Renew

This thread for the most part is going to need to be remade once we see all classes play styles and options at 80. Just bringing up the fact that if things do not change, some classes might get shafted to make raid synergy stronger is enough.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Shakes

I agree that it is bad for people who made a priest because they want to heal to find out people only want shadow. It's the same situation all hybrids find themselves in though, eg elemental shaman and fury warriors have a hell of a time finding 5 man groups due to lack of CC, and hence often are forced into speccing for something they don't want to do either (healing and tanking respectively).

On the other hand, I also think the game would be better if all classes were expected to make use of all of their abilities. In an ideal world, shaman should be pew pewing lightning bolts as well as chain healing, and priests should be melting face between heals.

I do wonder if the healing/damage gear being the same thing, and the large increases on base amounts on the healing spells we're hearing about are a step towards that. Maybe the aim is that during some phases there will be crazy burst you need to drop big heals on, and during other phases there will be little damage but it'll be a DPS race. In which case hybrids might play a little more like hybrids. Maybe instead of wanting to bring 7-8 pure healers, you'll want to bring 10 healing capable players, some of whom are specced to tank or DPS half the time.

If hybrids earnt their spots due to their versatility, not their buffs, that would also allow them to solve this stacking issue.

 

Amera

To be fair, you have one healing tree, and one PvP/support tree, but that is neither here nor there. I said "So as long as you can justify a single holy priest in the raid, there isn't really a problem for the class." In early TBC, every raid still had a holy/disc priest for imp DS, then several shadow priests. Was holy balanced? No, several abilities were weak. Was the class as a whole suffering? No, because you had plenty of priests in a raid. I remember bringing 4 at the time, which actually meant that some other class was getting shafted, since 9/25 is actually less than 3 per class.

Anyway, this is something of a tangent with priests in particular, but the general point is that if nothing changes with totems and curses, shaman and warlocks will be taking raid spots away from other classes (just like right now). In early TBC, shadow was actually very similar due to high personal DPS and incredible synergy.

I'm actually an advocate of raid-wide buffs in general - you should feel much more powerful in a raid than you do solo. And, as has been mentioned a lot, it reduces crippling dependencies on certain buffs (read: windfury). I can't see why having Devotion Aura on an entire raid would be a big deal - or any other aura, for that matter.

As for being "duped" about what someone signed up for, it's certainly a legitimate concern, but it is hardly unique to priests. Druids, paladins, and shaman have all had that issue since release, and still do in some ways.

 

Lanlaorn

Druids, Paladins and Shaman are hybrids, Priests are not. Officially, anyway. Someone picking a Paladin and not expecting to be a healer I could easily see, but picking Priest to be a DPS class? Has anyone in any game ever picked the healing class expecting to be a DPS class?

Hell I rerolled Priest in TBC knowing the new Shadow spells and talents but even I fully expected Priests to be a mainstay of healing, they were pretty much THE healing class pre-TBC. Pallies and Druids were effective but severely limited in scope.

No matter what happens to the game I believe that Priest healing, Warrior tanking and Rogue, Mage DPS should remain viable. I would say Warlock and Hunter as well but for some reason I consider Rogues and Mages as the real pure DPS classes. Perhaps because they're not pet classes? I'm not trying to justify this classification by the way, just describing my odd thought processes, heh.

I don't know why Blizzard has managed to keep Warriors as the top tanks despite keeping Feral and Prot Pally tanks very powerful (especially in the case of the prot pally) but somehow can't do the same for healing and DPS.

 

Shakes

I guess it depends on what game background you come from what expectations you might have for classes. I'm sure a lot of people come from a D&D based background. There, priests are as much offensive as defensive weapons. Rogues are a utility class, not a damage class.

I can very much see people rolling a priest expecting to do damage, especially when the game was new. I knew plenty of priests who hated having to spec out of shadow at 60 and be forced into healing MC.

 

Duilliath

Mostly due to gimmick fights (fear, shield requirements, lack of good resistance sets) and item design.

That said, I've felt annoyed a number of times over Blizzard back-pedalling with Class Descriptions and what they then made of those classes, but honestly feel that it's largely irrelevant to this discussion.

I quite favour the idea of raid wide buffs - it'd really loosen up the demands. Only two warriors would be needed for shouts, two Paladins for the more desireable auras, 2 Shamans for the most used totems etc etc. Could even make the Tranquil Air totem and BoS interchangeable again with that -threat modification mentioned earlier (anything not in bearform/defensive stance etc), as this would make it easier to just bring a Resto Shaman instead of a Paladin if you don't happen to have a second Paladin available.

It'd require some redesigning, sure, but they're at work already for WotLK, might as well get it right while they're at it. You could easily keep some buffs group-based still or indeed add that Exhausted-type debuff (which I personally don't quite like as much due to having complications in PvP/Arena).

 

Kruthal

I really like this idea. Make BoS and Tranquil Air not stack, and change around the totem schools so that all the relevant totems can be provided by two shamans. Then you need two shamans and two paladins for all dps-enhancing buffs, and you bring a third of either class for the threat reduction totem/blessing. Has to be coupled with doing something about Heroism/Bloodlust of course. Hybrids of these classes up to 2.5 is great, more has diminishing returns. Except for healers of course...

 

Solmyr77

What other buffers are you talking about ? Paladins already justify three raid spots which is fair enough. Other healers aren't really worth to be called buffers, they do have some buffing -like mages- but those buffs are comparably weak and can be provided by a single member of that class. Priests and druids should get into a raid via their healing capabilities, beating shamans and paladins at that. Beating them by enough to make up for the non-existence of those super buffs.

You're all talking about making everyone a buffing machine like shamans, which is making every class equally strong by making them equal.

 

Kaytikat

Looking at this from a purely devil's advocate point of view here (i.e ignoring the human issues) does it really matter how many of each class is "needed" for a given raid? Sure there's the mathematical "neatness" of having similar numbers of each class, but I don't really see what difference it makes in general unless you don't have enough of each class to meet the demands.

Take shaman as an example: even hordeside shaman are quite rare (being the lowest or second lowest represented class) and alliance guilds seem to have a hell of a time recruiting enough to meet current raid demands. Is the solution, therefore, to further erode shaman uniqueness so that less players roll shaman? Or should Blizzard be addressing the reasons for the shortages in the first place?

With WoLK on the way, players will be evaluating the classes and determining whether they should reroll. Currently, shaman are the kings of PVE, but are severely hampered in arena. For other classes this is the other way around. If Blizzard can find a way to even out the populations of the classes to meet the raiding (and arena) class demands then this is surely the most effective way to achieve the goals of this thread?

On another note, I think there is severe underuse of hybrids as hybrids. Most guilds have recruitment threads saying "looking for resto druid, holy priest, enhancement shaman" and tend towards DKP systems that punish hybrids for collecting multiple gear sets. This leads to issues such as "THE enhancement shaman isn't on today", something that just wouldn't be an issue if you had a raiding pool of, say, six shaman all with the gear to play any spec. It would also help get through speedbumps such as those found in sunwell where the required number of healers changes so much for each fight.

 

Lamaros

Getting all six Shamen such gear, on the other hand, might be something of an issue.

 

Moogul

In these days of 3-tokens per boss and iLvl 141 badge gear, it's not as hard as you might think.

 

◊ Cadfael

We're already seeing some hints of streamlining equipment, like making the desireability of hit, crit and spelldamage more similar across cloth casters (as evidenced in the alpha changes to make hit more important for shadow priests, crit more valuable to shadows and affliction locks who ignore these stats currently, etc.) This might mean that it we're moving into this direction with WotlK.

It would be very interesting to see if hybrids really become hybrids, switching their role and playstyle possibly even within one single encounter (obviously without changing equipment or respeccing). But also between encounters with just changing the equipment to perform an entirely different role would be rather interesting. It would also help for that "damn our sole enhance shaman / protection / retribution paladin isn't on, let's go farm BT instead of doing progression" thing that can crop up now, if you haven't enough people that are apt to switch at a finger's snip. Of course, if such a more involving hybrid role comes, you will need flexible people playing those chars.

 

duber

Do you think that this is partially addressed by something like the 2 piece set bonus (Your melee attacks have a chance to reduce the cast time of your next Lesser Healing Wave by 1.5 sec.) on Enhancement Shaman T5?

 

◊ Cadfael

No the talent changes currently in the Wotlk Alpha client. It looks as if generic cloth caster itemization is more homogenized, as the changes in the talents are making currently rather sub-par stats on items for certain classes more desireable. For example shadow priests only need few spell hit as with the talents, we can get up to 10% and so only need 76 spell hit to get to the cap. In the current alpha, the talent is reduced and we only can get 3% with talent points. Of course we still need to hit the cap, so now we need basically the same amount of hit as say a Destruction Warlock or a Mage. Currently we don't need the same equipment, as spellhit at some point becomes useless to us. With the current alpha however, we can use the exact same equipment as the other cloth casters, because they need it too.

 

Anaram

I doubt we'll suddenly see the hybrid classes return to a more "hybrid playstyle", at least not in raids. There might be the occasional fight where some such options are open, but generally I'd expect things to continue down the specialization road.

That said, I still hold that current system works reasonably well. Condensing warlock curses and going down the synenergy path should work reasonably well - the only thing I'm really missing is synenergy mechanics which don't depend on raid layout. Targeted abilities which can be used to buff someone else like the "new tree aura" seem like a much better solution than somewhat arbitrary group boundaries. Synenergies aren't bad, but pushing out too much strong synenergy (especially on the group level) seems to be at the end of it's road.

 

Shakes

The cynic in me certainly says the easy way out for shaman supply not meeting demand in PvE is to make shaman the top PvP class. As much as some try to deny it, there does seem to be a feedback loop on PvP/PvE class balance: after all, PvP servers generally lead PvE progression, so this isnt unexpected.

 

Amera

Druids buff a group with leader of the pack or moonkin aura, and the raid with motw; priests buff their group with mana returns as shadow, and the raid with Fort and maybe DS; paladins buff the raid with blessings and maybe crit; shaman buff their group with totems and a variety of spec buffs, as well as heroism. All healers of all specs are buffers in some capacity, and their buffs really are what sets them apart at this stage of the game. Shaman are amazing healers and bring the best group buffs, so they threaten the spots of other hybrids in particular, and sometimes pure DPS classes as well.

I don't even understand that last sentence.

 

• frmorrison

That bonus is pretty worthless, since casting the heal resets weapon's swing timers and likely will not proc when you needed to cast a heal. Decent bonus for PvP though.

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

 

frozndevl

One of the problems with the hybrids being forced to specialize is that disparate stats are required for each of the trees. This has partially been solved with the Mental Quickness talent that converts AP to spelldamage and +healing. If they expanded on this ability by making it go from any direction, i.e. +healing vies 10% buff to AP and spelldamage, and/or increase the %, it would allow for a hybrid to gear up with various pieces and remain an overall useful piece of an encounter.

What about having melee haste rating convert to a bit of spellhaste. Melee hit / spellhit, crit / spell crit, haste / spell haste, ap/spelldamage/+healing, there are corresponding pieces that could be shared to allow for more utility.

 

Mugorim

Why not just go 1:1 in the ratings? You could eliminate Spellhit, Spellcrit & Spellhaste entirely. I can't think of any problems with it offhand.

Not sure on AP/SD/Heal tho. A single "power" stat? Not sure how that would work out.

 

Mugorim

Is there a good reason to do this as opposed to returning to a more hybrid playstyle?

The game already has entire classes that are specialists (rogue, mage, hunter, lock). As you make they hybrids become specialists (the DPS focused ones at any rate), all they do is push the already existing specialist classes out of raids. And you figure it's only going to get worse in the xpac as they add in another tank/dps class into the mix. Does your raid body really need any more tanks or DPS?


If they maintained more of a hybrid playstyle (similar to how a feral can be DPS or tank as the need calls), then you're not forcing the DPS out of raids to make room for the specialized hybrids. It would be nice if they could make that work better with healing hybrids.


Something along the lines of extending the set bonuses that allowed for instant heals (enhance & feral t5 2/5) into talents is interesting. Granted, they'd need to do it in a way that didn't severely hinder their DPS (fix swing timer issues). If blizzard could effectively find ways to make those classes able to do both at the same time, it would give them a distinct and separate role instead of turning them into just another DPS spec.

 

PSGarak

Having hybrid classes act in hybrid ways requires a concentrated effort from encounter design towards multi-phase encounters with different role requirements per phase. I'm reasonably convinced that's the only way that a min-max mentality would start to prefer a hybrid-capable class/gearset over a specialized one. And mind you, it's non-trivial to make a fight that suddenly requires more tanks but can be done with less healers... making 6 in a row that aren't redundant is downright difficult.

Requiring different numbers of roles from encounter to encounter will work on easy content or give a role to hybrids in casual guilds, but the min-maxing mentality is to swap out fully specialized characters between fights rather than bring along one person who can swap gearsets at be at 75% (or 80% or 90% or 95% or, sometimes, even 99%) efficacy. There's mild possibility that soft-control methods (like tight trash timers in ZA) would encourage people to bring one roster instead of swapping. But there's also a good chance people would insist on min-maxing, use warlock summons to swap out characters, and bitch about inconsistent instance design, rather than take the hint. And it's likely that they would be right, too: swapping out min-maxed characters would stand a good chance to be more effective, even including swap-time overhead, than having one hybrid.

However, I don't think this addresses the initial issue of irreplaceable buffs/debuffs that currently drives shaman/paladin stacking (warlock stacking is just because our DPS is broke). I still think that making buffs not stack to allow more flexibility is the way to go. Note also: just because buffs stack doesn't mean they have to be the same buff. For example, say retadinds got themselves a 15%-chance extra-attack proc somehow. Now, an enhancement shaman isn't completely necessary for the melee group, but he's still an improvement. Perhaps a better example is Totem of Wrath (let's assume that hit rating can realistically be un-gemmed for more damage) and (current) boomkin aura: they both bring something to the entire group, and bringing both is good, but the second isn't worth as much as the first.

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

 

• Mjollnir

As far as 'evolving' encounters.. I am reminded about Fangkriss back in AQ40. At the time, I raided as a druid healer (of course, as we all know, back then if you were capable of healing, that's what you did). The way we worked the fight initially had the druids starting out in cat form, building CPs and finishing it, popping out and spam healing, shifting bear, and OTing adds which at that point were swarming down on us.
The strat was sound, and it always stuck with me as a beautiful usage of my class at the time. Assiting dps when healing was slow, bolstering the healing output when it was required, then assisting with tank duty when the need arose.

We later used a lock tank AoEing, but this digresses further from the intent of this thread.

 

Lezwyn

Requiring at least, say, two of each class or perhaps 1 of certain specs for a vaguely optimised raid is hardly friendly to lower tier guilds that won´t necessarily have mostly raiders with high attendency. For example, the lack of a paladin for salvation and shadowpriests for VT/shackle made attempts on Moroes at the start of the expansion (no shamans then too) unnecessarily hard and I'd rather not have a situation like that in the next expansion where we'll find out our enhancement shaman and survival hunter went on holiday so we have to cancel our 25 man due to lack of raiddps.

I think at heart it´s just improper classbalance. Supposedly, consumables are fine nowadays, yet raiding still requires you to take them, so I reckon synergies could just be lowered to a level you actually have a choice between giving a shadowpriest the last spot in your 4mage group or another mage, so there's probably a good middle to find. I don´t like the fact much I´m nearly harmless on my firemage without at least one additional source of mana, be it BoW/JoW, VT or Mana totems.

What needs to be done I think is toning down such buffs as salvation as well as giving alternatives for it (raidwide shaman -threat totem was a good idea). Making Battleshout not stack with BoM yet providing higher attackpower for being group only perhaps. Giving classes more mana regeneration options and halving the power of some of the external ones such as VT. Changing windfury, better weaponoils/poisons or give more classes abilities similar or slightly weaker in power than windfury that don't stack with it.

I suppose I disagree with the OP in that making some abilities raidwide so you don't need as many, say, shaman to provide totems is a bad solution as it means you might as well cancel the raid when you can't find such a class.

 

nfw

I would like to see them implementing a way to change gear in combat, at least for warriors , who are pretty useless if they start as one role but need to switch during combat (FR tanks on Illidan, or adds tanks on FLK once all adds are dead). A 3 seconds channeled, break on damage ability for example that takes them out of combat so they can switch gear.