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?
Right, I certainly don't want to get bogged down in the minutiae of exactly which buffs or totems should have out-of-group effects. I agree Mana Tide is probably excessive. You could keep it group-only, or you could add something like an "AoE cap" like they did for damaging AoEs -- cap the max % regen at some level so that if 16 mana-users are getting the benefit of the totem they only get back 12% of their mana, but if it's only ticking on 8 players then each of the 8 gets their 24%? Anyway, obviously if I were going to be making a more detailed proposal I'd have worked out a lot of the relevant numbers.
That would probably be too hard to organise within the raid as to who gets it, where to stand to get it, etc.
Keeping it group only would be best for Mana Tide and (obviously) BL, but pretty much every other totem is balanced if it were raid-wide.
As to stacking blessings, well, it's hard to implement a solution that would allow for 2 paladins a raid, while not being completely imbalanced in solo content and 5/10 mans. Perhaps combining Salvation and Kings into a talent deep in ret/prot would fix this, as well as (obviously) encouraging, if not requiring the use of a ret/prot paladin.
Why not make Prot Paladin Tree have a deep talent Like Blessing Master (shitty name) that allows you to use 2 Blessings instead of one1? It's not like you bring 3 Prot Paladins to 5 man or 10 man or even 25 man... And that encourage guilds to take Prot paladins not only Holy Ones. Following the idea of the above user.
As far as encouraging/requiring the use of a prot paladin, I think Blizz has been heading that direction with all the "boss spawns multiple adds" fights they've been throwing into their raids. I don't really think that's so much of an issue, so long as boss fights continue to bring out trash waves. I think the real issue with paladins is: 1) No compelling reason to bring more than one holy paladin, because of lackluster healing; and 2) no compelling reason to bring more than one ret paladin, because of lackluster DPS when not properly supported.
2) no compelling reason to bring more than one ret paladin, because of lackluster DPS when not properly supported.
That's true to some degree, however I think the main reason you won't see a raid with more than one ret paladin is because a second ret paladin brings zero utility to the raid outside of 2% damage to party (as 3% crit/JoW are being kept up by ret #1). With an extra enhancement shaman for example, you get WF/GoA/SoE to a second group if you're running melee heavy, plus the 10% AP buff.
That's true to some degree, however I think the main reason you won't see a raid with more than one ret paladin is because a second ret paladin brings zero utility to the raid outside of 2% damage to party (as 3% crit/JoW are being kept up by ret #1). With an extra enhancement shaman for example, you get WF/GoA/SoE to a second group if you're running melee heavy, plus the 10% AP buff.
That was partially my point. At least with bringing a second mage, you get a second Polymorph and pretty fair DPS. The shaman you pointed out quite well. Bringing a second ret paladin, what do you get? Blessing of Light? That should already be up on the tank anyway, and with only one holy pally nobody else will gain any benefit from it.
I think blessing of salvation needs to be removed from the game, if we are going to remove a paladin blessing.
This solves two problems:
1) Without salvation, tank's TPS vs party DPS must be balanced around innate abilities / class mechanics. Meaning if you don't have a pally (which is very likely in a 10 or 5 man group) your DPS won't be ridiculously threat capped.
2) Is one solution to the "must bring 3 pallies for optimal buffs", while better addressing 5-10 mans than removing/merging another type of buff, since otherwise a paladin will still be almost required, as opposed to "a nice 5-10% increase in dps/hp/etc."
To put salvation in perspective, look at the % impact of other buffs discussed in this thread:
Blesing of salvation: 30% less threat generated, about a ~42% increase in DPS if threat capped.
Windfury totem: 20% more white white damage, a ~10-15% increase in DPS.
Wrath of Air Totem: +100~ spell damage, a ~3-6% increase in dps/healing.
Blessing of might: +220~ AP. A 5-10% buff to AP resulting in a 3-6% increase in DPS.
Blessing of kings: +10% all stats, resulting in a 3-6% increase in survivability/DPS.
Feral/Balance Auras: +5% crit, resulting in a ~5% increase to DPS.
I think all buffs should be in the "5% increase" range, as opposed to the huge variation in power we see now.
There are a lot of buffs in the "nice to have, could survive without them" category. Although the game will change for WotLK, and anything is possible, look at the buffs that are "done right" right now: buffs that add roughly 5% to DPS or survivability. Small, nice to have, but not gamebreaking if you have them - and crippling if you don't.
Edit: Almost forgot to mention: Multiple buffs. Windfury is very powerful on its own, as is unleashed rage. Throw in strength of earth, totem twisting and bloodlust and you get a group benefit approaching salvation - better than salvation if the group is not threat capped. The point is, no one class, or lack of one class should have such a huge impact on a group or raid.
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 way "party-wide" totems are functioning now can have much a much much more drastic effect on raid composition than the way "raid-wide" buffs / debuffs currently do. If you need an additional Paladin Blessing, or Warlock curse, one person sits. If your enhance shaman can't make it, and you absolutely cannot replace him, four people sit.
Originally Posted by Macblade
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.
Yes, it would be a huge, huge problem. Warlocks aren't overrepresented in arena. Rogues are. And now you want to give them a 8-10% buff to their base DPS. And a 15% buff to Warriors' base DPS. With a healing debuff present in PvP, that's 16-30% more healing required to heal through a Rogue or Warrior's damage. Both of these classes operate successfully in PvP without WF, although warriors do make use of it depending on their team.
It's just asinine to remove something that creates balance, create a new problem, and then reinvent the wheel to solve a problem of your own making.
I'm curious to know if something akin to the following was implemented:
Once in combat, players cannot be swapped between groups. I'm fairly certain it was never intended by developers to have raid leaders swapping people around to make use of group buffs. While this wouldn't change some of the raid buffs that come into play, it would limit and force people to reevaluate which classes to bring. Stacking I'm sure would still occur, but things such as drums and lust would be 'properly' limited.
Balancing numbers is easy, address the concept instead of values that can be easily changed.
Things like hit, crit, haste scale too well, especially when %-based, but even when based off of ratings that are going to be changed in the expansion.
With raid-wide totems, changing the values, either they'd be too powerful in 25 man raids, or be less powerful in smaller groups (5-10 man or whatever).
Take Ret paladins as a key example: Even at 5% crit added by JOTC, many people in slower guilds don't bring them to Kara/Zul'Aman/heroics. For Brutallus? A Ret paladin is a key part of the fight, partly because of refreshed judgements, but in large part because JOTC (5% crit) scales so quickly for each additional DPS you add to the fight.
Add in the fact that they're ostensibly designing fights for both 10-man groups and 25-man groups at the same time, and I think that group-based synergy is likely to be more important, rather than less, because it's easier to "balance" across different raid sizes.
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.
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?
So your question is basically whether the rDPS increase from group composition is "artificial" or intended, in the sense of whether content is balanced with or without it. Brutallus is probably the tightest-tuned content currently in that you're basically expected your whole raid to be decked out with every piece of gear available beforehand, and you still need the group-comp boost. But I'm with other people in seeing that is irrelevant.
The problem isn't whether min-maxed raid/group comp or piecemeal approach is the baseline. The problem is that there's such a huge difference between the two. In that sense, it's exactly the same problem that caused alchemy to be nerfed. The boost from consumables was too great compared to individual gear or ability, and the question of whether the baseline is with or without it is not the way to look at it. In either case the gap is too large, so they hard-capped the boost available. Raid and group composition is currently playing a similar role (for some classes, an even larger one), and we're trying to figure out ways to close the gap between a (reasonable) piecemeal composition and a min-max one, as well as flatten the dropoff in effectiveness as you change composition.
The way "party-wide" totems are functioning now can have much a much much more drastic effect on raid composition than the way "raid-wide" buffs / debuffs currently do. If you need an additional Paladin Blessing, or Warlock curse, one person sits. If your enhance shaman can't make it, and you absolutely cannot replace him, four people sit.
Hence the need to balance shaman abilities that are clearly overpowered. My points are to be taken together, not one by one. If you adjust the glaringly overpowered party abilities down to the level of most others then this problem does not arise, and you also aviod going down a Warlock/Paladin "required raid buffs/debuffs" route. Which, as I stated in another point, is not necessarily a problem, but a tendancy towards balancing in this way will lead to moRe raid buffs and the possibiltiy of more than 2 required people per class per raid, and thus specific raid makeup.
And you are calling me asinine? There is nothing "balanced" about windfury when you HAVE to build a group around that single buff.
The fact of the matter is, is that right now WF is overpowered enough that rogues and dps warriors are viable (think of what would have had to happen in WF hadn't been around in TBC). Without that hack Blizz would actually have to something serious about putting all the DPS classes on a more even footing. That is what I'm talking about.
I could care less about PVP really. Though I would suggest that the easiest way to deal with that would be to make whatever changes out of reach of a PVP spec (e.g. the new 51 point Combat talent and Fury talent. Shadowstep/Hemo is already the most popular rogue arena spec and you would never see a ShS rogue in a serious raid).
Fire Vulnerability, for all means and intent, is a personal dps buff in the first place. Or rather, a debuff I need to keep up to sustain my own dps. If it helps other players, then good, but that shouldn't cause a personal dps loss. I view it the same way as ISB, shadow weaving, winter's chill and stormstrike.
However, COS increases shadow/arcane damage. COE increases fire/frost damage. For as long as warlocks cannot do arcane or frost damage, I would classify them clearly in the realm of 'increases other players dps'. Then there is COR, which I think just reinforces the notion further.
Your point can be used about warlocks as well. CoS increases their personal dps, and actually in BT level of gear casting CoS is higher personal dps than casting CoD on a boss without CoS. Same goes for CoE and fire destruction. However, as you mentioned, warlock curses affect more schools of magic than they can use and physical dps.
Currently though fire warlocks are dependent on fire mages, just as much as mages are on CoE.
Yes CoS increase a warlocks personal DPS as well as every other warlock, spriests and arcane casters. But it only takes one warlock and it lasts for 5 minutes. A fire mage has to result in casting scorch alot more than a warlock casts CoS in any encounter instead of the optimal fireball spam resulting in a significant personal DPS loss. Granted another fire mage eases this somewhat but he to is also suffering from a DPS loss from having to apply/rescorch or even restack scorches to improve his/her own personal DPS. Increase the fire vulnerability duration and this will help close the gap on mage vs warlock+CoD somewhat.
Back before the Emberstorm buff, the more salient distinction was that Improved Scorch was a mage-applied buff that only helped mages, meaning that it's inclusion was basically a null-case. Now that Firelocks occur every now and again that distinction varies from group to group, although it's still a valid one to make on occasion. Winter's Chill will still have this distinction until the inclusion of frost-speced DKs into the raid environment.
Dropping Doom for CoS is comparable to having to re-scorch. The need for raid DPS affects your cycle in a way that lowers your theoretical maximum personal DPS, although in the mage's case this is only true if someone else is casting scorch.
I will admit i havnt read all 15 pages of this but i have skimmed through and i did read gurgthok's initial post. Having played a Enh shaman since TBC. I have seen our public image change from "sub-par dps mercy slot" to "i posted i couldnt make the raid and sunwell was cancelled they had to do BT instead". having only 2 shamans definatly puts our guild at a huge disadvantage, having seen WWS's of bruts with 5 shamans 2x heroism melee groups kills in 5min 10seconds. Anyways the idea of raidwide totems really intrigues me, and i can definatly see this happening in the future. As its been pointed out, there is no room anymore for "the odd man out". If you can't fit into a definitive group your not worth bringing anymore. (see my deathknight paragraph below).
the only huge downside i can see coming if they do impliment raidwide totems and consolidating raid utility is end-game raiding guilds having the problem that they did at the end of naxx -> tbc with shamans becoming the new warrior/rogue problem (remember recruiting 8+ to kill 4hm). What guild progressing in Sunwell (mu'ru onward) that hasn't pushed to recruit 5-6 raiding shamans? okay ...3-6 raiding shamans. WotLK comes along, and your suddenly going to need...1-2?? maybe 3 (1 for each tree)...and your going to have a glut of shamans around either seeking a reroll or a new guild. Dont get me wrong you could still theoretically stack that many for heroism, call my crazy but i just don't see them keeping heroism at the usefullness that it currently is (i could be totally wrong here) , i mean what other buff has become singularly as valuable at increasing (burst and overall) dps as heroism/bloodlust? (salvation is all tha i can think of atm).
Consolidating raid utility im all for. I personally am tired of spending 6 minutes hitting windfury every 10 seconds then back to GoA, which im not sure would be solved since you would still want the shaman with talents spent in said totems to be the one putting them down. its a tough issue to answer, im just hoping blizzard comes up with a good way to do so.
(kind've offtopic)
Was discussing this in guildchat the other night in reguards to what role specifically Deathknights are actually going to do in raids. We had a couple interested in rolling deathknight and as it stands right now they seem to be purely a gimmick tank at best, so that leaves dps. To me it just seemed odd to introduce another dps class thats dps will be purely based on if they have windfury or not (another 2hander dps class), which is the same boat that ret pally and MS warrior is in. Right now on Brut we typically run a melee group consisting of MS warrior, 2x rogues , me (enh), and a BM hunter. This group makeup is just amazing for Brut, for any other encounters we typically swap the hunter for another rogue or feral. Anyways my point is that right now i am just curious where Deathknight is going to fit into all this, since right now it would mean swapping out a MS warrior for us, which is fairly bad because he's there for the 4% melee increase. Which means having an odd-man-out...something that you just cant afford these days.
I'm yet to see anyone offer a counter-argument against customiseable group composition as a method of negating shaman stacking; in fact it almost seems to have been glossed over altogether which seems bizarre considering it would alleviate much of the problem.
As a rule, keep group buffs as group buffs, but allow the raid leader to assign as many or as few people in that group as he likes. Unless I'm missing something, that one change would pretty much remove any desire to stack shamans (assuming you are stacking for totems of course), but would still allow you to separate your group buffs into the broad spectrum of tank/caster/physical.
It doesn't solve everything of course. As mentioned previously, there is definite consolidation needed with warlock curses and paladin blessings to avoid any benefit to stacking them. Also one potential pitfall with the customiseable group size idea is you would have a 'leftover' shaman providing tank buffs and consequently missing all the nice caster buffs.
The only vaguely elegant solution I can think of for that is that if the entire caster group was getting VT from a sole spriest, it wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world bring a second to cater for some casters in a tank group (resto shaman, Afflock with imp, Dev Aura paladin etc).
I'm yet to see anyone offer a counter-argument against customiseable group composition as a method of negating shaman stacking; in fact it almost seems to have been glossed over altogether which seems bizarre considering it would alleviate much of the problem.
A) It would require a lot of programming to make groups scale up to 40 people instead of 5, both in the UI and server
B) It would require tons of rebalancing of many core abilities for balance reasons
C) Everyone would just put the entire raid in one group, since all group buffs are beneficial
While it might be interesting to talk about this, as far as Blizzard is concerned, this option is not on the table. This change would be months of work for many, many people.
In contrast, changing totems to affect the entire raid would take at most a day.
A) It would require a lot of programming to make groups scale up to 40 people instead of 5, both in the UI and server
B) It would require tons of rebalancing of many core abilities for balance reasons
C) Everyone would just put the entire raid in one group, since all group buffs are beneficial
While it might be interesting to talk about this, as far as Blizzard is concerned, this option is not on the table. This change would be months of work for many, many people.
In contrast, changing totems to affect the entire raid would take at most a day.
I've personally got no beef with making certain group buffs raid-wide, but some people in this thread seem to think it's OTT or bad in some other way, so the idea someone had of customising group sizes seems like a happy medium. It also forces raid leaders to still build groups that make sense without having to get into the silly minutiae that TBC introduced.
To answer your points: A) You could fix it so three groups is the minimum you can have, and if you wanted you could have fixed groups of 5 in AV because group composition there is pretty much irrelevant. Would that help? I'm not really au fait with how much programming would be involved so maybe I'm not fit to comment, but it doesn't strike me as hugely complex. B) I don't really understand how this is any different to raid-wide totems/shouts/whatever, really, but maybe I'm missing something obvious? C) See A).
Allowing flexible group sizes would require restructuring the entire raid-group code, as well as anything relating to it. The UI changes alone (including rewriting the LUA specs for addons) would be pretty significant, but the tinkering on the server end could require a totally different memory-allocation and -access rehaul just to change group sizes, much less make them user-definable.
And your solution is useless. You have a 25-person raid in group 1, and one alt each in groups 2 and 3. Not to mention, what about 10-man raiding? Remember, any solution you propose there also has to account for having one 10-man raid in group 1, one raid in group 2, and five alts in group 3. Have fun =).
From a gameplay perspective I could see an arguement for going up to 6 per group with the introduction of DKs and paladins/shamans accessible to both sides. But this would also entail 5-man instances becoming 6-man instances, and I wonder what that would do to the game.
And you are calling me asinine? There is nothing "balanced" about windfury when you HAVE to build a group around that single buff.
The fact of the matter is, is that right now WF is overpowered enough that rogues and dps warriors are viable (think of what would have had to happen in WF hadn't been around in TBC). Without that hack Blizz would actually have to something serious about putting all the DPS classes on a more even footing. That is what I'm talking about.
I could care less about PVP really. Though I would suggest that the easiest way to deal with that would be to make whatever changes out of reach of a PVP spec (e.g. the new 51 point Combat talent and Fury talent. Shadowstep/Hemo is already the most popular rogue arena spec and you would never see a ShS rogue in a serious raid).
The power of WF is completely irrelevant if any raid group can provide it to all potential beneficiaries with ease. Making non-tree specific totems raid wide make the standard to which encounters are tuned much easier to achieve for all guilds, as well as encounter design more standardized, as you can assume a best case scenario for buffs.
The power of WF is completely irrelevant if any raid group can provide it to all potential beneficiaries with ease. Making non-tree specific totems raid wide make the standard to which encounters are tuned much easier to achieve for all guilds, as well as encounter design more standardized, as you can assume a best case scenario for buffs.
Bolded section is the crucial point. A raid-wide totem makes this a trivial concern in a 25-man group, but remember that 10-man raiding is going to be further legitamized in the expansion. Each class needs to either be able to stand on its own, or at the least have more than one interchangable option for bringing it up to viability.
Bolded section is the crucial point. A raid-wide totem makes this a trivial concern in a 25-man group, but remember that 10-man raiding is going to be further legitamized in the expansion. Each class needs to either be able to stand on its own, or at the least have more than one interchangable option for bringing it up to viability.
I agree with this, I just don't see it as a potential problem in 10 mans, as I've never had an issue supplying adequate DPS in the existing 10 mans as a rogue. Casters will be missing buffs / synergy as well in a 10 man. I haven't seen anything that is cause for grave concern yet.
First, 10-mans have not yet to date been cutting-edge meaningful content. They will, which means that min-maxing will start occuring and notions of 'adequate' will change significantly. Second, neither casters nor even rogues depend on any other-class buff to the extent that arms warriors and ret paladins depend on windfury. Third, the fact that casters will be missing buffs is also something we are trying to address in this thread, so it's a valid concern.
06/05/08, 6:08 AM
Following the idea of the above user. 
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