Don't think so. With Priest's Spirit eating up a killing blow but Bosses sporting enrages that also have haste +200-500% you buy at most a second or so in general. Nothing that needs to be worked around in my opinion.

At the moment we are able to keep our tank up for a few seconds when Brut Enrages through Shield Wall + Last Stand + Every Healer Max Ranking. Combined with an additional cheat death angel, spirit link, etc. these mechanics could be exploited to give even more time. Yes, it would only be a few seconds, but how many times are there a few "last second" kills going on for heavy checks like Brut?

Wasn't this kind of fudging of mechanics/gear why elixirs were nerfed as well?

I thought it was pretty much established around here that requiring some very specific class abilities for a boss fight is bad design and should be avoided. What happens when your 10 man raid doesn't have a priest or a shaman at all?

It doesn't make much sense to design a fight around guardian spirit, it has a 3 minute cooldown after all. Spirit Link might be more viable but I think the purpose of the spell is just to give some nice synergy with chain heal for 5 mans. Chain heal already has a pretty big role in raids.

Any priest's shield could absorb it. Resto (?) shaman's spirit link. A resto druid could spam regrowth to get a crit that shields some damage. Paladin talents aren't out yet, but I heard something of a proactive heal like either PW:Shield or Earth Shield.
There are elemental absorption potions for non-physical gibs. There is also some consumable that absorbs (I think it was BoP or herbalist-only though, so not usable in general).
And there's always the Arathi Basin/Ouro trinket.

So, 1 class and 1 spec have a failsafe absorbtion, 1 has a reasonably reliable one (regrowth has ~60% or more crit if specced) and the last class has no talents yet (they could perhaps taunt+bubble).
In addition, there are more ways to shield damage without healers.

From this point of view, it doesn't require a certain spec. There are ways to do it without, even if it takes some more effort.
I feel that a challenging 10-man should push players to their limits. Not every setup has to work equally well on every boss.


As an example, we've been at Zul'jin with 2 prot warriors, 2/3 healers and 5/6 casters. (Reason was half the guild needing the Malacrass' trinket.)
That's arguably a skewed setup, and Zul'jin's eagle phase is pretty stupid with this setup.
(That phase is quite stupid no matter what, but that's another can of worms.)
It's our fault that we used this extreme setup, and we get punished for it. No big thing.


Take Zul'Aman. It's balanced around 1.5 (or 2) tanks, 3 healers (2 if you outgear it), rest DPS.
It favours HoTs (Nalorakk), AoE (Janal'ai), offensive dispels (Flame Casters, and more so purging Mind Control), any tank survival buff/debuff (Nalorakk, Halazzi), permanent CC (Malacrass adds) and physical DPS (Zul'jin eagle phase).

In short, it favours a balanced raid that has most major roles covered. Most tasks (dispelling, buffing/debuffing) can be done by 2-3 classes - those should be able to be required. Decursing is available to mages and non-feral (or non-tanking at least) druids, giving it to resto shaman should be enough to be demandable for a 10-man.


I feel there's a lot you can demand from a 10-man group. Not every setup will have every ability, but most setups with some common sense who can think out-of-the box and put in some effort can do a lot more than people think.
At least a lot more than those people who never run MgT without 3 mages/warlocks.

You dont need an Arms/Fury warrior in your raid for their utility (Unless you're melee heavy, then Arms is a good choice). You dont need a Moonkin in your raid either, and there's DPS classes with 3 trees for DPS, with one tree usually being a superior choice at any given time. And as far as I understand, the Death Knight talent choices arent role restrictive, as Blizzard has said they didnt want to pigeonhole DKs into specific specs for roles, which probably means there will be one or two superior specs (based on normal trends with talent specs).

I dont think all 30 specs are going to be needed, and with how many talent trees are viable now, you dont see one of every spec in raid anyway.

EDIT: In regards to specific classes for specific jobs, you really havent seen much of that since pre-tbc where having a certain number of decursers/cleansers were required for fights. I like the design philosphy TBC has yielded.

You bring two of the classes in which you only have two good players, or two well-geared players, or whatever. The "min-maxed" answer is going to change depending on whether the fight favours melee, ranged, casters, physical, is aggro-sensitive, is not aggro-sensitive, advantages one class ability, disadvantages another, ad infinitum.

It's actually more than 5 specs left out because there are only 4 healing specs and you usually need 7-8 healers. But again it doesn't matter - you bring your best players, and as long as you're not doubling up hybrids you should do fine. (You may also want to pay attention to caster/physical balance - eg., bringing mostly physical pure DPSers and mostly hybrid casters isn't going to go well since your DPSers aren't getting many buffs and your hybrids don't have very many people to buff.)

For guardian spirit to reliably prevent MT death, the following must be true:
1.) The GS priest must know with near-certainty which tank is going to die and be able to target said tank.
2.) The GS priest must know in advance when the tank is likely to die.
3.) The tank is unlikely to be saved by normal heals alone.

Point 3 virtually necessitates either some sort of predictable hard enrage (whether percent based or timer based) or other situation in which the healers can't keep up with the damage dealt due to some anti-healing mechanic (RoS phase 1?) or tank error (too many marks stacking on 4H? getting hit by shear on Illidan?) "Random tank death syndrome" is too unpredictable for GS to be terribly useful -- if the tank wasn't taking unhealable damage, and you knew in advance he was likely to die, then what were you doing that whole time?

In TBC, Hydross and Brutallus are the only fights I can think of where guilds routinely hit the timed enrage (with Hydross, I'm judging from 2.0/2.1.) With the percent-based hard enrages of bosses such as Kalecgos, Leotheras, and Mother, GS is unlikely to be reliable, either because the enrage is more dangerous to random raid members than the tank (Leotheras), because there are multiple tanks and fight mechanics prevent the priest from knowing which tank will die (and in the case of Kalecgos, might not even be able to target said tank), or because the enrage timer lasts long enough that there is a likelihood that GS would expire before the tank is even in danger (Mother).

Guardian spirit being able to predictably buy a couple seconds at most on two or three raid bosses means that it is no more overpowered than a talented 0.5s mass dispel. It's a nice addition on paper, but a lot trickier to use in practice.

Compare this to pre-nerf elixirs/flasks. Flasks alone used 3 fel lotus (which had lower drop rates than they do today), 7 mana thistle, and 21 "other" herbs. If that "other" was Terocone or Nightmare Vine, you could easily be looking at prices of 150-200g/flask, with no Marks of the Illidari to ease the pain. On top of that you had the stacking elixirs, which for min-maxing meant an oppressive amount of materials used (easily totalling another 50-100g per boss attempt in a world without daily quests.) It was also far too powerful to simply ignore, as using a pre-nerf flask plus all the useful elixirs meant a huge increase in ability for all 25 characters throughout the entire encounter. The potential 2-3 seconds gained at a hard enrage from GS does not even bear comparison to alchemy's effects on raiding and player morale in patch 2.0.

Guardian spirit's weakness is that it just affects negates a single killing blow. It would be amazing for Kael's pyroblasts, but an enraged Brutallus gains something like 150% haste in addition to his 500% increased damage. Even through shield wall, he's going to do so much damage that guardian spirit will be a drop in a bucket (his swing speed is going to be much less than one second, so avoiding one fatal blow really doesn't buy much time because Brut's enraged DPS is absolutely unhealable, even against shield wall. The only way a tank survives for any significant amount of time is with an avoidance string).

Far more effective is having the tank taunt and then BoPing the tank, tank uses mocking blow when the taunt expires, then challenging shout, and then another taunt to tank through the full 10 seconds of BoP.

Guardian spirit won't be useless, but it will be quite limited and hard to use effectively. It looks amazing (prevents death!) but in practice it's more or less like an NS (being more powerful against larger incoming hits and less powerful against smaller incoming hits).

So, raids will have 5-6 healers? That would be too kind.

This train of thought is poorly conceived for there will almost always be optimal specs for DPS classes. Theres also a lot of group composition factors to take into consideration. Optimal DPS groups right now will probably stay fairly static going into wrath (aside from raid wide totems, everything else seems to be staying fairly static), the changes to these groups actually rely on the changes to tanks and healers.

Will tanks still require DPS groups to act as threat machines or are their mechanics changing (assuming some abilities stay group only)?
Will mana still be an issue with healers in Wrath or will only DPS centric classes require Shadow Priests?

I really don't see the structuring of raids changing very much in Wrath except the addition of Deathknights. With the consolidation of CoS/CoE, raid wide totems, more viable Ret Pally DPS, and a few other known alterations in Wrath, will benching 1-2 Shaman or Warlocks for a couple DKs create a new and exciting raid environment? Really?

Where exactly was that established? Felmyst is a great fight, theres no 'bad design' about it simply because it requires priests. Being in the very end-game instance, its extremely reasonable to assume you WILL need to have 3 of that particular class available, especially being a hybrid. Thats just one example, but theres certainly no way that a fight requiring very specific class abilities is inherantly bad design..

.. only if they put it in the incorrect place in progression. Obviously if you put a Felmyst like priest-requirement fight in Gruuls position it would be a disaster - as you wouldnt reasonably want to demand that a fresh/new/inexperienced guild can field the strict requirements, however it fits perfectly well into a Sunwell type instance.

I would disagree aswell and call it bad design, but i never saw a fight where it wasnt exaggerated that you absolutely needed X amount of a class for a first kill. Theres tons of examples where it was claimed, but always some guild killed it with a different tactic and way less stacking.

It's bad design when the _only_ way to solve a certain problem is with a single ability of a single class, like requiring a mage to spellsteal. There is nothing challenging about that, it's just a gimmick. Congratulations, you managed to show up with a mage in your raid, here's your loot.

Aren't you oversimplifying things just a tad? Yes, I agree that Mage tanking on Maulgar/Council is enabled solely by Spellstealing and cannot really be emulated by anything else, but then again, Maulgar/Council would be one of the last fight's I'd call out "here's your loot" on.

The presence of a Mage/Priest/whathaveyou enables you to do the fight, but its still a very challenging fight regardless.

Follow-up question: Are specific specs required for these current TBC gimmick fights? I imagine Pyroblast would hold better opening aggro than a Frostbolt, but then most (all?) guilds misdirect to the Mage anyway. Similarly, how effective is a Shadow/Holy Priest at Mass Dispel on Felmyst, as compared to a Disc Priest with the MD cast time reduction?

Of course I'm exaggerating, my point is that you can give players a much more interesting problem to solve if there are multiple ways to approach it, and this won't automatically make it easier or less challenging.

And I think blizzard is aware of this, it's the reason they are spreading so many abilities around to different classes so that the chance that a raid will always have the necessary tools available will be much higher. As an example, balance druids, shadow priests, rogues (and I bet hunters will too) are all getting new abilities to enable them to aoe decently, this will let them develop more fights that require aoe dps without presenting a barrier to raids that don't have mages/warlocks.

I'm not against spellsteal or mass dispel or any other specific ability being useful or very powerful in certain situations, what I'm opposed to is it being the only way to do something.

Are the fights you mentioned any less challenging if a mage still has to tank but is not required to spellsteal? What if instead of a magic reduction buff that particular add has a buff that increases magical damage by 400%? You can still have someone tank him by just dispelling the buff, which multiple classes can do, but if you have a mage he can spellsteal it and increase his own dps by a huge amount. This lets you do the fight without a mage while still maintaining the importance of spellsteal.

Well, your glass is simply half empty. There is a challenge to geting all the required raid elements (class/spell/talents ready at hand) to be able to handle a raid encounters mechanics and win. One of the biggest challenges of Sunwell is not really doing the fights themselves, but actually making sure your guild has the required elements (enough shamans, enough synergy hybrids etc etc) to be able to craft your groups/raid to a high standard they require in the first place. Finding, recruiting shamans (or rather, getting the right 10-11 healer makeup for learning guilds) is in some ways harder than actually doing Twins themself.

You can say 'congratulations you have a mage in the raid, heres loot' - but that applies to.. alot of fights, 'grats you have a few healers, tanks and dps for brutallus - who can perform simple functions and spam 1-2 keys, grats heres your loot too'.

I agree that having mage spellsteal tanking was not appropriate on the very first raiding boss in TBC, but having a (appropriately placed) encounter require it , in no way really makes it bad design inerhantly, even if people consider it 'gimmicky' - its more dependant on what level of raid progression that boss is at , and the target raid audience.

The question here would be if that is either desireable or intended. I'd rather think that 25 good players who are more or less spread out via speccs/classes should be able to do any fight. Aiming for having all 10 classes in the guild is not the question, but strongly favouring certain classes over others for long periods of time leads to problems, if fast switches in that balance or forced requirements occur.

Also if the most min/maxed setup is way better than lacking one or two people for that, it leads to scaling for those setups unless you want to trivialize the encounter for that setup ('... heres the loot'). That would make the setup requirements mandatory until the first serious nurf bat and not just a difficulty to obtain that you can make up by better players, more routine or better gear.

Maybe this will get better already with homogenized gear, 30 raid viable speccs for 25 spots and new "cross-job" skills like moonkin aoe, but calling the current and past situation good design and a challenge that people should like putting up with is a bit of a stretch in my opinion.

In regards to Shaman stacking, from my perspective i think 25 man raids will never want more than 4 shaman and with 1-2 being required, 3 being very useful, and much of the utility provided by the 4th being wasted, and 5 or more offering close to zero utility gains. Much like the situation currently faced by paladins.

Lets assume:
1) that raid wide totems will no longer stack, as 3-4 elemental shamans hit capping the entire raid seems out of the question.
2) Some totems will offer only group buffs or a forbearance type de-buff to prevent healing stream & mana tide Shenanigans (or will be re-worked).
3) Some totems will be condensed as noted with the plans for grace or air/strength of earth upgrade.
4) One new totem for each element, with one likely being an elemental pet.
5) Bloodlust remains the same or again gains forbearance.

Under these circumstances, one Shaman of each spec could offer the raid the vast majority of the useful totem buffs and still have some buffs of only limited usefulness for that encounter up. However given that the improved weapon totems are rather low in the enhancement tree, and current trend of 6-8 healers per raid i'm worried that the enhancement shaman will get left behind in favor of a healer spec'd for those buffs.

The requisite enhancement Shaman may quickly lose their raids spots in wrath.

Did you forget about unleashed rage? 10% ap is HUGE

Also compared to most hybrid offspecs enhance shaman do great damage. Also they have been such a staple of TBC raiding that it would take real big nerfs to make people get out of the OMG WHERES ENHANCE SHAMAN TONIGHT mode.
If anything by seeing their Wotlk enhance shamans are looking great pve wise.

Given the recent announcement over totems, I have to ask: Will Vampiric Touch/Vampiric Embrace get changed to "raid wide" too. Many raids are taking 2-3 shadowpriests as a "required".

In a 10 man raid, a raidwide VE/VT feels balanced, esp. as the other (melee) group would usually only contain 1-2 people who would benefit from it (hunter/retadin, maybe).

However, in a 25 man raid, it's an awful lot of mana returned! Esp. if more than 1 shadowpriest is in your raid. If Vampiric Touch WERE changed to raid wide, it's possible that it would HAVE TO be changed to non-stacking - so only the most "powerful" VT would be allowed on the target. I don't see this as a good approach but it would prevent shadowpriest stacking.

Perhaps Vampiric Touch could gain an "intelligent" mechanism for deciding which raid targets get mana back, i.e. if it restored mana to the 4 other people IN THE RAID (within range) who are lowest on percentage mana. So whoever needed it most, got your VT (as well as the caster.)

They gave unleashed rage as an example of a raid-wide buff, right? That means one enh shaman in every 25-man - buffing tanks (this may matter), melee dps, and hunters.

No i did not, I'm just saying with 6-8 required healers, limited "good" totem slots, and much of their utility (by no means all) replicated elsewhere; the enhance shaman may quickly come down with a case of the 4th Paladin blues.

At the end of the day if as a melee dps hybrid class you provide poor/limited utility, then other things being equal you should be replaced by a rogue.

*EDIT* I really hope I'm wrong here.

Keep in mind that if Unleashed Rage goes raid without a target limit, a single Shaman could hit the Tank and 5 melee. That's a big buff; you get Melee DPS buffed, you get your Threat Celing raised, and you bring someone who is likely contributing more total damage at that point than a Rogue would. The decision will mostly rely on if UR gets a target limit, and how many melee you have; each additional melee increases the value of an Enhancement Shaman.

Given a general move to 2 of each class, 5 random selections for a 25 man, I'd say the Enhance Shammie is pretty solidly in his raid slot still.