Simple question. Remove any personal bias because you play a certain class - What SHOULD be the top 5 classes in order from highest to lowest. The situation would be a standard tank and spank raid. Don't overcomplicate with aDPS scenarios. Go.
You should elaborate a little due to word choices and phrasing. What a lot of people think SHOULD be the top 5 is quite different than what the current top 5 meta is.
Wizard, Zerker, Rogue for the top 3 in no particular order. Then for the last 2 spots should be mage, ranger, monk, necro, or bst.
I agree with TheAgenda. Top 3 make sense but the next 5 are unclear. They all have varying degrees of healing/pet healing, pulling, and tanking ability. I'd say ranger and monk over the pet classes. But that's debateable.
it should be competitive amongst all classes on a single target.... it should not be a insanely large gap between 2 classes and the rest of the raid
The ranking is also going to depend on what your target is as different raids favor different classes. Another factor is the raid makeup and what adps support each class has. It isn't fair to just say a standard tank and spank as that will still depend on other factors like how resistant the mobs are and how long the fight is.
100%. If you put them in Tiers though Tier 2 should be competitive with Tier 1 and Tier 3 with Tier 2. Competitive does not mean ahead but it shouldn't be a 20% + difference.
the reality is that all dps classes should probably do the same dps and have other things they bring to the table to make them attractive that is the smart way of balancing things
For DPS it should be, Top3 (in this order) Ranger, Rogue, Zerker (Headshots, Assassinates, Decapitates) Below that top 3 (in this order) Necromancer, Monk, Mage, Beastlord, Wizard, Bard
You want a blanket statement to encompass an entire game. I feel that is a poor way of looking at it. IMHO every class should be able to shine on an event or two. The current issue is that one or two classes are consistently out parsing every other class regardless of situation. That is why you hear cries and see tears of class XYZ is OP and class ABC needs boosted. If everyone could feel good on a couple events, then you are more likely to overlook the ones you do not do as well. So maybe next expansion there is an event more suspectable to piercing. One more suspectable to DOTs. Things like that. So that one event the rogues and rangers are best. Another event is magicians and beastlords. Another is necromancers, shaman and Druid. Etc.
Always see Berserkers and Rogues listed higher than others when they get about the same amount of the mythical "utility" that others have. There is not much difference between Berserker / Monk / Rogue in terms of what they can do beyond straight DPS. Perhaps there was 15 years ago, but not anymore. All 3 pure melee are nothing more than straight line DPS and the tier they fall in should reflect being even on everything else.
Monks have 1000000x the survivability zerkers/rogues have in raids and in group content. Are you really going to ignore everything a monk has and just pretend they're only dps ? Give me mend and you go blind while burning and have to root yourself and have your burn do damage to yourself or have to cap your hp at 90% to use several abilities.
