◊ nathanbp

A 5 second channel on a 10 minute(?) cooldown that let warriors swap gear while channeling would be pretty cool (total going out of combat seems unlikely, plus as any mage can tell you, dropping combat during a boss fight results in being pulled back in almost instantly). I can see Blizzard having a problem with it though since it more or less requires an addon to swap gear during those 5 seconds.

 

Xeri

There's two ideas from this thread that I like. The first being instead of 5 groups of 5 in a raid, the interface allows you to create flexable groups that give everyone what buffs/synergy they prefer, something like this:

Physical Group
Warrior Prot
Warrior DPS
Shaman Enh
Hunter BM
Hunter Surv
Rogue
Rogue
Deathknight
Paladin Ret
Druid Feral

Healer Group
Priest Holy
Priest Disc
Priest Shadow
Druid
Paladin
Paladin
Shaman
Shaman

Spell Group
Warlock
Warlock
Mage
Mage
Shaman Elemental
Druid Moonkin
Priest Shadow

Obviously that's very basic and there could be restrictions to things, but the basic idea would be balance around something like that. A forbearance-type debuff for Bloodust would be necessary.

The second idea is that certain mechanics such as totems and auras would effect Friendly players within X amount of Range. Perhaps have totems or Ferocious inspiration be raid-wide buffs, but "OP" buffs such as Mana Tide limited to group. There would be less need to create a "melee group," but rather a group that receives the limited more powerful buffs. This system would have a nice effect on PVP as well, allowing people out of group to actually receive your buffs.

Lastly on synergies specifically. Lots are posting about the simple way to solve synergies from being too overpowered is simply to nerf them hard or limit to say, 2 per person. This is really the last thing I'd ever like to see. For me much of the fun in raiding is getting massively buffed to take on a tough opponent.

 

Anedris

The OP is talking about cutting edge 25-person content, where it is entirely reasonable to assume 1 of every class. 10-person content has never required consumables or perfect class stacking (although doing anything without a paladin is going to be a trial - salvation is one stand out that could use an equivalent somewhere else). I don't expect this breakdown to change.

If your enhancement shaman or survival hunter goes on holiday you can always just have another shaman or hunter respec, or you can just go without their buffs. People have already mentioned that unleashed rage could probably use tuning down a touch. Once that's done (make it not stack with battle shout or whatever) the enhancement shaman only provides a mildly improved windfury over his resto counterpart (and he can twist, but Blizz might eventually fix that mechanic, who knows). Survival hunters have never been required for anything - in a raid with good physical DPS they will output more RDPS than a BM hunter, but not by leaps and bounds.

If putting a shadow priest in the 5th spot of a group that already has 4 casters provides no more RDPS than putting a mage there, who in their right mind would ever bring a shadow priest to a raid? Why would you take a DPSer who requires a perfect group setup just to output the same DPS as another DPSer who can be tossed anywhere (putting five mages in a group is equivalent to throwing them in the healer group without a shaman)?

I would argue that it is entirely reasonable to require one of each class for 25-person content. It is not reasonable to require five of a given class. It should not require one of a given spec (though it could be considerably favor one spec - e.g. Morogrim and a protadin).

 

PSGarak

Well, one valid question with that is how do you require one of every class in 25-mans without requiring one of every class in 10-mans? For example: if your fix to requiring enhancement shamans is to allow a resto be a reasonable substitution, that still means that you need a shaman for your melee. The fix works for 25-mans (and does a pretty good job, except for elemental shamans), but doesn't change that a warrior or paladin can't DPS in a 10-man without a different class present.

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

 

Anedris

You need more equivalent buffs. Salvation and windfury are outliers because nothing else comes close, and the result is that 10-person raids need a paladin and they need a shaman (unless they stack casters almost exclusively, but that's an unbalanced composition in its own right). If there was some other way to gain significant threat reduction and if windfury wasn't so head-and-shoulders above every other DPS buff in the game the issue would be lessened.

And you also don't tune 10-person "numbers" fights to the same level as 25-person versions. This doesn't mean 10-person content has to always be easy, but its difficulty needs to come from execution (eg. the style of Netherspite) not from pure RDPS requirements (eg. Brutallus).

 

Starfire

We all know Blizzard will just nerf salvation and windfury instead. I think the evidence is that Blizzard seems unhappy with windfury. Didn't they nerf it before only to revert the change because it was too damaging? With wotlk there will be a chance to revamp it completely.

 

Feorthas

There's also the possibility of having classes provide self buffs that are just as desirable but fail to 'mesh' well with things like Windfury. One good new example is the updated Frozen Rune Weapon buff--now that it provides a frost vulnerability, which both DK Tanks and Frost mages can make use of, Frost specced DK tanks may just forego windfury in order to provide additional threat for themselves (more than windfury can provide) AND increase the output of a frost mage (who is capable of providing additional synergy for the Death Knight!).

No clue how Salvation might become less desirable in any way but the above is at least a step in the right direction.

 

Anedris

They might reduce the necessity of salvation by simply making threat much less of an issue. The latest defensive stance for warriors increases threat generated by 45% (up from 30%) and shadow priests in their current alpha form have something like 40% passive threat reduction (up from 25% on live).

Speculating, they could be thinking of a model where threat is mostly a meaningful concept in terms of picking up all mobs (stopping them from ganking healers etc.) but where a tank focusing all her attention on one mob is going to quickly become uncatchable in aggro.

Edit: Looks like the defensive stance buff is due to the removal of the defiance talent, so no actual change there. Speculation likely incorrect.

 

Feorthas

I certainly hope not--removing the threat of gaining aggro from an encounter would be extraordinarily lame; I, personally, like having to do some work (occasionally, as sometimes will occur even with a bear tanking something) to hold onto a mob and take pride in being able to say "yeah, overzealous-dps-guy-X did everything 'wrong' that he possibly could've but I still held the mob" (again, I'm a bear so YMMV, etc. etc.).

 

Enova

Been reading this thread for the last 4 hours, and, after one long, half written post I lost due to a power failure, and a lack of time to actually reply to some of the most interesting stuff that's been brought up, I'll just sum up my thoughts about what changes we need to see before the whole unnecessary stacking is solved.

I'll start off with agreeing that stacking is a pain, for so many reasons it's not worth even going over. So, how would we... I mean Blizz fix this? The way I see it, a few kinds of changes in the game approach and mechanics need to change. Actually, most of the stuff here is dug up from existing posts around here, but I'll try to compile them into a few categories, that should not exclude each other, but rather, be complementary.

A. Granting all classes some sort of positive synergy with other classes. As in everyone bringing their own utility. In theory, every class has useful skills. Mages conjure biscuits and sheep stuff. Rogues nuke shit and can occasionally kick. In practice, that's utter bollocks, since you're not going to need sheeps, biscuits or kicks for most of the boss fights. So, give every class (possibly even spec) something that buffs people. The raid, the party, just a part of the raid, whatever... Hemorrhage and Expose Armor, for the rogues are two interesting skills with potential, for example. The problem is EA overwrites a stack of sunders. Make these two stack, problem solved. Hemo, however, seems a bit more interesting... if only it was truly viable for a standard combat swords, or even a mutilate build. I know this is going to sound silly, but imagine Hemo that takes up a single debuff spot, and up to 3 rogues can add a charge each, possibly for increasing bonus damage (i.e 45 damage for 1 rogue, 100 damage for 2 rogues, 170 for 3 rogues, although they'd have to make it untalented, cause the idea of 3 Hemo specced rogues in a raid sounds wrong). Mages have no real skills that I can see that would make for good synergy, but a simple on crit effect or on hit proc added to their main damage dealing spell could ensure some kind of synergy. The possibilities are limitless here. One free crit on the next spell that lands on the target, regardless of school or caster. Replace free crit with anything from spell haste to free mana cost. As long as the effect is up often enough, a mage should be worth his spot. For variety, you could have different effects on different schools of magic.

Long story short, the idea is to give everyone some kind of unique raid or party buff, such that nothing becomes irreplaceable, and nobody is there just to buff your star dpsers.

B. Modifying the core of the buffs debuffs to a more accessible format They did that to alchemy, they can do it to buffs. Personally? I'd rather not have them limit the number of blessings you can have, though. Raid wide totems? that seems a bit iffy, and besides, how would you fit, for instance, Tranquil Air Totem into the equation? (and yeah, Gurth mentioned it already, but it seems like preferential treatment, so to speak to exclude that single totem - unless there are other criteria). On the other hand, Totem of Wrath for the whole raid seems so juicy... but more on that later...

Merging CoE and CoS into a generic Curse of Vulnerability (or heck, Curse of Pushover Bore the Lootbag, for all I care about the name) sounds good. Keep in mind, though, this could make warlocks seem more like the 'one of' class, that's just there for the mages.
Merging some of the paladin blessings effects is also an example for this. For example, grant BoK the 15% extra threat from BoS, and allow a second BoL to negate that, for the tanks. Or, grant both BoW and BoM the 15% reduced threat effect (with a caveat that they should cap at 15% threat reduction regardless of how many blessings you have), and negate that with BoL.

The idea behind this kind of changes is to remove the need for large numbers of warlocks, paladins and shamans, compared to other classes.

C. Making it inefficient to stack classes past a certain point. Simple, eh? As it stands now, you could, in theory, as discussed earlier, bring 10 warlocks to a raid, or 5 BM hunters in a group, that would gain a massive 15% damage increase just from their own synergy, with an additional Survival hunter and retri pally buffing them from outside the group. While you could add a stack limit of 3 to Ferocious Inspiration, I don't see any real way to make most stacking ineffective. I have seen a suggestion of adding a limit to Curse of Shadows and so forth, but I think, in the context of merging effects with Curse of Elements, the fairest (by no means am I claiming it's the best) way of limiting it is that the effects should only apply to, say, the first 5 spells that land every 5 seconds. I have no idea yet if it should count DOTs that are applied as spells, count the ticks as individual spells, apply to DOTs by default, or not apply to DOTs at all. Alternatively, 2 spells per school every 5 seconds, or somewhat similar. Again, numbers are not set in stone, rather just a graphical illustration of what I had in mind.

The point of these would be to set an optimal balance where everyone gets the most out of the raid, but not to punish a raid too hard for being short on mages one night and bringing in all your warlocks.

D. Miscellaneous changes. Stuff that would make everyone's life easier. Nothing set in stone, no griefing or complaining here, although I'd sure as hell like to see these go through. These are just some of the examples I could think of; a lot more things would fall under this category
- 31 and 41 point talents being raid wide rather than party wide. I.E. Moonkin aura, Leader of the Pack, Totem of Wrath, Shamanistic Rage, Trueshot Aura, etc;
- Windfury, enchant procs, and Battle Shouts on ranged and shapeshifted attacks, since they generally break the rule of having an uniform physical dps standard; that would help in fitting a loose melee dps + hunter in the tank group, with a resto shaman, for instance
- Removing the debuff limit. Apparently, a stealth buff to warlocks, or something, but I'm hoping that it would make debuffs based synergy more viable, especially in the context of a new, debuff heavy class.


All in all, no single buff should be critical to a class' or group's performance. I've yet to find a viable alternative idea to Windfury. The [Righteous Weapon Coating] seem like a nice enough starting point, but I'm not exactly sure I want to have shamans replaced by a quest item. Also, I had something cooked up for Bloodlust/Heroism in the post that I didn't finish, but I simply don't have the time to reconstruct that right now.

EDITED: Minor clarifications, the tranquil air bit, and added the last paragraph.

Guilty as charged ^

 

Starfire

Actually, you could say... make blackmithing item and/or alchemy item that is like 80-90% as effective of windfury. Remember those sharpening stones and those shadow oils? Hell, even make profession-only version as a perk.

Goal shouldn't be to make them 100% as effective as windfury, but effective enough that windfury wouldn't feel so "Required".

 

Tyrian

Heres an idea: What if some buffing classes have a very special buff that YOU chose the effects of. You could only receive one of these buffs, per class, per raid. Using totems as an example, what if Shamans had a special totem they could drop and its effect/use depended on a inscription you chose. For example. Shaman drops 'Totem of Generic Use'

If your a mage, you get 'Inscription A - Allows you to channel the effects of the Totem-of-generic-use into magical energy' (Aka, A Wrath of air totem')
However, a Druid in the raid gets 'Inscription B - Allows you to channel the effects of the Totem-of-generic-use into Solid Power' (Aka, A Strength of air totem')

Both of the players are using the same totem, but for different effects.

Now apply it to Paladins. A Paladin blesses 'Blessing of Generic Use'

If your a Ret Paladin, you get 'Inscription C - Allows you to channel the effects of Blessing-of-generic-use into increasing your power (Aka, Blessing of Might)
If your a Shadow Priest, you get 'Inscription D - Allows you to channel the effects of the Blessing-of-generic-use into restoring magical energy' (Aka, Blessing of Wisdom)

This helps solve a few problems with one stone and lesson the need for 'the third+ shaman' type situations. Keep two of each class, and use the generic-class-buff one of them provides to get your third - without actually inviting a third from that class. (Lets ignore things like heroism/chain heal atm)

This would also fix some group problems. For example: the nightmare of slotting ret pally/fury warrior into raids without WF. Now they could still go into that Hunter group, and choose their buff to be windfury.

It doesnt however dilute the value of raid synergy - it just grants some extra flexibility - since you might only have 2 members of that class in the raid, but can get that third essential buff/totem from that class without actually inviting a third player. And, of course, its providing the backbone for inscription to be a useful profession. Everyone will want to choose their buffs in this manner - and inscription would flourish as a result.

 

Starfire

Maybe that new talent "Vigilance" is a sign of things to come. (Warrior talent, grants 5% dodge to the person under its effect (Does other things, but not relevant to my point)).

Of course, in regards specifically to windfury, thing that's always intrigued me. When shamans use windfury for themselves, they just use weapon imbue... if you ask me shamans should just be able to do 30 minute imbues in the do-not-trade slot.

This might be really neat if you somehow limited it to say 5 imbues per 30 minutes. But only 5 imbues of one time! So like a single shaman could do 5 windfury imbues and 5 flametongue imbues. That might be interesting.

 

Enova

This could actually open the posibility of WF totem working like a mage table, or something, but the innate problem it creates is you still need below 5 melee, or a multiple of 5.

Guilty as charged ^

 

Lanlaorn

That and the Windfury weapon imbue is far more powerful than the totem version, and enchanting Offhands as well as Mainhands would be still more ridiculous.

Assuming the creation of a second, nerfed, imbue that's identical to the totem for these purposes, I think it would be a fine solution since your Ele and Resto shaman could distribute the buff as well. Assuming 3 shaman, you're clear up to 15 melee. I can't see any raid bringing more than that.

 

Linnet

I like the thinking behind that talent. Something deep in prot that will help with tanking but will also help the raid when you are off-tanking (would love to see more off-tanking type talents for warriors).

 

Roywyn

That would actually be a huge step backwards.

Shaman are balanced with dual WF imbues, other melee are balanced with WF totem MH, and poison/stone/coating in mind. (Even if balance may or may not be a bit off.)
Now if melee doens't have a WF totem, it hurts, but it's not too bad - think solo, 5mans, Kara.

If you change it to your idea, then melee would have to be rebalanced (=nerfed) for (dual) WF imbues, and they'd be really terrible without these imbues and enough shaman.
All it does is making you even more dependant on shaman for your melee.


Putting a WF imbues into trade windows is like inscribing a Shadowbolt with Ignite, or Fireball with ISB or Holy Light with Lifebloom.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

JasoNintendo

You could work it like Enova suggested, and say let a certain number of players click on a totem ala mage table or soulwell, and it enchants your main hand with windfury for 30 mins. Adjust the number of charges appropriately and you have the best of both worlds; your non-shaman melee get WF only in their main hand but for the whole raid, and Shaman get to keep their dual-imbues.

 

Tonyk

I think there are a few things they could do to streamline raid compositions.

• Fuse Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom into one buff. The only classes that this effects are Ret Paladins, Hunters, and Enhancement Shamans. The last of those doesn't need the regen and Blizzard may give Ret Paladins and Hunters sufficient regen in WOTLK.
  Turn Blessing of Sanctuary into a self-buff. No Warrior cares about this buff when they could get Kings, Might, and Light instead. All this change does, along with the first blessing change, is remove any reason at all to take 4 Paladins.

• Next up are Shamans. You're already going to be giving everyone in melee range a Strength of Earth and Windfury Totem, so why bother making this require two people in melee range? Same goes for ranged dps classes and healers - raids are taking 4+ shamans because everyone needs totems. So make them raid-wide, as suggested in the OP, but make sure some totems stick with your group like Mana Tide.
  Then you stick a 10 minute "Exhaustion" debuff on people so they can't get multiple Bloodlusts and you're looking at 2-3 Shamans per raid.

• Fusing the two spell damage curses together works, too. It makes bringing a 3rd Warlock only for Healthstones, which is a very marginal gain compared to the first two.

The last thing to do would be to bring actual hybrids back into the game. Something like an instant heal that healed everyone within 20yards of the Paladin for a large amount (3-4k) that scaled with attack power and couldn't be used on the caster and with a short cooldown. Giving Ret Paladins (or any healer, really) the ability to AOE heal without impacting their dps too much would go a long way to lowering the amount of healing classes you need.

 

Solmyr77

Result: No more than 3 Palas per raid because they're weaker at healing/dpsing/tanking than their counterparts. Working as intended.

Result: If Shamans are the best healing class at healing, they will still be preferred for any remaining healer spots after the buffs are covered(3 Palas, 1 Priest, 1 Druid, none of them required to be healers).

You can't get rid of this kind of stacking. There will be a basic raid composition that covers the needs and then there will be a number of remaining spots that are better to be filled with class X than class Y. High numbers of one class result from the fact that X is either heavily represented in the core team as well(like Shamans) or due to a high number of remaining slots(like Mages pre TBC from what I read here, never raided back then).

Result: See above. As long as there is no decursing involved, the 3rd, 4th and even 10th Warlock provides more than the 2nd Mage.


And something more general:
There is no point in giving other classes lesser versions of -for example- Windfury. I saw 80% of its power mentioned here, such a spell wouldn't be used when WF is available. And for bosses like Brutallus every single percent of damage will be made available by the high end guilds. 25% difference is far away from taking a valid spot in a progress raid. Such buffs would make 5man content more foregiving though.

 

PSGarak

The general idea is that you recruit good players for the roles, rather than having to either target specific classes from far-flung realms or trial half-assed players because, due to poor game design, they are a better inclusion into the raid than a well-played member of a different class. This requires softening the current hard requirements on class composition.
For a raid leader deciding whether to include an enhancement shaman or another melee, the choice is obvious when the enhancement shaman adds his own DPS and buffs other people's by 50%, but less obvious when it's their own DPS plus 5% of four other people's. The individual skill/gear can start competing with the mere class in terms of making that decision.
And the entire point isn't particularly aimed at bleeding-edge min-max guilds anyways. Even if an enhancement shaman is 2% better at a slot than the hunter they have, most guilds (even 'hardcore' raiding ones) won't bother to recruit to fill that slot with the more optimal choice. The optimality of a choice doesn't automatically mean that's what players will do. It's what they'll try to do at first, but their actual decisions are also influenced by availability of that option, and availability and relative viability of alternatives. That's why people kill Brutalus with Mutilate builds.

As far as paladins... they need buffs anyways. That's a separate issue than the one under discussion here. To turn this question on its head: Is it really acceptable that guilds have to stack 3-4 of an inferior class to be effective, or is that a piecemeal bandaid fix that should be replaced with a proper review of the class? (Ditto mages/warlocks).

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

 

Floria

It would be great if this conversation wasn't constantly hijacked by whining about class balance. This thread is not about mage DPS, it is about how to make sure under-represented classes get their slots by bringing utility, while finding a way to make over-represented classes less necessary.

There is a difference between "necessary" and "desirable". Right now Bloodlust (Heroism for you pacifists) is so over-powered, and totems so incredibly necessary that many raids are finding 4-5 spots in their raid for Shamans, even if the players behind those characters are bad players, or if their posted numbers are weak. 3 Paladin blessings are necessary. 3 Warlock curses are necessary.

If suggestions in this thread were implemented, then only 2 warlocks would be necessary. If Warlock DPS continued to be competitive, then more might be desirable, but that's outside the scope of this conversation. Similarly, with raid-wide totems and Bloodlust Forbearance, only 2 shamans would be necessary. If Shaman healing continued to be dominant, then more might be desirable, but again, irrelevant to this discussion.

The key is to make 1 of each class completely necessary (huge marginal utility over zero), with either a buff, debuff, or amazing DPS, and a second of each class (whether same spec for mages/rogues, or different spec like Holy/Shadow or Balance/Feral) mostly necessary (significant marginal utility over one). So long as classes have that, then 2 of each class is represented. I'm kind of surprised that this thread has gone on as long as it has, since the suggestions are so simple and elegant.

 

Solmyr77

I'm with you on that one since I have to make these decisions myself for my non-hardcore guild. Numbers play a big role here: 2% individual performance may not be much, but 20% gets your dog's alt into the raid if an encounter calls for performance.

On a side note, I'd like to know how much difference Ret Palas made for early Brutallus kills, when picked over a 2.2k Rogue. Noboby ever questioned that move, in fact it was proven beneficial, but I don't remember the numbers. I suppose that was a min-maxing move that would have been eliminated by any subpar spec in the raid like the Mutilate Rogue you mentioned. Sunwell gear is killing Brutallus for these specs, I'd say.

 

RpgWizard

Except if you don't talk about class balance, then the discussion means nothing. The fact you call into question Bloodlust and totems with regard to shamans is a class balance issue because a class brings those buffs. The class is balanced (apparently) with those synergies in mind. You cannot separate the two things, class balance and raid synergies are not mutually exclusive.

 

PSGarak

You can separate them in that you can deal with the two issues consecutively rather than concurrently. It's true that you can't just remove synergies and expect the classes to be balanced as-is, but it's perfectly valid to leave individual contributions to be tuned after raid-buffs are evened out. We are implicitly assuming that, after any buff/debuff/synergy reworking, class balance would be redressed appropriately (ie at least as good as it is now, however good you may think it is, and often allowing it to be better).
More to the point, we don't really need exact details of how such balancing would work to discuss the raid synergy aspect. Vague generalities like "bring paladin healing up to match other healers closer" is sufficient for the discussion at hand.

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