A reliable and relevant class for the whole experience

Hello guys, how are you doing?

Well, as the title suggest, i would like to ask you your opinion regarding the idea of having a class that can be considered reliable and relevant for the whole Vanilla - TBC - WotLK experience.

You see, ive mostly played with paladins my whole life and for a new experience like the one Onyxia is promissing, i thought of doing something new too. This mean even a choice of a entirely new class for me.

But, im not into making many alts, so ive come to you to ask this: which classes do you guys think is a solid choice, reliable and relevant throught vanilla, TBC and WotLK? Aside only paladins (for ive played them too much) and rogues (ive never had a good experience with them, so no).

I think this thread could give ppl some insight about classes as well, so i hope i get some good answers.

Thanks, guys!

I guess you're asking which class is good in every expac/raid tier...

I'd say healing priests are probably one of the most consistently well performing classes through the expacs. Warlocks and Mages tend to be good in all expacs for ranged DPS. Rogues and Warriors tend to be highly desired melee dps. I'd say everything else has a lot more variability depending on the expac or raid...

Your safest pick is gonna be a druid. He can play 4 different specs, which results in the class having always something "viable" in each expansion. Also you can always switch one spec for another if you simply dont like the playstyle.

Otherwise it depends on what you really like to do ingame.

Mage, Warlock, Priest, Shaman

Well, this is going pretty much as i thought it would, thanks everyone.

But, now i have a question i would like to raise here: how about the usefulness of DPS only classes? I mean, do some of you think that classes that only have DPS talents are useful? I mean, without the flexibility of multiple roles, are they still a viable, solid and relevant choice?

I ask this because for some time i had this prejudice towards DPS only classes. But now things are diferent and i would like to know your opinion

You can justify bringing just about any given class or spec into a raid comp. The problem is that doesn't mean that every person playing that class or spec will find a raid, because if there's 5 raid groups every week, there may be 10 players of that class/spec trying to find a slot, and you can only justify having 1 because of a unique buff or debuff they bring (which also often could be brought by another class/spec).

So as far as pure damage classes, I think mages and warlocks are usually pretty strong regardless of the raid phase or expac and can usually justify more than 1 in a given raid comp. Rogues also usually do well enough to find raid comps willing to contain more than one (you said pure dps so I excluded warriors). The only question on whether you, personally, can find a raid slot is just how many other people roll them (assuming everyone plays their class/character with a reasonable level of skill and doesn't get blacklisted by those willing to form raid groups or guilds for being bad). Hunters aren't bad either, but they aren't always S-tier DPS so they might not get as many slots as other DPS classes depending on the phase of the server we're in.

Warriors were god tier DPS in vanilla and A-tier in TBC and WOTLK, god tier tanks in vanilla if you still decide to tank
Locks god tier in all xpacs
Rogue also A-tier in all three xpacs.

Really you can excel with any class if you're good. I recall rogues were the first class in TBC who broke the 4k dps barrier.

To be very honest, i am between a warrior to tank/melee dps, a priest to heal/cast dps or a mage/warlock for sole dps
By the time the PTR allows us to level from scratch, ill have chosen