WoW: Why you shouldn’t take class tier lists so seriously

“How good is my class?” Many WoW players ask themselves this question – especially at the beginning of an expansion. Some even tested during the WoW: Dragonflight beta phase not only whether the revised gameplay of their class was good for them, but also how the specs in raids and dungeons performed. Because of course you want to be as good as possible in your guild or M+ group.

Most players don’t have the time to spend hours testing or comparing, and rely on the ominous tier lists that circulate around the forums and on websites (yes, with us too…) to be published. These represent the metagame of WoW (buy now ) If you are in the S or A tier, you are really good. If you are a C or D tier, you can delete your character almost directly. At least that’s how it seems. Let’s take a look at why tier lists have little meaning, to say the least.

When even the pros make fun of tier lists

I wouldn’t be writing on this topic if these tier lists didn’t have such a big impact on average players. We know from past expansions that even casual players orient themselves towards world first raiders or MDI professionals. This results in comments in the dungeon browser, even on lower difficulty levels, such as “Search only for class XYZ, must belong to pact XY” or something similar.

The tier lists of DpS, tanks and healers are also viewed almost religiously. From the reaction of the WoW professionals, however, one should notice that these animal lists have little meaning and, above all, normal players who play the heroic raid or a maximum of +15 dungeons should never choose their class based on these lists .

Echo’s Naowh made fun of animal lists on a WoW site and even criticized them as misinformation or manipulation of the community. Later, just for fun, he created his own animal list.

By random wheel he decided where which spec would land. The crazy thing about it: Players actually oriented themselves on this tier list, which was intended as a joke, which was actually only intended by the world first raider as a mockery of this tier list phenomenon. He later had to delete the Tier List tweet due to the heated discussion as to why Class XY ended up in Tier Z.

Liquid also makes fun of DpS tier lists on Twitter. But here, too, you can see in the comments how heatedly players discuss where their spec is/should be on the list. There are a dozen reasons why nobody should take these animal lists seriously.

So many reasons…

The most obvious is the state of enlargement. Please let the following sentence sink in: Developer balance changes are currently based on normal Mythic dungeons.

We are in the first M+ and Raid ID and sooo much will change in the healing and DpS numbers of the specs. Because the endgame of the expansion was obviously not balanced on “M0”. There will be balance changes after the first Raid IDs. Then, little by little, regular players will also get their set bonuses, which is followed by the second balance adjustment. That’s how it was in the past.