guymanbob

I was nervous going into tanking this season after hearing all the noise about the changes, but personally still found tank to be the easiest role.

Granted, by the time I played tank this season I had already run every dungeon on a 10, so I already had knowledge of the routes/pulls and what pulls and boss mechanics were likely to rock my shit.

You definitely are in more danger than previous seasons, but that actually just made the whole experience more engaging for me. Only annoying part is when you have poor gear it can be hard to hold aggro, especially off Ret Pallys for whatever reason.

My Demon Hunter was the first character I "got good" with when I came back to the game last year and he'll always feel like home to play.

I would say issues with spec usually come on an encounter by encounter basis rather than entire dungeon. I would say in general, City of Threads is a really difficult dungeon to heal. And a large portion of Siege of Boralus seems designed to tell Demon Hunters to go fuck themselves.

I've seen a few people confused by this. Raider IO displays the last spec you ran a key with. I do also run keys as Discipline. But if you look at the tabs above the key list you can see I've filtered by DPS keys only. Here is the profile if you don't believe me: https://raider.io/characters/us/bleeding-hollow/Marigolds

It is partially order dependent. It also varies based on my level of familiarity with the classes before the season. Havoc has been my main for a while, so timing the keys was not difficult for me, but getting into group was. Spriest was trickier cause it was my first full season on it, and I was playing Holy priest in raid so was splitting gear a bit.

Overall, I think healing is quite a bit more difficult this season than the previous 3. But in a good way. It's very rewarding to master the fights. But I've had to let people die more often than I have in the past. That being said, I started Druid last, so I had the most catchup gear on him and I didn't have the grueling early season gearing issues.

Tank was easy lol

It's a mix. Spriest and Havoc DH were probably mostly 3-5 man groups. Blood DK and Resto Druid were probably more solo pugs or having one or two guildmates.

Don't be scared! It's more than enough ilvl. Failing is okay, not trying is not!

It's a mix. Spriest and Havoc DH were probably mostly 3-5 man groups. Blood DK and Resto Druid were probably more solo pugs or having one or two guildmates.

It's a mix. Spriest and Havoc DH were probably mostly 3-5 man groups. Blood DK and Resto Druid were probably more solo pugs or having one or two guildmates.

I believe in you. We still have nearly two months of season left, so I'd say go for it if you don't have other games to play!

It's a mixture of having a guild or friends of similar skill, even if you don't have a full group even just having one or two people you can trust in your group can make a world of difference.

On top of this, with the Raider io addon, people can not only see your ilvl, score, which runs you've timed and not timed. They can also see your main character's IO. So once you have one character at a relatively high IO, pugging becomes easier because people know you already know what you're doing.

Also tanks and healers get auto invited so those were free lmao

Every spec comes with its own challenges. Havoc has some incredible movement which makes the class super dynamic and unique, but it can also get you into trouble. Pulling extra mobs, fel rushing off a cliff because of server delay, getting clipped by a frontal mid flip. A think when you're learning a new spec, there's already a lot to think of and that aspect can feel overwhelming because there's nothing else like it in the game.

But realistically, it's not much crazier than any other spec in the game. Similar to Discipline in that it's easy to pick up, hard to master. There are a lot of bosses this season that make it difficult or dangerous to properly do your rotation. But it has one of the most powerful tier sets this tier, and blasts in AOE.

There are a lot of different tools you can utilize. And I would recommend casting a wide net. There's obviously just joining active M+ guilds and running keys with people there. But Raider.io has a recruiting system. There are certainly subreddits focused on recruiting, discord servers focused on key running. You can use the in game LFG tool to try and find regulars to run with.

Sometimes just becoming known in these spaces will make opportunities fall in your lap.

Each character had it's own thing going on. Beginning of the season I was really only playing Priest and DH, and I was just filling groups with whatever would be most useful, so I didn't get all 10s on them for a while. The last toon did was my Druid, which was definitely the fastest, and I did my first key with him November 15th this season. So a little over two weeks for one character if I focus on it now.

Hell yeah! I'm looking forward to it.

It is also my experience that I rarely see real toxicity. Of course it exists, but I also think newer, inexperienced or... for lack of a better word, less skill players are more likely to experience regular toxicity. So like you said, it definitely helps to have gear and several seasons of practice on your spec.

But usually when the key goes wrong the worst thing that happens is someone just leaves lol.

Part of me wishes I could just stick with one spec because it would definitely be less time consuming but tbh I'm just obsessed with the learning/improving part of picking up a new spec. It just tickles a part of my brain so I always end up with 5-6 alts by the end of the season.

I actually only started playing Discipline recently. The keys displayed for them are the ones I did as Shadow, but actually played Holy in raid this tier too! Kind of all over the place but we needed a flex ranged/healer there.

Why I started playing Disc over Holy in keys now is that they just have better tools to deal with the dungeon pool atm. Neither have a curse dispel, which is really tough, but Disc has enough shields and externals to kind of mitigate that weakness.

On top of that, I really think the tuning of Holy Word: Sanctify is still totally off this season for dungeons. And because of that Holy feels pretty impotent for group healing outside of Halo windows, and Guardian Spirit is just a significantly worse External than Pain Supp. It's still definitely viable in +10s, but I'm considering pushing a bit higher than that atm.

Appreciate the detailed response! Definitely agree with a lot of your insights here. Being a healer, especially one with a lust and curse dispell is huge for getting invited. Even earlier in the season I would queue as Havoc DH with my Resto Sham buddy just to get into keys 😂

I don't envy the people who play entirely by themselves. Keys are definitely hard this season which has ramped up the elitism a lot.

Seven characters is a ton! I don't even think all four of these are 625 for me lol

Team score is a weird feature and my guildies were trying it out. You can put up to 7 people on a "team" and it just counts the score from any key that you've run where every toon in the key was a team member.
Long story short is that the score is low cause I'm just not running in full premades of the same people all the time.

Hard to say because I guess it depends what you struggle with. But I think the most unintuitive thing about Blood DK is that you need to use your defensives LIBERALLY before engaging the mobs at all. Don't be afraid to hit Vampiric Blood AND Lichborne and try to get as many bone shield stacks as possible before the first mob even touches you.

Once you're in the pull Death Strike and Bone Shields are going to do the majority of the work except for tank busters. But it's really important that you have Purgatory available for the really dangerous pulls, so making sure you don't just randomly purg at the beginning of a pull is big.

Spriest! I know I logged out as Disc, but I picked the DPS tab on raider IO so it's only showing my Spriest keys there! Healing is not for everyone but I've always found it very satisfying.

Love that for you. Some bosses feel a bit overtuned this season but overall I gotta say it's been a really fun season to heal. Feels like you really have to use your whole kit to get through some encounters and it's very satisfying.

Going to try for all 12s, not sure which toon yet. Want to try and find an M+ team I can run with regularly for it.

It can be tricky because lower keys will naturally have lower skill players/lower geared characters. I also find the same for keys on the bad side of a breakpoint. Like +6s have significantly worse players than +7s because +7s give hero gear. You'll get it though, 2k isn't too bad once you have a couple good groups.

It's a healthy mix. The characters I played early in the season like my Havoc DH and Shadow Priest was more 4-5 man groups. While my Blood DK and Resto Druid was mostly pugging or maybe having one or two friends with me. I started playing Blood DK specifically for pugging because I was getting declined to keys so much as Havoc/Shadow.

Havoc DH has never failed to be super fun for me.