I still maintain that Prince is a terrible fight that should have been scrapped before it ever went live. When my old guild killed Prince on our third attempt ever because we got lucky on the infernal drops, it was a big letdown and didn't set a good tone for the rest of TBC raiding.

The biggest problem with Prince is that it actually punishes you for dealing with the infernals properly. Every time you move the boss a significant distance, you prolong the fight. Longer fight means more infernals, more infernals means more moving the boss, and so on. You also risk the tank getting knocked out of healer range, and have to deal with having someone else direct the tank's movements because the tank can't see most of the platform with the wall at his back.

Back when Kara was serious business, I spent our first month forcing my Kara raids to run Prince the "right" way. We called infernal drops, we rigorously adjusted our position in phase 1 to make sure we could get through phase 2 without getting boxed in, we worked out in advance who was clicking the minimap to signal the tank where to move. We still wiped, because even on what could have been lucky infernal placement we were making the fight hard. Meanwhile my guild's other Kara raid, with basically identical skill and gear, barely moved Prince and just accepted that if they got boxed in they were wiped. They wiped way the hell less than we did.

I don't think people run the stupid "camp the door and hope no infernals drop there" strat because they're poor strategists or poor players. I think they do it because they're smart enough to figure out the precautions against getting boxed in are more likely to wipe them than bad infernal placement. (And yes, Prince is a joke now, and some of you are probably already typing up a story about how you killed him in 90 seconds last week on your green-geared alt with no healers and an AFK rogue tank.)

Just because there are precautions you can take against worst-case random events doesn't mean it's actually worthwhile to take them. I mean, you could have two priests respec Pain Suppression for Bloodboil every week and make every fel rage theoretically healable, right?

Aye, I agree. Bloodboil is another example of an encounter with an interesting healing mechanic. Everything is predictable and controllable. Fel Rage is perfectly healable even on the worst class (Mage) and you have a fair few seconds to respond to it. It still takes proper skills and tight assignments to get the job done, but it isn't a random crapshoot where you're just hovering your grid to see who's getting the next megahit. What makes BB a nice encounter healing-wise is that there is no stupid random spikes. You know who and when to heal which makes the fight more about strategy then about good reflexes.

Leo is interesting as well; there is positioning of healers and inner demon targets as well as the whirlwind dot. It ticks for quite a bit, but not so fast that it can kill someone before you can land a heal.

What I absolutely hate about council is that someone can get a flamestrike, properly dodge it and then gets the rogue poison with an instant envenom and just dies before anyone can possibly land a heal. Again, it doesn't happen often, but it *does* happen. Another example of a poorly designed raid-damage mechanic is Winterchill's Icetomb. It just kills most people on under 2 seconds. Of course on Rage it doesnt really matter since he's such a pushover and you can PvP trinket it, but I dont think that in the five months I've be killing Rage almost weekly I 've seen a single kill with everyone alive.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that raid-damage isn't so bad, unless you can get these dumb spikes on people because it comes from multiple sources. Kalec's arcane buffet alone wouldn't be so bad, but combined with the curse, the *random* shadowbolts and the *random* "teleporting back to dragon world right next to where a portal spawns in 1 seconds and nuking me for 7k" I honestly think it's stupid.

The fact that you need *nine* healers (over a third of your raid) to heal the fight only adds to my belief that the raid damage is starting to become too much. Sure, the fight is perfectly doable and it's tuned alright. But, as I put before, it's pure number tuning. "Hey let's make sure all 25 raiders take some ridiculous amount of damage all the time. That should make it a tough fight!"

The thing is with Illidari Council, half the time people will live through that kind of combo with fast heals. The other half of the time it won't matter because it happens so little that it just will extend the fight for 30 seconds. The Ice Tomb on rage is easily healable. Have a 3 shamans/priests waiting for him to target someone else and then just assist off and spam the crap out of lhw/flash heal. Just saying.

That still doesn't make it not a stupid situation. Unpreventable deaths that are not part of the encounter (like they are on Teron and Azgalor) are poor design, no matter how many ways you twist and turn it.

The Ice Tomb deals 5K on impact and then ticks for 2.5k a second. That means it kills most people in two seconds excluding the time the bolt takes to get there. With a 1.5 second casttime for a quick heal, it means you have 0.5 seconds to react. Yes it is perfectly healable, but it relies for 100% on having superfast reflexes. If the majority of your raid is 25+ years old, odds are their reflexes aren't quick enough to deal with it. Poor design, really.

The thing about "unpreventable deaths" is that majority of them are very preventable, and "couldn't do anything" is just an excuse.

Power word: shield (2k) + prayer of mending (2k), that should be enough time to give them the extra 1-2secs they need to move their old fingers to button and heal the Tomb.

Teron/Azgalor unpreventable deaths don't make you lose durablity, and you can soulstone the target way before he dies. It's not as bad as "unpredicatble unpreventable death", which are quite rare. Besides, trash clearing + boss usually take 20-30 minutes anyway. The whole beauty of Illidari Council healing is the need for very quick reflexes (of both target potion/hs clicking and your healing). "After someone takes dmg you got exacly 2 seconds to land a heal or he dies" is a good motto there.

I've seen people raidheal I-Council with pretty much Greater Heal only (2,5secs cast time). It makes my skin crawl to even think about it, but apparently it can be done succesfully without any deaths.

If people are dying to tomb on rage, have them wear HP. There is nothing stopping your low-hp people from putting on 10,001 hp to give them an extra 2 seconds for heals. That strategy of wearing more stamina works on all bosses too where its possible for someone to die quickly.

Additionally it is not bad game design to die to a tomb in 2 seconds, its bad planning on your part to let someone wear minimal HP in the first place so they can do more dps / healing on a reward boss.

And the shield / PoM comment is very valid too. If you don't have your priests spread out to toss instants, that's another thing you're doing wrong. Bad game design should not be confused with poor planning and bad strategies.

I missed a critical "not" in there I just noticed. It should of course read: "Unpreventable deaths that are not part of the encounter (like they are on Teron and Azgalor) are poor design, no matter how many ways you twist and turn it"

I edited my post to correct it.

Anyway, I'm not complaining about Rage or Council or anything. I'm talking about my grips with the way Blizzard decides to make encounters hard (well, Rage... lol, but anyway).

Boneitus, there are indeed ways around the tomb on Rage. We just use PvP trinkets and hope you don't get it twice within two minutes, which usually doesn't happen. And since there are so many escapes (bubble, blink, iceblock, CoS before it hits (hard) and even beast within works) it doesn't really matter. Sometimes a healer *is* quick enough with a PWS or a mending or something. And if someone dies, who cares. Rage is not the point though.

The point is that Blizzard is trying to tune encounters healing-wise by throwing absolutely insane amounts of raid damage around which makes chain heal and priest AoE heals extremely efficient in the tier6 content which in turn pushes druids and paladins more and more to the background and puts shammies more and more in front. The fact that is mostly random and has spikes just adds insult to injury, because no matter how good your healers are, sometimes someone will die and you might just wipe over it. Especially with how tight SWP fights are tuned.

So no, I'm not too fond of this latest development in raid encounters.

Illidan phase 2 is another one of those retarded ideas. Completely unpredictable damage and if you're unlucky he's just gonna throw 4 of those fireballs in a row on a single group and then proceed to Dark Barrage someone in the same group. Again, it doesn't happen a lot, but if it does you're just going to wipe most of the time. Sure, we shrug it off, go again and kill him, but it's still dumb. No, then the Demon phase is a way better idea. You know your raid is going to take an absolute ton of damage and you know a healer of two might get the demons. And you probably have some Agonizing Flames ticking, but it's not the "um wtf just happened" effect if someone dies. I bet it's actually a lot more interesting to heal the demon phase then it is to heal the Flames of Azzinoth phase. Spam group heals and pray the RNG smiles on you?

Funny enough, as a dps I find most of these fights an absolute joke. It's basically "dps like crazy and don't stand in the fire". Tanks have interesting stuff to do, healers (apparently) have interesting (or at least hard) things to do and we dps... we just run around and nuke?

It would be refreshing to see something unique for DPS that didn't involve "burn down add X in Y seconds because if you fail bad thing Z happens".

I don't post very often on these boards but I read enough, and this is definitely worth seconding. I've always raided alliance since the very first days of MC up until now, and over time I've spoken with a lot of horde players who (during those days) would gripe about the ineffectiveness of shamans in raids. I've watched chain heal go from an average healing spell, to simply an overpowered one.

These days it seems that positioning in fights is always centered around small packs so that chain heal can have it's highest effectiveness. I mean granted, things like Burn, encapsulate, conflag make it so it isn't TOO easy and one isn't standing clumped for the most part, but either way a simple side step and it's back to chain healing being a staple of every raid.

I'm not saying sham are overpowered, simply that spell and how good it gets with more gear is simply amazing, has effected the way some guilds structure their strategy.

And you're right, it does kill paladins and druids, even though paladins probably have the better deal being that there will always be more than one (in ideal situations) and you really don't need more than one resto druid (except for a fight like twins) but that's 1 in how many encounters?

disclaimer: post written hastily while about to catch a train. excuse incomplete thoughts.

Even if there are occasional combinations of raid damage that are quite literally unable to be healed, they are also usually rare enough to be offset by battle rez, ankh, or even soulstone on those that are low health or accident prone. Death is not permanent removal from the fight.

Well tuned is when a specific series of two or more non-related events has to occur for the attempt to get so out of kilter you can't recover from it. Strategy is making sure you have contingencies for every individual event. Finding issue with something being "too random" because it occurs frequently is bad strategy. The longer the fight, the more likely that random event becomes until it's a certainty.

I think the talk of Chain heal being over-powered is partially the result of a confirmation-bias on the part of people who do not play a shaman. True, its absolutely essential on Twins. However to date, this is the only fight we go out of our way to stack shamans for, and the prevelant attitude towards it totally neglects to consider the number of fights where the raid has to be more than 8yds apart and Chainheal is all but useless outside of the melee group.
Ultimately, point being that other than the few fights where Chain Heal really shines, its just an average spell and on the whole, is not any more overpowered than hots or shields or POM or whatever healer specialty you wish to throw in the list. Each class has its benefits/draw backs and for the most part, healing make up decisions are made based on the relative skill of the players in question, rather than their class (twins is the big exception to this). We run 2 druids, 2-3 shaman, 2-3 pallys, 2-3 priests on average with some minor fluctuations based on attendance and we havent ever found our healing lacking or felt the need to recruit more resto shamans.
Regarding the post about killing off druids/pallys - we have always used 2 resto druids and at least 2 pallys and unless drastic changes were made in the future, I do not see that changing.

Let's not discount the power of chain heal. Its raw throughput is tremendous for two reasons. First, it scales remarkably well -- a talented chain heal yields an extra 1.65 healing per point of +heal gear before crits, suffering no penalty for it's multi-target nature. Second, it intelligently selects it's secondary and tertiary targets to minimize overheal. And this intelligence goes beyond simple efficiency: chain heal is blessed with the ability to disproportionately heal the player closest to death.

Chain heal of course has range limitations, but in exchange it is not group specific -- indeed area damage is generally just that, it effects a physical area. It is generally more desirable to be able to heal players within a particular space than to be able to heal players within a particular party. Since parties are ultimately artificial, the players within a party will often not be near to one another. Further, virtually every fight in the game involves at least significant clustering due to the nature of melee. Thus, even if chain heal cannot efficiently heal everyone, it can still top off a large portion of the raid with amazing speed and efficiency, allowing everyone else to heal themselves. Also, chain heal's range limitation can easily be overcome by intelligent positioning. This can be done dynamically by grouping up at specific times. Due to group-swap limitations imposed by Blizzard, dynamic party switching is incredibly cumbersome.

But perhaps more importantly, I don't think anyone believes that (with limitations, as you mentioned) shaman are a necessity because of chain heal. That analysis is too simplistic. Rather, the overall package shaman bring, which includes not just healing but the potent dps and regen buffs is incredibly beneficial to the raid. Further, because shaman bring concentrated party buffs (large dps increase to one group, for example) rather than dispersed raid wide buffs (e.g., fort, mark, blessings), they stack remarkably well. Indeed, the fifth shaman still brings significant buff value, whereas the second or third priest, second druid, and third or fourth paladin bring relatively little in the way of synergistic buffs.

Finally, no one doubts that raids can and do kill bosses with shaman-light raids. The question is whether overall raids are significantly more successful with a full suite of shaman (e.g., 1 enh, 1 ele, 2-3 resto) in place of a mix of other classes.

All that aside, I think the rise of the shaman is just as much a product of more stringent dps requirements, and a shift in damage from tanks (single tank benefiting paladins and multiple benefiting druids) to the raid as a whole.

Regarding Tuning:

An encounter is well tuned if:

a) the encounter can be defeated with optimal gear/play from the raid (C'thun 1.0, overtuned); and
b) the encounter can be defeated by the well geared/played characters given the target demographic of the encounter (shade of Eranikus, overtuned); and
c) it's difficulty is appropriate for its placement within the broader scheme of encounters (Rage, well-tuned since he is reward loot and since trash is a portion of the encounter); and
d) players are rewarded for playing well and punished for underperforming (MC, under-tuned since much of the raid could slack; RNG "preventable" death fights discussed above, over-tuned since players are not rewarded for perfect play); and
e) the encounter tests the skills it is designed to measure (Patchwerk, well-tuned); and
f) the skill measured by the encounter is appropriate/enjoyable for the target demographic (Loatheb, poorly tuned -- tests ability to gather consumables, which player feedback indicates is not a reason they enjoy the game).

Zune: Yes, I am not saying Chain Heal is a bad spell or discounting its usefullness, nor was my post intended to address all the "complaints" regarding shaman balance. All I am saying is that people tend to focus on the current fight(s) and forget those that came before and consequently, have an inflated picture of chainheal's "overpowered-ness"

However, you should be careful when you ask "whether overall raids are significantly more successful with a full suite of shaman (e.g., 1 enh, 1 ele, 2-3 resto) in place of a mix of other classes." First of all, because once you have 2-3 resto (just as you have 2-3 of every other healing class), the question turns into "is it fair that enh/ele synergize so well with their respective dps groups. If you are talking about bringing 2-3 resto shaman vs 2-3 additional healers of another class, then sure, that might be less effective - but that would be the case for any role where you stacked one class over another.For purposes of raid-weighting, placing an ehancement shaman, an elemental shaman, and 2-3 resto in the same "group" and then saying that group is over-represented is oversimplification of the issue;
Secondly, because by nature, this situation will be true of nearly all "off" specs. ie; why we bring an arms warrior, a ret palladin, shadow priests, etc is that the overall group is better off with one of these "off-specs" in that spot even if they themselves only contribute averagely. Making use of raid/class synergies is a bigger part of the game now than it ever was in the past and to ignore that aspect of the game seems like wishful thinking.

Edit: just to be clear, I am not considering Twins for this discussion. I am all too ready to admit that Twins in the current form is (over)tuned specifically to heavily weight shamans.

Shaman are "overpowered" because all healers are (within limits) interchangeable and shaman are the only healer that brings major stacking non-healing benefits. Once you have one druid for mark, one priest for fort and IDS, and 3 paladins (some of whom can be protadins or retadins) there is simply no reason to have any more of those classes. It is wholly logical to stack the remaining 3-6 healing positions with shaman, because shaman stack, whereas priests, druids, and paladins do not.

The solution (which Blizz is probably aware of and which they are probably implementing for Wrath) is to give the other healers some reason to be there other than their healing. Innervate and battle res don't compare to bloodlust and totems, and while blessings are extremely powerful they don't stack beyond three.

But suppose they implemented the following as talented abilities deep in the healing trees of the other classes:
- Blessing of Pally-Stacking (paladin): Increases all damage and healing done by 2%. This effect stacks up to 5 times.
- Unstable Infusion (priest): Target player and all group members within 30 yards gain Unstable Infusion. This effect doubles all damage dealt by critical hits for 15 seconds. 10 minute cooldown.
- Fury of the Woodland: Your next heal over time applies the Fury of the Woodland buff to its target. This buff increases all damage done by 100% and doubles all threat generated. It lasts as long as the HoT it is bound to continues to affect the target. 2 minute cooldown.

All of a sudden, there is a reason to stack non-shaman healers.

(Note: Some of those, particularly the priest one, would be wholly broken in PvP. These are just examples.)

As discussed a few couple pages ago, here is another example* of a non-shaman healer spell that can reduce the dependency of chain heal.

(A selection area like Flamestrike, Mass Dispel, etc.)

A spell like this would not address the totems/lust issues, but it could certainly be a nice substitution for chain heal.


*This is an EXAMPLE, I'm not trying to spread potentially fake info.

Quoting OP:

As said already, you can do M'uru just fine with two Resto Shamans which is a very standard setup. You can do Twins (in what order you want) with two Resto Shamans, druids and priests only need to adapt (learn to play, if you want). And don't say that you need Heroism/Bloodlust on Twins, please, as most guilds beat enrage with 1:30+ mins. The only encounter in Sunwell which heavily favours one class, is Felmyst.

However, this thread is not about class representation and the Reston Shaman as far as I know.

I agree with the intent of the OP, but not necessarliy the interpretation that says we cannot discuss class representation in talking about tuning. I whole-heartedly agree that it should not turn into a whine-thread about why my disc-priest cannot tank felmyst effectively. But in discussing "the process by which a given challenge (specifically, raid encounters) is made sufficiently difficult for its target audience." I feel that class-related discussions may be eminantly relevant - If an encounter requires a significantly "non-standard" raid make-up to be successfully completed, or is completable with a standard make up but a non-standard makeup trivializes the encounter, that to me meets the criteria of a tuning-issue.
Note, however, I am not saying that any of the current fights do or do not meet that criteria; however, I think it would be a mistake to unilaterally dismiss the entire possibility of discussing that issue (which seems to me to be what the last 5-10 posts are discussing, or attempting to at least).

If the OP/Mods disagree, feel free to delete the post(s) and let me know, I will take no offense.

I disagree with this statement whole-heartedly. Once you have 1 enhancement shaman in the melee group and One elemental shaman with mages/locks, you have very little reason to bring 6-7 resto-shaman as the bulk of your healers. After the first 2 or 3 resto shaman, the only additional benefit you get from more would be additional bloodlusts - very few groups would benefit from multiple totems of the same school. Additionally you would be running into the issue with stacking the group so high with shaman as to affect fewer non-shamans overall. With the recruiting power that the top 10-20 world guilds have, I would expect to see exactly this situation if it were truly the best way to min/max the raid make-up.

Let me get this straight: you're saying that since Shaman only offer vastly increased benefits up to 5, while Paladins cap out at 3 (cap in terms of no further buff-stacked benefit), Druids and Priests at 1 (or 2 depending on spec), Shaman aren't (stack-wise) overpowered? Further, you say the only benefit is more Bloodlusts - another Bloodlust for a group in a 6 (or so) minute fight hardly constitutes "only" - its still a fairly major stacking benefit.

That aside, unfortunately, "tuned" rather has to factor in that people can and do stack classes in this way - otherwise there is simply too wide a gap between those who do and don't. It could be likened to those who use Mana Potions every cooldown and those who refuse to. If its tightly balanced for those who do, its overbtuned for those who don't. Tuning should not need to hinge on filling a fifth of the raid with a single class