Lucinde

I was going to mention salvation, because it does have some synergy with DPS but chose not to as to keep the thread on-topic. Now that you mention it, I'll go into it anyway. BoS really isn't as awesome as it looks.

For starters, most hunters don't use it. Ever. Rogues, with their inherent aggro reduction don't need it. Sure, it just means they don't have to fade/vanish which saves them a few GCD's at best. Hardly 100 dps.

Warlocks have some good use for BoS, no doubt and will likely have the greatest dps increase from BoS of all classes. It's nice for mages as well, but Arcane mages don't need it at all. Second tier dps classes like Elemental/Enhancement shamans, Shadowpriests and Boomkins don't have proper aggrodumps of their own, have use for BoS, but since their dps is generally already lower the actual gain diminishes quickly. Shadowpriests are a special case here because VE almost doubles their tps. They can just not use it on aggro sensitive encounters and be fine without BoS.

And then of course for any encounter that has adds, a lot of movement a tauntable bosses or a clothie boss, BoS is largely redundant. I can't remember the last time I had to actually watch my threat on Anatheron, Az'galor, Archimonde, Supremus, Akama, Gorefiend, Mother, Council or Illidan (outside P2). That's 9 out of 14 encounters in tier 6 where BoS is exactly 100% useless. And then there's BB and RoS who both have phases where threat doesn't matter in the slighest and phases where it's a nightmare no matter if you have BoS or not. Having worked on Kalecgos, I can safely add that threat is a complete non-issue there as well.

BoS is definately not as good as totems. It may well be for Brutallus or Najentus but then the Shamans still have Bloodlust/Heroism. And you know what's funny? Hordies have always been doing fine aggro-wise even without pallies pre-TBC, because shamans *also* have Grace of Air. Yay!

And even then, the reality of BoS is just that it allows you to do your optimal rotations while sitting at 90-95% of your tanks aggro instead of the 120-125% you could safely sit at without pulling. BoS is very nice, but not godly.

I'm also not unconvinced BoK adds 100 dps to "many classes". And still, shadowpriests are scaling gimped and if WoA adds 100 dps for me, I can only imagine what it does for a warlock. I know "without a shadow of a doubt" that BoK doesn't add anywhere near 100 dps. It's more like 15 - if that. The extra hitpoints are more useful than anything else. Plus, if you want to compare kings, you have to compare it to WF as well which adds ~20% white damage to all melee. For the average 2k rogue that has 70% of his dps in white damage, that is about 280 dps from *just that totem*.

We could argue about this all day and even if I get convinced pally buffs are on par with shaman buffs, where does that leave druids and priests? Oh right, in arena's.

 

Grizlor

Rogue innate threat reduction is intended to counter the fact that players in melee range only need to exceed the tank's threat by 10% to pull aggro (as opposed to 130% by ranged). Feint is 20 energy, or half a sinister strike, and only reduces aggro by 105tps (at best). Pretty much your entire post is wrong, or baseless assumptions. Horde not needing salvation pre-BC because of "Grace of Air?" Do you mean Tranquil Air, which wasn't added until 1.9? Clearly you never fought Vael, Broodlord, or even Onyxia without salvation.

 

moowalk

Not really. I'm not sure of exact numbers, but it's much closer to 1 damage = 0.5 dps.

 

◊ manly

What about mage buffs ? Lets see.

-Arcane Intellect
-Fire Vulnerability (mage-only buff for all intent)
-Winter's Chill (mage-only buff for all intent)

To make matters worse, arcane, fire and frost spec don't even have synergies across specs -- a fire mage won't benefit from a frost mage in a raid.

---
All classes that provide dps benefits to other classes seem to have their personal dps lower. This makes sense since it counter-balances the fact that, well, they buff other people's dps. I am talking here about

-shadow priests
-enhancement shamans
-elemental shamans
-moonkins
-ferals
-dps warriors

What I don't understand is why warlocks have escaped that faith? They provide very valuable raid dps benefits to all melee classes, and almost all casters too (ie: all dps classes in a raid). COR, COS, COE is no joke. They are very considerable raid boost. Why is it that all other classes that provide raid dps buffs (see examples above) have to pay a personal dps penalty whereas it seems warlocks don't ?

 

Daedalix

I was thinking about this very thing when pondering possible Deathknight raid synergies. Rogues, the only pure dps class, don't provide buffs, but destro locks are an equally "pure dps" class and have raid synergies. I think the counter to this would be that a destro lock's raid synergies are less than that of an Affliction lock's synergies and so it depends entirely upon spec. An Affliction lock trades off personal dps for some improved raid dps. Similar to a fury warrior vs. a Imp Slam/Bloodfrenzy warrior or hunters with the tradeoffs between their Survival/BM/MM spec choices.

The other consideration is that 2 warlocks are really all that is necessary to fully benefit a raid while having multiple shaman or moonkin, for example, is beneficial because their buffs are party-specific.

All in all I'd agree with you, but there is Some tradeoff involved. Most of the examples you pointed out are pure hybrid classes who atleast have the option to serve a more optimized purpose whereas Warlocks do not.

 

Lucinde

No, that's what you get when you roll alliance. Did you? And yes I meant TA. I can imagine it being rough on Vael. Other than that?

It's ok if you want to defend your shaman, but at least give some proper arguments. Baseless assumption? I'm clearing MH/BT weekly. I'm telling you salvation isn't worth 100 dps in most encounters. Can you prove me wrong without flaming?

I already said as much as "salvation is good". In fact, it's probably a pally's best buff; that's why you bring one. Salv on your raid, kings on your tank. Same reason you bring a priest and a druid. That still doesnt change the fact that shammies are vastly superior for their group use. Until the top end guilds stop stacking shamams and encounters are significantly easier with a lot of them it's going to be hard to convince me, and many others otherwise.

 

Northerner

Well, I'm not sure that raid-wide buffing classes and group-wide buffing classes really need to be separated for looking at this sort of thing. After all, an enhancement shaman or shadow priest or BM hunter or whatever is indeed buffing the raid's dps through buffing their party's dps. It is easier to see how a raid buff applies across the board but I don't think anyone would maintain that bloodlust for an obvious example is not worth considering as a raid dps buff, even though it is party-specific.

Ignoring that though, clearly the first three warlocks provide exceptional raid-wide buffs. The only questionable ones are CoE (depending on the number of frost/fire damage dealers) and if you choose to bring an affliction warlock for malediction/embrace. I can see what you might go with two as your necessary number but three is still quite beneficial for many common raid compositions.

In the end though, from a tuning standpoint you might simply design with the presumption of certain common raid buffs/debuffs. Although I think it's disingenuous, you could then proceed from there to consider those "needed" raid buffs/debuffs as no longer counting towards a class' strengths. I don't like that viewpoint for tuning but it seems that Blizzard at least engages in it to some degree.

 

Grizlor

I played an horde holy/disc priest and a warlock pre-BC. Shamans were far and away the worst healers for the first 2 and a half years of the game, and now are highly desirable simply due to the way blizzard has chosen to design encounters. For all we know, Kil'jaeden could be C'thun 2.0 where totems are completely marginalized because of raid mobility reasons. News flash: Totems are supposed to be better than blessings because they only affect 5 people, and except for a healer or melee group, you usually have 1-2 people who don't even get benefit (ferals/prot paladins and windfury, for example)

If I were to wager a quess, at least half of the uproar over shamans is simply due to frustration in recruiting them. Maybe if the class was less of an abomination in other facets of the game, more people would be drawn to it. The solution isn't to nerf shamans, but give other healers utility that makes them desirable. Considering shamans can be 3 specs, I don't think having 4 in a raid where 2 are healers (out of 8), 1 is enhance, and 1 elemental to be too off-base.

 

Moshne

While I realize this thread is not supposed to be the "fix the shaman problem" thread, I think these sort of blanket statements ignore a much more complicated situation.

As an elemental shaman, I realize that a big portion of what makes me raid viable is the fact that I can bring an additional heroism to the raid. My WoA totem can be brought by a resto shaman, and my ToW effect is not used by most of the casters in my group (the shadowpriest scales poorly with crit, and is easily hit capped, and others end up hit capping as well.)

In exchange for this extra heroism/bloodlust, my personal DPS is dropped by a fair amount in relation to the "dps" classes. Halving the value of heroism would be a backwards sort of fix for the stacking of shaman healers vs. other healers, but it would hamper, if not cripple the raid viability of elemental, which is only sitting on the positive side of viability by a small margin as is.

I feel like we should be focusing on the philosophical problems/successes in the tuning of the encounters, rather than looking for ways to nerf the classes that are being stacked to compensate for encounter design.

 

Lucinde

The tuning process isn't really that complicated. Hard to get right, sure, but not complex.

There basically two variables present in designing an encounter:
1) the technical part (execution - who has to do what and where does everyone stand)
2) the numbers (how hard does the guy hit for, what is the enrage timer, how much non-MT damage is present)

With the game that is over 3 years old, part #1 is easily beaten by the seasoned raiders. Just look at Moroes, for example. It's just a control/position/tank transition fight with a very soft enrage timer that is your healer's mana. What needs to be done is crystal clear on the first attempt even if you never stepped foot into a raid before. Yet, tons of people wipe because the bleed dot ticks for a fair bit, adds break cc and kill healers etc.

Then there is Kael, who is nothing but "ok wtf is going on and how do we deal with it". Once you got your assignments covered and everyone knows all the stuff that's going on you're there. Similarly, Kael is very easy to repeat after a first kill.

Whatever interesting mechanic the devs come up with (Kalecgos for example is a very nice example of a cool fight mechanic), the top guilds are going to figure it out on the first 10 pulls and proceed to get a kill one or two days later. I don't think this will ever change. Then the guides come out and "lesser guilds" practice for a few nights and kill te boss.

With that in mind, complexity tuning will never be true tuning. I'd instantly step in I have a preference for interesting fights over number fights, but the reality is that no matter how complicated a fight is - it can be beaten by any group with reasonable skills. It may take a bit longer than the bleeding edge, but everyone can do it.

What leaves us is number tuning. More raid damage (twins, M'uru), more tank damage (Brut -> Stomp, Kalec -> Corrupting strike) or harsher dps requirement (Brut, M'uru P2). More and more encounters are tuned by making the numbers bigger which is exactly why people stack shamans. If encounters would be less number-tuned, but just more complex or requiring more than just "loads of group healing and loads of dps" you would see less shaman stacking.

Or they could just make heroism/bloodlust the 41 point elemental talent and move the totem somewhere else in that tree. That would rule it out for resto's and would kinda screw enhancements. They do, however, already bring aforementioned Windfury as well as Unleashed Rage (or whatever the name of that talent is) which is more than enough group buffs without heroism.

 

• Intermission

Ah yeah, good point, I didnt think about that (we dont have an Elemental shaman). As you said, enhance and resto shamans bring massive dps and healing to the table, Lust or not.

Which leads onto...

As radical as that is, I think that would be perfect to balance the class. Obviously it wont happen (public outroar), but it still sounds like a great solution.


In context of this threads main topic (encounter tuning), and as Lucinde put it, the execution/numbers game:

It would be a big loss to take away the number challenges from encounters, in all its forms: raid damage, tank damage, dps, etc. All are important in conjunction with execution elements in order to make the execution needed in the first place, and not just a zerg. Clearly the class needs to be changed instead of raiding itself being changed, in order to fix these sort of balance problems.

 

Valerian

Probably a little too extreme. However reducing the effect of bloodlust/heroism and then adding a deep elemental talent to improve it would probably be more "reasonable"

 

Quintessa

A couple people have touched on it, but I think the primary aspect of whether or not a fight is tuned is is it repeatable. Strategies, class makeups, all that changes from guild to guild. Just look at Twins, there's several strategies out that make them killable, but the big question is can the fight be repeated week after week with less trouble than the previous week?

Take Mother Shahraz 1.0; she was killable, but the fight was so badly tuned that repeat kills were more a factor of luck than execution. I would say Eredar Twins borders on this, my guild has killed them every week since our first kill, but every week yields just as much frustration as the previous week (confound/conflag combos on the tanks ftw).

But then take a look at M'uru, the fight requires theoretically more effort than any other boss in Sunwell, yet I would say it is exquisitely tuned, just for the simple fact that there is nothing in the fight that doesn't make it repeatable week after week, and with none of those, "WTF just happened?" moments.


Oh yeah, and as a warlock I vehemently denounce any Bloodlust/Heroism nerfs :]

 

Lucinde

I'm personally not too fond of the most recent developments in encounter tuning that seem to involve "as long as you make sure the whole raid is getting massive amounts of semi-random damage it's hard".

I mean, WHY does Kalecgos need to do the stupid raid-wide Arcane AoE? Why does the curse have to bounce when you let it tick out? Why does Sathrovarr need to throw those multi-target shadowbolts? It's just making the fights more a healing nightmare than anything else. Like I said, I love the mechanics and getting your portal rotations right and getting Sath to actually hit your tank is what makes the fight interesting. I understand something is needed to ensure everyone keeps rotating between worlds, but they could instead just have placed a debuff that instantly kills you when you are in the dragon world for longer than 3 minutes instead of throwing around a stupendous amount of raidwide damage.

Does M'uru really need to hit 5 players with 1000 shadowdamage every goddamned second for the fight to be interesting?

 

Maldi

It's really blizzards newer way of making sure you bring X healers to a fight. The alternative is a hard enrage timer like brutallus. The solution, adding a hard enrage and no raid damage would certainly lead to some boring healing, it would just bring back the days of 6 healers spamming the tank and so forth, its not enjoyable.

As a raid healer im quite happy with the current raid healing in the game, it has its challenging parts and its easy parts, but on the whole its alot better then spamming the tank. My only concern with all the raid healing is the dominance shaman have over it compared to other classes, but thats been discussed to death.

 

Floria

Cue rehashes of 2.0/2.1 era complaints about casters doing too much damage compared to melee due to elemental shamans having better totems. Though, I guess back then it was the issue of casters having T5-equivalent gear before T4 instances. Maybe if Blizzard doesn't royally screw up the talents/gear for WotLK, this change could go live without people complaining that much.

 

Quintessa

You already answered yourself on the AoE thing in Kalecgos. An insta-kill debuff would make even less sense. The AoE does the same effect but makes healers a part of the fight, rather than just having them spam the tank the entire time. The curse adds a second soft enrage timer to the fight, if you take too long to kill him the curses stack up and the raid begins to die. Otherwise you could just take as long as you want getting to 10%/10%.

I had a comment about M'uru but not sure how close we may be getting to breaking the forum rule. :\

 

Valerian

It would probably still be more efficient to throw the Shaman into the melee group for his better bloodlust and then back out to the caster group even if it was elemental. It would just bring some viability to the elemental tree compared to the other two.

 

CD

The other alternative is other types of raid damage- not everything has to be randomly targetted spikes on a small number of people like we have on 4/5 of the SP fights so far. Less randomness in the aoe damage would favour priests, more long duration effects like burn or agonising flames would favour druids.

 

◊ manly

EJ is the living proof that this is not true. To the best of my memory, we had 6 consecutive one-shots on pre-nerf Shahraz.

 

Liebestod

This may have been gone over already, but one thing I've noticed in a lot of balance discussions is that a lot of raiders don't feel that it's legitimate to have to plan their strategy around randomness, they want to imagine a "best-case" scenario and hope it occurs for their kill, and if it doesn't then they bitch about the fight being "too random". What they should be doing is formulating their strategy based on the likelihood of sub-optimal random events that they'll actually be able to react to. I think the quintessential example of this was Prince Malchezzar in Kara... the first guilds I killed him with, the strategy would be to start the tank off against the wall and if an infernal lands on that spot, then simply move a tiny bit out of the way... until eventually you get cornered and trapped in and the fight ends. This was a rather myopic strategy, and lead to a lot of bitching about how random the fight is. But a more intelligent strategy would dictate that you should always try to have the tank in the most open area of the arena (account for some lost DPS in moving), and that one should plan for jumping from one spot to another if it looks like the tank is getting cornered. However, I think it's pretty safe to assume that a lot of guilds didn't do this and just hoped that the tank wouldn't get cornered instead.

It's possible that Prince was "too random", yes, but it's more likely that guilds were just too damn inflexible. I think this mindset towards randomness needs to ease up.

 

Bjork

We had four Shamans on both our M'uru-kills so far (one pre nerf, one post). Two resto and two enh. - could have gotten a kill with only one enh. shaman aswell (trust me, I have enough wipes on M'uru to know by now), running a completly normal setup.

What we experienced was that phase 2 got a lot easier with two CoH-Priests. Everyone was alive 10-15 seconds longer and it was a safe kill in the end instead of a low-percentage wipe.

The fight is very well tuned - or balanced if you want - as you can have lots of different setups and have success. SK Gaming killed it without any Holy Priests or Resto Druids, we chose to rely heavy on them (after trying lots of different setups).

Quite impressive by Blizzard getting the fight so perfect with hardly any PTR-testing.

 

Lucinde

Well, the instakill was just a random idea I threw out as an alternative to stacking stupid amounts of damage. It could as well be a debuff that you get after 2,5 minutes that reduces your damage and healing done to the dragon by 75%. Or heck, make it a stacking effect (like, 10% per stack) so you actually have to do some proper dps on the dragon as well instead of "just randomly nuke it when you can until it's at 15% and then don't touch it until Sath is at 15% as well". Or, really anything else that forces you to go into those portals.

What the arcane debuff does right now is just throw crazy amounts of unavoidable raid damage around just to give the healers something to do. I can imagine a more elegant way to get your healers involved. I mean, sure spamming tanks ain't too interesting, but is spamming random raid members with CH or CoS that much more challenging? It just adds an IMO unnecessary element of to a fight that is by design a display of control, organization and execution and not of who can field the best AoE healers. In that respect, burn and meteor slash are far more interesting ways to give healers something to do, as burn is just one target and meteor slash isn't random. Heck, even Gruul and Mag did a better job at giving healers some work; there's tons of raidwide damage going on, but at least you know when it's happening and it doesn't have the (again, IMO) stupid spikes.

Random burst damage from multiple sources on your raid = bad. It can cause unpreventable deaths (small chance, but it can happen) and on several of the current endgame fights that just means a wipe. Judging from the fact that people are stacking relative large of healers in SWP - 9 on Kalec, 10/11 on Twins, and, what, 9? on Felmyst - as opposed to pretty much running all of tier6 with 7 and sometimes 8 healers I do think Blizz has been going a bit over the top with the raid damage.

I ask again - would these fights really be poorly tuned if the non-tanking part your raid didn't take 80% of your healing power and we could actually take a normal 7 healer setup instead of this "stack more shammies" crap?

If so - why? What am I missing that makes this massive amount of semi-random raid damage so interesting and critical to the spirit of the encounters?

 

Vihermaali

I've seen a healer do closer to 900k-1000k efficient healing on a single felmyst kill (easily over 1 million "raw healing"). If you don't throw a massive amount of dmg for healers to heal, there will be a lot of unused healing power. And if me (CoH priest) and the resto shaman don't need to heal anything then it's way too easy (for us). Brutallus is an extreme example of "no aoe dmg" encounter that is hard to heal. But if a tank dies, it's in less than 1 spells cast time. Brutallus is NOT fun to heal. Numbers thrown at non-tanks are much better way to challenge the healing limits, I think. In addition to some interesting mechanics on how the numbers are delivered, of course! Illidari Council is almost perfect example on how to make interesting encounter to heal. Huge amount of raid damage, but not unpredictable. It's dependant on multiple healers, and their skill. After overgearing it becomes boring again, but that's progress.

Haven't seen M'uru yet, but at least on 4 first sunwell bosses there is no special need for a shaman healer. I'm only counting the pure healing ability, totems and bloodlust/heroism are a whole another matter of course. I (CoH priest) can heal it just as well as any shaman. Of course I believe in balanced healing teams (2druid+2priest+2paladin+2shaman) but thats a different matter.