I said something similar in the other thread, but;

Assuming Blizz can keep classes to within 2-3% of one another (HA!) this means that raids will have a lot more freedom in building themselves out of friends and good players instead of requiring very specific lineups.

That assumes Blizz can keep classes within 2-3% of one another (HAHA!).

True. Add on to that the fact that player skill varies. There is a reason why one hunter can do 3.1k dps and the another with the same gear/buffs/group hunters can do under 2.5. And thats more than simply a crit chance variance. As you said, if Blizzard can actually get the class dps that close -- and KEEP it close with gear scaling as we go through content -- then hopefully it will come down to picking the people that never die to Encapsulate, have instant Firebloom-last-cast-before-Darkness reaction times, kill Shield Orbs quicker, can run from Gravity Balls, and do more damage. Rather than an ordinary hunter doing more damage than a good mage.

But that is a big bloody if, with plenty of HAHA!'s!

The thing is they can even be further away from each other than this. Currently they are SO far apart (with little real skill defining some) that its CLEAR you need to stack. With the looks of the new talents and skills dps looks like it'll be more skill intensive then before. It will be a lot easier to pull the GOOD players into a raid without needing to worry their class is subpar. For this to be true blizz doesn't need them to be EXACTLY equal they just can't currently be as unequal as they are. I'd suspect even up to a 10% difference would probably be ok to distinguish between good and bad players regardless of class.

Delete Please.

While I agree that spreading the discussion around in many different threads is a bit scrambled there will inevitably be discourse on it within each class thread, which has nothing to do with a fear of creating new threads.

However, why discussion sprung up in this thread instead of moving directly to http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t26275-c...vulnerability/ is likely due to the Wrath specific nature of the topic.

There are two types of guilds. Guilds which have access to every to multiple characters of every class and spec, and guilds which don't.

This change will make life a lot easier for the second type of guild. However, it's possible that the first kind of guild will be able to indulge in stacking as you have described. But given that the first type of guild stacks raids regardless of what you do, I'm not sure there's really a solution that still maintains some flexibility in who you can take to raids.

That depends on whether being able to get all your raid buffs more consistently as well as getting new ones will make up for losing the ones that used to stack.

Assume this is the case for now then because I am pretty sure Brutallus was designed with all available raid buffs in mind, lest they want to trivialize it for guilds that could get all raid buffs. I may be missing something, but just from a melee PoV we gain 3% haste and 4% more damage dealt from Ret Paladins which is new in Wrath and lose BoM/BS stacking, BF being cut in half and CoR/FF not stacking. It looks like melee got more nerfs than buffs here.

There's more to it than just that. For example, you lose the current Windfury totem entirely, and instead get 20% Haste .. which is a bigger DPS increase for Rogues considering dual wield mechanics and Combat Potency. It's too early to say decisively whether the changes will end up being an overall buff or nerf, nor is that relevant. WotLK is going to be a new game, and WotLK encounter tuning will depend on WotLK buff/debuff stackage, not TBC buff/debuff stackage.

I think this is where talents such as Wrecking Crew, (Bloody) Vengeance and Moonfury come in, among others.

It occurred to me upon reading that Shadow Weaving was now a self-buff: If we have talents that increase personal DPS by x%, then if class a is lagging behind the rest of the pack by z%, increase the talent's benefit by z.

Diverse mechanics can cause balance headaches trying to weigh DOTs against nukes against auto-attacks, but if you've got something that increases your performance (and only yours) by a percentage, then you can leverage that to simplify the balancing process.

It sounds like we aren't going to see something like a TBC rogue in Wrath (i.e., a class/spec that justifies its raid presence based on nothing but its personal DPS). Everyone will bring buffs, and if everyone does less damage because most of the buffs don't stack, so what? Boss health is tuned based on what a Wrath raid can do, not what a level 80 raid using TBC mechanics can do.

It doesn't really matter if no one does significantly more DPS in PvE than they do in PvP as long as everyone's PvE DPS is similar (or those with weaker DPS bring stronger buffs, etc.). RDPS can be poor and boss health can simply be tuned to that (poor) number and it'll be fine. Maybe some people will grumble about not seeing so many pretty numbers but the numbers will be increasing over level 70 ones anyways so meh, they'll cope.

The point is, if 2 classes bring the same gain to a group and only one class is really needed due to its roll (read: Prot Warrior Sunder Armor, Rogue Expose Armor), why bring the other class at all if not for dps? And here we are again, rogues have to justify their spot in a raid via DPS and not Utility.

It doesn't necessarily have to be that everyone will bring buffs. All it has to be is that all necessary buffs are obtainable wfrom 1/3rd of the raid, and that healing, dps, and tanking are at a similar level of output for all classes once those buffs are taken into account.

It may well be that Rogues have much fewer buffs than Death Knights do. As long as they both do equal DPS once buffs are taken into consideration it is less of a major issue. Your skilled DK will take up one of your 10 buff spots. Your skilled Rogue will take up one of the 15 other spots.

A class which can provide a whole number of buffs will be a little more likely to get a raid spot than one which cannot, because they have the option of taking one of 25 spots and not just 1 of 15 but in reality I don't think it will be a huge issue. The general difference in quality between the 'best' player in a 25 man group and the 'worst' will ensure that anyone of sufficient skill will find a place much of the time.

Provided there are no notable dps, tanking, or healing benifits from specific classes. Which is the big difficulty. Because otherwise the issues that Intermission raised come into play.

I would disagree that 10% is acceptable wiggle-room between classes. At a certain point of progression skill does not make up for a 10% difference in DPS/Healing/Tanking capacity.

Re the above:

Not, it becomes a point of:

Players 1-10. Picked by your class buffs and your skill at playing your class.
Players 10-25. Picked by your class dps/healing and your skill at playing your class.

It's not a rogue issue. Everyone who isn't in the 1-10 players contributing buffs has to justify themselevs on dps/healing and skill.

And everyone in 1-10 has to justify themselves in skill too, because otherwise someone else who can do the same buffs but is better will take their place, and they'll have to justify a place in the second group.

If you have a great DK tank, an average Warrior tank, and a great Rogue what two are you going to pick? You pick the DK to tank and the Rogue to DPS, because they maximise your output from the "forced" classes insofar as you require sunder or expose, and require a tank. The fact the warrior can do both is much less important now, not more, because you're unlikely to get to a position where you've filled up your raid with your 25 best players and you still don't have a warrior or rogue in there.

Thus, barring gross class imbalances in output, buffs become somewhat trivial in comparison to pickign the best 25 players in your guild.

Because the Rogue doesn't belong in the "Stupid Things People Do" thread? Because the Rogue is your guildie/RL friend? Because is an all-around great player that won't blow up the raid?

And finally, because the difference between the Rogue and the other player is not large enough to sway your decision either way.

Not withstanding the fact that Rogues are still due for a polish pass. The as-yet-unannounced Blood Frenzy equivalent? I'd be willing to be bet my firstborn that it's going to be coming from the Rogues, specifically, a charge-less Hemo.

Agreed.

There's also no +melee / physical hit (de)buff either. It's a plausible option to give to rogues.

EDIT: Draenei buffs are still only party-wide, aren't they?

Seems i ommited an important piece of information (posting on the same topic in 3 threads on the same forum is bad).

As far as i recall, rogues are the only class that currently gains about 100% dps by raid (de)buffs. We are the real buff sponges which will make us a NIGHTMARE to balance under this new conditions. Because either
a) we dont bring enough dps to fall into the category "good player, good dps" for pve
or
b) we just rip shit apart in pvp because our stand-alone dps got buffed so hard that noone in pvp will stand a chance just to make us compete in pve

I will reiterate the point once:

Everyone will have to justify their presence in the raid on DPS/Healing/Tanking. Because if all they had was buffs they would get replaced by the other classes that can do the same buffs but better DPS/H/T. It is not a Rogue issue alone. If your class does worse DPS than other classes that can also provide your buffs you're in the same situation. Once you have one person with the buff in the raid the fact anyone else has it does not matter.

As regards to Rogues scaling with buffs far more and this being a PvE/PvP problem:

1. It's a beta, they can fiddle with how much each class scales with certain buffs if they need to. (They can do it in live too).
2. PvP and PvE are vastly different in a number of ways.

Trying my best to not sound like a whine, but isnt b) already the case? Not as dramatic as your describe it, but certainly on that side of the spectrum. Particularly the scaling aspect, as seen with S3 and beyond.

Because the new raid-buffs/debuffs-damage vs solo/pvp-damage issue is seemingly hard to balance from a numbers point of view as you said, perhaps they could balance it by easing up on some of the abilities they are giving or already have given to rogues. Or conversely, add more escape stuff for others (eg hunter changes). --- after typing that, I realise that's a stupid idea, restricting design and playstyle etc etc, so read the paragraph below instead:

My personal opinion, and something I have been trying to push for since the existence of TBC (and earlier) is to remove rogues from the game. But a more realistic approach I think is to just further separate the pve and pvp trees of a rogue. Buffing combat dps to respectable raiding levels, while leaving the fancier stuff in the other trees, with significantly less damage modifying talents.

Intermission, just food for thought, what keeps the rogue to sh*t on the fancy tricks and just rip stuff apart with your more realistic approach of buffed pve combat tree? Nothing, its the exact problem why rogues got the nerf with resilience, hemo normalisation nerf and tri-spec hemo combat nerf. It did lead to too much offensive power for rogues. Players are not stupid sheep that follow Blizzard when they say "subtlety is for pvp, combat is for pve, assassination is .. meeh", players will figure out how to break out the fixed forced rules. Bend them as far as possible until Blizz gets out the nerf stick again if enough QQ arises... which mostly results in nerfing a class in PvE due to being OP in PvP. Let me close with... this is no whine post, its my subjective view of what is currently happening due to the (de)buff consolidation and general observation of mechanic changes that happened during TBC.

It seems that amplify magic isn't mentioned in the consolidation post. That's quite interesting seeing how that was one of the bigger buffs a mage could bring, especially to 10-mans.

Well if it was me, I'd make a combination of [Cheap Shot, Kidney Shot, Vanish, Sprint, Wound Poison, CloS] deep non-combat talents, and speed up Crippling Poison unless talented. Not going to happen I know, but just throwing it out there as a solution to the "go combat and zerg them anyway".


Any word on group versions of Damp/Amp magic?

That one is as well thought out as allowing pets in BM spec only. Obviously if you don't know a class at all, you don't have to discuss about it's mechanisms.

Regarding the Rogue situation overall, I would wait for talents to get finalized and then see how it works out. There are plenty of ways to make classes do good dps in pve while limiting them in pve. At the end of the day, rogue will remain as their base dps measure class, even if other classes end up closer than before.