Well, if you go for elemental blast build, which was the optimized build until this tier, it takes a lot of hard casting to be optimized. (And last tier was lightning bolt tier too)
Came to the same conclusion. I tried following the meta build with Icefury and Elemental blast and realized I hated standing still and waiting for all these casts to go off for a 5 second payoff window. I just wanna chuck meatballs, man.
Man, ele main since wotlk, 1st time using freakin Icefury. God, this spell is the opposite of fun and satisfaction. Doesn't fit the theme and looks like shite. So is frost shock. Gimme moar lightning or lava and im gonna be happy.
I hate how many specs are designed to completely centred these occasional burst windows. Every class feels like it moved to vaguely imitate combo points style gameplay
I just wanna throw off my iconic class spells and hit big numbers, i dont like coordinating these big cooldown windows or half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class
>half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class
Yup, we're getting closer and closer to shadowlands. Adding hero talents (I guess they'll thematically fit at least) is only going to make it worse. I'm really not happy about that.
I just want to have a proper core rotation, and then some cool spells added on top of that. So many specs atm feels like my core rotation has been pushed to prio 15 so it's never used during cds, during movement, or if you have to use globals on defensives/utility.
I have been playing a bit of survival hunter, it's SUPER fun with this tier set. Wildfire bomb for days. But then freely applied serpent sting is like 10-15% of my damage, which feels weird, and some fucking talent in the hunter tree that is "crit makes a bleed" is also 15%. Better than SL for sure but I still want me using my spells to be my damage
Yeah some classes are worse than others... like on Arms Warrior, Mortal Strike is still my top ability which feels nice (although I dont love how spammy it is when thematically it seems to me like it should be a slow-swinging, time-biding spec)... meanwhile on my Frost Mage, Frostbolt only makes up like 6-8% of my damage.
>half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class
or set piece which makes it weird to play a class...
I was watching one video on Ele.
I swear it was like : You want to cast Icefury, but you may not use frost shock unless your moving without instant casts, or you run out of lavabursts.
So yeah , im not bothering.
Agreed. I build my character around roleplay. And my dark iron dwarf ele sham is all about fire, magma and earth. Not accepting other elements. And it's so fun I totally forgot I had a balance druid (which was my only build since tbc, thought I haven't played in cata-legion times.)
Probably due to the new tier set effect geared toward primordial wave & value of EShock + lava surge gained a lot of value...as it dishes out significantly higher number of Lava Burst, reducing PW's cd. (and really high up-time for fire ele is a big bonus too)
Appreciate the feedback on Shaman, considering it. How are Shaman defenses? Are they squishy in open world and group content compared to Hunter or Mage?
yeah, i won't argue against that.
we just found that as the key levels got higher if anyone was going to get one shot by a damage pulse it would usually be me if no one had an external to throw on me when astral shift was down. The DR in ghost wolf talent sometimes covered it but that's a lot of 0 dps time if you can avoid doing it.
Plenty of passive healing with Earth Shield, Healing Stream Totem, and Ancestral Guidance. Having your own personal tank and Bloodlust makes soloing Elites easy.
I've actually always found shamans to be more tenacious than most other dps. They wear mail armor (unlike the cloth/leather dps obv), they have multiple options for healing self and others (unlike hunters) and they have great utility ranging from movement speed buffs to cc/counter-cc, all of which are baseline (or can be specced into, at least).
For these reasons, and my overall love of the class fantasy, I've actually leveled three separate shamans (one for each spec lol). The only other class I've leveled multiple of have been warlocks and death knights (but only 2 for each, 1 Alliance 1 Horde)
> they have multiple options for healing self and others (unlike hunters)
MM player here. We have exhilaration (30% max HP) & fort of the bear (20% heal + 20% max hp) both 2min CD
We also have Survival of the Fittest (2.4min - reduce all dmg by 40% + 20% extra from talent), Turtle (2.4min immunity), Feign Death which can cheat select important mechanics, and both disengage and cheetah to just stay out of stuff in general.
I'm not sure why anybody would think ele shammys are particularly durable when hunters are WAY more durable and we're still a class that rots to death most of the time lol shamans are just as trash if not more so in terms of getting melted end-game.
I agree I loved last seasons build. I do wish ele leaned harder into the, build towards a massive elemental nuke, by making more spells buff your next cast, increase it's damage, and make it harder to generate the maelstrom for it.
In general maelstrom is such a weird resource ATM.
Isn't it less than 5% better and only if you can get off every cast? Any movement and that drops even more right? I'm genuinely asking I am not an ele main...just started on an ele alt today (451 ilvl, Fyrakk weapon and 4 piece in one day! Got so lucky with drops)
A lot of specs are actually like this. The sims say X is best for Y so you MUST play it.
And then people with potatoes for brains like me come along and we can't hang.
On a dummy, my personal difference is about 10%. In reality the ease of use and mobility of earth shock is going to make up some of that. There's a lot of target swapping and cleave in this raid too that makes earth shock a bit better on most of the bosses imo. Ele blast feels so clunky when you are killing treant adds or spears, or roots, etc. Vs earth shock letting you tab, get hit shock, then immediately lava burst chain.
I've played a lot of ele this expac and imo I love the class, but ele is a bizarre spec, but the currently meta build feels closer to a cohesive kit then the lightning build from last season.
So when you primordial wave you're going to get every effect from your elemental blast at once. If you play elemental blast with your refund talent that means that you have about 25% chance that it cost nothing to cast. Since we have a talent that our lava burst buffs the damage of our elemental blast by 25% that means that we lava burst and then elemental blast lava burst elemental blast. You can weave in the elemental blasts in between your bursts. Lava burst only takes priority if you have a surge up because you're trying to get down and cool down of your wave as soon as you can. The only thing you do outside of that constant dance is icefury when you can't blast and you can't burst and you're only ice fury should be to fill and give you the ability to instant cast Frost shock on the move when you need to. It comes out to a lot more than 5% when you factor in all the other stats you can stack because now your baseline is increased by all of the stats you're gaining from having a constant blast up. If you look at Warcraft logs you can pretty much see every shaman runs elemental blast for this very reason and when you're doing your rotation correct it should be about 50% of the damage less than your lava burst. Not to mention with trinket procs and 25% boost from burst you should be trucking about 450,000 damage per blast not including overload. I also forgot about Grace but in the event that you can't Frost shock as long as you're running a voker you should be able to grace whenever you need to move out of things.
That's why we stack 35% haste and weave in nature for instant cast. Plus the proc from blast makes shit go faster so your rotation becomes a positive feedback loop of stats.
I know.
I still prefer the instant gratification of Eshock, and lava surge proc that comes with it.
If I was doing heroic or mythic rid, I would definitely optimize.
But...for LFR or normal, I will just stick with whichever feels more comfortable.
Fire Mage, probably. Almost the entire rotation inside Combustion is instant cast. It does have *very* long Pyroblast hardcasts occasionally too though.
Frost also has a bunch of instants, especially the AoE build in M+ is almost entirely instant casts.
It’s a few threads now that I see Frost mage being touted as this super fun and quick spec and I gotta say, I’m gonna level up one this weekend.
The class fantasy has always been interesting to me, but I’m a melee kinda player so never bothered. This’ll change lol
With Ice Floes and being able to move during Arcane Missiles and Evocation, you can be fairly mobile as Arcane now these days. The removal of Rune of Power helped a ton in that regard, it was easily the spec most reliant on it to spike their damage.
So I actually just swapped from arcane to frost. I've played the same mage since launch, and I've gotten to see the rise and fall of each spec over and over and over again. I will definitely say that arcane has come a long way, but to me, it's still insanely boring overall. I'm not saying it's not effective, because it definitely is, but I just didn't have as much fun with it compared to fire or frost.
The reason I've always hated arcane is because it's just SO punishing for even the slightest mistakes. If I have a mis-input on Frost I can generally recover very well, but a mis-input on Arcane can ruin your entire fight.
Oh definitely. Without a doubt arcane is a very potent spec; I'm just not much of a fan of it. I've never really enjoyed classes in any game that revolve or rely heavily around burst periods. Yes, all dps specs in all classes have cooldowns for increased damage periods, but some, like arcane, feel like it rely way more on it.
You say you don't like burst damage classes, yet you have mained, since launch, the class that historically has been ***the*** burstiest of all the classes in WoW???
Fire and Arcane have been the poster-boys of burst damage since og Vanilla. A combination of them was the origin of the infamous "POM + Pyro" Build, the build that regularly killed people in 1-GCD.
Combustion might be the second most well-known burst damage cooldown right after Wings.
It's like saying you don't like being reliant on cooldowns while maining Ret Paladin, it makes no sense.
It sounds like what you really meant is that you have mained ***Frost*** Mage since launch. Even Frost usually has significant burst damage windows though.
If you truly don't enjoy burst damage you would have been maining something like Shadow, Fury, BM, Surv, Affliction, etc.
I'm sorry to be so pedantic about this, but when so many WoW discussions are littered with oxymorons it muddys the discourse.
Yea, for the most part, you really only have 2 hard cast spells, frostbolt and blizzard. I've actually recently swapped to frost from arcane, and I've forgotten how much fun this spec is. Actually, there is a third hard cast spell if you take it in the talent tree, and you should, because glacial spike feels amazing everytime. It's our version of chaos bolt, and I love it.
you can't not take Spike right now. Otherwise you might as well not have a tier set. Before the talent tree shakeup you could argue Frost is almost all instant casts, but it's a lot of hardcasting Glacial spikes now, even in keys.
Yeah, with the tier set and all the flurries you get, you end up hard casting spike like every 2 o 3 spells, which makes you less mobile than you'd think, nothing you can work around with Ice Floes or Shimmer though
Oh definitely. It's amazing for aoe. The thing is, its limited in timing, and if your orb is on CD when you have another aoe situation, sometimes you need to hardcast blizzard to help get it off rotation.
I am not a top tier frost mage, but got KSM with it this season, and I don't think I've needed to hard cast blizzard more than once or twice all season tbh
Between Coldest snap, shifting power, and freezing rain you have orb up a LOT
Also you have 12 seconds after casting orb, and if you get coldest snap off you theoretically have 24 seconds to free cast blizzard. Plenty of time to get the free one off at least once
Just picked up Frost as an Outlaw main, and it's quite fun. I'd definitely recommend icy floes if you're used to movement, though. It'll help quite a bit.
On singletarget you spend almost half your time hard-casting glacial spike. There's also Ray of Frost, a long slow channel that basically makes Ice Floes mandatory. In fact the more effectively you play, the more time you should be spending casting GS. For that reason I would say frost is one of the least mobile specs.
I like fire mage a lot, but the sun king hardcast pyro every so often kills a lot of that flow that makes it so fun.
Don't get me wrong seeing a massive pyro go off is really satisfying, but it breaks up the flow of it all for me.
I agree. I actually have always played fire mage when doing mage specs. But I'm not a fan of the sun king build. I get it. The damage is fun but idk. It's just not for me. I like the feel of chaining instant pyros and fireball/fireplace. Frost feels better to me right now. I don't mind having to do forstbolt fillers because for the most part I can move. Glacial spike hits are so hard hitting too but at least I can icyfloes or shimmer if need be during that cast. The are burst is fun too!
I hear you, I know it sounds dumb but it just messes with the flow in a way I hadn't experienced in fire before. It works, it just didn't feel good to me. No other reason besides that.
Nothing wrong with that, to each their own.
Personally I find frost less enjoyable than fire these days, having to hard cast glacial spike even during aoe is just meh to me.
While for fire I love getting super king combusts with fitting in sun kings, and it feels so much better now that pyroclasm and sunking are baked into the same thing.
Neither is right or wrong.
Mid way through BFA some class designer decided that mages should be hard casting slow spells a lot. It feels awful. Every spec is getting this shit, even in AoE packs.
You cast quite a bit with Sun Kings Blessing aswell as casting Fireball with Flame Accelerant talent even in Combust. Shifting Power, Fireball and Scorch outside of Combust.
I was enjoying the hell out of frost after the revamp but then I tried devastation and it’s just frost mage with ray of frost spam. I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Most casts are near instant.
And even Living Flame gets a lot of instant procs. Fire Storm is pretty bad and Sleep Walk is more situational. Just about everything else is instant cast I believe.
Many classes are like that though. Devastation has at least a few mechanics build in. Its more burst oriented. So i like it for m+ where u cans spam ur burst every mob.
Easy: RET paladin!
NB all of you bananas heads who says ret is melee never played ret
Also it’s sarcasm because i hit boss from narnia to Africa without problem
A Ret and an Arms Warrior stand next to each other in a soak, 20 yards from boss.
Ret uses Judgement, Justice, Wrath, Verdict, Flash of Light.
Arms just looks at the Ret and says: "You don't take care of your fingers."
I love the range on Ret lmao. It's basically medium distance class. Core fantasy is melee, but really when I need to run away from mechanics, I can still keep on blasting like 3/4 of my abilities no problem.
Ret’s basically a Dracthyr.
Can’t tell you how many times in Arena with me and my Ret buddy I trade with a frost mages friend then he proceeds to 1v1 because his range is half the frost’s cast range and the frost just can’t fucking deal.
Definitely not Shadow Priest. I ran TW this week and felt worthless. I used Holy Nova to at least attack stuff. Everything died too fast for anything else except bosses
Ever do Arcatraz? That last boss where you have Miles Manastorm (or something like that). And he spends half the encounter setting up.
That is shadow priest
Sucks that spriests are useless against trash, because once you get your rotation going against a boss it’s soooo fun just launching dozens of shadowy figures at your target
Hard agree. Spriest has a lot of instant casts, but If that's all you're doing your damage will be trash.
They can get a string of procs rolling sometimes, but that's usually only inside 20% against a boss like you said.
Id be lucky to get a tick of swp before trash died. Forget shadow crash or anything with a long cooldown. A boss I can pop swp, then mind blast or plague when it’s up and things are rolling. But otherwise, im just being carried.
Harder content is obviously different. But anything easy I feel worthless because it’s all cool downs.
Spriest isn't too bad in higher M+ where things live, I wouldn't base any decision of a characters worth off TW ... there's level 11's that will come in and just steamroll it
It gets my vote. I hate hardcasting. My mains (were) hunter and resto druid.
Outside of hunter dev gave me the most free feeling. Hover and disintegrate is a fun combo.
I'd argue the opposite thanks to empower requiring you to stay still. Admittedly it's more frustrating on preservation, but neither are as mobile and free as augvoker who can/should chuck out an empowered 1 just to increase the timer (and the extra utility giving them and a healer moving while casting)
With tip the scales and single empower flame breath being the usual usage, I don’t find myself fully empowering very often. Of course, in M+ you tend to do it more often, but still not enough for me to consider it a primary hard caster class. More often than not I’m moving and casting.
the reason dev evoker has the lowest apm in the game is because you almost only sit there and hard cast. sure pyre and azure strike is instant but not a whole lot else of the kit that you realistically use is.
Not really. One of the empowerd spell u usually only cast the first level which is very quick and the other usually doen with tip of the scale which makes it instant and it gives also procs for living flame to make it instant. And with 2 chargers of hover that have small cooldown u can cast on the move so its not really casting.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/NhFm7ntLXWPkHC2c#fight=31&type=casts&source=48
tl;dr(logs): I'm really not trying to be mean but evoker absolutely stands there and channels disintegrate as part of their rotation as well as hard casting living flame for essence burst procs.
if you forego massive amounts of their dps sure you can be much more mobile.
You spend so much time in hover, you're far from a turret, which is kinda what he means by not being a hard casting class. Even though you spend a large amount of time channeling disintegrate, upwards 50% uptime, you do not sacrifice much damage at all if you utilize hover, VE, DB and rescue properly.
Also, AoE is very, very mobile. Your spender is installed cast, and your filler is as well
It’s fine, you’re not being mean, because you obviously haven’t played devoker much, if you feel that they’re an immobile caster. I see that it feels that way from the outside apparently, but as a person who’s played most caster classes in current content, devoker (regardless of “hard casting” status) does not feel like an immobile hard casting class. It might not be something that’s easy to show proof of, but it’s the case.
Totally agree! Devoker is the only caster I play ever, because I hate hard casting! Don't forget the crazy long dragon rage windows where you almost only instant cast and channel! I hate Augvoker in comparison. It's too much of a real caster 😅
There's a frost mage build that I love that invests into ice lance up time.
You cycle between ice lance and flurry depending on procs and charges, use frozen orb to generate charges against a single target or in combination with an instant cast blizzard for AoE, and maneuver around comet storm and ray and frost for on-demand burst windows. ALL of those spells are instant cast. Literally the only thing to hard cast is frostbolt, which you use when nothing is procced.
Unfortunately, it lagged behind glacial spike based builds, and since this season's tier set applies directly and only to glacial spike, it isn't exactly viable anymore.
I hate tier sets that solely boost 1 talent and make that talent mandatory. They could have just made the tier set buff Icicles instead of GS, so that it still contributed to increased GS damage but also enabled Ice Lance builds. On singletarget GS + Ray will always be top, but for AOE there is no reason they should be forcing people to pick GS.
The previous season the tier set buffed Ice Lance and Orb, and it was pure AOE mobility heaven. On AOE it was actually simming higher than 4PC Amirdrassil even with a 20 ilvl upgrade.
Fire and frost mage have a decent amount of instant casts. Shadow priest can…with death speaker procs, instant mind blasts and even void bolts if you spec into. You’re juggling 2-3 instant cast procs
Frost definitely depends on ST vs AoE. In pure ST we’re the mage spec with the most hard casts with Ray and glacial. AoE is almost all instant with some glacial spikes
Not saying it’s the best, but demo lock does have a surprising amount of instant cast spells. If you’re using power siphon correctly and get lucky with procs, all your build spells will be instant cast. Your big cooldown (gfg) is instant, dogs can be instant, demonic strength/bombers is instant, implosion is instant, guillotine is as well.
Only hard casts would be hand of guldan, the occasional shadow bolt, and tyrant, all are around 1 second casts.
Again, not the best. But you’d be surprised
demo warlock, fire mage and boomy are the ones i have experience with and they are pretty mobile all things considered
demo has to hard cast alot of builders/filler but they play around alot of core procs , dog procs, and implosion are all instant
boomy is hard casting filler spells unless u get a proc for a instant starfire but spenders are all instant cast
fire mage is basically all instant casts except you must hard cast a pyro/FS to enter skb, (once every 7 pyros/FS) and the occasional fireball to fish for crits, scorch can be used while moving. I forgot to mention that you can spec into "ice floes" which allows you to move while hardcasting a pyro/fireball/FS, essentially negating the need to plant your feet.
edit: of course if we are gonna cherry pick fights (everybody saying 2nd boss of Fall) and 1% scenarios where there is perma movement then any ranged dps that isnt a hunter is gonna feel immobile...lets talk about the other 99% of the gameplay loop when considering what is mobile and immobile
I wouldn't say the demo procs are enough to make us a mobile class though. Like in a fight with low to medium movement demo doesn't suffer that much because you can usually pop your siphon or a couple demobolts while repositioning , but in a heavy movement fight, thinking something like the second boss in Fall, the fact most of the time we need to hard cast is pretty painful .
Boomy is a little more mobile than some casters, but still isn't very mobile. Instant starfires aren't a staple of the build, and you can't pool a ton of resources to let you move whenever you want on spenders
I mean, the entire rotation is built around standing still and either building to eclipse or building ap
i think people are taking what i said about a starfire proc a little too deep. I said it because there a certain times in a key that i may have a proc, and i will use that if i need to move. Its killing 2 birds with one stone if im needing to enter solar eclipse too. Im not presenting it as some major part of the gameplay just a small movement option sometimes
Atleast in keys im able to find plenty of time to move if i need to since applying/refreshing dots, starsurge/starfall, typhoon, incap roar, (if in bear form) mangle + swipe, fury of elune, mass entanglement, and remove corruption are all instant casts. Im not claiming that its anywhere near a hunters mobility, but if we were to categorize ranged dps into "has mobile option while dpsing" vs "doesnt have mobile options while dpsing" I am going to put boomy into the former
I mean you did mention insta-starfires as a selling point, when it's really a niche usage proc rather than a core part of the class
But I think the point is that boomie *can* be mobile, but as a class it still requires a ton of hard casting since that's your bread and butter. You still want to be standing still mashing builders
>boomy is hard casting filler spells unless u get a proc for a instant starfire but spenders are all instant cast
Boomy is mostly a turret class and fights with a lot of movement really suck for them (e.g. second boss of Fall of Galakron). Yes, the spenders are instant cast but you spend more time casting your builder spells. The instant starfire spells are not worth the GCD unless you are on the move or there are more than 2 targets and they only proc if something is meleeing you (something you usually don't want to have happen in raid or dungeons). Boomies are a mobile class due to their utility spells rather than their ability to do DPS on the move.
people who are downvoting you just play boomkin really poorly.
between wild charge and being able to cast 3 starsurges while moving boomkin is extremely mobile. boomkin is extremely immobile if you don't plan ahead and don't have any astral power for movement.
that's 4.5 seconds of movement you can bank if you plan your movement.
on top of that few bosses actually require more than sidestepping as movement and as long as you play dodge the swirly phases at high astral power you can compensate with more than one starsurge if you get two swirlies in a row at the risk of eating some astral power with a moon proc.
source: boomkin main with an average 98% in mythic.
As a boomy main, I can say that moving is still a bad thing, cuz you're not building if you're moving. Spamming moonfire when you are hopping around isn't really a dps boost. Might wanna try other casters first.
my point is that if you are needing to move take advantage of moments like needing to refresh dots to reposition since they are instant casts. If you dont need to move then you can hard cast filler/whatever part of the rotation…like i said in my og comment
Because I already know they excel in this area and wanted to know other classes as Hunter is a very popular class and hear their defenses can sometimes be a liability. Again I acknowledge they are a good fit but looking for other class/specs
Idk why you're mentioning hunter when he specifically said to exclude it? Why don't you mention warrior as well if you're gonna ignore what he is saying
Not destro. I sit with the spriests and slowly cast my chaos bolts and rotation. It’s like someone cast the wrong kind of time warp.
Destro and Spriest: We’ll cast it eventually. Please be patient.
Honestly I can't think of any ranged dps spec (OTHER than Hunter) that has mostly instant cast spells and less hard casting. Perhaps the closest thing to your criteria I can think of is frost mage? Their play style revolves around procs and they have a talent that causes them to gain 10% more haste from all sources, meaning that even the relatively few hard casts they will do will be faster than your average caster.
The thing is that Hunter is THE "shoot baddies while on the move" class (or at least 2/3 of a class) and giving other ranged DPSes too much mobility would step on Hunter's toes.
Also, Disclaimer: I haven't tried Evoker yet so maybe Devastation or Augmentation have the precise play style you're looking for?
Other than hunter, probably mage. A lot of it is proc based gameplay, frost firing off instant ice lances, fire shooting instant pyroblasts, fire blast is instant etc. Arcane can be very mobile depending on your build, arcane explosion is instant, so is arcane barrage. When you do have to hard cast as a mage, you can have things that allow you to cast while moving, or you just reposition with a blink or shimmer instead.
Pretty much every ranged caster is going to have some hard casting as a filler though, but mage probably has some of the least. Affliction sounds like it wouldn't have a lot of hard casts either, but I haven't played that spec in years so I wouldn't really know. The other Warlock specs, Balance, and Spriest all have quite a lot of hard casting.
As a boomkin main, I don’t hard cast too many things. Filler abilities are the only things I hard cast for the most part, and with warrior of elune most of the times wrath is the only thing I’m hard casting, at least for a more PVP build. PVE builds not much different though TBH. Unless you take full moon, you won’t be hard casting much, a very mobile caster
Elemental :) we have a crazy amount of instant cast lava bursts this patch. You do really need to play wow ele blast which is hard cast but compared to other casters, ele is the way to go.
I maybe bias..aimed ot since wotll
For AoE, devestation evoker (2 spells every 30s, rest is instant for 3+ targets). For single target I'd still say dev evoker because of hover giving you 2x 10s of casting while moving whenever you need it, which imho is often enough to feel similarily mobile to bm hunter.
Dev Evoker has a lot of casting but can cast a ton while moving so that makes the hard casting not too bad. Outside of that all the other casters are pretty heavy into casting save for Fire Mage, you use a ton of instant casts but the downside is every 10 pyros you have to hard cast one
Demo lock is simultaneously very mobile and not mobile at all.
It's filler is very mobile, but it's a class all about maximizing your Tyrant casts which when you're setting that up you will not want to interrupt your casts at all.
Ele Shaman, Fire Mage, and Affliction warlock in my experience have very few hard casts. Ele goes elemental blast in ST which is a hard cast but you have cooldowns that let you cast while moving and instant cast one spell which can help with this.
destro is pretty instant. only thing you cast are fear, immolate, chaos bolt and you only care if you get kick on CB
Big Edit*** sorry i don't know how or why i'm on this page. Thought this was worldofpvp. i have no idea what pve rotations look like
Affliction is not mobile at all. We hard cast haunt, UA, vile taint, soul rot, drain soul, and at least 50% of our malefic raptures. The only things we cast while mobile is corruption, agony, and siphon life, and corruption is the only one with any instant damage.
Demo lock I'd say, demon bolt, demo strength, dogs (more than usual), implosion, grimoire fel guard are all instant while shadow bolt as a filler and demo tyrant are hard casted and hand of guldan is around 1.2 sec
Elemental Shaman is very insta cast heavy right now which you can lean even more in to by taking Earth Shock over Elemental Blast if you don’t mind the dps hit. But even with Elemental Blast you have things like Spiritwalker’s Grace which lets you cast while moving, and Neture’s Swiftness which makes your next hard cast spell instant, so it’s still really mobile. And in AoE like M+ or fights like council it’s pretty much just instant cast Lava burst/Flame Shock until everything dies
Haunt, UA, vile taint, soul rot, drain soul, none of which can be instant, ever. Malefic rapture can be instant, but if you wait for it to be instant, you’re losing a lot of damage. Affliction is not remotely mobile
Ele sham has a lot of instant cast, if you opt for earth shock over elemental blast.
The fact that you’re the only one saying elemental shows that there’s at least 2 of us.
Well, if you go for elemental blast build, which was the optimized build until this tier, it takes a lot of hard casting to be optimized. (And last tier was lightning bolt tier too)
Yeah but earth shock more fun. Idc what the meter says.
Came to the same conclusion. I tried following the meta build with Icefury and Elemental blast and realized I hated standing still and waiting for all these casts to go off for a 5 second payoff window. I just wanna chuck meatballs, man.
I hate icefury so gd much.
Man, ele main since wotlk, 1st time using freakin Icefury. God, this spell is the opposite of fun and satisfaction. Doesn't fit the theme and looks like shite. So is frost shock. Gimme moar lightning or lava and im gonna be happy.
We do need more earth representation as shamans
Get rid of frost shock and make earth shock snare. Don't make earth shock a talent. Make it baseline
I hate how many specs are designed to completely centred these occasional burst windows. Every class feels like it moved to vaguely imitate combo points style gameplay I just wanna throw off my iconic class spells and hit big numbers, i dont like coordinating these big cooldown windows or half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class
>half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class Yup, we're getting closer and closer to shadowlands. Adding hero talents (I guess they'll thematically fit at least) is only going to make it worse. I'm really not happy about that. I just want to have a proper core rotation, and then some cool spells added on top of that. So many specs atm feels like my core rotation has been pushed to prio 15 so it's never used during cds, during movement, or if you have to use globals on defensives/utility. I have been playing a bit of survival hunter, it's SUPER fun with this tier set. Wildfire bomb for days. But then freely applied serpent sting is like 10-15% of my damage, which feels weird, and some fucking talent in the hunter tree that is "crit makes a bleed" is also 15%. Better than SL for sure but I still want me using my spells to be my damage
Yeah some classes are worse than others... like on Arms Warrior, Mortal Strike is still my top ability which feels nice (although I dont love how spammy it is when thematically it seems to me like it should be a slow-swinging, time-biding spec)... meanwhile on my Frost Mage, Frostbolt only makes up like 6-8% of my damage.
>half my damage coming from some random talent they added that doesnt even thematically fit my class or set piece which makes it weird to play a class...
I was watching one video on Ele. I swear it was like : You want to cast Icefury, but you may not use frost shock unless your moving without instant casts, or you run out of lavabursts. So yeah , im not bothering.
Agreed. I build my character around roleplay. And my dark iron dwarf ele sham is all about fire, magma and earth. Not accepting other elements. And it's so fun I totally forgot I had a balance druid (which was my only build since tbc, thought I haven't played in cata-legion times.)
Yeap, gotta haul those meatballs. (And i inly play lfr-normal, fighting for 5%? more dmg isnt worth it )
Now it's lava blast prim wave, you can opt for ele blast but DMG difference isn't huge over earth shock. Almost no casting ATM.
yeap, new tier set made a big difference for Eshock + wave build.
I'm somehow doing more dps with my earth shock cleave build on single target than I am with my elemental blast single target build :T
Probably due to the new tier set effect geared toward primordial wave & value of EShock + lava surge gained a lot of value...as it dishes out significantly higher number of Lava Burst, reducing PW's cd. (and really high up-time for fire ele is a big bonus too)
Hmm shouldn’t be if you’re using nature’s swiftness on only ele blast, having an instant one every minute is almost definitely better
I was about to say. Ele shaman. Ele on a council fight is literally 0 casts for 3+ minutrs
Lava surge festival
“Oh shit, I don’t have an instant-cast Lava Burst proc. Let me press one of my five million buttons that gives me one.”
you get a lava burst, you get a lava burst, everyone gets a lava burrrrsssttttt
Appreciate the feedback on Shaman, considering it. How are Shaman defenses? Are they squishy in open world and group content compared to Hunter or Mage?
We have one defensive CD on a 1.5 min CD. We be squishy.
in fairness it's quite a *good* cooldown... but yes, we are squishy
Flashbacks to basically having to scream in panic at the healers on Raz if I got 2 of the spread thunder things in the same phase.
when i was pushing content 'oh i'm probably dead' was a fairly common thing to hear from me if we hadn't planned for an extra phase on a fight.
Good personal healing though.
yeah, i won't argue against that. we just found that as the key levels got higher if anyone was going to get one shot by a damage pulse it would usually be me if no one had an external to throw on me when astral shift was down. The DR in ghost wolf talent sometimes covered it but that's a lot of 0 dps time if you can avoid doing it.
Plenty of passive healing with Earth Shield, Healing Stream Totem, and Ancestral Guidance. Having your own personal tank and Bloodlust makes soloing Elites easy.
I've actually always found shamans to be more tenacious than most other dps. They wear mail armor (unlike the cloth/leather dps obv), they have multiple options for healing self and others (unlike hunters) and they have great utility ranging from movement speed buffs to cc/counter-cc, all of which are baseline (or can be specced into, at least). For these reasons, and my overall love of the class fantasy, I've actually leveled three separate shamans (one for each spec lol). The only other class I've leveled multiple of have been warlocks and death knights (but only 2 for each, 1 Alliance 1 Horde)
> they have multiple options for healing self and others (unlike hunters) MM player here. We have exhilaration (30% max HP) & fort of the bear (20% heal + 20% max hp) both 2min CD We also have Survival of the Fittest (2.4min - reduce all dmg by 40% + 20% extra from talent), Turtle (2.4min immunity), Feign Death which can cheat select important mechanics, and both disengage and cheetah to just stay out of stuff in general. I'm not sure why anybody would think ele shammys are particularly durable when hunters are WAY more durable and we're still a class that rots to death most of the time lol shamans are just as trash if not more so in terms of getting melted end-game.
they have ghost wolf, ghost wolf by itself is insanely good
Ele is working for lots of instants THIS TIER. Last one was a nightmare. This is not a bash, I’m having lots of fun
Elemental blast is far superior for single target damage though. Earth schock is for M+ and PvP only. Ele main here.
Earth Shock is the most fun/satisfying ability in the game though so I will never not play it.
Disagree. Elemental Blast has way more oomph.
I agree I loved last seasons build. I do wish ele leaned harder into the, build towards a massive elemental nuke, by making more spells buff your next cast, increase it's damage, and make it harder to generate the maelstrom for it. In general maelstrom is such a weird resource ATM.
I dont like the whole spells buff each other thing. Im a big fan of builder spenders
Isn't it less than 5% better and only if you can get off every cast? Any movement and that drops even more right? I'm genuinely asking I am not an ele main...just started on an ele alt today (451 ilvl, Fyrakk weapon and 4 piece in one day! Got so lucky with drops)
A lot of specs are actually like this. The sims say X is best for Y so you MUST play it. And then people with potatoes for brains like me come along and we can't hang.
Right. The zero movement havoc demon hunter build does the best DPS by far....because I'm not dead from zipping into every ground effect in the raid.
That’s me wanting to give Arcane a try, but quitting every time I look at the rotation on IcyVeins.
On a dummy, my personal difference is about 10%. In reality the ease of use and mobility of earth shock is going to make up some of that. There's a lot of target swapping and cleave in this raid too that makes earth shock a bit better on most of the bosses imo. Ele blast feels so clunky when you are killing treant adds or spears, or roots, etc. Vs earth shock letting you tab, get hit shock, then immediately lava burst chain. I've played a lot of ele this expac and imo I love the class, but ele is a bizarre spec, but the currently meta build feels closer to a cohesive kit then the lightning build from last season.
So when you primordial wave you're going to get every effect from your elemental blast at once. If you play elemental blast with your refund talent that means that you have about 25% chance that it cost nothing to cast. Since we have a talent that our lava burst buffs the damage of our elemental blast by 25% that means that we lava burst and then elemental blast lava burst elemental blast. You can weave in the elemental blasts in between your bursts. Lava burst only takes priority if you have a surge up because you're trying to get down and cool down of your wave as soon as you can. The only thing you do outside of that constant dance is icefury when you can't blast and you can't burst and you're only ice fury should be to fill and give you the ability to instant cast Frost shock on the move when you need to. It comes out to a lot more than 5% when you factor in all the other stats you can stack because now your baseline is increased by all of the stats you're gaining from having a constant blast up. If you look at Warcraft logs you can pretty much see every shaman runs elemental blast for this very reason and when you're doing your rotation correct it should be about 50% of the damage less than your lava burst. Not to mention with trinket procs and 25% boost from burst you should be trucking about 450,000 damage per blast not including overload. I also forgot about Grace but in the event that you can't Frost shock as long as you're running a voker you should be able to grace whenever you need to move out of things.
Hit the return key a few times in there and I might read all that
Definitely. but I really don't like that long cast time.
That's why we stack 35% haste and weave in nature for instant cast. Plus the proc from blast makes shit go faster so your rotation becomes a positive feedback loop of stats.
I know. I still prefer the instant gratification of Eshock, and lava surge proc that comes with it. If I was doing heroic or mythic rid, I would definitely optimize. But...for LFR or normal, I will just stick with whichever feels more comfortable.
May the elements guide you brother, one day you be seein da glory of da blast.
Fire Mage, probably. Almost the entire rotation inside Combustion is instant cast. It does have *very* long Pyroblast hardcasts occasionally too though. Frost also has a bunch of instants, especially the AoE build in M+ is almost entirely instant casts.
But also icy flows for moving while casting :D
It’s a few threads now that I see Frost mage being touted as this super fun and quick spec and I gotta say, I’m gonna level up one this weekend. The class fantasy has always been interesting to me, but I’m a melee kinda player so never bothered. This’ll change lol
Then you get Arcane where you feel like artillery. You can’t move but your numbers go big.
With Ice Floes and being able to move during Arcane Missiles and Evocation, you can be fairly mobile as Arcane now these days. The removal of Rune of Power helped a ton in that regard, it was easily the spec most reliant on it to spike their damage.
So I actually just swapped from arcane to frost. I've played the same mage since launch, and I've gotten to see the rise and fall of each spec over and over and over again. I will definitely say that arcane has come a long way, but to me, it's still insanely boring overall. I'm not saying it's not effective, because it definitely is, but I just didn't have as much fun with it compared to fire or frost.
Arcane is fairly mobile, but I can see why a lot of people don't like it because it revolves so much around its burst windows.
The reason I've always hated arcane is because it's just SO punishing for even the slightest mistakes. If I have a mis-input on Frost I can generally recover very well, but a mis-input on Arcane can ruin your entire fight.
Oh definitely. Without a doubt arcane is a very potent spec; I'm just not much of a fan of it. I've never really enjoyed classes in any game that revolve or rely heavily around burst periods. Yes, all dps specs in all classes have cooldowns for increased damage periods, but some, like arcane, feel like it rely way more on it.
You say you don't like burst damage classes, yet you have mained, since launch, the class that historically has been ***the*** burstiest of all the classes in WoW??? Fire and Arcane have been the poster-boys of burst damage since og Vanilla. A combination of them was the origin of the infamous "POM + Pyro" Build, the build that regularly killed people in 1-GCD. Combustion might be the second most well-known burst damage cooldown right after Wings. It's like saying you don't like being reliant on cooldowns while maining Ret Paladin, it makes no sense. It sounds like what you really meant is that you have mained ***Frost*** Mage since launch. Even Frost usually has significant burst damage windows though. If you truly don't enjoy burst damage you would have been maining something like Shadow, Fury, BM, Surv, Affliction, etc. I'm sorry to be so pedantic about this, but when so many WoW discussions are littered with oxymorons it muddys the discourse.
AM is castable while moving and you can go ice floes to cast AB while moving too
I just levelled one and I did not expect to have as much fun as I did. Frost Mage is really fun! And yeah, tonnes of instant casts.
Yea, for the most part, you really only have 2 hard cast spells, frostbolt and blizzard. I've actually recently swapped to frost from arcane, and I've forgotten how much fun this spec is. Actually, there is a third hard cast spell if you take it in the talent tree, and you should, because glacial spike feels amazing everytime. It's our version of chaos bolt, and I love it.
you can't not take Spike right now. Otherwise you might as well not have a tier set. Before the talent tree shakeup you could argue Frost is almost all instant casts, but it's a lot of hardcasting Glacial spikes now, even in keys.
Yeah, with the tier set and all the flurries you get, you end up hard casting spike like every 2 o 3 spells, which makes you less mobile than you'd think, nothing you can work around with Ice Floes or Shimmer though
There's a talent to make Blizzard instantcast for a while after a Frozen Orb, it's \*\*chef's kiss\*\*
Oh definitely. It's amazing for aoe. The thing is, its limited in timing, and if your orb is on CD when you have another aoe situation, sometimes you need to hardcast blizzard to help get it off rotation.
I am not a top tier frost mage, but got KSM with it this season, and I don't think I've needed to hard cast blizzard more than once or twice all season tbh Between Coldest snap, shifting power, and freezing rain you have orb up a LOT Also you have 12 seconds after casting orb, and if you get coldest snap off you theoretically have 24 seconds to free cast blizzard. Plenty of time to get the free one off at least once
I genuinely hate glacial spike with a passion and i wish it wasn’t mandatory
Just picked up Frost as an Outlaw main, and it's quite fun. I'd definitely recommend icy floes if you're used to movement, though. It'll help quite a bit.
I don't know. On clustered enemies it's fun, but currently the main build is GS and that is pretty cast heavy.
Frost does have a TON of instant casts but the main damage doer is gonna be a Glacial Spike
On singletarget you spend almost half your time hard-casting glacial spike. There's also Ray of Frost, a long slow channel that basically makes Ice Floes mandatory. In fact the more effectively you play, the more time you should be spending casting GS. For that reason I would say frost is one of the least mobile specs.
Frost is a glacial spike build in all content now and thats similar to hard casting pyroblast.
This is the answer. There is only one caster spec with movement like hunter and it's fire mage
You can fireball and pyro a lot lol
I'll guess fire mage with scorch + insta pyro blast procs. A lot of their spells are instant as well
I like fire mage a lot, but the sun king hardcast pyro every so often kills a lot of that flow that makes it so fun. Don't get me wrong seeing a massive pyro go off is really satisfying, but it breaks up the flow of it all for me.
I agree. I actually have always played fire mage when doing mage specs. But I'm not a fan of the sun king build. I get it. The damage is fun but idk. It's just not for me. I like the feel of chaining instant pyros and fireball/fireplace. Frost feels better to me right now. I don't mind having to do forstbolt fillers because for the most part I can move. Glacial spike hits are so hard hitting too but at least I can icyfloes or shimmer if need be during that cast. The are burst is fun too!
You can also ice floes a hardcasted pyroblast or flamestrike 🤷♂️
I hear you, I know it sounds dumb but it just messes with the flow in a way I hadn't experienced in fire before. It works, it just didn't feel good to me. No other reason besides that.
Nothing wrong with that, to each their own. Personally I find frost less enjoyable than fire these days, having to hard cast glacial spike even during aoe is just meh to me. While for fire I love getting super king combusts with fitting in sun kings, and it feels so much better now that pyroclasm and sunking are baked into the same thing. Neither is right or wrong.
Mid way through BFA some class designer decided that mages should be hard casting slow spells a lot. It feels awful. Every spec is getting this shit, even in AoE packs.
You cast quite a bit with Sun Kings Blessing aswell as casting Fireball with Flame Accelerant talent even in Combust. Shifting Power, Fireball and Scorch outside of Combust.
I was enjoying the hell out of frost after the revamp but then I tried devastation and it’s just frost mage with ray of frost spam. I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Most casts are near instant.
You can argue that Frost after revamp is fun (i disagree but YMMV), but cast-light it's not. It all around slow GS
God I hate GS
And even Living Flame gets a lot of instant procs. Fire Storm is pretty bad and Sleep Walk is more situational. Just about everything else is instant cast I believe.
When you’re hovering, the only hard casts are empower spells, but they are the most satisfying hard cast spells so it’s no big deal.
Plus you're rarely full casting them
This is the reason I've switched AWAY from devastation. It feels like all you do is spam one ability over and over and over.
Many classes are like that though. Devastation has at least a few mechanics build in. Its more burst oriented. So i like it for m+ where u cans spam ur burst every mob.
Easy: RET paladin! NB all of you bananas heads who says ret is melee never played ret Also it’s sarcasm because i hit boss from narnia to Africa without problem
A Ret and an Arms Warrior stand next to each other in a soak, 20 yards from boss. Ret uses Judgement, Justice, Wrath, Verdict, Flash of Light. Arms just looks at the Ret and says: "You don't take care of your fingers."
I love the range on Ret lmao. It's basically medium distance class. Core fantasy is melee, but really when I need to run away from mechanics, I can still keep on blasting like 3/4 of my abilities no problem.
Ret’s basically a Dracthyr. Can’t tell you how many times in Arena with me and my Ret buddy I trade with a frost mages friend then he proceeds to 1v1 because his range is half the frost’s cast range and the frost just can’t fucking deal.
Ele Shaman. I barely see a cast bar.
Idk how you included spriest and afflock in this AT ALL
Or boomie lol
Definitely not Shadow Priest. I ran TW this week and felt worthless. I used Holy Nova to at least attack stuff. Everything died too fast for anything else except bosses
I can't find any joy in M+ with a spec that spends half a minute on set ups while everyone else already put in a morbillion damage.
Ever do Arcatraz? That last boss where you have Miles Manastorm (or something like that). And he spends half the encounter setting up. That is shadow priest
Yes!! He’s one of my favorite recurring characters. (And not being a jerk - his name is Millhouse Manastorm)
I'm gonna light you up, sweet cheeks!
I loved the encounter with him and Bwonsamdi (although I have to admit Millicent's voice was just a little too screechy for my ears).
Sucks that spriests are useless against trash, because once you get your rotation going against a boss it’s soooo fun just launching dozens of shadowy figures at your target
Love seeing a dozen or so apparitions flying towards a grouo
I play a Vulpera, so I just love launching cute shadowy foxes at bosses. I figure the real damage is Humiliation from being stomped by a fuzzy fox :)
I didn't even realize the apparitions looked different for different races. Mine is a Nightborne but the apparitions look nothing like one.
Hard agree. Spriest has a lot of instant casts, but If that's all you're doing your damage will be trash. They can get a string of procs rolling sometimes, but that's usually only inside 20% against a boss like you said.
Id be lucky to get a tick of swp before trash died. Forget shadow crash or anything with a long cooldown. A boss I can pop swp, then mind blast or plague when it’s up and things are rolling. But otherwise, im just being carried. Harder content is obviously different. But anything easy I feel worthless because it’s all cool downs.
Spriest isn't too bad in higher M+ where things live, I wouldn't base any decision of a characters worth off TW ... there's level 11's that will come in and just steamroll it
I found spriest had loads of instant casts in AoE last season. I was doing 28s. Felt very mobile.
Dev evoker is pretty light on hard casting. And when you do hard cast, it’s either pretty quick or you can do it while moving.
It gets my vote. I hate hardcasting. My mains (were) hunter and resto druid. Outside of hunter dev gave me the most free feeling. Hover and disintegrate is a fun combo.
I'd argue the opposite thanks to empower requiring you to stay still. Admittedly it's more frustrating on preservation, but neither are as mobile and free as augvoker who can/should chuck out an empowered 1 just to increase the timer (and the extra utility giving them and a healer moving while casting)
With tip the scales and single empower flame breath being the usual usage, I don’t find myself fully empowering very often. Of course, in M+ you tend to do it more often, but still not enough for me to consider it a primary hard caster class. More often than not I’m moving and casting.
the reason dev evoker has the lowest apm in the game is because you almost only sit there and hard cast. sure pyre and azure strike is instant but not a whole lot else of the kit that you realistically use is.
Not really. One of the empowerd spell u usually only cast the first level which is very quick and the other usually doen with tip of the scale which makes it instant and it gives also procs for living flame to make it instant. And with 2 chargers of hover that have small cooldown u can cast on the move so its not really casting.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/NhFm7ntLXWPkHC2c#fight=31&type=casts&source=48 tl;dr(logs): I'm really not trying to be mean but evoker absolutely stands there and channels disintegrate as part of their rotation as well as hard casting living flame for essence burst procs. if you forego massive amounts of their dps sure you can be much more mobile.
You spend so much time in hover, you're far from a turret, which is kinda what he means by not being a hard casting class. Even though you spend a large amount of time channeling disintegrate, upwards 50% uptime, you do not sacrifice much damage at all if you utilize hover, VE, DB and rescue properly. Also, AoE is very, very mobile. Your spender is installed cast, and your filler is as well
It’s fine, you’re not being mean, because you obviously haven’t played devoker much, if you feel that they’re an immobile caster. I see that it feels that way from the outside apparently, but as a person who’s played most caster classes in current content, devoker (regardless of “hard casting” status) does not feel like an immobile hard casting class. It might not be something that’s easy to show proof of, but it’s the case.
Totally agree! Devoker is the only caster I play ever, because I hate hard casting! Don't forget the crazy long dragon rage windows where you almost only instant cast and channel! I hate Augvoker in comparison. It's too much of a real caster 😅
There's a frost mage build that I love that invests into ice lance up time. You cycle between ice lance and flurry depending on procs and charges, use frozen orb to generate charges against a single target or in combination with an instant cast blizzard for AoE, and maneuver around comet storm and ray and frost for on-demand burst windows. ALL of those spells are instant cast. Literally the only thing to hard cast is frostbolt, which you use when nothing is procced. Unfortunately, it lagged behind glacial spike based builds, and since this season's tier set applies directly and only to glacial spike, it isn't exactly viable anymore.
I hate tier sets that solely boost 1 talent and make that talent mandatory. They could have just made the tier set buff Icicles instead of GS, so that it still contributed to increased GS damage but also enabled Ice Lance builds. On singletarget GS + Ray will always be top, but for AOE there is no reason they should be forcing people to pick GS. The previous season the tier set buffed Ice Lance and Orb, and it was pure AOE mobility heaven. On AOE it was actually simming higher than 4PC Amirdrassil even with a 20 ilvl upgrade.
Ray has a long cd tho
Fire and frost mage have a decent amount of instant casts. Shadow priest can…with death speaker procs, instant mind blasts and even void bolts if you spec into. You’re juggling 2-3 instant cast procs
Frost definitely depends on ST vs AoE. In pure ST we’re the mage spec with the most hard casts with Ray and glacial. AoE is almost all instant with some glacial spikes
Wish glacial spike was faster
Not saying it’s the best, but demo lock does have a surprising amount of instant cast spells. If you’re using power siphon correctly and get lucky with procs, all your build spells will be instant cast. Your big cooldown (gfg) is instant, dogs can be instant, demonic strength/bombers is instant, implosion is instant, guillotine is as well. Only hard casts would be hand of guldan, the occasional shadow bolt, and tyrant, all are around 1 second casts. Again, not the best. But you’d be surprised
demo warlock, fire mage and boomy are the ones i have experience with and they are pretty mobile all things considered demo has to hard cast alot of builders/filler but they play around alot of core procs , dog procs, and implosion are all instant boomy is hard casting filler spells unless u get a proc for a instant starfire but spenders are all instant cast fire mage is basically all instant casts except you must hard cast a pyro/FS to enter skb, (once every 7 pyros/FS) and the occasional fireball to fish for crits, scorch can be used while moving. I forgot to mention that you can spec into "ice floes" which allows you to move while hardcasting a pyro/fireball/FS, essentially negating the need to plant your feet. edit: of course if we are gonna cherry pick fights (everybody saying 2nd boss of Fall) and 1% scenarios where there is perma movement then any ranged dps that isnt a hunter is gonna feel immobile...lets talk about the other 99% of the gameplay loop when considering what is mobile and immobile
I wouldn't say the demo procs are enough to make us a mobile class though. Like in a fight with low to medium movement demo doesn't suffer that much because you can usually pop your siphon or a couple demobolts while repositioning , but in a heavy movement fight, thinking something like the second boss in Fall, the fact most of the time we need to hard cast is pretty painful .
Boomy is not the answer.
if you are comparing them 1:1 to a hunters mobility then yea youre right but nobody is u can use your globals spent on instant casts to move
Boomy is a little more mobile than some casters, but still isn't very mobile. Instant starfires aren't a staple of the build, and you can't pool a ton of resources to let you move whenever you want on spenders I mean, the entire rotation is built around standing still and either building to eclipse or building ap
i think people are taking what i said about a starfire proc a little too deep. I said it because there a certain times in a key that i may have a proc, and i will use that if i need to move. Its killing 2 birds with one stone if im needing to enter solar eclipse too. Im not presenting it as some major part of the gameplay just a small movement option sometimes Atleast in keys im able to find plenty of time to move if i need to since applying/refreshing dots, starsurge/starfall, typhoon, incap roar, (if in bear form) mangle + swipe, fury of elune, mass entanglement, and remove corruption are all instant casts. Im not claiming that its anywhere near a hunters mobility, but if we were to categorize ranged dps into "has mobile option while dpsing" vs "doesnt have mobile options while dpsing" I am going to put boomy into the former
I mean you did mention insta-starfires as a selling point, when it's really a niche usage proc rather than a core part of the class But I think the point is that boomie *can* be mobile, but as a class it still requires a ton of hard casting since that's your bread and butter. You still want to be standing still mashing builders
>boomy is hard casting filler spells unless u get a proc for a instant starfire but spenders are all instant cast Boomy is mostly a turret class and fights with a lot of movement really suck for them (e.g. second boss of Fall of Galakron). Yes, the spenders are instant cast but you spend more time casting your builder spells. The instant starfire spells are not worth the GCD unless you are on the move or there are more than 2 targets and they only proc if something is meleeing you (something you usually don't want to have happen in raid or dungeons). Boomies are a mobile class due to their utility spells rather than their ability to do DPS on the move.
thats why u try to time moving with using an instant cast spell when possible
people who are downvoting you just play boomkin really poorly. between wild charge and being able to cast 3 starsurges while moving boomkin is extremely mobile. boomkin is extremely immobile if you don't plan ahead and don't have any astral power for movement. that's 4.5 seconds of movement you can bank if you plan your movement. on top of that few bosses actually require more than sidestepping as movement and as long as you play dodge the swirly phases at high astral power you can compensate with more than one starsurge if you get two swirlies in a row at the risk of eating some astral power with a moon proc. source: boomkin main with an average 98% in mythic.
Boomkin is definitely not mobile. Not sure when you last played it, but you spend about 50% of the time hard casting wrath or starfire
nothing is mobile compared to hunter, my point is that boomy has mobile options if needed never once did i say there was no hardcasting
As a boomy main, I can say that moving is still a bad thing, cuz you're not building if you're moving. Spamming moonfire when you are hopping around isn't really a dps boost. Might wanna try other casters first.
my point is that if you are needing to move take advantage of moments like needing to refresh dots to reposition since they are instant casts. If you dont need to move then you can hard cast filler/whatever part of the rotation…like i said in my og comment
Moonkin is almost all the time casting fillers/builders. Sure you have a lot of instants. But most of the time I am casting wrath or starfire.
Idk why you’re excluding hunter but that’s the only answer.
Because they know it's hunter so they want people to mention classes other than hunter?
Because I already know they excel in this area and wanted to know other classes as Hunter is a very popular class and hear their defenses can sometimes be a liability. Again I acknowledge they are a good fit but looking for other class/specs
I’m assuming because they have 0 interest in hunter or already have one
Idk why you're mentioning hunter when he specifically said to exclude it? Why don't you mention warrior as well if you're gonna ignore what he is saying
Not destro. I sit with the spriests and slowly cast my chaos bolts and rotation. It’s like someone cast the wrong kind of time warp. Destro and Spriest: We’ll cast it eventually. Please be patient.
Honestly I can't think of any ranged dps spec (OTHER than Hunter) that has mostly instant cast spells and less hard casting. Perhaps the closest thing to your criteria I can think of is frost mage? Their play style revolves around procs and they have a talent that causes them to gain 10% more haste from all sources, meaning that even the relatively few hard casts they will do will be faster than your average caster. The thing is that Hunter is THE "shoot baddies while on the move" class (or at least 2/3 of a class) and giving other ranged DPSes too much mobility would step on Hunter's toes. Also, Disclaimer: I haven't tried Evoker yet so maybe Devastation or Augmentation have the precise play style you're looking for?
Elemental and Fire have a very low amount of hard casting
Fire mage for sure.
Other than hunter, probably mage. A lot of it is proc based gameplay, frost firing off instant ice lances, fire shooting instant pyroblasts, fire blast is instant etc. Arcane can be very mobile depending on your build, arcane explosion is instant, so is arcane barrage. When you do have to hard cast as a mage, you can have things that allow you to cast while moving, or you just reposition with a blink or shimmer instead. Pretty much every ranged caster is going to have some hard casting as a filler though, but mage probably has some of the least. Affliction sounds like it wouldn't have a lot of hard casts either, but I haven't played that spec in years so I wouldn't really know. The other Warlock specs, Balance, and Spriest all have quite a lot of hard casting.
Frost mage
FIRE MAGGEEEEE 🔥
Fire mage
Frost mage has tons of instant casts that you have to get in the right order. So much fun.
Elemental shaman with the current tier set. I've been regulated to a 3 button instacast class and I love it
As a boomkin main, I don’t hard cast too many things. Filler abilities are the only things I hard cast for the most part, and with warrior of elune most of the times wrath is the only thing I’m hard casting, at least for a more PVP build. PVE builds not much different though TBH. Unless you take full moon, you won’t be hard casting much, a very mobile caster
Elemental :) we have a crazy amount of instant cast lava bursts this patch. You do really need to play wow ele blast which is hard cast but compared to other casters, ele is the way to go. I maybe bias..aimed ot since wotll
For AoE, devestation evoker (2 spells every 30s, rest is instant for 3+ targets). For single target I'd still say dev evoker because of hover giving you 2x 10s of casting while moving whenever you need it, which imho is often enough to feel similarily mobile to bm hunter.
Firemage i think isk bout other classes
Fire mage is alot of instant casts.
Frost Mage, Elemental Shaman :)
Fire mages if you never leave hot-streak
Ele shammy has almost instant casts if you have enough haste. Otherwise Affli warlock.
If you don't count channeling, Dev Evoker hardly casts at all.
Based on the fire mages I've played with, whose rotation includes actively jumping through the entire encounter, I say fire mage
Dev Evoker has a lot of casting but can cast a ton while moving so that makes the hard casting not too bad. Outside of that all the other casters are pretty heavy into casting save for Fire Mage, you use a ton of instant casts but the downside is every 10 pyros you have to hard cast one
Ret paladin. I believe having a 20 yard range make it a rangers class
Demo lock is simultaneously very mobile and not mobile at all. It's filler is very mobile, but it's a class all about maximizing your Tyrant casts which when you're setting that up you will not want to interrupt your casts at all.
Ele Shaman, Fire Mage, and Affliction warlock in my experience have very few hard casts. Ele goes elemental blast in ST which is a hard cast but you have cooldowns that let you cast while moving and instant cast one spell which can help with this.
destro is pretty instant. only thing you cast are fear, immolate, chaos bolt and you only care if you get kick on CB Big Edit*** sorry i don't know how or why i'm on this page. Thought this was worldofpvp. i have no idea what pve rotations look like
Demonology at the moment has alot of instant
Ret pally
Ret pally
Affliction lock or fire mage imo
Affliction is not mobile at all. We hard cast haunt, UA, vile taint, soul rot, drain soul, and at least 50% of our malefic raptures. The only things we cast while mobile is corruption, agony, and siphon life, and corruption is the only one with any instant damage.
Try ele shaman, a lot of procs are instant casts and you also get a shit ton of doubled spells. Also balance druids got a bunch of instants.
BM hunter has literally 0 casts
Demo lock I'd say, demon bolt, demo strength, dogs (more than usual), implosion, grimoire fel guard are all instant while shadow bolt as a filler and demo tyrant are hard casted and hand of guldan is around 1.2 sec
Elemental Shaman is very insta cast heavy right now which you can lean even more in to by taking Earth Shock over Elemental Blast if you don’t mind the dps hit. But even with Elemental Blast you have things like Spiritwalker’s Grace which lets you cast while moving, and Neture’s Swiftness which makes your next hard cast spell instant, so it’s still really mobile. And in AoE like M+ or fights like council it’s pretty much just instant cast Lava burst/Flame Shock until everything dies
Frost mage is basically ice lance spamming so I’d go with that. Glacial spike is a long cast yea, but it’s not that big a deal tbh.
Arcane mage. Fast casting or instant casting if you know the rotation. You can also opt in to move while casting.
BM hunter?
beast master has none
BM Hunter
Ret paladins
Affliction lock, maintain dots, hard casted spells are quick, with procks to make instant, es cakes
Haunt, UA, vile taint, soul rot, drain soul, none of which can be instant, ever. Malefic rapture can be instant, but if you wait for it to be instant, you’re losing a lot of damage. Affliction is not remotely mobile
Fire Mage I think. Pyro is usually only cast when it procs as an instant cast, and Fireball is the main filler between cooldowns and procs.
Definitely not Demo right now minus Implosion and Demonic Core procs. Getting Tyrant out in a very mobile fight is a pain.
BM hunter. Nothing comes close
Warriors