Vandalia1998 wrote:Saffron wrote:There's no easy or 100% right way of answering this. However, it's true that most people of a class would play the same spec for raids. There were off spec raiders for various reasons, but generally, if you want to get into a guild for a trial, you may be best off using these...
Druid - Restoration. A very good raid healer who provides other utilities such as rebirth and innervate. I've seen both Feral and Balance druids in vanilla, but at the most one of each/either in a raid.
Hunter - Marksmanship. Because it provides the highest individual DPS for a hunter. Pets are not very useful in raids.
Mage - Fire or Frost. Depending on the resistance types you have in your raids. I have not seen Arcane mages in raids before TBC.
Paladin - Holy. Very good raid healers and providers of buffs. Not a pro on these since I played horde, but I think maybe some guilds ran with one Retribution paladin. I think Prot paladins had awful mana issues.
Priest - Holy. Excellent tank healers. One of the raid priests should be specced into Prayer of Spirit. Shadow priests did exist, but no more than one in a raid, and only after debuff slots were extended.
Rogues - Combat was most common. Depends on what kind of weapons you want to use.
Shaman - Restoration. Outstanding group healers.
Warlock - Destruction, at least until debuff slots are extended.
Warrior - Protection. Warriors are undoubtedly the main tanking class of vanilla. However, you got away with being Arms or Fury if you had some tanking gear in your bags. For encounters where you need a lot of tanks (Garr, Sulfuron, the fire adds on Rag etc) it was better to have a couple of DPS warriors who could make themselves useful on other encounters while still being able to tank mini bosses.
Basically, if your chosen class has a healing spec, you're expected to play it most of the time.
What about Priests that had two healing specs? Was Holy better then Disp back then?
I was never a great theorycrafter, but it seems to me that the disc tree was mostly used as the "off" tree where you put some points that were more useful than just cramming everything into one tree. Both Holy and Shadow priests usually spend some points here. Some talents in Disc are very good - Meditation is great, for instance. When it comes to healing throughput though, the deep holy talents like Spiritual Healing, Spiritual Guidance and Improved Healing are simply too good to pass up. Some of the deep disc talents are damage oriented (prime example is Force of Will which only applies to offensive spells and spell damage), and if your main job is healing, I find it hard to justify spending so many points on not-great talents in order to reach Power Infusion. Also, PI would be better utilised on someone else rather than a priest, probably.
I was one of two "spirit" priests in our guild, meaning that I ran with a 21/30/0 spec which allowed me to pick up the spirit buff as well as the most important holy talents. Back then, I never saw guilds advertise for Discipline priests, but I'm sure they existed. We never ran with one, and we were a moderately successful guild.
