We have a oomkin from time to time in raids, depending on encounters of course, but i have to say if you give him a spriest and a shaman in some fights he shines quite well.

Al'ar
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=llsgdezy5gslg

Would you better build a group with Warrior-Rogue-Rogue-Shaman-Druid for 2 rogues to be full buffed or Warrior-Rogue-Shaman-Druid-Hunter for the 4 others to have trueshot aura ?

I would build a group of ench shammy, rogue, rogue, rogue, fury warrior.

Hey Cromfel, nice work. In your spreadsheet (the one that deals with a melee + caster dps group). There is a slight error in the Paladin Melee DPS contribution (cell I19). The formula is correctly attributing the benefit to the 4 other melee dps in the paladins group, however when it comes to the sanctified crusader increase, it is only including the 4 'fixed' members of the caster group and not including any bonus from the 5th hybrid/non-hybrid person, thus showing a lower melee dps contribution than it should be.

The same is true of the moonkin in the caster group, as it's faire fire beneft is only including the 4 'fixed' melee dps'ers in the dps group.

Might be worth changing the paladin/moonkin dps contribution assuming the other group is a non-hybrid group (otherwise their contributions are being based on 8 other people when there are in fact 9.

There are a couple of things about healers in general and restro-druids in particular, which struck me in this thread.

Shamans are put in the MT-group regardless of the spec for extra threat through WF-T. Threat generation rarely has been a problem for my guild since MC. We always put a Restro-Druid (me) in the MT-group, which adds about 200 +healing. (MTGrou: MT1, MT2, druid, pally, warlock) Also we bring only 1, rarely 2.

(we also have a hard time recruiting high-attendance shamans, I have to admit.)

Healer groups are pointless unless paladins/priests/druids do not have a shadow priest or a restro-shaman (manatide), or everyone has its weapon enchanted with spellsurge. (Aura of concentration for some specific encounters). We aim to bring 2 shadowpriests, one being dedicated to the healer group as a mana battery. One of our Holy-Priests is rerolling to Restro-Shaman to fill another spot in the healer grouo. Shadow+Resto-Shaman+3xother healers +1-2 Healers in other groups (usually paladin being with the feral Tank, when he is offtanking.) Adding up to 7-8 healers. Sadly not always 3 Paladins, but a lot of priests.

Close call. The optimum for the BM of course would be, enh shaman/feral druid+dps warrior+MM-hunter+shadowpriest, but if you had to pick one the mana gained from the SP surpasses all other buffs, especially if you gear towards it (items with tons of AP/crit/agi/some hit, but no/low int/mp5), the constant healing on the pet coming to that. Also the BM hunter is a viable addition to a caster group since on many encounters he gives back a 3% dmg buff (flat, from all sources) almost permanently, while his pet is critting the boss.

Won't it be more useful, less time consuming and overall more preferrable just to spec him shadow?

I updated the spreadsheet and image to have average of the 5th caster dps increase.
Same was added to moonkin to have average of 5th member in melee group benefitting from the IFF.

I have been rounding downwards on many places to make the numbers look just a bit smaller than they really would be, just to stay on safe side since it would be huge work to calculate actual benefits that different specs give. I think rounding down this way gives pretty good estimation, as the crit effect should on average give more than the given 3% dmg increase to many classes.

If someone can prove trough calculations that the crit wont increase minimum of 3% dmg on average, I will be more than happy to fix it. Until then I will have to use the current information and by that using +3% for sanctified crusader is atleast the increase what it brings.

You could argue the opposite that having a 15minute wisdom on a feral is a waste.

I dont want to sound harsh but theres so many people justifying an extra 'x' in the raid by making one job easier.
For example, giving ferals salvation and giving light to the tanking feral is solved simply by putting the paladin on druid salvation healing that tanking feral.

In my opinion the only 4th blessing to make enough difference to an entire raid is the luxury of having Blessing of Light on everyone(with the opera libram), which increases a paladin's raid healing by 20%+ and this is obviously only an advantage if everyone is taking damage.

I don't often get placed in with the MT, only for grounding totems on vashj and WF on fights where tank really needs extra threat, neither does the enhancement shaman we bring to raids.

This is because the totems we drop are always going to be more benafical to the melee groups than to the tank, as the small amount of extra negation given to the tank is very minor compared the boost to DPS.

This is a slight tangent, but I find the TBC emphasis on "perfect group" synergies (as discussed in this thread) to be very much a mixed blessing. One the one hand, it gives a significant number of new beneficial roles to certain hybrid classes, which expands raiding opportunities and is a very good thing. On the other hand, it makes raid composition significantly more rigid, and while I don't expect that serious raid guilds will have much of an issue, it can absolutely kill a more casual sort of raiding guild (like mine, which can't find an elemental shaman to save its life).

Shrinking size from 40 to 25 should have had the effect of making the raid endgame more accessible, but I think raid composition in TBC is actually more brittle and therefore a larger hurdle because of these synergies. I'd really love to see some kind of quantification between pre-2.1 consumables and the use of correct class combinations, because my hunch is that they are in the same order of magnitude. The difference is that the former is a huge time and gold resource issue, but the later is about having the right people always available. Both are pretty big issues for a casual raiding guild to overcome...

I think your on the right lines but people definitely over emphasise the importance of hybrids, for example 'D&T' dont raid with feral druids, we could quite easily do without our elemental for a raid (we do quite often), bar messing around in SSC we would never think of taking a moonkin and finally until our warriors get over their angst we wont have a ret-a-din geared enough to bother seeing how long it takes to rip on a boss.

Your last point is probably a server specific one more than anything or maybe even a faction problem. Horde have no shortage of paladins really, lots of people wanted a better pvp healer - lots of people wanted blessings in their raids. As for alliance, some are suprised when they have to kill shamans twice.

Don't your casters get a shadowpriest?

I wanted to make another point but first: Yes, you're correct. they've used both elem and enhanc shamans at times.

My point: Gearing up hybrids is alot more risky than gearing up primary classes since they are more likely to change, quantifying this is hard but if it's only 3.2% improvement like in the op's example it would be a pretty easy chooice for me atleast.

http://www.partyjouren.se/wow/wws-history/

Halk = Moonkin
Venomia, Djed = Feral
Chewwi = Ench
Podia = Elem
Sadiir, Fro, Kyris = Shadowpriests

Ignoring the synergy hybrid classes can bring is just silly if you're trying to find an easy way to boost your raid's dps. I'm sure it works for some guilds to bring pure classes, but the overwhelming majority of WWS parses I see show that most guilds bring way too many tanks, healers, etc. There isn't a single fight in all of SSC/TK that needs more than 1 prot warrior, yet some guilds use 4. Feral druids can do the same tanking job 90% of the time while being able to DPS quite well when they're not needed to tank, as well as provide lotp to a 3 hunter/sham/druid group.

The fact that DPS warriors/enh shaman can produce 1000+ dps (gear) while enabling rogues to hit 13-1500 dps is invaluable. Plus, a DPS warrior can throw on resist gear and tank hydross adds, wrath of the astromancer, trash if someone's AFK, etc...basically anything that won't 1-shot with a crushing.

If WWS has shown us anything, it's shown that many guilds manage to complete encounters with FAR less than optimal raid groups. 15m morogrim kills, etc. The difference between raiding with 18-19k raid DPS and 10-12k raid DPS is staggering, and hybrids allow for a lot of the synergy in group buffs and task flexibility that create that kind of damage.

The difficulty lies in the fact that sometimes collecting gear for a hybrid (as has been discussed) can be difficult, and people switching specs from healing might need a couple of weeks to collect gear, re-learn fights, dps cycles, etc.

on another note, clearly all guilds rely on people to show up, and sometimes swapping specs or having someone reroll just isn't possible....and you're not going to tell your prot warrior with 100% attendance that you're booting him to recruit some unknown feral druid. However, if you're building a guild or have a larger one with flexibility, there are certainly some great choices you can make in raid composition that will make things easier, and using hybrids is one of those choices.

Some people need to have some advice given to them on HOW to play their class better. This moonkin may either:
1. Not be good
2. Be a lot better if they had the right gear/buffs/dps cycle.

This is true of any class, hybrid or not. Your guild is either in a position to toss out bad performers and find better ones or not. If not, do yourself and your friend a favor and see if they can be taught to improve. I'd say, in my experience more people improve with mentorship than don't. And if you don't have a policy of mentorship and improvement you will have progression issues because there are always underperformers who don't venture out into the web to figure out how to perform better on their own and need guidance.

Moonkin especially are a class with tipping points between awesome and suck. On the playskill side there is just as big a learning curve switching from healing to ranged dps as there is switching from healing to tanking. In fact its probably bigger as great healers have more of a sense of aggro, what happens if they let that one mob loose for a second, etc that make them good tanks. There's a large chunk of initial theorycrafting work that makes a huge difference, I highly recommend just glancing at Efejel's spreadsheet in the class mechanics forum just to get a sense of what is possible, dps cycles, etc.

Gear is also a huge issue, and I understand the reluctance to allocate loot to the druid while playskill is in question. First the obvious- if the druid has 650 spell dmg cause they are only in leather while your mages are at 1000+ of course the druid will underperform. The more subtle point is that since base dmg is lower on our spells, a lot more of our "boom" comes with how we scale with gear. A moonkin at 1000 spell dmg is going to be a lot closer percent wise to a mage than a moonkin at 600 or 300.

That being said, I agree with the hesitation to bring moonkins, an "average" moonkin doesn't bring something to the table the way even a bad shadow priest does. That's where the class needs the most help, it shouldn't be a "hard-mode only" spec.

That seems to be coming a problem that even worst shadowpriests are taken in raids with open arms, while even best of the some other hybrid specs are having huge problems to even being considered as viable raid member.

Edit:

As raw equal damage doesnt seem to cut it for Moonkins and Retribution Paladins, what would be considered as sufficient addition to their toolset to make them seen as reasonable option?

Or is the problem directly bound to shadowpriest and them being easily deployable on groups while their mana/heal regen doesnt suffer any penalty from having multiple Shadowpriests in raid? I have been thinking that as reason, but I havent really deared to mention it without inspecting all other possible reasons.

Raw moonkin damage is a lot closer to cutting it than ret pallys, if not cutting it already with equal gear. The problem more has to do with the fact that DPS is a dime a dozen, just cutting it isn't good enough when you have mages etc sitting on the sidelines. To be honest, my raw damage is fine, 80-90% of a pure class is where I should be, its the lack of group benefits/synergy.

There are two very easy ways to fix moonkins desirability problems, even if it is stepping on shadow priest and elemental shaman toes (probably why they aren't in). Both are deep balance talent changes that would be a reason to have a balance druid rather than any druid and would make us directly competitive to the other two specs we are closest to.

1. Improved moonkin aura based off of ILotP from feral, have spell crits return a percentage of mana. Kill's the rapidly untrue oomkin nickname once and for all, and brings to some classes a shadow priest like mana return.

2. Have improved FF effect spells too if it is going to be in deep balance.


I have no fraking clue what to do to help retribution pallys. IMO balance just needs a nudge, ret needs a complete overhaul. They really need help.

Our guild is currently on kael`thas and weve been using an enhance shammy and fury warrior in our melee group (usually 3 rogues shammy war, sometimes 4 rogues 1 shammy)

our shaman can do as much damage as much damage as I could without him, so having him in our raid is VERY beneficial.

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=o4tw1hjetbkkq

our most recent magtheridon kill (udarikan = fury, knoxville = enhance)

hes hit up to 1100 sustained on morogrim

pretty good for a hybrid.

Not to knock on your work, but like you said in the op, I don't think this spreadsheet accurately shows much at all. The average dps of x class in y guild doesn't mean much, if you were trying to really model the gains/losses from hybrids you'd have to make up individual class spreadsheets (or use already existing ones), equally gear all the classes and figure out their max possible sustained dps and then do thew hole "switch out xx for hybrid" math. Alot of these numbers just seem really off to me and not a good way to prove/disprove something.

That said though, from the bit I looked into it, I do believe completely optimal raids would include a ret pally and moonkin instead of that extra DPS warrior or mage. The possible individual DPS they can bring is much higher than most WWS logs can ever show due to bad gear/grouping. And I think the raidwide buffs/synergy they bring is also very fine as is, and nothing extra is needed to justify a raidspot for them.

I think it's unfair to compare them to shadowpriests because the gains from a shadowpriest are just so huge you'd have to be very stupid to not take them. I don't think it should be that way, I don't think *forcing* people to bring these hybrids by making them so ridiculously good (like a spriest) but it's probably too late for that.

I think the real reason why people don't raid with so many hybrids is just because like a few other people said, noone wants to sit solid members out of raids consistently to make room for such a small gain. Anyone that can do some basic numbers can tell you there's no argument that switching out a mage in full t6 for a moonkin in full t6 and cloth epics will result in a boss dieing quicker. But it boils down to is it really worth it? Speaking of my own guild, our regular melee group is a dps warrior, 3 rogues and a resto shaman. With the upcoming changes and crazy buffs I'm sure they'll give paladins I have no doubt it'd be a huge gimp to the raid to not take one... so who would have to sit... one of the rogues. These 3 rogues have been in the guild for a very long time, a couple from early naxx and one from the MC days. They're all very active and perfect at their class... so how exactly would that work? That's the real problem with hybrids IMO, it's just hard to fit them in the limited raid slots, regardless of the gain they give. Even with ret pallies the way they are now, I have no doubt the raid would be better off -1 rogue +1 ret pally, but I'd never suggest it just for that reason... I can't ever see anyone saying "hey let's get rid of one of our dedicated active members who has been with us for so long to make room for x hybrid that will increase raid dps by 1.5%!"

I guess that is a problem with the class too. With shadowpriests, it was actually very worth i.t Not only do they bring a huge DPS boost from just misery+weaving, but the heal/mana regen utility is just so huge. I remember early BC days, on Gruul 1.0 progress when we tried out spriests to see their lvl70 utility. It was so crazy how much smoother a raid went when most of the people were still in Naxx gear/some kara epics. Taking 3 shadowpriests negated pretty much any healing required for 15 people, gave healers such an easier job than before, gave DPS like warlocks a boost more useful than 3 flasks stacked, etcetc. It was actually worth telling some of your raiders they would have to sit/rotate in and out/whatever for a shadowpriest because the benefit is so huge, it's just not worth it for the bit of DPS increase the raid would get from the other hybrid classes.

And also, to the few people saying the problem with some hybrids like ret pallies is threat... lol no. Speaking from a bt/hyjal perspective, the threat output by tanks is just too high for anyone. On the earlier weak hitting bosses like najentus/supremus a tank can easily sustain 1500~ tps. On the later, harder things like Mother/Illidan it's very easy to sustain 2000+ TPS from pull to death (without a shaman). Unless your tank is bad at the game, threat isn't, wasn't ever and probably won't ever be an issue for any class on the large majority of encounters, regardless of threat reduction..