It's a pretty stupid thing to worry about. As has already been stated in this thread, druids can already stealth-res a whole raid by battle resing a real resser. Personally, I hate using the term "res" because there's no way to make it look good when you start adding -er and -ing at the end. I hate adding suffixes to fake words.

But I digress. The only real reason druids didn't have a ooc res was because of this whole concept of 'unique class flavor'. This term in practice is a euphemism for 'developer stubbornness' and fortunately they seem to be taking the opportunity to re-examine some of their unnecessary taboos.

I think that's irrelevant when you have 1 tanking class with a res and 4-5 dps specs with resses.

It's a limitation that a druid healer faces when trying to find a group in LFG that other healers do not face. When you're talking about PuGs (the same people who used to believe - or maybe still do - that heroics are impossible without two mages) that can matter.

Given the newfound viability of prot paladins, ret paladins, enhancement shaman, elemental shaman and shadow priests, why is it necessary for a group's resurrection ability to lie with the healer? After all, the battle rez ability could very well sit in the ranged or melee DPS or tank slot. At this point nobody is JUST a healer, and it seems as odd to claim that druids need a standard resurrection as it would to claim that paladins, priests and shamans need a battle rez.

10 classes, 3 which can res, instances only having 5 people.

Remove one from each as that is the Druid.
9 potential DPS/Tank classes, 3 which can res, and 4 slots required to be filled - its not that improbable you wont have any of them if all things are truely equal (which they wont be).
You shouldn't need to further tailor/restrict your group from the generic Tank, Healer, 3DPS due to something stupid like res abilities.

Going on about something like this rather silly, as is ammo / feeding pets / souls shards and so-forth.

There is also no real reason not to give druids in OOC rez, other than upholding styles that have persisted from the begining of the game. There are no balance issues that this would cause, while giving pally's etc a battle rez would have dramatic changes on the game.

That would be Blizzard teching boss design against the metagame.

Drumbearance. That, combined with the relatively small increase (and therefore probably a relative decrease) in drum power should serve to make LW less stupidly good for WOTLK.

Out of curiosity, why would giving another class a Battle Res be overpowered? As has been discussed so much in this thread Blizzard is clearly trying to reduce the number of totally "unique" things for each class (my guess is we're going to see some other class with a Blessing of Freedom clone soon since that is pretty much one of the few gamebreaking unique abilities left) to make it easier to balance 10-mans (I would assume).

What is it about Battle Res that makes it so special that it can only be given to Druids?

STEALTH + UNLIMITED REZ. Druids can stealth. A real rez can be used from a range. (Soulstones, Ankhs, etc, rez you on your corpse, no margin of error.) An OOC-capable rezzer with stealth would be capable of bypassing content in ways that other rezzers would require very precise (or lucky) suicide runs to pull off.

STEALTH RUNS. Druids can also heal on stealth runs. Part of the tradeoff to allow stealth runs -- and not have stealth-penetrating mobs everywhere -- is that the ability to bypass content is limited by the fact that you walk a finer line in terms of the risks that you take regarding dying. Non-stealth parties have to slog through some content that stealth parties can bypass, but non-stealth parties have more margin for error (i.e. you can have people die on back-to-back pulls, but hey, no big deal).

BALANCE. Should Feral and Balance Druids also get an OOC rez? Shouldn't that be a reward to Resto Druids, who are the ones who are actually short-changed by having no OOC rez? Not to mention, what about the other healers who will now basically be step below Druids in the rez department: OOC only, not Battle. It's like you're boosting the entire Druid class two steps instead of one.

It's not that hard to figure a way around these and other concerns. Put the OOC rez capability deep in the Resto tree, and create a mechanic (reagent, etc) that allows the Druid to choose ONE of three: a) OOC rez, b) Battle Rez, c) stealth, in a single instance run.

Stealth run? You've got Battle Rez only, and have to live on the edge, as intended for stealth runs. Solo healer? You don't really need stealth or Battle Rez -- you're now the equal of any other healer, rez-wise. Going to be the clutch Battle Rezzer? Then you don't get to OOC rez with the other healers, but you can prevent a wipe pro-actively. Feral or Balance: you still bring the same Battle rez extra-value-added to the table.

The problem is, people who yell for OOC rez just want it added on. They can't see any objections to it. They want to get all of the spells other rez-capable classes get, and they want to keep their unique abilities, too. No compromises. No balance. No "yeah, perhaps it could be cheesed." Nope, just give it to them with absolutely no changes anywhere else. Bah.

Bummer. I was looking forward to having increased movement speed tacked onto the Drums of Battle. I suppose a 15% faster running speed raid combined with the 95 haste rating (probably not huge in WOTLK), would be a tad overpowered.

Dont get me wrong, I feel the drums are massively overpowered compared to other professions and need a reduction/restriction like the one given... it's just that the movement speed got me all excited and such.

Nothing, warlocks effectively have it too.

In 10 man raids you can't afford to have any essential ability be totally unique. Of course WoW is full of cool unique abilities, so they must be either excluded from the raid game entirely (like grounding totem pre-TBC) or left as desirable but nonessential. No magdamars allowed.

I don't see why a second class shouldn't get a Battle Rez, but the argument I can see cropping up is (just playing the Devil's Advocate here):

You increase the average expected amount of Battle Rezzes per raid encounter from Warlocks and Druids to Warlocks, Druids and X.

Blizzard already made changes to Soulstoning such that you can't have the entire raid Battle Rez itself via Warlock alts*, so it appears to me that Blizzard likes to keep those kinds of numbers in check.

*Yes, I am aware of the "offline Warlock alts in groups 6, 7 and 8" trick, but the intent is there.

There is a huge difference between a battle-rez and a soulstone. One can be fired off anytime you see it needed, while the other requires you to have future telling abiilities to know who is the next person that will die.
The purpose of a battle-rez is to have something to compensate for the mistakes of one person, while a soulstones purpose is to save you some walking or extent the time to try encounterns while trashrespawn. Thats at least what they are used for now.

I also dislike the idea of having druids an ooc res like any other class. First of all I hope they wont go to far with their, everyone needs the same abilities path they've choosen. It would be quite annyoing if everyone had the same abilities, wouldn't it ? Then as already mentioned, its not like it is impossible to have a Grp running around and doing well without anyone who can rez. For 25 and 10 man raids there should be no problem having a rezzer like a paladin available

It's not that different classes can't have battle rezes, it's simply that more classes can't have battle rezes. Battle rezes are supposed to be powerful, and are balanced around being rare. There are already three classes that can rez in-combat (one requires pre-selection, another is self-only), adding another is a non-trivial incremental improvement. So no, there isn't any good reason that paladins in particular shouldn't get battle rezes (or warrior resurrecting shout or mage arcane rez or whatever), it's just that warlocks/druids/shamans already got there first, and now we're full.

As far as out of combat resurrections, I have no problem giving them to everybody. Corpse-runs are actually a fundamental game mechanic of RPGs or even WoW, they're an incidental design decision that's been adhered to with varying degrees of strictness over the years. Giving every healer an OOC rez ensures that every remotely viable group has resurrections while not giving res to every class, but I really see no gameplay reason to restrict resurrect from every single player. There are lore/immersivity/consistency issues with it, but no gameplay ones. As far as I'm concerned, everything that happens Out Of Combat is a convenience issue, not a balance one*.
As far as stealth runs, that's just conflicted game design. If you don't want stealth runs, nerf stealth by redesigning the dungeons.


*I still consider inscriptions removing reagent costs to be a non-trivial non-cosmetic buff. Bag space affects farming.

QFT. Blizzard seems to be homogenizing the classes a bit (leaked shadow priest/balance druid aoe, spammable resto druid aoe heal), and frankly it makes the game a bit boring. Honestly, there are other things that druids could use, like a spell interrupt while in bear/cat form, an equivalent to vanish/evasion, etc.


Just give priests (for instance, and yes I know priest talent trees have already been leaked) battle rez as the 51 point holy talent. That way, healing priests are forced to choose between a 23/48/0 (imp DS) or a 20/51/0 build. Same thing applies to paladins: give a battle rez as a 51 point holy talent, now paladins have to choose between getting Kings or getting battle rez ability. Allowing people to choose their spec should encourage more diversity in classes in raids.

QFT. In all druid OoC rez discussion (both on EJ and WoW official forums), all I see are druids saying the equivalent of: "Well, we need OoC rez so we can be viable healers, but don't give other healing classes our battle rez because we need to be special". Honestly, that kind of thinking is selfish and annoying. There's nothing that requires a OoC rez to be the healer's responsibility; paladins, priests and shamans are frequently brought along in non-DPS capacities and can still rez.

While a spell interrupt is arguably still limited enough to use some spreading around (Aran much?), Vanish/Evasion is not an ability that a Druid needs in the "10-man all the way to Arthas" school of dungeon design.

Shadow Priests and Balance Druids need AOE because you can't always count on having a Mage or a Warlock in your 10-man, nor can you count on just the two of them (1 Mage/Warlock each, that is) being enough for a 10-man version of Hyjal trash waves.

The same goes for Resto Druid AOE healing (can't count on that 1 Shaman being Resto), Warrior AOE tanking and so on.

It seems to me that the paradigm of unique classes is shifting away from unique abilities and sub-roles that can be fillled in a group (AoE damage, OOC rez, agro dump), and more towards uniqueness from the player's perspective in how they perform that task. For example, (New) Hurricane, flamestrike, and SoC are all viable AoEs from a raid-balance perspective but behave differently from an internal perspective and help make the classes feel different and unique to play. Personally, I would much rather have SoC than any form of AoE, even if it did 2/3 the damage of Flamestrike-spam, just because it's a fun spell that suits the reason I rolled warlock in the first place.

Not that this addresses resurrection in particular because there's not much variation you can do on OOC rezing, but the rest of the homogenization trend that it's a part of is not completely bulldozing class uniqueness.

I agree that stealth is a totally different issue. Personally, having played a rogue for at least a year now, stealth runs are one of those things that pretty much fall under the sounds-really-cool-but-isn't-that-great-in-practice catagory. Off hand the only stealth runs that can at all be argued as unbalanced is the 2nd and 3rd Kara fragments. Otherwise, pretty much every instance that I can think of has something keeping you from going on past the first boss. So then you're up against the problem of actually trying to get a full stealth group going. I'm sure I'll get nitpicked to death over this post, but I'm happy to stick my neck out there and say that stealth runs are vastly overrated and I think there are much stronger arguments against giving druids an OOC res.

It's just a pointless annoyance for 5 mans, I don't see why people are making such a big deal out of this. If groups have a tank and 3 dps (none with a res) and the only reason they won't take a druid is because of ooc res there is a problem. There have been times while putting heroics together I've taken t4 geared pally alts over a t6 geared resto druid just because how annoying no res can be when someone (usually me) does something silly, overaggros and dies.

So they can copy one class, but not another. And then you go on to say that other classes could do with a battle res.

I think this argument of "stop making everyone the same" has gone way too far. People are honestly clutching as straws when they claim things like Flourish is too close to Chain Heal and Circle of healing -- the ONLY similarity is that they're AoE heals. Every single thing about them is completely different. Hell, they could give paladins an AoE absorption spell and people would cry out "stop homogenising my class!".

An OoC res makes absolutely fuck-all difference to raid balance or performance. It's a convenience, just like increasing bag slot sizes in TBC, or reducing plate repair bills midway through wow-vanilla.

How the hell do people even manage to compare OoC rez and Battle rez and say that giving out an out of combat rez is in any way shape or form equal to giving people a Combat rez?