While I don't mind enrage timers in general, I think there are too many too early in the raiding progression.

For example, Gruul is supposed to be as hard now as Onyxia was 6 months in to live. Our first Onyxia kill was about 5 or 6 months in to live, and I can say with certainty that Gruul is still considerably harder than Onyxia was at the point. The reason? Growths. While not your typical enrage timer, they place a definite limit on the duration of the fight and thus limits your flexibility in overall group makeup. If you lose some DPS early you have no chance of making a kill. Similarly, one person making one mistake during a ground slam can kill several people.

Compare this to Onyxia circa April 2005; the only real DPS race was during stage 2, where you needed to get her to land before a deep breath killed you. You could avoid this issue entirely by just dodging the deep breaths. I think we had about 10 people out of 30 dead on our first Onyxia kill, compared to none on our first Gruul. Short of someone pulling aggro and getting a side breathed on, there wasn't any way in which a single person could wipe the raid by doing something stupid.

Is Gruul easy now for an experienced raiding guild? Of course. Is it appropriate for the second 25 man raiding encounter in BC to take a level of execution on par with late AQ40? Most likely not.

I think the basic fact that Blizzard has failed to realize in this is that the majority of people playing WoW, even the majority of people interested in raiding, are simply not that good at it.

Well, this is what I was getting at. As long as a fight somehow rewards higher DPS with a lower tanking/healing requirement (as many fights do), the Berserk timer is unnecessary. There doesn't have to be an absolute minimum that causes you to fail, if low DPS puts increasing strain on the raid in various ways.

Nightbane is only sustainable with many deaths after 25% (i.e. you can still fight it out after the third air phase goes badly; we actually have people use important timers during the second air phase for this reason), so it's not that bad. If they wanted to eliminate that, they could just have him enrage at 5%.

With other mechanics, even enrages, if you wipe at 5% on a boss, you have a number of ways to try to fight out a kill on the next pull (using DPS buffs, or tightening up the healing so you last a bit longer, or refining your execution so you can handle one more transition). With Berserks, you're left to pop consumables and hope it all works out again. This is a lot less fun, especially when you're working for a first kill and your execution is inconsistent. You can have a great 5% wipe, tell the whole raid to pop their buffs, and never perform that well again for the rest of evening. This sort of thing can really hurt guilds who aren't at the elite level, who are trying to find progress.

Pretty much thats the common complaint as usual when this topic gets brought up. A lot of people seem to want to stack healers like the good old days of MC & BWL. For some reaosn stacking healers is good and stacking DPS is bad and it ensures we can ask all our hybrids who might be able to heal to then say you are going to heal (and before someone comments well hybrids don't DPS as well so it discourages bringing remember thats why they added synergy to hybrid classes). Saying make the encounter less strict doesn't work because guilds will still over bring healers intentionally because well a lot of healers just can't plain heal (same can be said by a lot of DPS as well).

I can understand why people don't like a hard berserk based on time and want something more original on what causes it. First time we saw the berserk on Hydross it was at like 15% and it just ultimately came down to us swapping a healer out for DPS. If we weren't willing to do that then what we could have done instead is wait to out gear the encounter with gear from Karazhan but there needs to be limits on how much healing you can bring and I'm not really hearing great suggestions of how to limit number of healers besides people asking Blizzard to be more original when oftentimes they've done a lot of other things before and maybe Blizzard feels like those other means seem more gimmicky than hard berserks.

Around half the encounters we've seen have hard berserks that have a time based element with the rest you are limited by something else so its not like thats the only thing Blizzard uses (though its the most common hence most complained about).

-Solarian the number of marks bouncing around balanced with having enough AOE DPS to kill the adds
-Al'ar Stage 1 can you kill him fast enough that the adds don't start spawning really fast (though its kinda a hard limit but its based on number of times he actually moved to a new location with quills not counting).
-Gruul stacking damage debuff
-Prince infernals

Oftentimes healing elements are also use though sometimes guilds love ot bang their heads on those ones!

I don't really think that's true, at all. From my perspective, it would be much nicer if there was no need to stack anything, be it DPS, healing, tanking, hybrids. This is from the perspective of someone who was barely finished with MC when the expansion hit, but it seems to me that there is a major philosophy shift between "bring a group of 40 people with a non-stupid group composition" and "bring 25 people with no more than 8 raid-specced healers, no more than 2 tanks (preferably 1 warrior and 1 druid), and 15 raid-specced, situationally-aware DPSers, all arranged in intelligent groups". It's just a fact for us that, on some raid nights, we have a different group composition available. Maybe we only have 4-6 raid-specced healers, and want to use a Shadow Priest/Feral Druid/Prot Pally as a healer. Maybe we have 10 healers who are willing to go, and for whatever reason our DPSers all have something else to do. Through MC (and I get the impression BWL, and some amount of AQ, at least) we were able to simply modify our strategy slightly to manage those sorts of fluctuation in attendance. Having strict berserk timers disallows us from even trying, if we know up front that we don't have the correct ratio available on any given night. It's also pretty much an unspoken rule that we won't sub anyone out between encounters, unless they volunteer or need to leave for some other reason.

Do I think we should be able to walk into any fight with 20 healers, 2 tanks, 3 DPS, and walk out an hour later with a dead boss? Not really. Though, I have to say, it's impressive watching the ultra-long endurance videos of people 3 or 4-manning Onyxia after they massively outgeared her. That's nowhere near progression content, though.

I think the point that Arawethion made regarding moving pressure points for moving raid makeups is important. If you stack in one place, it should increase the pressure in others. If you stack in that other place, then the pressure will be shifted somewhere else. It's really frustrating, when you consistently (and I would call ~50% of encounters consistent - I'd go as low as 15-25%, even) are simply shut out of encounters, based on having a few too many/too few of a class. Especially when you approach those encounters from the perspective of a group where that wasn't all that big of a deal, before.

Obviously, encounters/gear/etc has changed with 2.1, and maybe there will be enough additional leeway for the first tier or two of raiding, but it's definitely something that is important to keep in mind when creating encounters.

Also, from a continuity perspective, there really does need to be something more than, "Oh it's been 10 minutes, time to one-shot everyone." in place, where berserk mechanics do exist. Seriously, if a boss is capable of that sort of attack, why the hell don't they use it early on? Or, at least, once they realize they are "losing" the fight? That just seems a bit too "because"-ish, to me.

I think encounter mechanics that make a fight significantly more difficult the longer it goes is good. I dont think encounters that get some primary difficulty from "You have X minutes to kill this mob, or you will all die" are well designed at all.

I like having different ways to accomplish a kill, and hard and fast enrages destroy flexibility. There is nothing wrong with having viable strategies that depend a little more on unrelenting survivability than on ruthless DPS... it allows for a wider variety of raid builds and for more different and creative uses of classes.

Granted, an encounter that could be accomplished with 1 prot warrior and 24 holy priests is stupid as well. Well designed enrage-like mechanics provide a sweet spot for dps and healing, that changes on a curve... the current enrage timers are a cliff. Make 10% less dps than the sweet spot mean you need 40% more healing, so at the end of the day you really want that DPS, but if a great group happens to be a little DPS light that day, others can pick up the slack... but only if theyre exceptionally good at filling their role.

Right now, its just a cliff... an encounter with a hard line of "output X dps or lose" is obnoxious. "Output X dps or things are going to get REALLY difficult" is a good fight.

I'd like to see fights that worked stacked either way (or unstacked) and still were challenging. If Gruul didn't have crushing blows I'd totally see him as working this way. Brought too much healing? Fine, he takes longer to kill but you can also heal through it. You'd still hit a limit where stacking more healers didn't help, but you could do it to a certain point and just deal with the bigger growths. Or stack DPS and kill him faster, and have to worry about healing less.

(Crushing Blows being the problem just because they discourage healer stacking since healer stacking won't prevent your tank from randomly dying on a later growth)

Fights that get harder over time, but where the thing that makes them harder can be compensated (to a point) by the people who aren't doing DPS (and thus decreasing the time) would be the ideal.

Vael(more healers and tanks means you can survive him longer - to make up for the lower DPS, more DPS means you don't have to) and Gruul seem to me to be pretty good examples of this.

I think enrage mechanics engender some of the worst aspects of WoW raiding there is. i.e. raid stacking (and hybrid unfriendliness), spec purity. and consumables.

Personally, I think you overestimate what was required for Molten Core. The characterization I'd make is "Bring a decently geared tank, 3 decent healers, and 36 people who aren't actively trying to sabotage you" (I'm exaggerating, but not by much) - which, admittedly, is sort of fun, but I for one am not sorry that modern raid encounters are a bit more demanding on the skills of the entire group rather than just on a few key personnel. I think it's good that it matters whether you have good dps or not, whereas in MC there weren't really any fights other than Rag where it particularly mattered if your dps was good. I personally find it a bit more rewarding when it matters whether I perform well or not, which, in MC, it really didn't.

Comments like this are exactly what I don't like. As long as a boss actually hits someone, healing and tanking are required. DPS is not inherently required in a fight. Thus, any fight that does not include mechanics to encourage DPS is implicitly telling you to stack your raid for healing and/or tanking. Why was this not a problem when 2 of 3 elements were required, but now it's a problem when 3 of 3 are required?

Requiring DPS doesn't need to equate to raid stacking, hybrid unfriendliness, or whatever else you want to moan about today. You're only complaining about how well a fight's numbers are tweaked, and anyone citing specific examples should probably run the same boss fight in 2.1 before you talk about it being too strict again.

I suppose that might be true. Given that I was generally healing (and somewhat undergeared, even later on), and would like to think that I fell into the category of "decent healer", it might have been more engaging for me than for other people. Certainly, I know it was compared to my friend who I watched do it with his rogue - while barely keeping one eye on the screen, and his back turned half the time.

I'm glad that there is somewhat more responsibility needed from everyone, in general. I'm just not sure that there isn't also a place for "MC" and it not really mattering, in the broader scheme of things. I don't want to bring up the same old things (especially when the basic level of things just changed), except to say that I think it's important to keep in mind that there are two distinct audiences that content is being designed for. I really liked the concept of the "scale" that was brought up, with one end being progression-oriented, and the other being "we're here because we have a bunch of people that want to do something together". That second group can include people who are just time-limited, experience limited, or just plain not that great.

Berserk timers, specifically, seem to be a useful tool when developing high-end, top-of-the-ladder content, where you really want to be asking for everything that everyone has to give. Conversely, they seem especially ill-suited for an encounter where the focus is really still about getting the forward momentum going.

One has to keep in mind that there were a lot of people (many of whom were even in "raiding" guilds) for whom a normal Baron run was difficult - let alone the 45-minute one - up until the last day of vanilla. It's not really reasonable to have early encounters that exclude them flat-out.

Edit: Actually, the more I think about it, I'm okay with the concept of DPS being tested. I'd just rather have it be an intelligence test, rather than a meter"-test. We've always had a Paladin or two that were Retribution, and as silly as we all knew it was (including them), there were plenty of fights where we could have them DPS. That's not really viable with a hefty DPS-or-get-berserked time limit on a fight - more people have to be performing to their limit. I guess, in the end, it's an issue of tuning - and 25/25 seems a bit high, to start. Heck, even 20/25 seems pretty high. Considering that there are four tiers in TBC raiding, what if the "expected peak performance" curve went something like this:

Normal 5-mans: 2-3/5
Heroic 5-mans: 5/5
Karazhan: 7-8/10
Zul'Aman (if 10-man): 10/10
Tier 4: 10/25 (starting) -> 15/25 (end)
Tier 5: 15/25 (starting) -> 20/25 (end)
Tier 6: 20/25 (starting) -> 25/25 (end)

That's a sliding scale of skilled players needed, and gives pretty much every group along the way something to do. It also makes sense from a learning perspective, since the 5/10 good players in any given guild, along with the encounters themselves, will teach the other players how to improve, and the true skill level of guilds would eventually lead them to the appropriate place. This may be what the developers are already aiming for, though, and with the appropriate tuning changes made, hopefully it's where we'll end up being.

That's not really a fair statement. Of course some DPS is required on boss fights. The balance was pretty much built in, your healers couldn't last forever if the boss didn't die so you'd need more healers if you had less DPS, etc etc.

Sure, you might be able to toss one prot warrior and 39 holy paladins at an encounter, I don't think anyone ever really bothered. You'd be better off at least dragging some rogues along.

But the issue here isn't "DPS is required". The issue is, "You need X DPS or else you get ported out of the instance." basically. I think people really just don't like that level of artificial roadblocks as a substitute for design.

But it's not an issue to say "You need X Healing or else you get ported out of the instance.", or the same for tanking? There needs to be some minimum to the amount of DPS you can bring, just like there is for healing and tanking. You aren't going to kill hydross with 2 tanks or 4 healers, why should you be allowed to kill him with 6-8 dps?

This is really the only piece of berserking or enraging that bothers me. I can't stand the fact that we know at 90% we aren't going to make it.

I agree with Quark in that I don't see the problem with DPS requirements *in principle*. It makes no less sense than require to tanks and healers. It's the numbers game of X DPS/X TIME/etc that generally needs tweaking.

Morogrim is a great example of this. Like fights that become easier with more healers, this fight becomes exponentially easier the more DPS you bring. Stacking specifically in casters(Bring More Warlocks©)is fine for a single fight, so I don't even mind raid stacking here. There's no timed enrage, but if you can't keep up with the pace of killing murlocs, you're never going to kill Morogrim no matter how good your healing or tanking is.

The tuning of the fight, at least prior to 2.1, was simply an example of the Flask-tuned balancing. The numbers game made the fight difficult, but the idea behind the fight is solid.

That depends.

Like people have said, there's no issue with requiring DPS or requiring DPS to be on the ball with intelligent design. It's really more the artificality of it all, and the fact that berserk timers are really outside the scope of the encounter altogether.

To compare it to tanking, it would be stupid to have an encounter that required a particularly geared tank, but then the mob just went nuts and just AEed the room for 30k damage if the tank didn't produce X threat in Y time for whatever reason. (Misses, etc.) The "natural" thing to happen would be that the person who overaggroed died or something similar, not an artifical "Oops, you all die now." thing.

Back to DPS, the "Natural" thing to happen would be to have the mob be tough enough from the get go that you need to burn it down fast, or require DPS'ers to pay enough attention to have to deal with adds and still DPS the boss and whatnot. Not to have some mechanic that is really completely separate from the fight itself dictate everything.

Also, I think one of the big issues I'm having trouble expressing here is the concept that the Berserk Timer is really completely outside the scope of the encounters themselves. The idea that you have X boss with Y abilities and Z hit points and such, and that your raid can handle that. You're doing great, no one is dying, the tank is fine, the healers are reporting their mana is great, and then boom the fight just ends. Not because the boss overwhelmed your tank or the healers couldn't keep up or something, it *just ends*

It shouldn't be like that, really. If you can handle the encounter, whatever your strategy is, then you should be able to defeat the encounter. Not have an artifical roadblock tossed in front of you because Blizzard just decided to do it.

I don't think anyone seriously wants to be able to do it with 6 dps, but would 10 or 11 be so bad? I mean you have 4 tanks, 8(?) healers, and that leaves 13 dps. The number of tanks is pretty well dictated by the encounter design, as it often is, but the healer/dps mix ought to be fairly flexible.

I think the real issue is 25 vs. 40. When you had 40 raid slots, and let's say you brought 5 tanks and 15 healers by default, adding one more healer reduced the % of dps slots in your raid from 50% to 47.5%. With a 4/8/13 mix, adding one more healer reduces it from 52% to 48%. That may seem like a small difference but when you think about the contributions of individual players, the probability of someone dying, and all the other factors that are step-functions of players rather than continuous functions of dps or hps or whatever, it's a big difference.

Basically the problem is not that "there is some minimum dps requirement" it's that "there is a required balance of healing/dps and it is too tight to allow for reasonable variation in raid composition". Having one random person who can't show up, or one person who disconnects, or dies a little too early, shouldn't doom you 100%. Obviously you can "solve" this by having a massive bench but that's a non-starter for many (most?) people.

To loosen the restrictions on healing/dps ratios is to nerf the encounters. If we allow more room for variations in raid composition, then an optimal raid composition will have more room for error and thus the fight will be easier. This seems to be alot of what happened in 2.1, and I'm not saying I'm opposed to this, it just seems people don't understand that asking to be able to raid with less optimal raid groups than they currently can is the same as asking for the fight to be nerfed.

It goes beyond just dps versus healing and beating enrage timers. Consider Tidewalker and the AoE on murlocs. If this were balanced around bringing 4 AoE classes, think about how trivial it would be with 6 or even 8. To balance fights around a bad raid composition is to in most cases trivialize them with a good raid setup. Once again, I'm not saying this is always a bad thing, but people should quit thinking that a fight can be equally difficult no matter what sort of class balance you bring.

There seems to be a lot of misconception in this thread. Though maybe it's just a miscommunication on my part, and the part of others who seems to agree with me:

There's no problem with the idea that motivates berserk timers: that of giving fights a DPS requirement.

We clear? We savy?

The main argument is that berserk timers introduce this requirement in a very straighforward manner which does not give much room for error and, most importantly, little room for flexibility.

It is possible (we've seen it in other encounters) to introduce DPS requirements along with tanking and healing requirements without requiring a berserk timer. Therefor if we can think of ways to do this for some fights that currently have them (and I provided a few suggestions earlier in the thread - both for chaning the basic mechanics and disguising the berserk to seem less artificial) then why shouldn't we?

Surely the best fight would be one where tanking dps and healing requirements are carefully balanced so that the fight is a challenge for a variety of raid makeups and strategies? I'm not suggesting, nor are others, I think, that healer stacking is good and fun. But take the example of Hydross mentioned above:

Why should it be that because one raid has one more healer than another it cannot kill him? Wouldn't it be better if the encounter was balanced in a way that having that extra healer made the fight harder because it went longer and thus put a further strain on healer mana - therefore balancing out the difficulty of the encounter.

If you take too many DPS and the DPS die then you wont have the DPS to kill him in the length of time your healers can keep the raid up. But if you take too many healers then the fight will go longer, while you have more healers to sustain it over this added time. However if the DPS or healers die in this scenario the balance will be thrown out and you will still fail. In both cases the encounter would be just as hard, but it would be dictated by execution, not by execution and exact raid distribution.

The argument against this is that being able to stack healers can trivialise some encounters, which is true. But then I would suggest that those encounters are poorly designed because they fail to introduce DPS advantages in the fight itself.

Hydross is not one of these fights though. It has a clear DPS requirement in the fight that has to be met: if you cant kill all the spawns before you have to swap him to his other form then you will never kill him as you'll get no time to DPS him down. Thus if they want to adjust the DPS requirements of the fight all they have to do is adjust add HP, there's no need for the berserk.

Of course there is a place for the 'berserk-like' fights that do have stricter requirements and Gruul is an excelent of a 'natural' way to implement this.

But the at-10min-you-die implementation is restrictive when implemented on too many fights, especially when done is such a silly manner. That's what we're talking about.

I think mana regeneration, and the five second rule in particular, is a big barrier to making raid makeup flexible. I unearthed an old spreadsheet I made for my MC-geared priest, and I found that I could sustain 250 healing per second for six minutes, 275HPS for five minutes, 300 for four and a half, 325 for four, 350 for three... basically, a small change in the number of healers in a raid can have a big impact on the raid's longevity. This is common sense to anyone with a lot of raiding experience, I imagine, especially for spirit-stacked healers who can stay out of the five second rule.

If you graph HPS and longevity, you get a sloping curve. The reason for the curve is mana regeneration. If regen was non-existent, the graph would be a straight line instead. Mana regeneration is why each healer you add to a raid increases the value of pre-existing healers. Every additional healer allows other healers to spend a higher proportion of the time regenerating mana. For the most part, this is not the case with DPS: except for class- and spec-specific raid buffs and mob debuffs--which barely offset the cost of using non-optimal damage classes and specs--one more DPSer has little effect on the value of the other DPS.

To prevent healer stacking from being a superior strategy, but still allow flexibility in raid makeup, DPSers need to feed off each other in the same way, and at the same rate, that healers do. Or the other way around: healer mana regeneration needs to be crippled so that each healer added to a raid brings a fixed quantity of healing per fight, as opposed to a fixed rate of healing per second. Maybe eliminating the five-second rule would have the right effect too, but I haven't tested that thought. If you'll allow me to make up some numbers to illustrate my point: right now, going from 7 DPS to 14 DPS halves the kill time, but going from 7 healers to 14 healers triples healers' time till OOM.

There are already some mechanisms in place for this. To a limited extent, bringing more warlocks allows more curses to be placed on a target. Mages can modulate their DPS and DPM with arcane blast, doing a smaller percentage of total raid damage in a DPS-stacked raid but doing it faster. But there need to be more: stacking curses, stacking armor debuffs, stacking battleshouts, and things of that nature. With the right balancing and scaling, this would allow a difficult encounter to be completed both with a raid of 11 healers and 12 DPS of the right class type, and with a 7-healer, 16-DPS raid. Given the state of PvE class balance in this game over the last few patches, I sincerely doubt that Blizzard could pull off the necessary tight-rope balancing act to make this kind of flexibility work. But it would be much more interesting than berserk timers, and it would allow many more guilds with wonky class balance (the guilds that brought nine warriors to MC for example, or any guild that isn't leading progression on its server and struggling to recruit specific classes) to succeed in raiding without trivializing the raid content.

The thing is, if you have undergeared tanks, you can often make up for it by having healers who are particularly on the ball. If your healers don't have the gear, your DPSers can push it hard to make the fight faster, placing less strain on them. They can also play smart, using pots and bandages to reduce the strain on healers. Healing is also never very tightly tuned. Often a tank is taking damage that could be healed by 1-2 perfect healers, but you put 4 on him because there's going to be user error and unpredictability. "Heal better" is almost always a real option. If your tanks are undergeared, you can weaken your other groups to create tank groups that give your tanks the perfectly optimal buffs.

There are many ways you can interestingly react to a gear deficiency in healing, and a few when the issue is tanking. If the issue is DPS there is often little you can do. 500k Revenge crits? ^_~

Also, there are ways to introduce requirements on your dps --similar to requirements on your healers-- without requiring X DPS from the raid. C'thun is a good example. There are myriad targets to DPS that must be killed quickly (like healing! but backwards) and there is "overdps" in that someone can have a bolt in the air as something dies that doesn't damage it, or lose casting time or travel time as a mob they're focusing on dies. You could have PERFECT execution and X Actual Possible DPS in your raid or SLOPPY execution and 2X Actual Possible DPS in your raid.

That's a FUN way to require something of DPS. Same way as you do for the others.

Ah but that's why I provided the example of Hydross. You could apply the same to Illhoof too.

The concern where half DPS classes = twice as long to kill is only the case when you have something like Gruul. Where you have something like Hydross and Illhoof you actualy have a situation where double DPS is more than twice as fast to the kill, due to the nature of the adds and Illhoof healing. Thus in those fights all you have to do is adjust the the DPS requirements of these indirect factors in order to balance them with the extra longevitiy from more healers.

So while I understand the situation, the fact is that berserk timers are not the only way to govern a balance between DPS and healing. And changes to the 5-sec rule and the like are not needed either.

This is obvious really. Otherwise every fight in the game would have a berserk timer. This isn't the case.

Repeating again: The example of Gruul is one where a berserk timer is needed (as DPS does nothing than direct boss damage) but it is handled much much better with growths.

Berserk timers are simply an indication of rushed or uncreative encounter design.

Okay, you make a very good point with adds that heal the boss, so that the raid has to "pay interest" on its DPS deficit. But other than bosses that heal themselves over time, how else can DPS stacking be rewarded? I can't think of any other way to make DPS stacking beneficial without being required, other than by making boss debuffs or player buffs stackable. Bosses that heal themselves over time could become the new berserk timer. It would allow much-needed flexibility in raid make-up, but it could also become ubiquitous and potentially as yawn-tastic as berserks have become. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, though? Buffing bosses with significant HP/5 and lower total health doesn't feel as contrived to me as a wipe timer, and it would address the problem I discussed in my last post.

Now that I think of it, wasn't wing buffet another way to allow a see-saw between healing and DPS? More healers allowed healing threat to be spread out, and more DPS ended the fight before threat became unmanageable? I don't know from experience, because my guild had just reached Broodlord Lashlayer when the 2.0 patch was released.

Anub, Hydross, and Tidewalker (and possibly others) have a feedback mechanism that provides a similar effect; the slower your dps, the longer it takes to kill the adds, so the less time you get to dps on the boss, which amplifies the effect of your low dps; a reduction of dps results in a more than proportional increase in fight duration.