Azurai

Honestly, heroism should be nerfed anyway. But AW wouldn't be strictly worse, it would be used under different situations. 30% damage > 30% haste for some things, like

• hordes of adds that might survive single rounds of ae w/o the buff
• jousting encounters (you get 2 spells before having to move, for instance)
• shields like kael'thas (tk version)
• when you have other active haste buffs (KJ comes to mind)
• mana fights
• Loatheb (crit buff means you get a lot more from damage, yes?)

etc.

 

• frmorrison

The Wrath wiki says the Fear doesn't have a cooldown.

 

Altirias

very interesting thread, and it seems that Praetorian put his finger on something that's also into blizzard developpers.

I know how you guys feel about alph leaks and such, but I can't help to throw a glance from time to time. Here's a little something that supports Praetorian's initial idea

 

Prinsesa

Altirias, I believe that quote was already posted several pages earlier. If not here, then in the WOTLK thread.

In any case, it's good news indeed - Curse of Elements being folded into 4 elements months before WOTLK is a good indication that Blizzard is listening intently.

I find an impending change to Totems intriguing though, particularly on the part of Tranquil Air - if it was made workable in a raid setting, it could easily take the place of Salvation, making the 3rd Paladin interchangeable with a 3rd Shaman (first Shaman is Strength of Earth/Mana Spring/Windfury, second is Stoneskin/Healing Stream/Grace of Air, did I get that right?)

EDIT: I'm surprised there's no word on Bloodlust-stacking yet though. We've already seen Tinnitus (cannot be affected by drums for 2 minutes) on the WOTLK thread, yet BL as a consolidate-able raid utility is as just a pressing matter.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

flyingtoastr

I don't quite think so. It would go a long way towards making pallys and shamans interchangable in smaller groups, but as TA and Salv stack I see no reason why you wouldn't want both of them in a raid.

And technically the salv pally is the first pally (Salv > Kings > Might/Wis on high incoming damage fights like most of Tier 6).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Prinsesa

I was thinking more towards making 2 Paladins give out Kings and Might/Wis while a 3rd Shaman gives out Tranquil Air in a situation where you don't have 3 Paladins, but you DO have 3 Shaman.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

flyingtoastr

I think it would depend on the class and the tank's TPS mostly.

Salv and TA stack to 44% reduction before any class talents. Ret Pallys (for example) with both would be at a balmy 61% reduction while destro warlocks would hover at around 50%. Generally the best way to increase DPS is to increase tank TPS or reduce outgoing TPS (until you get to a point where it becomes impossible to pull threat, meaning you can sacrifice a little TR for additional damage), so I could see raids still running with both.

Of course with the tank scaling we're seeing (everything a warrior does is getting an AP coefficient) I wouldn't be surprised if exactly what you think will happen. Making raids less dependent on Salv might be a good thing, but in reality you're just replacing one buff (Salv) with a different one that sucks a little more (TA).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Altirias

Sorry for publishing redundant information, but this forum goes a bit too fast for me sometimes, and I can't check it all and keep current

What I found really interesting was actually the changes to party wide spells such as prayer of healing as stated in the quote, It would certainly change things in healer distribution in raids. Thinking about raid wide Tranquility and how powerfull it could be ?

 

• Chicken

I wouldn't make the mistake of assuming such spells would remain at their current power if changed in such a way. For example the Prayer of Healing change mentioned above keeps it at the same potential healing per second as it has now, while nevertheless giving the spell raid-wide benefits.

Though on the subject of Tranquility specifically, it's wise not to forget that it has a long cooldown. So while it might provide your raid with a ton of healing while active, it's still only for 8 seconds every 10 minutes per Druid.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Phlis

No, that would be a 4th Shaman. If you have 3 Shaman, one of each spec, totems would look like this:
Enhancement: Windfury, Strength of Earth
Restoration: Mana Spring, Grace of Air, Stoneskin
Elemental: Healing Stream, Wrath of Air, Totem of Wrath


You'd need a 4th shaman for Tranquil Air. Also, think about how totems work. Totem placement would be rediculously tight to be able to get all the dps and not the tank. I honestly think raid wide totems make's Tranquil Air a very bad totem, like giving your tank salv, theres no point in putting it down. Except for some ranged DPS, who at max range are out of the 30yd totem range, they would have a use for it.

 

Potta

This is mis-leading, the AP coefficients are being added to abilities that aren't, and never will be, in the threat rotation. TC maybe, but even so, it's a once every 30 seconds ability unless there is more than 1 mob.

 

Grungo

If they were to make totems raid-wide, I imagine tranquil air would get a change something along the lines of, "Reduces threat for all raid members within 30 yards, unless in defensive stance, bear form, has righteous fury active, or <insert DK tanking thing here>." This could also make it the default totem for 5-mans (where it's currently near-useless), as 5-man groups are rarely composed such that everyone will see benefit from Windfury, GoA, or WoA.

 

Prinsesa

While you make a good point about totem dropping, I think all of us here are going in with the assumption that Tranquil Air will be tweaked at some point to only apply to non-tanks more easily if Blizzard makes totems raid-wide

Sunder Armor getting an AP coefficent is most likely going to affect Devastate as well, and Devastate is definitely in the threat rotation.

And I think its a bit shortsighted to call out those changes just yet - new itemization and threat MIGHT make Shield Bash/Concussive Blow/etc. part of the rotation as the game scales and whatnot.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Pitbuller

# Rend's Scaling with weapon damage has been improved.
# Rend has had it's duration reduced. Total damage dealt is unchanged.
Rend (Rank 10)- 300 damage over 15 seconds, additional based on weapon damage. "If the target becomes enraged, Rend causes four times the normal damage".
+75% damage from talents.

If scaling is "good" then rend even could get to "the threat rotation"

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Lanlaorn

The cooldown on Tranquility would prohibit even a raid wide version from being really broken, honestly Flourish seems more powerful than a raid wide Tranquilitiy, despite Tranq's absolutely ridiculous HPS.

The Prayer of Healing change, if it makes it live, would be quite amazing. I could easily see it replacing Chain Heal as the predominant raid healing method. With Chain Heal the AI only does the thinking for you with 3/7 of the spell's throughput, with this new PoH it would be 100%. Plus PoH hits 5 targets as opposed to 3 and for far greater throughput. with a similar 3 second cast time to Cheal's 2.5.

Just have the raid group up within the PoH radius (which is quite large when talented, compared to Cheal's bounce range) and the Priest mindlessly spams PoH as it automatically chooses the 5 lowest HP players and pumps HP into them.

I think it's the wrong direction to take the game, what we need is a nerf to Chain Heal's bounce AI and to replace it with human decision making and not to give another class a "lol I chaincast one spell for ridiculous throughput this fight" spell. That said, Priests do need something and this is something suitably overpowered to do the trick.

Personally what I'd rather see is a ground-target version of PoH, keep it capped at 5 players and lose the "pick the lowest HP" AI aspect. Just have it work like Mass Dispel so it prioritizes those at the center first in case the raid positioning is not quite right and you catch someone at the periphery you don't want.

That takes some intelligent setup and decision making to use effectively, you have to actaully manually target to use it but it's still ridiculous throughput if you work for it.

 

Smurrf

Here I was thinking that PoH going raid wide would allow you to target one person, and get their group...having it act as Chain Heal does now seems a bit off.

 

Lanlaorn

Well that's the way I read this:

 

Smurrf

Ah, okay...I missed reading that last part. I just don't know about that though...it seems as if it would instantly increase the desirability of having a priest over having a shammy, if all you had to pick between was one of those two to fill your last spot. 3 targets hit semi-intelligently, as the flavor of a class, I can buy. 5 targets hit semi-intelligently, as well as Circle of Healing, as well as Prayer of Mending, Renews, and all the other stuff that each individual priest has to offer (not counting spirit/fort), all just counterbalances the totems, and perhaps even outweighs them, I think.

 

Shakes

Prayer of Healing is point blank on the priest though. I can see them toning down the radius (currently 30 yards) if they allow it to go raid wide, such that it would only really be a win when everyone is tightly bunched. Otherwise are you really going to go running over to people to heal them with PoH, or would you just cast a normal, non-point blank, heal?

 

PSGarak

It's quite possible that they would also alter the spell in other ways to compliment that change. The most likely thing would be adding a cooldown, which they apparently already did to chain heal in WLK alpha. What is basically comes down to is, the group structure is becoming less important compared to the raid composition.

Also, for raidwide air totems the likely preference is: Windfury > Tranquil Air > Wrath of Air > Grace of Air, with TA shifting depending on threat sensitivities, and Grace of Air moving up depending on raid composition. Raid-wide TA could be implimented by throwing a toggle for defensive stance, bear form, righteous fury, and frost presence, there's already a precedent for toggling off of righteous fury.

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

 

Benita

I fully agree. Going places with 25 people instead of 5*5 seems like a good change and the way it progressed since the early days of non raid UI MC stuff with more than 40 (which was more or less coordinated groups of 5 as you just had a hard time to figure out what to heal/buff outside of your groups compared to now).
The group heals being changed to raidheals falls in that category aswell as the group buffs. I wouldn't mind actually if VE, PoH and Tranq would join the category of just healing the 4 closest to the targets like CoH and apparently Flourish already do. Semi-intelligent "homing" heals are inviting one button spamming without consideration to positioning and implementing cooldowns seems like a brute way to nurf it.

As for the threat stuff, i never really liked the lack of control about that. No toggles for + or - threat talents except for paladins with RF. Tranq air totem being a poor supplement for salv back in the pre BC days was obvious from the start and getting more control over these things by an RF like min/max toggle would be a good change for pve.

 

Phlis

Meh, seems like a shit load of work when getting all other totems to work raid wide seems rather trivial. Going from party members to friendly targets, while yes a big deal, doesn't seem like a lot more work in the "possible targets" area then fixing tranquil air.

Another thing to consider is actual fight design. Totems have a 30yd range, to make them truely raid wide that would need to be doubled probably. On a lot of fights people are already just always out of range. Every Sunwell fight -Twins, for example, has groups of people over 30yds apart as part of the strategy. That is just how it goes sometimes. So, even with raid wide totems targetting all friendly targets, they wouldn't be as powerful as blessings because of the range mechanics.

 

Pitbuller

Expect every shaman got 4 "raid wide blessings" and paladin got one.
Talented mana spring > talented blessing of wisdom
Blessing of Salvation > Tranquil Air Totem
Blessing of Sanctuary > Stoneskin Totem
Blessing of wisdom > Strength Of Earth
Resistance totem == resistance aura

Then we got also wf, healing stream, agi, wrath, searing, magma/nova, raid wide poison/disease cleansing and lot of not usefull stuff(yet)

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Altirias

So give totems to pal !

Jokes aside, Totems and Blessings stack and they are very complementary. the problem is that there are too many beneficial blessings and totems, thus bringing even more and more Pals and Shamys gives even more to the raid, which is less true for mages, rogues, dps warrior, survival hunt and probably many more.

Praetorian's idea was (if I'm not mistaken) to change the way raid synergy works so that stacking some classes wouldn't be that much beneficial to the raid. raid-wide totems wouldn't actually change anything, you would still want to bring 4 shamas so that everybody could have every available totem.

so what other solution could be found to counter the interest of stacking significantly classes that provides so many interesting and stacking buffs ? Warlock's "issue" is partially solved, provided they don't keep this huge step ahead in terms of dps, bringing 2 warlocks can know be sufficient to debuff a boss (new CoE + CoR - that is considering that CoW doesn't stack with demo shout and doesn't prove to be more viable than the warrior debuff)

But additionnal Shamans and paladins would still provide a lot for a raid even though there are already 3 of them in the roster. Allow shamans and paladin to throw more totems / more blessings ? Provide talents in specific trees that could "merge" totems or blessings ?

 

Prinsesa

Actually, it would change something: Slot competition for the melee group.

Currently, one (Enhancement) Shaman is mandatory, because he provides WF Totem and Unleashed Rage

Another slot is for the Warrior's Battle Shout, because he provides Battle Shout and needs WF

A third slot for the Ret Paladin, because he provides Sanctity Aura and (more importantly) needs WF

Another slot for the Feral Druid, because he provides Leader of the Pack

The final slot traditionally goes to the Rogue, because he needs all the buffs provided by the 4 other people, although he offers nothing to the group himself

Quite a big ruckus started over at the Rogue WOTLK thread was what was going to happen to the 5th:Rogue slot come the expansion.

BM Hunters are already competitive as a 5th, but also provide Ferocious Inspiration to the rest of the group.

Death Knights are a melee class, which comes with the presumption that they'll need Windfury as well, and I suppose most everyone expects that they'll have their own utility to provide to the group as well.

If totems and shouts were made raid-wide, assembling the melee group could be a lot more flexible, because you no longer have these complicated arguments like: "If the Rogue loses the melee group's increases to his personal DPS vs. the Death Knight's percentage buff to everyone else, will it produce higher RDPS?"

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler