World of Warcraft: My Favorite Classes/Specs

As an alt-a-holic, I am someone who generally has been agnostic in terms of favoring any single class at the very top. I can see the benefits of each and enjoy the play style of most of them. The only thing I really don’t play is a healer as I feel that it can be a stressful role. Most times I just a play a DPS role, but I also enjoy certain tank specs for soloing content. So I wanted to enumerate my favorite classes/specs that I enjoy playing and the reasons behind them.

• Protection Paladin – Since Cataclysm’s 4.3 patch, I’ve pretty much focused on Retribution. The truth is that I’ve really been a huge fan of that spec. It gets the job done but I honestly like protection paladins far better. Most of that is due to players like Hobbs or Toweliee who use the protection spec not just as a tank, but for soloing content and PVP. The thing I really enjoyed as a protection paladin was the survival aspect. I think after Cataclysm, the protection spec lost a little bit of its luster and you can’t really do the same large pulls that Hobbs had done prior to Cataclysm with the evasion issues in mobs. But the idea of having a nearly immortal type of class with great AoE damage, self healing and resurrection made this class one of the most versatile and strong classes around.
• Enhancement Shaman – I came across the Enhancement Shaman when my friend decided not to play one. It was considered the leveling spec back in the day. After transferring realms, I ended up re-rolling a new Enhancement Shaman but fully enjoying the benefits of BoA gear. I noticed while leveling just how awesome and versatile the Enhancement Shaman was. Obviously, you have their huge buff of Bloodlust, but you get killer/free AoE heals in Chain Healing and Healing Rain, reincarnation for wipes or emergency situations, great indoor movement as a ghost wolf, awesome damage that can work both as a melee and ranged and other forms of abilities like CC, slow effects, etc. to compliment your group. Probably, my favorite activity during a raid or even 5 man is to drop Healing Rain on my party whenever my Maelstrom Weapon procs, pretty much lending a hand to our healers since usually my Shaman ends up doing quite a bit of damage without the free lightning procs.
• Blood Death Knight – Again I play Frost for the most part but whenever I get into trouble in my frost spec, I end up switching over to Blood for the survivability aspect. Everyone knows just how OP the Blood spec is, especially when you see other Blood Death Knights soloing raids, even on Heroic mode. Back when Blood used to be a purely DPS spec, I still ended up using that spec for everything. But overall, Blood is great not only for survival but a reasonable amount of utility.
• Feral Druid – I truly miss the days when Feral was not separate from Guardian. With just a few talent points being different, you could still use your de facto Feral spec as a bear giving you both the survivability and the stealth aspects for certain situations. That pretty much gave you an extra option to either go pure healing or boomkin, but you had even more versatility in tight situations like if a tank died/left and you just needed someone to pick up an encounter for a few seconds or minutes. Not only that, in general Feral druids are just great for soloing stuff. I have a deep love for classes that have some form of stealth ability just to avoid unnecessary encounters. And if you’re into herbalism, everything just becomes that much sweeter overall.
• Combat Rogue – I never tried the Subtlety spec but I went Assassin once I hit 68 on my second rogue. It was tough surviving in solo mode to say the least compared to the combat rogue, which felt more like a toe-to-toe type of fighter. Yet I never probably played Combat as a toe-to-toe when I soloed, preferring to use stealth to slay my opponents. I liked that as a combat rogue you had pretty good survivability back in the day with some boosts to armor and a few other defensive stats.  But the thing I love about rogues the best is Vanish. It’s one of the ultimate “holy shit!” buttons around, if not the best. Pulled too much aggro? Just Vanish. Accidentally, walked into a mob? Just Vanish. Someone trying to gank you? Just Vanish. Lots of uses and scenarios. You could screw up too by resetting an encounter. But in general it’s just something that I can’t live without anymore.
• Beastmaster Hunter – Not the incarnations that spawned from Cataclysm to the present moment. I’m talking about the old version. The Hunter wasn’t always the easiest class but it was my first class and spec that I tried out. There was a lot of micromanaging especially with the pet, but I quickly discovered that you could do so much with this class. Essentially, it was the real “survival” spec for the hunter because your pet acted as a mini tank. With a few macros, you could easily send your pet into a pack of enemies, have it grab all the aggro, then just Volley away. These days aggro as a Hunter is a lot messier, even with a tanking class. As a BM Hunter, I used to run friends through older instances and you could essentially power level people by doing this method. Of course, if your pet died, things could get ugly fast but it was neat just being able to tame exotic monsters and your pet having it’s own talent tree. It made your pets even more special. Now, the BM Hunter is a total shell of itself.
• Demonology Warlock – The Mist of Pandaria version is definitely a vast improvement. It is a little awkward because of how you constantly switch between demon and normal form, especially with the separate action bar. But the thing I like about Demonology is that it’s a great survival class. Unlike before, your pet is extremely tough and can endure a lot more. People often talk about how Warlocks are capable of soloing a number of situations and most of that is due to their pet. I haven’t tried soloing older stuff but the cases where I needed to handle tough encounters, I found that I really didn’t have many issues, barely seeing my pet’s health go down. And some aspects are pretty smooth like their AoE.
• Frost Mage – Frost Mages have changed quite a bit since I started one out back in Wrath. When Frost Mages received a pet at lower levels, they pretty had better overall survivability. These days they are one of the top damaging specs and a great PVP spec. I do miss the older days of the raw Blizzard AoE where you could decimate areas just channeling that awesome spell. Also, the freezing aspect is something that pretty much carried over from Diablo where you could freeze and shatter opponents with a killing blow. Although you don’t really shatter opponents, you still have the chance to slow them down and put the hurt on them before they could reach you. I still need to finish up leveling my mage to 90 to see how the game play changes, especially with a lot of heavy movement based fights. But it’s something I’m heavily looking forward to in the near future.
• Protection Warrior – I mostly play fury these days, even while leveling. But the Protection Warrior was something that got me interested through a friend. While leveling he would go as Protection and a bunch of us would instant queue. Then I had the opportunity to give it a shot. It’s just a fun class where you have a lot of movement boosts as well as the ability to take on a great deal of mobs with some level of self-healing.

What about priests and monks? I haven’t done much with my monk except get up to level 16. I think eventually, I’ll just delete her and reroll as horde so I can get all the benefits from the rest of my team. But priests….quite honestly, until I hit my mid 70’s in Cataclysm, I absolutely hated them. Eventually, I got good enough to manage my mana and some other aspects but it was just a horribly painful class to level. Now, things may have changed with Mist of Pandaria and I will be leveling my priest to 90 last. Still, it’s a class that I really have little care for overall and don’t really care for some of the changes that happened once Mist of Pandaria came out.

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