SanSul

We already see encounters being designed for Lifebloom, Circle of Healing, Chain Heal, and 2 Second Holy Lights. If Paladins are given to many new healing spells (which after 3 years, I am hoping we get something!) it will completely marginalize Priests.

Priests may be the jack of all trades, but a lot of their spells are mana hogs. Not to mention, a lot of their spells might be useful on a small percentage of fights, but left to collect dust on many others. Holy nova, lightwell, binding heal, flash heal, etc etc. 25 man raids might not have as much discrimination with healers, but 10 mans can. If a Paladin can replicate every (USEFUL/USED) spell of a priest, + blessings, then no need to bring Priests. We already saw this with Kara in TBC early on, where Holy/Disc priests simply were not needed, and if you did bring a priest (for shackle/fort), then it would be shadow.

 

Shakes

Given the way they're going with gear (looking like one set of gear for multiple specs), I think it's more that they want you to say "Ooops, no moonkin tonight, I'll just get one of my restos to respec". Which seems practical, since if the inflation of last expansion is any indication, 100g in WotLK will be equivalent to 10g now, ie you'll respec without even thinking twice about the cost.

So perhaps you'll want a roster of about 4 of each class, with one of each spec and a "floater" who specs according to whoever didnt show up.

 

malthrin

Here's a thought for killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Remove the armor reduction from Curse of Recklessness. Give Rogues a couple useful debuffing poisons - a -armor and one that duplicates the increased chance to hit off Imp Faerie Fire maybe. Now your mandatory 3 warlocks drops down to 2, and if you're required to bring rogues, you might as well put them in the melee group.

You could even let poison talents affect some of the debuff poisons, encouraging someone to loot the damn daggers.

 

• Adoriele

If only rogues had some way to remove armor from the target...

The ability to drop away from stacking Warlocks will not come from changing CoR. That spell is fine as it is. What's not awesome is that CoS/CoE both need to be up on the boss in order to make full use of Locks, Mages, and Spriests.

 

• frmorrison

Rogues can remove armor, but it overridess Sunder Armor.

Adding a small -armor poison (make it require daggers but overrides CoR), adds Rogue utility and uses daggers.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Cirocco

Except rogues don't have, at least not one that's usable if the tank is a warrior or there's a warrior applying sunder, whereas the other armour reducing ability's happily stack. I expect you knew this so I'm confused as to what what your point is.

 

• Playered

Yes, but he has a valid point - removing the need for one curse helps the situation just as well, be it CoS, CoE, or CoR.

 

Nal

Please moderate this post if the contents take the thread off topic.

I think the class balance issue is only a part of the equation. The other part is encounter tuning. That is to say, class balance matters only to the degree that encounters are tuned too tightly.

Encounters need to be tuned tightly if you want to support a world first/competitive PvE metagame. But obviously the more tightly tuned encounters are the more pressure you put on game balance issues like warlocks vs mages, bloodlust/heroism, leatherworking etc. Balance issues really only matter when they have practical implications.

You see the problem in high end arena. Obviously high end arenas are, as a theoretical matter, tuned to the absolute limits. Class balance there seems to be somewhat problematic. If perfect (tight) tuning is a design goal in 25 man content, I don't see how the same problems won't crop up there as well.

If you don't want class imbalances to greatly impact people's play decisions, you are limited to how tightly you can tune encounters by how well you can balance classes. And this will, of course, either impact the competitive PvE metagame (at the high end) or will restrict access to content by the larger majority.

I'm not trying to stir up any animosity. I'm just suggesting that encounter tuning plays a much larger role in this discussion of class balance than has been suggested thus far.

 

malthrin

It's not being discussed because it's a given that a difficult encounter will support a "best" raid composition. This thread is looking for mechanics tweaks such that a solution to the "best raid" problem involves a mostly even mix of classes, instead of one weighted heavily towards, Shamans, Warlocks, or anything else.

 

Douglas

Thing is, if you want to support both the larger majority and the high-end competitive PvE metagame, as you put it, the two issues are not separable.

It's like what was done with alchemy. Could they have solved the problem for most players by simply tuning the encounters for people who only used two elixirs without forcing that limit on people? Sure, they could have, but it would have basically destroyed the "competitive PvE metagame". Blizzard has a long multi-franchise history of trying to cater to many, many different types of gamers with one game, so it's kinda a safe bet they won't go down that route.

So, yes, a key thing is that encounters need to be tuned lower, but for that to happen, the benefits of stacking have to be brought down too. So the two are inexorably intertwined.

 

• Adoriele

My point is, what's the difference? Adding a -armor poison to Rogues does absolutely nothing. It would require Rogues to lose either WF or DP to do something they already can. If they wanted Rogues to be able to debuff a boss's armor, they would allow EA and SA to stack. They don't, so it should be patently obvious that that's not what Blizzard wants.

Also, think of the PvP applications. EA is a damn good finisher on a clothy already, and if you're planning on a Rogue poison debuff taking CoR's place, it would have to have a similar amount of -armor, which is to say nontrivial. So a rogue would get a huge boost against cloth, and with enough passive -armor would be able to use a different finisher with larger effect.

Yes, rogues need utility. But why spend the time developing a new ability that does the exact same thing as an old one, when you could just remove the restrictions already in place.

 

Lanlaorn

Because Expose Armor removes a lot more armor than CoR?

If you're advocating nerfing Expose Armor to CoR/Faerie Fire levels and letting it stack then I'm certainly all for that. Anyone who plays a cloth caster in pvp would probably thank you

But anyway this still only mandates one Rogue per raid. Everyone will bring at least one to pick up the rogue items anyway.

 

Lujaar

Agreed, we could live without CoR reducing armor, and any decent raid-debuff poison would be a nice boost for mutilate.

I don't think rogues need too much help right now. Most guilds seem to run either 2 or 3 of them, which is an equal share of the available raid spots. It may be a problem in WotLK when they start having to compete with deathknights and more ret paladins for battleshout/windfury spots though.

The best way to get rogues more raid spots is just to create more battleshout/windfury spots per raid. That was never a problem in 60 WoW. You could put 10 rogues in a horde raid and every one of them would have battleshout and windfury, no problem. Unfortunately TBC piled on more group synergy and tightened the groups. Your melee group has 3 spots after the warrior and the shaman, so if you need a 4th battleshout/windfury spot you have to look to the tank group. But there's a ton of tank synergy too, so now once a tank group gets battleshout, windfury, and all the available tanking buffs, the group is full. 2 warriors, shaman, non-ret paladin, tree. In WotLK it'll probably be 2 warriors, shaman, paladin, deathknight, which isn't any better for rogues.

Assuming commanding shout and devo aura aren't going anywhere, the solution might be to give rogues a group buff that works on tanks - all of your group members gain 2% parry and 2% anti-parry, or some such nonsense. Or make Sanctity Aura, well, not an aura, so ret paladins can run devo. Neither fixes the underlying problem that groups aren't big enough for the amount of group synergy in the game anymore, but at least it'd be one more possible battleshout/windfury spot per raid.

 

ZippyTSP

How about:

1) Every class gets raidwide abilities that benefit the raid in some way. Abilities with similar effect stack so there is no overlap and therefore bringing the 1st of every class is the optimal raid setup. It's already the optimal setup from a loot perspective and I don't think anyone will argue a balanced raid should be missing a class. So the optimal raid setup is only taking up 10 (counting DK) of the 25 spaces and the last 15 are flexible.

2) Only one raidwide ability per class can be active at once so there is no incremental value to any of a class beyond the first for the purpose of raidwide buffing.

3) All other abilities are "personal only".

A few examples with existing abilities (remember other classes would be rebalanced during the process to account for lost synergies):

Shaman: Totems would become raidwide but only one players totems would be active at a time. Heroism would become a self buff only.

Warlock: Only one debuff curse could be used at a time. ISB would be a self buff only

Hunter: If you had one of each you could have Expose Weakness, Ferocious Inspiration or True Shot Aura active at one time but not the other two.

Druid: Tree of Life and Boomkin aura would be raid wide but you could only use one at a time.

Set up this way with the raidwide buff being signficant (say a 5% boost to raid DPS/healing/protection) you would want one of every class which is a good thing. But after that each class would stand on their own individual performance and therefore be alot easier to balance.

This type of setup would also allow for alot of raid flexibility because you could choose survivability buffs on a tough AOE fight but DPS buffs on a farm fight, etc, etc.

The big problem right now is the incremental value, or lack thereof of the 2nd and 3rd and 4th of any class/spec. The value tied to a classes party or raid buff is so huge (Heroism, Curses, Blessings) that it skews the raid in favor of stacking for those abilities.

In order to be neutral in who you bring to fill spot 20-25 the playing field needs to be equal. In order for the playing field to be equal, the 2nd+ of any class cannot bring raid/party utility.

Thoughts?

 

Harwin

That might make stacking even worse. In the case of shamans, you either pick Wrath of Air (and stack casters, not bringing any extra melee above what is needed for the basic buff) or, more likely, you pick Windfury(and stack physical DPS, bringing 1 warlock and 1 mage)

Basically, for Paladins and Shamans(mostly this affects them) it is either better for them to pick physical and stack physical or for them both to pick magical and stack magical. Once I have enough mages that I turn all my buffs to mage, I want even more mages, although I may still only want 1 shaman.

 

alvinrod

I'm not even sure if the warlock stacking issue will continue to exist in WotLK simply because at this point it appears to me as though affliction may be the best warlock raiding spec, at least initially. If 50/0/21 is indeed the best warlock spec it's unlikely that a raid will be able to stack a significant number simply due to debuff limitations.

Consider that each affliction warlock will use at least 4 debuff slots

1 for their curse
1 for corruption
1 for siphon life
1 for unstable affliction
1 for immolate (Do affliction warlocks use this?)
1 for drain life or drain mana (If the warlock ever needs to use either for some reason.)

Then there's the additional overhead as well

1 for shadow embrace
1 for improved shadow bolt

So at minimum affliction warlocks will use 4n+2 and at maximum 6n+2 debuff slots.

This means that the absolute best way to limit warlock stacking is to make the best warlock raid build be affliction. Three warlocks would be able to supply all of the curses but would eat up 14 debuff slots alone. A shadow priest will eat up another 6 slots as well which would mean between 4 characters, half of the debuff slots have been used.

For every DPS class there needs to be something that prevents stacking if it is the best DPS class. This can be done through debuff slot limitation, mana starvation, or necessity for support. There's also the problem that shaman are in general the best support class for every DPS class in the game. It seems as though you really want to have one per group and shuffle bloodlust to the best DPS group.

I think the best solution that I've heard to prevent shaman stacking is to simply introduce a debuff that prevents you from receiving another bloodlust for a short while, similar to how mages were given the hypothermia debuff to prevent back-to-back ice blocking.

It's also difficult to speculate on shaman at the moment simply because their new talents and abilities haven't been released yet. One solution to work around the 6th melee problem is to provide certain classes with a self-weapon buff that is as good or better than windfurry totem but cannot be used in conjunction with it. For example, Blizzard could buff rogue poisons to be a more significant portion of their damage or death knights could receive something like this out of the gate since they're a new class.

The other alternative is to make another class better support for a specific type of DPS group. Right now it appears as though a Moonkin is viable alternative to a shaman in a caster group. Of course this ends up potentially shafting whatever shaman tree has been replaced for a raid role.

Removing the ability to constantly give only a few groups bloodlust would probably make shaman less valuable, but the totems that they bring to each group still make them hard to pass up in favor of other classes.

 

Shakes

Using debuff slots to "fix" this problem is hardly an elegant solution. I really hope they don't go that way. Besides, unless they make affliction somehow scale with haste and crit, I can't see it beating out destruction for very long. Remember affliction beats out destruction at T4 level gear too.

Does giving a debuff on bloodlust achieve that much? Sure, it stops you stacking bloodlust on one group, but if you give one bloodlust to each DPSer rather than 4 bloodlusts to the 4 best DPSers, the net result isn't that much less.

If we're talking about this at the "first kill metagame" level, is stacking really an issue? I mean is SK are willing to take time off work to get the first kill, is expecting some members to reroll a different class for raid composition reasons really that much of a burden in comparison?

 

Lunkhedd

I think one major underlying issue here is really exclusivity--certain classes are the sole providers of buffs that everyone wants, so those classes are in greater demand. To an extent, exclusivity is a necessary feature of a class-based system (if a class can't do anything unique, why have that class?), but there are still various ways to spread things out, as people have been predicting for multi-target heals and CC based on the WotLK leak. The risk is watering down a class or spec to the point where it has no real purpose.

The easiest way to reduce exclusivity, of course, is to add similar abilities to other classes (e.g. Reincarnation vs. Divine Intervention vs. Soulstone vs. Feign Death/Vanish/Invis + cables). The more of this one does, the more a class has to be looked at as the combination of things it can do rather than the sole provider of any individual thing.

For example, suppose that in WotLK, we get the following changes inspired by other posts in this thread:

• paladins gain Fanaticism Aura, which behaves like Windfury totem.
• rogues gain Frenzy Poison, which gives anyone striking the poisoned target a chance to gain an extra melee attack.
• Windfury Totem, Fanaticism Aura, and Frenzy Poison share a 3 second reactivation cooldown.
• (fury?) warriors gain Inspiring Shout, which behaves like Bloodlust/Heroism (melee only)
• mages gain Spell Haste, which behaves like Bloodlust/Heroism (casting only)
• Bloodlust, Heroism, Inspiring Shout, and Spell Haste all cause an Exhaustion debuff that prevents any of them from being reapplied for 10 minutes.

Such changes would solve most of the shaman stacking issues, leaving shamans the best overall group buffers but with smaller margins, and would also help address several other problems (paladin farming speed, retribution paladin and dps warrior viability without a shaman, mage vs. warlock stackability, rogue utility, melee group overflow). The only real problem introduced is that more marginal shaman specs (elemental?) are more likely to be shut out unless they're boosted in some other (presumably less specialized) way.

It's also possible to provide abilities to different classes which achieve similar ends through alternate means. For example, druids are the only ones with Innervate, but restoration shamans, shadow priests, and paladins have tools which can reduce the need for more Innervates. That works because for almost everyone except arcane mages, there's only so much mana they need to use. I'm not sure how one might get a similar effect with dps buffs, but I'm sure somebody will be able to think of something.

Something similar might work for helping with the healer numbers. As someone else pointed out earlier, every healing class has some sort of low-downside healing ability available to non-healing specs (improved leader of the pack, judgement of light, vampiric embrace, healing stream totem), but none of these are powerful enough or flexible enough to really reduce the number of healers required in most fights and reduce the need for additional members of healing classes. Perhaps it would make sense to strengthen healing options for non-heal-spec hybrids rather than extend their buffing abilities.

Stackability tends to make matters worse, and I think controlling how things stack will be important in any scheme that Blizzard comes up with to reduce exclusivity. I would be surprised if they could get away with removing any of the existing stacks without making other significant changes, though. They might also try more reverse stacking, where the more of class A you have, the more of class B you want. For example, if Improved Shadow Bolt were changed to increase the crit chance of the next 4 crittable spells (shadow or not) rather than the damage, and other casters got more out of crit than warlocks, adding more warlocks would make other casters more desirable.

 

alvinrod

Well it's one way to stop serious warlock stacking. Is there really any better way to do it than making destruction so mana starved that it has to spend a lot of it's time tapping or beating the hell out of it with a nerf bat so that it scales like crap? I really don't care if some warlock spec can do better DPS than a mage can, but if warlocks are stackable what's the point of having more than one mage (or any other DPS class) outside of some fight that requires them for gimmick purposes?

If you used a hypothermia-like debuff mechanic for Bloodlust it would really limit the number of effective bloodlusts to around 3. A healing group really doesn't get much use out of a bloodlust and depending on the composition of a tank group it's unlikely that they'll get much use out of a bloodlust either.

 

• sadris

Make bloodlust a raid wide buff with forbearance. Now shaman are good based on true merits rather than their 700 RDPS; problem solved.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

PSGarak

PvP gums up the works for that solution. Jackasses and idiots in Battlegrounds (and uncoordinated world PvP!) could give you the forebearance-type debuff in a useless situation and lock out your major buff for ten minutes. I suppose paladins can already do that to each other with BoP, but a one-minute debuff on one person versus a ten-minute debuff on a raid is two orders of magnitude more griefing. I'm inclined not to care, but I doubt blizzard can afford not to.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Solmyr77

There really is no need for groundbreaking changes. Blizzard only has to make the purists better at the core tasks(dps and healing) than the supporters. Any raid will always be based on a number of supporting classes providing the necessary buffs with the rest of the slots being filled with the best dps or healing classes. If the latter weren't also shamans and warlocks, there would be a rather decent class balance in raids.

 

Amera

That misses the entire point that hybrids are competing against each other as buffers. Making the pure DPS classes better doesn't affect the fact that shaman are the best hybrid class in the most situations, and that stacking them brings absurdly good results.

This is a good point, but at the same time it is also about the only way for a hybrid specs to become legitimate. Enhancement shaman, feral druids, and shadow priests are the success stories of the expansion in terms of having an actual non-healing hybrid role, and they all bring something unique that you can't get anywhere else. Guilds often recruit players of these specs specifically, rather than the class generically.

As long as shadow is the mana bot that it is now, there will always be at least one spot for a spriest in a raid, and maybe two. So as long as you can justify a single holy priest in the raid, there isn't really a problem for the class. As much as people complained about priests in early TBC, most guilds were also using 2-3 shadow priests (who were also top DPS at the time). Holy might not have been great, but the class as a whole was fine (insofar as 2-3 of any class is "balanced" representation).

 

Starfire

I disagree.

A class that has two healing trees being a subpar healer? I didn't sign up to be a dpser. Yes, I love the shadow tree and I love my shadow brethern but I think there's a very big problem when you think its okay for raids to bring 3 shadow priests and 0 holy or discipline. Doesn't the very fact that we have 2 trees and the fact our original description described us as the most powerful healers mean we should... well... be healing?

This is a complete role reversal, from a role of preserving your fellow raid-members to destroying some object. This isn't the same as an enhancement shaman going elemental. Their job is still the same, just the method of doing it is different.

Not to mention the complete 180 from Shadow priests being laughable in Vanilla to Discipline or Holy priests being laughable in TBC.

Oh well, with discipline being able to return mana and the nerf to vampiric touch, I imagine priests are far better off in wotlk.

 

Renew

Uhm, it's like this for pretty much all [s]healing[/s] classes at one time. Content design and player skill dictates who would be best for X [s]healing[/s] role. Holy Priests are amazing and have been for a while.

Things change as content changes, but player skill can cover up for those 'lack of' moments as a lot of classes are interchangable.

Confidence is not Arrogance.