Vagabond

On the "having to decide which if the 10 different heals I have is the best one to use *this* moment in time" vein.

Everyone's talking about all this new reactive, multiple different spells playstyle in a vacuum, not factoring in the DDR we'll be put through for boss encounters.

Blizzard loves their DDR. I doubt anyone can dispute that.

I just get the feeling that, for some large portion of time, this is going to be "GRID is new, and we're on Hiegan" era all over again, where 80% of your healers die off to the first DDR phase due to not having 4 eyes and 15 fingers.

DDR is fine.

10 widely different spells requiring split second decisions and monitoring of Cooldowns/GCDs may be fine.

DDR + 10.... I just don't know.

 

Pyros

We did halls of stone with me on a shitty geared DK tanking, and yeah it was pretty tight mana wise, the resto druid(T4 gear)had to innervate and pot. Now, it wouldn't have been quite as hard if I could actually target shit instead of clicking the particles effects, so I could try tanking. Especially true now that I have decent tanking gear, and they improved pestilence. The event is arguably overtuned currently, even excluding the targetting issues, at least was when I did it.

Anyway, not saying holydins are fine currently, they're probably quite shitty if you say so, but the downranking changes have only gone in last patch, and they haven't bothered balancing around it. They already said they will fix everything, both pve and pvp wise to fit with the change, instead of reverting downranking. I doubt they're gonna check paladins, see they can't cast for more than 2mins in a row, and be like "ok it's fine retadins are good so we don't care about holydin healing". Yes it's probably broken atm. It's beta and after those kind of big changes you can't expect for everything to be balanced. It will get changed, hell the holydin pass wasn't even really done yet, they said they're buffing beacon too so it's actually good, and they haven't even done that. I also expect changes so people aren't so tempted of being sheath bots, by either moving sheath or offering better alternatives in holy.

 

Linnet

I think it'll be fine. We used to use lots of different downranked versions of spells anyway so in a sense were already doing something similar. The people who got too used to much simpler healing styles may have some trouble adapting though.

Druid: Peace

 

• alcaras

That encounter is a bit... buggy, at the moment. Waves of mobs with perma combat for the entire duration.

A lot depends on whether you tank can hold onto everything; if he or she, then you're golden, since you don't have to spend too much mana as you just heal him. But if stuff starts going crazy, you can quickly burn through a mana pool and need to Divine Plea + Mana Pot to get back up. I had horribly mana issues there not as Holy, but as Prot. Holy I was fine, but largely thanks to having a good tank who made sure all the mobs were on him, making my job easy.

I do that fight in the hallway in front of that room, since I can't stand the particle effects in the room itself -- they look cool, but are horrible for fighting.

 

Shakes

You're missing the point. Enhancement shaman are balanced around everything they bring to the raid. If someone else is bringing the totems anyway because you're stacking healers, then enhancement shaman are less valuable than other classes than can provide the 10% attack power buff and 20% haste buff.

 

Lanlaorn

I understand your point completely, but I think it is exactly Blizzard's intention that if you have 2 Resto Shaman then the only reason for an Enh or Ele is their talent specific buffs (Unleashed Rage, Totem of Wrath, etc.) and you're not forced to bring 4 Shaman.

Every other class that also has a healer spec is like this, if you have 3 Holy Pallies the Ret doesn't bring any Blessings, just his talented effects like Crusader Strike, etc. If you have a Resto Druid the Feral doesn't contribute MotW anymore, only LotP. Holy Priests bring Fort, Shadow Prot, etc. so Shadow Priests "only" contribute VT, etc.

I think Unleashed Rage and Stormstrike (if you have an Ele Shaman/Moonkin) are sufficient but I'm not in beta so I don't really know how Enh Shaman DPS is doing.

 

Anedris

The point is that the enhance shaman will NOT be bringing unleashed rage to the raid because someone else (DK?) will be bringing that effect (and the two will not stack). Resto shaman have nothing to do with this (except insofar as that if enhance shaman no longer warrant a raid DPS spot those shaman might spec resto and fill a healing spot).

I do not see this as a bad thing, however. As long as no other class can bring unleashed rage (or as long as whatever UR-equivalent another class brings stacks with UR), every raid will always need an enhancement shaman. Period. (Unless it's some kind of bizarre excessive caster stacking creation, or unless it's sub-optimal.) And that requirement of one class/spec is no longer acceptable in a game with 30 class/specs.

So enhancement shamans must not be required. There are three ways to go about making them non-required - you can take away their unique buffs (take away UR completely), you can nerf them so severely that even with their unique buffs they're only equal in RDPS contribution to a rogue (this would make the enhance shamans totally worthless in smaller content and PvP), or you make their buffs non-unique, allowing a different class/spec to provide the same benefit.

I think it's pretty clear which road is the most painless.

The min-maxers, of course, will figure out that they need one class/spec to provide UR (or its equivalent) and will look at who can provide that buff while also contributing the most personal DPS or other benefits. If Blizz does their job this calculation will be so hopelessly complicated (depending on how many other shaman/DKs/whatever are in the raid, what kind of encounter it is, what the rest of the raid looks like, etc.) that the only realistically reasonable course will be to take the most skilled player.

This does hurt the effectiveness of stacking an enhance shaman with whatever other class/spec also provides UR, but again, make the calculation of benefits complicated enough (and the personal contribution of the two class/specs strong enough, since neither is relying on UR to gain its raid spot) and it shouldn't be a big deal.

 

Shakes

I'm not talking about forcing you to bring one. I'm saying you should have the option to bring one without it hurting your raid. I agree 4 shaman shouldn't be required, but given the intention to have 7-8 healers, you have to make it so 4 shaman is a useful raid composition. Enhancement and elemental shaman should be competing with DPS specced players for a spot, not with resto specced members of their own class.

If you assume enhancement shaman (due to the large number of different buffs they bring) have somewhat lower DPS, then in any scenario where someone else is providing their buffs, they're going to be underpowered. The alternative of balancing their DPS around assuming someone else is providing most of the same buffs leaves them overpowered in 10 mans where that wont be the case.

The fact that every other healer class is in the same boat is exactly the issue I'm highlighting: stacking healers hurts the viability of the DPS specs of those classes.

As I said initially: the real fix here is to bring the percentage of healing specs in line with the percentage of healers required. They could either reduce the number of healers, or instead of releasing the DK, released a healing class, but they chose to do neither, and I worry it's going to come back to bite them and undo the good work they did in making hybrids useful in non-healing roles in BC.

 

Anedris

Think about it for a moment - why would Blizzard let someone else provide their buff (UR) and not make sure that someone else does about the same personal DPS as the shaman?

Really though, once you start spreading these buffs around you no longer have to balance around them. Enhancement shamans don't have to do significantly poorer personal DPS to make up for UR, because every raid can be assumed to have UR anyways (and the same thing goes for whoever else provides UR). (This does become a bit problematic in 10 persons as you mention, but the easy solution to that is to spread the buffs around even more so they can be assumed in that setting as well... by which time the buffs have become all but meaningless and are only really a penalty for solo play, so we may as well eliminate them entirely... hmm...)

(Obviously you can't let enhance shamans out-DPS the rogues, but they don't have to be "gimped" in any particular fashion.)

I agree completely about healer numbers being out of whack though.

 

Lanlaorn

I don't see a problem with the Enh Shaman being more valuable in the 10 man where he's the only one supplying totems. Similarly the Ret pally would contribute a ton of RDPS with a second blessing, Feral Druid with MotW or Spriest a ton of utility if he brings Fort.

I know the analogy isn't quite accurate because shaman totems are generally quite a bit stronger than something like MotW, but still the fact remains that in a 10 man situation where you would expect one of every class anyone who has group buffs is far stronger than in the corresponding 25 man situation where someone else could provide redundant buffs.

IMO balance for the 25 man and just assume the 10 man has one of every class with less efficient back up tactics available.

 

Anedris

Well, in the 10 man setting though that windfury totem might only be buffing two or three people, though, whereas in the 25-person raid it might affect six to eight. We're used to thinking of totems and blessings as virtual necessities for acceptable performance, but at some point you have so few people to buff that the buff is no longer worth much.

 

Pyros

One thing I don't get is, enhance shamans don't only provide UR do they? I mean, totems, stormstrike debuff and a bloodlust, those still work right? Obviously you can get totems from your resto shamans(or elem don't know which is better to sacrifice points with), and bloodlust is a base shaman skill, but still it's not like enh shamans are just UR bots. If you give the ability to another class, in this case DK, to provide UR, that doesn't mean DKs can provide the rest.

They can provide imp icy talons for windfury, but what about strength of earth(and whatever totems that are still group only, unsure how they work now). They're still short of bloodlust and stormstrike. Can replace SS with the frost debuff on weapon, but then the DK is like a debuff bot, and can't DPS for shit. Imp icy talons is deep in frost, deep enough that you have to sacrifice runed weapon, using the frost debuff runeforge instead of the dps ones is also quite a loss of personal dps, while SS is proced on basic enh sham attack.

In the end, you can choose to spec a DK so he can replace an enh shaman. However, if they make enh shamans(as well as other hybrids) closer to pure DPS classes, that means that specing utility on DK would probably give a lower personal DPS than an enh shaman, because you have to go out of your way to do it, while it's enh shaman role to buff other people. So in the end you'll just have your DK speced pure blood and bring an enh shaman. But if your enh shaman doesn't raid because he has a girlfriend and she wanted him to go out, you can just ask your DK to suck it up and spec in a way so that the raid wide DPS loss is way less important, by providing the buffs while losing a bit of personnal DPS. That's how I think they see the changes and will try to balance around.

 

baghwan2

Uh, enough with the raid balancing and spell down ranking theorycraft?

 

Lanlaorn

I don't understand why people get annoyed by discussion of WotLK (it's effects on raid composition or healing spells in this case) in the WotLK discussion thread. I'm sure everyone loves seeing new information posted here when they check the thread but this isn't a newsfeed, it's a chat thread.

 

Pyros

And it's the weekend, which usually means there will be no news until next tuesday(or monday if we're lucky with the dev posts). Also the downranking discussion is actually quite interesting since it comes from a very recent change in wotlk beta(last week build). Arguably, the raid composition discussion is probably not as interesting because it'll still change before release, but I'm sure quite a few people feel concerned about the changes to their raid contributions(enh shams, spriests, fury wars and so on).

 

Ashen

Understandable. But "what-if" discussions about raid compositions are pretty pointless, since there's really no significant way to determine right now, what raids will be like. I mean, the level cap is still 77 on the beta. Max level gear, skills, talents, and more importantly RAIDS aren't even available yet. At the starting of Burning Crusade, Paladins were the most dominating class, but by the end of the raiding spectrum, we were seeing an overabundance of Shaman. I think these things speak for themselves, in that there's really no reason to get all worked up about it, when we're still fairly early in Beta.

Though I do like seeing discussions on downranking, seeing as that is a pretty huge part of the game that is about to change. I'm interested to see just how static Inscriptions end up being, because as of now, things like Earth Shock are about to be a lot more costly in the Arena meta game. But on top of that, if rumors are true, then we're about to see a rather large intellect buff at 80? I get the feeling that Blizzard has some intentions of balancing out the change, with a lower stat value on intellect, and I'm wondering if there's any noticeable change on the gear, up towards 80 that would mirror this.

 

spanko

Actually thats the problem, in TBC UR is what got enhancement shamans into raids. If not for UR nobody would be bringing them. The thing here specifically with enhancement that has shamans crying foul is the DK basically encroaching on our territory. Thats the best way I can think of to describe it.

Think about it like this, if a Blood specced Deathknight can bring similar personal dps as an enhance shaman, can provide UR and WF, can provide group healing while dpsing similar to a shadowpriest, and on top of all of that throw on tanking gear and tank trash and/or bosses or adds during bosses or tank in anyway that is useful to a raid, then why the hell would you ever bring an enhancement shaman? That not even mentioning the fact that right now in beta the DK version of UR also increases hunter ranged AP, whereas the Enhancement version does NOT. Other totems and bloodlust are irrelevant because every raid has to bring a certain amount of healers and resto shamans can provide both those things. As it stands right now in beta an Enhance Shaman is straight up a worse choice than a Blood DK in a raid because the DK can tank and heal his group and his UR works for hunters.

 

Anedris

An extra bloodlust is irrelevant?

If the DK version of UR affects ranged attacks, the shaman one obviously will too once they get it fixed (or maybe the DK one is bugged and it's not supposed to affect ranged, whatever, they're obviously supposed to be the same). Obviously if you have three resto shaman healers the value of an enhance shaman goes down - this is exactly the same as the value of a retadin being less if you have three holydin healers. As to the DK being able to off-tank... the enhance shaman can off-heal. You can quibble over which is more useful but it's just going to depend on whether you're trying to kill Al'ar (need more OTs) or the Eredar Twins (need more healers). And obviously if you're a top-end guild you're just going to respec people or swap people out anyways.

If DK utility and DPS is out of line they will be tuned down. If enhance shaman utility and DPS is out of line they will be tuned down.

There is an issue with healer numbers. It's obvious, we've been there, spelled it out.

Everyone's territory is supposed to be encroached on. That is the point. If everyone has their own unique territory, everyone is essential to an optimized raid, and that doesn't work because there simply aren't enough spots.

 

Leaflock

Edit: duh, the buffs will be raid-wide.

Classes with overlapping buffs and abilities do make for the possibility of one being unintentionally more optimal, but when done right, would generally allow for more options in composition for the majority of raids. Instead of a guild relying on one enhancement shaman to always be there, more people can fill the dps buffing role as needed. If the buffs end up affecting both melee and ranged, the DK can change spec for more dps/utility as needed. That "as needed" phrase is key-- more flexibility means more better.

 

Britton

All of this talk of UR vs the DK buff becomes pretty irrelevent next push, as the DK buff has been changed to 20% strength boost.

 

Lanlaorn

I never played Melee DPS but isn't that better for the 1 str = 2 AP classes? Especially if they're gemming for Str already because Kings boosts it.

That's kind of interesting, why make it terrible for Rogues but even better than UR for everyone else? I think that's a mistake since it seems to encourage stacking the DK/Ret/DPS Warrior/Enh Shaman/Feral Druid spots at the expense of Rogues.

The DK's buff being better for the Enh Shaman than the Shaman's own buff is odd too.

 

Pyros

It'd be better as 20%str, but I haven't seen anything about them changing it back to a str buff from an official source. Mind linking the quote? Checked shaman boards too, don't see anything there either. 20%str would be better than UR for pretty much every class but shamans and rogues.

 

Lambach

No, shamans got changed to gain ap like rogues. Only 1 ap from str now, however they now also gain ap from agil, and I guess int also.

 

urotas

Unleashed rage is still far better than 20% strength even for the strength classes, because you get ap from many other sources than just strength. A typical warrior/paladin might have 800 strength and 3500+ ap fully buffed now, so unleashed rage would give 350ap and the 20% strength buff only 320 ap. If they are changing the buff to 20% strength it'll be weaker than the shaman version, because other classes get less benefit from strength.

 

spanko

I can't find anything even remotely hinting at that change either, I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. Also to clarify the point I was trying to make; there's absolutely nothing wrong with giving multiple classes the same raid buffs and making them compete with each other for a raid spot. It's a good idea but you'll have to excuse me if I'm skeptical in Blizzard's ability to balance it so that one class/spec isn't so much better than another that it completely invalidates it. It's too early in beta to freak out, that's for sure, but the whole point of beta is to point out imbalances like this and discuss it. Right now that imbalance definitely exists between an Enhance Shaman and a Blood DK.