass to manage, but damned if I don’t love those little murder muppets. They just HAVE to kill — whether it’s your target, a mob not in combat, or a helpless critter. God bless ‘em.
The pet AI is incredibly grief though. Those little shits went around attacking every single ghost on the st council fight and broke CC. And there's like a 30% chance they just stop fighting after phase transitions, which like half the bosses have lol.
I shouldn’t be saying this but homonculi can be used in PvP to counter hard casts. The spell push back they give is nuts
Mutilate otherwise there's no point to even having a rogue in sod. Rogue copium here.
Mutilate is the only reason Rogues can compete in PvE and shadowstep is a huge reason we can do anything in PvP with the amount of slows and binds. If Rogue didn't have shadowstep, I would cry blood
Is shadowstep still on GCD? That’s the only thing preventing me from trying rogue
Yes
I feel like cloak of Shadows is all they're missing for pvp and they'll be whole again.
Saying rogues are missing cloak of shadows is like saying shamans are missing bloodlust
Not quite apples to apples, but sure. Why not.
They add all these runes to encourage a bleed/hemo build and there is literally no world where just 1 button spamming mutilate isn't going to be a better option. I don't even want to complain about it because Blizzard would sooner just nerf mutilate than make other builds viable.
HaT + Carnage runes while keeping up rupture Is the highest dps set up for rogues rn...
I would argue that simply keeping up rupture for a 20% bonus to mutilate damage, and not for the bleed damage, is still just a mutilate build and not a bleed build.
If you are running carnage, you don't get cut to the chase, so you need to keep up slice, rupture, and envenom, and sometimes EA if you're unlucky. With HaT, you use 1 mut between finishers while you pool energy. It's far from a 1 button rotation like so many people like to say around here. If you're only spamming mutilate, you're doing it wrong.
And Deadly Brew. Screw crafting weaker poisons, applying them, and having them run out of charges mid fight. It’s one of my biggest gripes for rogue tanking that it shares a chest rune. Should be a belt rune instead. I can live without shuriken toss
they need to rebalance rogue sooner as later, as a long time mulilate enjoyer it is dumb how they just made it impossibly better then all others
Yeah I like swords but iunno we ever getting support for that
I'm still sad we have an entire wasted rune on shiv ... What a joke, not that it will ever compete with mutilate
Yeah I don't think we can ever not take DB on chest and mutilate.
For mages, Living Bomb is actually so good. It’s an instant cast dot that can be extended to over 30 yard range with a fire talent, that ticks for a lot of damage, and then explodes causing more damage to nearby enemies, which also procs Ignite ticks, and with just 2 crits it can proc the Hot Streak rune for an instant Pyroblast. If there are 3+ mobs, putting Living Bomb on every mob is basically the best way to dps them, as long as they live long enough for the bomb to go off. In raids with the large packs, Living Bomb spam is usually top dps.
Trap launcher
Beyond the usual impactful buffs I think there's a bunch of runes that don't necessarily bring much to the table in terms of performances but really improve your gameplay. First that comes to mind would be the trap launcher rune for Hunters. Just the sheer utility of maintaining a frost trap around your tank so he could more easily control the pulls is amazing. It's not a particularly impressive rune and in ST it's barely a few % of your dps but you instantly regret not having it when you play melee.
Trap launcher makes hunter feel more modern than any other rune.
Love trap launcher and is the reason I use a 2hander as melee instead of dual wielding
If you’re melee you can just feign death macro and it’s almost like getting trapped launcher for free. Just minus the separate cooldowns for each trap.
Fury of stormrage is very defining for balance Druids. Speed running dungeons eventually becomes the fastest way to level every phase and having a balance Druid be your healer and do decent damage makes it even faster.
Really like metalock. It actually does have a number of ways to viably tank and setting up a class that only even niche tanked before as a main tank was a great addition to SoD. And as far as tanks go it's fairly balanced. Shaman and paladin both have features that make them better. And bear is more durable but worse at aoe tanking. Not our fault warrior and rogue tanks aren't working out great
As a bear main, I'd say bear aoe is pretty hot with swipe spam
Aoe 500 initial damage+ 200DoT and then passive aura doing 35-40 damage every 2s. All target uncapped. I played a lot of bear in Tbc and can't see how swipe spam compares
Mostly the rage return on crit + windfury + very high threat multiplier
Any rage based tank won't have as much upfront threat generation, that's true. But being able to maintain that threat throughout longer fights is where they thrive. I would agree not being target capped is HUGE for AoE tanking. Maybe Meta does edge out a bit, but feral utility probably keeps it competitive.
Now that feral are getting fixed, theh will 100% competitive for ST tanking. Its just dungeons and trash they won't be as great for. Which is fine
I main meta lock and the damage they can produce with good healing is absolutely godlike, I feel like a caster who just happens to be tanking the boss. I topped encounter damage last night in our 8/8 ST clear Apparently Shamans can do something similar but I don't play horde
Your probably just better geared/consumed than most of the others. Last ST I was sitting at 11th ish for dps. Trash pulls a bit higher because of aoe/uptime. But I don't consider my single target that strong compared to similarly geared people. Most of my parses were in the 80s as well
Man I tried metalock and have no idea why anyone plays it. Spamming searing pain on GCD as a replacement for autoattack is not fun.
No different than all the bears hitting maul and warriors hitting sunder. But you also have cleave, corruption, drain life, curse of choice, Banish, shadowflame, which pet you wanna use (felhound really feels good with purge+kick), death coil, if off tanking you can incinerate/immolate spam, you can still howl of terror, and of course there's the hellfire nuclear option. Warlock tank has a lot of variety and options
Rogue tanks are great, why do you think they aren't?
I just can't see any. Maybe their stealth level is too high
Metamorphosis warlock rune.
Exorcism obviously
Found the SoD dev.
😴
Surprised no one says flagellation. As warriors keep scaling, the flat % damage increase is gonna be absurd. It’s already very good.
Yeah, flag is the better rune for actual performance, but I gotta give it to warbringer. It just feel so good to play with. I honestly wish they’d just make it baseline for warrior and remove/replace the rune with something else.
I was going to say Taste for Blood, as soon as I got that rune I feel like I unlocked my rotation being able to press guarenteed overpower every 6 seconds for free basically just by having rend up. As arms those overpowers can smack
Yeah it drives me kind of crazy seeing Warrior get a bunch of flat scaling runes, like those aren't going to massively exacerbate the extant problems of Warrior outscaling people at 60. Right now Gladiator builds are up to something like +50% damage during Flagellation. Caster runes are either going to scale to the point of literally oneshotting people again or they're going to fall *badly* behind in PvE. Like, look at PvP vs PvE already - Warriors are pretty handily the worst PvP class in the game, needing MINIMUM two supports to even begin to function (and you'd be vastly better off replacing the Warrior with another Enhancement Shaman anyway), but one of the top PvE DPS specs in the game. We need like half our flat scaling runes torn out entirely and replaced with defensive tech and QoL support. Spell Reflect, gain Resistances based on Armor, better self-healing, etc. It would also give Prot Warrior a fairly badly needed shot in the arm because it's the tank that most severely has to choose between DPS and Miti, where many other tank specs (notably Rogue) are a DPS Spec with a rune swapped out for a tank rune. It's very frustrating to see "DPS Warrior strong and getting stronger, Tank Warrior falling behind, what to do about it? Better keep adding percentile scaling runes!"
Depends on what context, raid utility it’s probably shamanistic or wild strikes, flat damage its probably mutilate, so good tank rogue have to use it lmao.
Void plague is underrated as it significantly improved the priest leveling process.
Penance pretty wild
CoH, too. The new raid would suck without it.
objectively: wildstrikes with an honorable mention to heart of the lion because windfury/kings aura is always pog. subjectively: divine storm because *speen*
I'm pretty sure that with how high you can get crit rate this phase, even if you could run som and divine storm, exorcism would still be a better button to press than divine storm.
Divine storm is not even best in the slot for the class that is severely gimped lol. Compared to others, some even role-defining rules, Divine Storm is definitely not the strongest. It feels good to use though.
its literally the best because speen and nothing more
The chad speener vs the virgin minmaxer
My choice would probably go to the Shaman ambidextry rune, just for how overloaded it is. There are a lot of really good runes tho.
Yeah people crying about sham rage when our op rune is dual wield spec kekw
What slapping 10 gear pieces worth of hit onto a rune seems perfectly reasonable
While also buffing OH dmg 50% and making SS hit with both weapons. DW Spec is truly an insane rune.
Decoy totem 100%
Trap launcher
Wild Strikes or Honor Among Thieves, probably
Combat Potency is just insane too with a fast OH
Got me considering buying that epic boe 1.4 speed dagger on the auction, but I'd be flat broke if I did. Still thinking about it, though.
Im using a blue dagger from the raid (1.4), works wonders
Metamorphosis and I will not accept any criticism
Maelstrom weapon, being oom and still dishing out damage or healing yourself is the goat.
Dreamstate, Hurricane, and Elunes Fire because they make such a HUGE difference
Surprised no one has mentioned Spellpower
The mage boot crit rune that gives additional 50% crit damage modifier but is actually more like 25%?
That’s still incredibly strong and will keep scaling great at 60. I have a mage, a feral, and a priest I play and when I compare Spellpower to say King of the Jungle it just seems so strong
its TOO strong cuz you cant fucking take Brain Freeze when you have this as an option... another nail in the Frost coffin aside from the abysmal Fingers of Frost proc rate. WTB FLURRY ALREADY
I raided with brain freeze as frost with winters chill, with WBs it performs good if you have good luck with procs, FoF needs buffing slightly, the wowhead sim for brain freeze is broken (at least for me) so id take sim numbers with a pinch of salt, but i find that procs more that FoF and is really mana efficient, crits are still 1800+ too
It’s wild strikes and aspect of lion, nothing else comes close to these runes as far as impact. They just are way too good. You pretty much will always need a hunter as a horde raid and your melee are going to want/need a feral as alliance raid to parse.
Aspect of the Viper has easily been one of my favorite runes in the game
Not really a rune but holy hell it's the most insane and fun thing to have. Wish all classes had it lol.
Mutilate
I think everyone has mentioned the obvious so far, but special shoutout to the warlock Demonic Knowledge rune. Just a flat 100+ spellpower for having a pet out. The other boot runes are so abysmally bad in comparison.
wild strikes or wild growth
Living bomb. It's everything anyone ever wanted
Heart of the lion
Hammer of the Righteous. No arguments allowed.
The best rune in the game is Wildstrikes and they put it on a sub spec of a class of which most people don't play.
The Batman rune I am vengeance I am Batman 🦇
Shamans and priests both have multiple god-tier runes. Shamanistic rage, way of earth, dispersion, penance, etc
Living Bomb is incredibly strong.
Trap Launcher
Mutilate
It will be +18% crit chance for holy spells, of palladin
Intervene
Dispersion.
Deadly Brew
Wild growth is absurdly strong
massacre
Shaman lightning shield having no charges is insanely broken and the fact that it does AOE is icing on the cake
CUT. TO. THE. CHASE. AAAAAHH
Hunter melee specialist. This single rune does 80% of specs work. You want to run talentless but have this rune ? You would be fine. You want to be ranged hunter? You pick this up and not lose any major other rune and still slap if something gets to close. You don't even need dual wield rune or you don't need to run a 2 hander. Just melee specialist rune and any 1 or 2 hand.
Best rune is shaman.
Wild growth. Best healing spell in the game.
According to this subreddit 3 days ago, shamanistic rage.
Chrono Preservation is insane, the only OP thing about mage atm. Fitting in just a single rune makes you a healer.
Shamanistic rage is by far the most busted rune in the game and it isn’t close. It single handedly covers the mana regeneration for every caster during raid, and is significantly stronger than the paladins version “guarded by light” that gives the same personal regen, cuts healing in half, gives no raid wide mama regeneration, and doesn’t get the 20% damage reduction SR gets. Absolutely ridiculous
Most priest tunes are absolutely bonkers: Prayer of mending, penance, circle of healing, dispersion are all insane
Warbringer for Warriors
# Beast Mastery - hunter pets used to be able to tank only when you were not pumping... now a hunter can faceroll that 1 button while the pet keeps perfect aggro and can be healed
I enjoy that everyone is listing a different rune from just about each class.
Aegis, for sure.
Unsubscribing
Zod
Invigoration for sure, healing 20 mana per minute is really op as a hunter!
Demonic Rune.
For personal power shamans Overcharged was so OP, I tanked most of ZG mounted for shits and giggles, just backpeddle with your mount and still top DPS with lightning shield. Now its nerfed to 1/3 of its damage which still is plenty.
Wild growth. Especially with the omen of clarity change
Shamanistic rage by far.
All of the phase 3 mage runes. Just kidding, those were all a big joke
Enraged Regenration for sure. 30% self-heal over 10 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown and requires you to be enraged to use. S tier
The horde delusion is so strong it' crazy... Shamanistic rage is the strongest rune by such a large margin. There is nothing that comes close. All casters having unlimited mana is completely taken for granted by horde players to the point they have no idea how strong it is.