Let's put it this way: You could eliminate chain heal completely (replace it with CoH say) and people would still stack shaman. Ergo, the problem doesn't stem from shaman being the best raid healers (and they're the worst tank healers - though they can do it fine, all three other classes bring more to that role - so it's not that).
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.
Well, why limit it? If your raid's melee > your raid's shamans x5, there's something seriously wrong with your raid composition. Why not just let us target a group and buff the whole group with windfury, as many times as we want? It's not like we need the cap to get more than 1 shaman into raids - we have bloodlust and other totems - and capping it would just make buffing more of a hassle than it needs to be. (As would this "do-not-trade slot" business, but the means by which we'd apply the buff have zero impact on how powerful it is.)
As several people have already said, this would have to be a different spell than self-only Windfury Weapon, which is way better than windfury totem.
This would also be a nice ham-fisted fix for totem twisting, at least in the sense that everyone would get the benefit of two air totems and Blizzard could balance around that assumption. I'm fine with totem twisting, enhancement is retardedly easy without it, but Blizzard's stated their intention to get rid of it and making windfury not a totem would be a lot better than any other "fix" I could think of.
The more I think about this solution the more I like it.
Well, why limit it? If your raid's melee > your raid's shamans x5, there's something seriously wrong with your raid composition. Why not just let us target a group and buff the whole group with windfury, as many times as we want?
The only possible reason I could think for objecting to shamans giving out windfury imbues is pvp-balancing. A single shaman in AV or any other large scale battleground they decide to add, could buff the entire raids melee with windfury. Also in arena you couldn't destroy the opponents windfury totem anymore. An enhancement shaman probably doesn't have any problems dropping it again every 10 seconds, but a resto shaman may not always have the time to do that, and the receiver may not be in range of the shaman at the time anyway. An imbue version would eliminate all of these downsides.
One way to balance it might be to make the non-shaman version of windfury dispellable, and disappear on death. That way the shaman would need to be in line of sight of the target, and spend a global cooldown every 10 seconds if they are being dispelled, to give their teams warrior windfury. The windfury weapon would be a dispellable 30 minute buff, that would tick every 10 seconds enchanting the targets mainhand with windfury for 10 seconds. Alternatively you could just make it completely dispellable, though this would eliminate the shamans option to keep windfury up even with dispelling.
Adding a forbearance effect to bloodlust sounds good as well. On a related note adding one to leatherworking drums would be a good idea too. That way you would benefit from having one leatherworker in the group, but wouldn't need your entire raid to reroll leatherworking. Adding similar buffing items to other professions would be welcome as well.
Instead of the suggested tank, melee, healer groups, give the raid leader an interface to select the # of groups and select the # of players in each group. If you could choose maybe 15 players max per group it would essentially create a physical dmg group and a spell based group. This idea along with the previously suggested bloodlust-exhaustion would make 2 shamans ideal. There would be some balance issues with certain effects, like mana-tide, but it would allow much more and much needed flexibility in class composition.
It seems to be to be a simple problem, with simple solutions:
1. Adjust group buffs that are significantly better than others down.
2. Make it so each class has only a small number of significant buffs, and that these buffs can all be applied with 2 or less of the class in the case of Raidwide buffs.
3. Adjust DPS output for buffing classes/specs even/a little lower than non-buffing classes.
I do not like the "make x buff raidwide" suggestion as this leads us down the 'ideal' raid path where you must have z and y of each class and that alone.
The problem is just one of balance:
Gurgs original example of Warlock is not that hard to fix. He mentioned it himself, it's solution 2 and 3. Consolidate the Warlock curses into two so that you don't get raidwide returns beyond the second warlock, and adjust the personal DPS of the class down. Make the DPS even to mages when using a damage curse, and lower when not. Then it becomes a matter of player skill (and boss design) on choosing what to do after you already have two locks.
The problem with Shamen is point 1. The enchancment shamen group buffs are too much better than others, so there is no real choice to make. Balance this out and then the problem goes away.
I don't think it's that big an issue. It's just balance, and can easily be adjusted. Making many buffs raidwide however will be a big issue, as it will result in more of the Paladin/Warlock situation where you must have X of this class in order to provide these raidbuffs, and if you don't you're screwed. Every min-max raid will tend towards the same form, rather than allowing the skill of players and the combination of party buffs to allow some distinction depending on the players guilsd have avaliable.
What you want the solution to be is one where, generally speaking, you have a 25 man raid with 1-2 of each class, and the remaining 5-15 spots filled up according to the skill of your guildmates avalaible, not a situation where every 25 man raid has the same composition.
I don't think it's that big an issue. It's just balance, and can easily be adjusted. Making many buffs raidwide however will be a big issue, as it will result in more of the Paladin/Warlock situation where you must have X of this class in order to provide these raidbuffs, and if you don't you're screwed. Every min-max raid will tend towards the same form, rather than allowing the skill of players and the combination of party buffs to allow some distinction depending on the players guilsd have avaliable.
I don't really understand why making certain buffs such as Windfury totem raid-wide would make you any more 'screwed' in their absence than if it's just your melee group going short. Surely the only difference is with raid-wide totems you only require one shaman to cater for as many melee as you like instead of having to either bring another shaman or ditch leftover melee.
Also FWIW I like the idea about being able to customise group sizes. That, coupled with a few other measures like consolidation of some Blessings/Curses would probably go a long way to alleviating the problem while still maintaining a semblance of group building strategy.
It seems to be to be a simple problem, with simple solutions:
1. Adjust group buffs that are significantly better than others down.
2. Make it so each class has only a small number of significant buffs, and that these buffs can all be applied with 2 or less of the class in the case of Raidwide buffs.
3. Adjust DPS output for buffing classes/specs even/a little lower than non-buffing classes.
I do not like the "make x buff raidwide" suggestion as this leads us down the 'ideal' raid path where you must have z and y of each class and that alone.
The problem is just one of balance:
Gurgs original example of Warlock is not that hard to fix. He mentioned it himself, it's solution 2 and 3. Consolidate the Warlock curses into two so that you don't get raidwide returns beyond the second warlock, and adjust the personal DPS of the class down. Make the DPS even to mages when using a damage curse, and lower when not. Then it becomes a matter of player skill (and boss design) on choosing what to do after you already have two locks.
The problem with Shamen is point 1. The enchancment shamen group buffs are too much better than others, so there is no real choice to make. Balance this out and then the problem goes away.
I don't think it's that big an issue. It's just balance, and can easily be adjusted. Making many buffs raidwide however will be a big issue, as it will result in more of the Paladin/Warlock situation where you must have X of this class in order to provide these raidbuffs, and if you don't you're screwed. Every min-max raid will tend towards the same form, rather than allowing the skill of players and the combination of party buffs to allow some distinction depending on the players guilsd have avaliable.
What you want the solution to be is one where, generally speaking, you have a 25 man raid with 1-2 of each class, and the remaining 5-15 spots filled up according to the skill of your guildmates avalaible, not a situation where every 25 man raid has the same composition.
If you nerf the strongest group buffs, you're going to have to drastically buff the baseline DPS/HPS of the classes that currently require these strongest buffs to be balanced. Would you really prefer having rogues running around doing 25-50% more damage unbuffed than they currently are capable of, because you don't like how strong an Enhance Shaman is? Just because a buff is strong, doesn't mean it needs to be toned down. If you just make it easier to provide these required buffs, the classes dependent on them won't be jerked around every time Hybrid Buffer X goes out drinking with his buddies for a night instead of raiding. And the fact of the matter is, classes that receive appropriate buffs are balanced, so there's no point in screwing with this.
The only possible reason I could think for objecting to shamans giving out windfury imbues is pvp-balancing. A single shaman in AV or any other large scale battleground they decide to add, could buff the entire raids melee with windfury. Also in arena you couldn't destroy the opponents windfury totem anymore. An enhancement shaman probably doesn't have any problems dropping it again every 10 seconds, but a resto shaman may not always have the time to do that, and the receiver may not be in range of the shaman at the time anyway. An imbue version would eliminate all of these downsides.
I thought about the AV thing and then realized I didn't give a shit. Honestly, your raid comp in AV is random and your group comp is at the mercy of the mouth-breathing lv62 melee hunter who happened to get leader. Blizzard should not balance group/raid buffs around AV.
The arena/organized PvP objection might be more of a problem though, depending on how the classes affected get changed in WotLK.
Why not have Windfury totem function like a soulwell? Gives you a 1/2 an hour buff that only works when the totem is active? Then the people that wanted Windfury could grab it, and as long as the shaman was actually present and dropping the totem (you could also add a range check) the people who wanted it would have their buff.
Why not have Windfury totem function like a soulwell? Gives you a 1/2 an hour buff that only works when the totem is active? Then the people that wanted Windfury could grab it, and as long as the shaman was actually present and dropping the totem (you could also add a range check) the people who wanted it would have their buff.
If the goal is to limit it to 4, 5, or some arbitrary number of melee, then all it does is cap your melee based on how many shaman you have, and once again an extra man will be left out. Raids will still have to "stack" a specific amount, and the extra melee out won't be worth bringing.
If the goal is to give all melee in a raid windfury with one buff - then why have the hassle of having a click mechanism?
1. Adjust group buffs that are significantly better than others down.
2. Make it so each class has only a small number of significant buffs, and that these buffs can all be applied with 2 or less of the class in the case of Raidwide buffs.
I do not like the "make x buff raidwide" suggestion as this leads us down the 'ideal' raid path where you must have z and y of each class and that alone.
The problem is just one of balance:
Gurgs original example of Warlock is not that hard to fix. He mentioned it himself, it's solution 2 and 3. Consolidate the Warlock curses into two so that you don't get raidwide returns beyond the second warlock, and adjust the personal DPS of the class down.
The problem with Shamen is point 1. The enchancment shamen group buffs are too much better than others, so there is no real choice to make. Balance this out and then the problem goes away.
I do not get all the hate towards making Totems or other buffs, raid wide. Why go through all these weird iterations of totem soulwells, or totem weapon oils, whatever when the simplest solution is simply changing the wording and function of Totems from "party members withing x yards" to "friendly players within x yards." As I have said, you make totems raid wide, and you never need more then 3 shaman. No need to nerf shaman buffs, no need to increase baseline dps of any class, just one simple change and shaman stacking goes away almost instantly. You have an Elemental Shaman buffing all your ranged Dps, instead of just 1 DPS group, and all of your healers with 3% crit and hit, and probably 101 spell damage and healing, 50+hp5 for everyone because he's dropping healing stream totem and it's affected by his +healing, and also maybe Tremor Totem, if something like the T6 4pc is implimented as a talent, or maybe a new Earth Totem which is actually useful for casters(spell haste anyone?). You have a Resto Shaman dropping Grace of Air for your Druids, Hunters, Tanks who want dodge, and Enhancement Shaman, and improved Mana Spring Totem for everyone, along with maybe Stoneskin totem for everyone, because honestly why not? And you have an Enhancement Shaman dropping Windfury, Strength of Earth, and maybe Poison Cleansing since his water totems are already covered. It's awesome and everyone is happy.
I do not get all the hate towards making Totems or other buffs, raid wide. Why go through all these weird iterations of totem soulwells, or totem weapon oils, whatever when the simplest solution is simply changing the wording and function of Totems from "party members withing x yards" to "friendly players within x yards." As I have said, you make totems raid wide, and you never need more then 3 shaman. No need to nerf shaman buffs, no need to increase baseline dps of any class, just one simple change and shaman stacking goes away almost instantly. You have an Elemental Shaman buffing all your ranged Dps, instead of just 1 DPS group, and all of your healers with 3% crit and hit, and probably 101 spell damage and healing, 50+hp5 for everyone because he's dropping healing stream totem and it's affected by his +healing, and also maybe Tremor Totem, if something like the T6 4pc is implimented as a talent, or maybe a new Earth Totem which is actually useful for casters(spell haste anyone?). You have a Resto Shaman dropping Grace of Air for your Druids, Hunters, Tanks who want dodge, and Enhancement Shaman, and improved Mana Spring Totem for everyone, along with maybe Stoneskin totem for everyone, because honestly why not? And you have an Enhancement Shaman dropping Windfury, Strength of Earth, and maybe Poison Cleansing since his water totems are already covered. It's awesome and everyone is happy.
In part because they're consolidating spellhit/crit/haste and the melee equivalents, per recent leaks.
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
In part because they're consolidating spellhit/crit/haste and the melee equivalents, per recent leaks.
Oh? Link?
Also, just because they're consolidating in one way doesn't mean that Totem of Wrath will be made the same way. There are still examples of Ranged Critical Strike vs Melee Critical Strike to this day. Scopes, for example. Just because they're making general changes doesn't stop them from leaving specific exceptions.
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
Also, I only really ment the totems I listed there/here:
Healing Stream - Nobody uses this because you only ever have 1 shaman in a group, raid wide totems makes this very useful
Mana Spring
Stoneskin - Same deal as healing stream, Raid wide Strength of earth means putting this down is actually a good idea.
Strength of Earth
Grace of Air
Windfury
Wrath of Air
Totem of Wrath.
Tremor Totem, Poison Cleansing, and the rest of the totems should stay group buffs, though any new totems, as long as they are just "Buff" totems(spell or melee haste maybe) and not specific mechanic(curse removal or whatever) should be raid wide where as if they give us a curse removing totem or something it should just be a group buff.
Also keep in mind this is just a fix for Shaman. People aren't stacking druids because of feral, moonkin or tree buffs. They may be bringing 4-5 druids, but it isn't considered "stacking." so there is no reason to make their buffs Raid Wide and I wasn't advocating doing that, or making stuff like Battle Shout raid wide either. Making Buff Totems raid wide is simply the easiest way of limiting Shaman stacking in my opinion.
The reason I'd prefer totems stay party only over raid-wide is because I like party buffs. I feel they encourage good group formation and lend some variation to raids depending what classes you have avaliable/skills of the players who play those classes. I think raid-wide things like Pally buffs and Warlock curses tend to force raid composition in a certain way, and make party compositon less important.
Making totems raid-wide would also work. But then you might get some other party buff that people optimise for, which in turn you will have to make raid-wide or balance. I just prefer you blance from the start and don't go down the raid-wide route.
As I said originaly, I think the best situation is where you're 'forced' only to have about 15 members of the raid be a certain class, where the remaining 10 can be made up of whatever dps/healer numbers you feel suits, and whatever specific classes you have the best players for. I think raid-wide buffs generaly limit this happening (Gurgs original complaint about Warlock Curses is a complaint of this nature), and adding more raid-wide buffs only make it more the case, especialy if this becomes the accepted method of balancing out things that are revealed to be a problem in this way.
The reason I'd prefer totems stay party only over raid-wide is because I like party buffs. I feel they encourage good group formation and lend some variation to raids depending what classes you have avaliable/skills of the players who play those classes. I think raid-wide things like Pally buffs and Warlock curses tend to force raid composition in a certain way, and make party compositon less important.
The current situation seems to favor just bringing 5 shamans over making good group formations. Shaman are currently the best group buffers for almost all classes (or all). If you wanted to keep totems party wide, you would either need to scale their power down or scale everyone else's buffs power up, which wouldn't really be a good idea. You don't need to make all buffs raidwise of course. Enhancement shamans would still have unleashed rage for melee groups, and you could replace totem of wrath with a similar party only buff for elemental shamans.
I don't think raid-wise totems would make any other specific class the next ultimate buffer either. There's no other class who can buff any kind of group that effectively. Paladin blessings are arguably at least as strong and universally useful as shaman buffs, but they are almost useless after the 3rd blessing. Shamans don't have such a built-in limitation, at least not yet.
The reason I'd prefer totems stay party only over raid-wide is because I like party buffs. I feel they encourage good group formation and lend some variation to raids depending what classes you have avaliable/skills of the players who play those classes. I think raid-wide things like Pally buffs and Warlock curses tend to force raid composition in a certain way, and make party compositon less important.
The problem is that it works the opposite for shaman because they're buffs are party only. You bring 5+ shaman so you can totems for every group and heroisms for every group, or rolling heroisms. You still would need good group formation, I'm not talking about Unleased Rage, Heroism, Battle Shout, Leader of the Pack, or Moonkin aura or anything like that. I'm talking about totems and only Buff Totems, not all totems.
If you nerf the strongest group buffs, you're going to have to drastically buff the baseline DPS/HPS of the classes that currently require these strongest buffs to be balanced. Would you really prefer having rogues running around doing 25-50% more damage unbuffed than they currently are capable of, because you don't like how strong an Enhance Shaman is? Just because a buff is strong, doesn't mean it needs to be toned down. If you just make it easier to provide these required buffs, the classes dependent on them won't be jerked around every time Hybrid Buffer X goes out drinking with his buddies for a night instead of raiding. And the fact of the matter is, classes that receive appropriate buffs are balanced, so there's no point in screwing with this.
Would this really be such a big problem? I would imagine part of the reason that warlocks are over represented in arena's is also why people would like to stack them in raids. Namely they can do a ton of damage without relying on other classes to buff them.
Personally, I would be in favor of getting rid of windfury all together. Leave the shammy self buff but that's it. No totem, no lightwell, no won't be traded. Shaman have good buffs in heaps even without windfury and the classes that would have problems without windfury should just be balanced around its absense.
Personally, I would be in favor of getting rid of windfury all together. Leave the shammy self buff but that's it. No totem, no lightwell, no won't be traded. Shaman have good buffs in heaps even without windfury and the classes that would have problems without windfury should just be balanced around its absense.
I think this would be the best way to handle it. The classes that rely on windfury are just too reliant right now and that's not good for raid flexibility. And it's also not fun to be so heavily reliant on one other class. Synergy is good, utter dependence on a single class is bad.
They don't especially need to boost damage right now to compensate (except relatively), they'll be rebalancing damage from all the classes in the expansion anyway so they can tweak it that way.
I have a question, and shoot me if I'm dead wrong on this given my lack of Sunwell experience, but I have to ask:
How much of this "raid-stacking" comes from the need to push content?
That is, if you need x rDPS to down a boss (which is what Brutallus basically comes down to), is this compulsive need to stack Shaman and Warlocks the symptom of a raid group trying to push too hard and making up for it via Bloodlusts and 5x Drum rotations?
I think it's pretty well established that Sunwell content requires most of your raid force to be decked out in T6, so I'm wondering if guilds are only stacking so hard because they'd rather not wait for their players to get best-in-slot and instead cheese the gearchecks in some other way.
Of course, that begs the question just how well geared are the top-guilds right now in relation to what they killed and when they killed it, which is why I'm acknowledging that I could be way off base here.
How much of this "raid-stacking" comes from the need to push content?
Does it even matter where it comes from?
Sure there is the need for a catalyst to start changes in how you think about the game (Think loatheb for consumables, 4h for raidstacking and now perhaps SW for group synergy) but once its out in the open it no longer matters where it came from. Because from now on it will pervade everything.
Actually, my line of reasoning was along the lines of:
As people get geared up more, rDPS increases, decreasing the need for stacking Shaman/Warlocks so much.
My question was: Just how geared are people? Is raid stacking artificially inflating rDPS so much that guilds are managing kills they shouldn't have? Once we have melee groups with 14/14 best-in-slot gear, will their DPS obviate the demand for Bloodlusts and Drums?
06/02/08, 6:38 PM
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