After weeks of thinking about which class I would like to play I have finally narrowed it down to two choices and I want to hear the opinions of people who have played these classes since I never played vanilla/classic before.



My main two choices are Rogue and Hunter so I want to name some pros/cons of each class in my opinion (be sure to correct me if I am wrong).



Rogue

+ Viable in both Pve/Pvp/Versatile
+ Good damage
+ Fun gameplay and good class fantasy


- Probably will be the second most popular class after Warrior
- High competition for gear / raid spots
- Bad reputation


Hunter

+ Easy to level
+ Not gear dependent
+ Enjoy the class fantasy
+ High skill ceiling



- Getting outscaled as classic moves along
- Low number of hunter spots per raid / not sought after
- Bad reputation
- Deadzone


I also thought about rolling a Warrior (leveled one to abut 35 on a private server), but I hate being dependent on other people and getting stomped in wpvp without healers. Tanking is fun, but I am not sure that I want to put so much responsibility on myself since I never tanked in Vanilla so picking up the class that requires the most time and that is gold heavy is maybe not such a good idea.

Don't let time be a factor. Classic is probably going to be my only hobby/job besides attending university.

Thanks for reading my ramblings and I hope you can guide me to a choice that would be best for myself.

I'd say Hunter could be the class for you to go for then.

Warrior will not be good char for you then. But you never know. You can try one as an alt.

If you like to micromanage, keep constant eye on something else than your char and target -> roll hunter

If you like to pay focus on yourself, be able to pick your battles and be a threat, do good damage in raids -> roll rogue

I will play both and will add a druid on top of it all.

as i see you have contra on both so there is only one way....... Play one of 3 Ret Pala on your server ;)

I don't think rogue will be the most picked class after warrior, I'm betting big money on that being priest... and then mage... and THEN rogue lol. I wouldn't worry about rogue being *too* popular. Also, I don't think you should really worry about not finding spots in raids as a Hunter either. I keep hearing that's a problem but in my experience, I can't remember my raid group and guild turning away people from a raid night because "we had too many hunters." Maybe it's cus we didn't have many hunters or maybe it's cus we just didn't care, but I don't see this being a problem. I voted for hunter for you, but simply because I think it's a more fun class, ESPECIALLY during levelling, which is going to be like 60% of your time playing world of warcraft, seriously.

Guest wrote: ↑

5 years ago

I don't think rogue will be the most picked class after warrior, I'm betting big money on that being priest... and then mage... and THEN rogue lol. I wouldn't worry about rogue being *too* popular. Also, I don't think you should really worry about not finding spots in raids as a Hunter either. I keep hearing that's a problem but in my experience, I can't remember my raid group and guild turning away people from a raid night because "we had too many hunters." Maybe it's cus we didn't have many hunters or maybe it's cus we just didn't care, but I don't see this being a problem. I voted for hunter for you, but simply because I think it's a more fun class, ESPECIALLY during levelling, which is going to be like 60% of your time playing world of warcraft, seriously.

Priest? Uh, what? Even during retail vanilla, priest wasn't an extremely popular class.

If we've learned anything from the past 4 big private vanilla servers, then the most played classes will be Warrior > Rogue/Mage > Rogue/Mage > Hunter/Paladin/Shaman > etc.

I'd probably say hunter because there will be an ocean of rogues and warriors. And if you had to weed out one of the three for sure, it's fury warriors. There will be too many of them, and getting crafted gear and slots in 5 mans and raids will be a nuisance.

This is honestly a subjective decision and im biased towards hunters. As a hunter main I will focus on your cons list for the hunter:

- Getting outscaled as classic moves along
You are the best DPS while leveling, dungeon gearing and tier 1. This means you are not competitive, but the BEST choice for phase 1, 2 and during progression in phase 3. Of 6 phases, you are the BEST for 3 of them. 9 classes, all can dps and you're the BEST DPS for about half of the game.

- Low number of hunter spots per raid / not sought after
There will be a lot of hunter spots during phases 1,2,3 and arguably during ZG in phase 4 where hunters are great for certain skips and their low downtime lends to fast clears. As ZG is primarily a catchup raid, the focus of ZG wont shift the meta much for group comps and hunters are still quite valuable at this point. You have the MOST leverage and bargaining power early on while you are seeking a guild, by the time hunters scale poorly and raid spots are harder to come by, you've already established yourself in a guild and networked in a way that you wont need to worry about a raid spot. Later in the game you can always make a case for a tranq shot spot, highest nightfall uptime or simply that your attendance makes you worthy of a spot. Vanilla content is pretty trivial, a raid leader will be more concerned with your attendance and loyalty than your throughput in most cases.

- Bad reputation
Which is easily reversed when you're creating your own parties, tanking your own dungeons from level 1-45, doing top DPS in MC and winning 1 vs X situations in world pvp. Your reputation is your own.

- Deadzone
I hear this all the time... This is as much of a weakness as a melee character not having ranged... Its just part of the class. I wouldn't call this a con. You have the ability to reset the fight MULTIPLE times with kiting, wing clip peeling, trap/scatter resetting, nade resetting, wing clip/intimidate resetting, tidal charm, various engineer resets, etc etc etc. You also arent awful in melee. Im not advocating that you will want to stay in melee range, but in certain circumstances its not the end of the world.

Example: You land viper sting on a mage. He gap closes you. You trap and reset the fight. While in trap you reapply your viper (doesnt break trap). The mage will have VERY limited mana... Especially if you toss in an arcane bomb to mana drain/silence. The spell pushback of your fast attacks, and your pet will make it difficult for the mage to equalize value. Can the mage counter this? Yea. You both have a lot of answers to eachother, but pvp is dynamic. Its not as simple as "gap close a hunter and he loses" unless the hunter is frumpy and incompetent. Assuming you are frumpy and incompetent, a hunter will still be one of your best options as a beast master hunter who can fair well in most 1 vs 1 engagements with limited competence.

I also think its interesting that people focus on the deadzone as a hunters weak point when it IS the win condition of fighting a hunter. As a hunter, you will win the majority of your fights when you are not gap closed. You will lose fights when an opponent can successfully gap close you for an extended period of time and nullify your damage. So what does this mean? You START most engagements winning, its up to them to close you and overwhelm you. This means two things. You KNOW what everyone is attempting to do against you and you have control over that win condition if you play correctly.

Your class is your own choice, you're going to be spending hundreds of hours on your main. My post is merely to challenge some of your cons for my favorite class. I wish you the best and hope you find a class you will enjoy =)

In short - both classes will be extremely valid in both PvE and PvP as long as you play them properly. Reputation good/bad is irrelevant regarding class. In Classic you will make your own repiutation as a player.

For me there are two major distinguishing factors of these great dps classes:

1) Do you like controlling and catering for pretty much 2 characters at the same time or do you prefer staying focused on controling 1char?
You need to control your pet well to perform properly in PvE and PvP. Pet in Vanilla also requires relatively lot of maintenance. It is great fun and unique depth/lore but it requires a specific effort. Rogue also has own nuances with leveling poisons and lockpicking but they are more personal. You will still always control a single char with rogue, poisons are just tools at your disposal.

2) Do you prefer ranged or melee playstyle? Both give quite different feeling. I mained rogue for most of WoW but I can also tell you that you need to absolutely love your melee class to bear with constant watching of raid boss ass. Feels great to destroy something in close combat but a single mistake e.g. overaggro often costs you death while single step out of boss attack zone means loss of dps.

PS. I still voted for rogue ;)

At least for your Warrior tanking concerns. In my opinion if you can tank in any other expansion. You can tank in classic. I tanked from TBC-Legion at a high level along with private servers and I found some of those expansions to be much more complicated than Classic. Classic is slower paced and a lot less stressful, especially compared to mythic +. I also say that if you can tank Myhic+ you can DEFINITELY tank in classic. That shit is way harder at high keys with bad gear than any classic dungeon or raid with bad gear. You just get to a point where you do not have enough health, mitigation or dps in the group to defeat certain encounters.

I can say this. Hunter will be a top class being played as people will be racing to hit 60 and hunter/Warlocks will be chosen a lot for the pet. Rogue's will be mostly played at first BUT when people see how slow it can be to level they will re-roll to probably a hunter.

Personally out of the two, go hunter you'll have more fun.

Stfuppercut wrote: ↑

5 years ago

This is honestly a subjective decision and im biased towards hunters. As a hunter main I will focus on your cons list for the hunter:

Not sure if you convinced OP but I am certainly ready to roll a hunter after your post!

Many people, streams, and so called theories will tell you a hunter doesn't scale correctly, are just utility, and don't compare. I never played private servers but I did play at release and raided to three wings cleared in Naxx. I had full tier one, two, and two pieces of tier 3. Saying that just realize it took me 6-8 months to get my sets. From my experience and believe me I raided with some good players from 3 to 4 different guilds other than my own. If you make your own ammo or buy AV arrows and have 75% of most consumables at my peek damage I was comparable to a frost mages and rogue damage. Yes a fire mage was stronger and yes a destruction lock was more powerful. The only fights warriors ever beat me was on the drakes in bwl because they'd taunt and get the wing buffets to lower their threat. If you use your class as a hunter correctly your strength is no threat same as rogues vanish, fein death means you need no threat reduction like the tranq totem and salvation and that is the point dps warriors, fire mages, and destruction locks will NEVER out damage you every fight because of that. The longer the fight last the more they'll have to hold back because of threat cap. And that's a fact no one addresses. I raided and cleared 3 quarters of bwl before horde even had the tranquil air totem. Then you knew what you could and couldn't do. We knew our threat so well I used to watch shamans line up near door on firemaw and place bets on who was dying first cause they had no threat reduction in their healing tree at the time. Yeah you can chart and say hey the numbers are more and scale better with this class and think cause the scaling and damages are higher so that's how we will rate them. I raided in a group of 40 with 5 of every class. We never stacked raids. Had a hunter group with 4 hunters and one shaman for grace of air and mana totem. One hunter with imp mark will work for all and only debuff we were allowed. Gave a marks hunter with trueshot and wolf pet to a two rogue, fury warrior, enhance shaman group. I raided MC before the armor had graphics. When they reworked the survival tree I spec lightning reflexes/scatter and started stacking stat instead of AP. Mid to late game with right set of items the survival spec out shines the marks spec. Not by much I'll add. Only a hunter that plays a lot can see the difference. Beast isn't bad its just to be honest entirely too many raid mechanics that'll make managing a pet in a lot of situations almost impossible. I always prided myself on 5 mans grouping. I could CC better than any mage because a good hunter can trap 2 targets and use pet as well. I could keep one target trapped forever regardless it is undead, humanoid. dragonkin, beast, or giant. Or group me with a good mage and give us a little room to kite, me and the mage with nova and frost trap can wear down packs all day long. And yes mages can crit off our frost and freezing trap effects. I will end this with saying ignorance is the key feature to why people say what they do. There are certain fights that cater to certain dps specs more I will agree but any person that knows their hunter class with half a brain from what I've seen is just as good if not better on certain fights. But from my experience their weren't many dps warriors and rogues ever out damage me on 70% of the encounters I experienced in classic. And I love to tell you I told you so and piss someone that assumes off.

I would join a instant 60 server and play around with hunter and rogue, then choose the class that you like the most. You will be able to find a raid spot with what ever class you play as long as you are good, willing to learn and show up on raid nights.

Leveling is a one time thing and i wouldn't discount rogue because its a little slower to 60, its a journey and you will make alot of friends.

Viserys wrote: ↑

5 years ago

- High competition for gear / raid spots
- Low number of hunter spots per raid / not sought after

No matter which dps-class you choose either of these conditions may apply. However, I would not put too much emphasis on those "cons", simply because when a guild/raid leader is picking someone for raids they do more than just simply looking at your class. It is not an understatement to say that Classic is strongly community-driven. This means if you spend time to learn your class/spec, play to the best of your abilities, spend the time needed to grind for consumables and generally be a good guy, you will have no problems finding spots in raids.

As for your question at hand, It is difficult to give you a recommendation as your pros/cons lists are first; very similar, and second; Not necessarily accurate.
As @Shadire already pointed out, I believe it would be helpful if you asked yourself if you prefer a melee- or ranged oriented playstyle. If you like to mix it up, you might wanna take a look at this:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1542.


Best of luck with your decision and may you enjoy Classic as much as I will!