Regarding the mage tanking query. I usually tank council (haven't done Maulgar since last autumn), I never get a misdirect. And frankly it's not needed. I just spellsteal, fireblast and starts casting normal spells and he'll never leave my side. The only ones that can pull aggro are the healers and all their aggro get split out between four mobs and is less than half off mine either way. Even a few seconds into the fight they're several thousands point of hate behind me even when they start healing their tanks/raid from the start. So for mage the spec doesn't influate the tankability in any significant way.

...

So you are upset that 4 shamans will be optimal, with 3 shamans being workable, and that an enh shaman is no longer REQUIRED (they pretty much still are).

Jesus christ, talk about entitlement syndrome.

I see your point. But if you step back and stop looking at the human element, the fact is you have a lot of people raiding as shaman now who wont be able to if shaman are made less desirable. What an impartial observer sees as needed balance, a lot of those people surely see as losing their spot.

Honestly I don't think they have anything to worry about really, I'm quite certain there will be that many people rerolling DKs or even just switching mains that class balance will be shaken up anyway. But it's a bit unfair to dismiss their concerns that their current main might not be desired in raids anymore: after all, we've certainly seen a number of classes go through cycles of lack of raid desirability through BC, so it can happen.

If a mouthbreather got recruited into a guild far above them in progression just because they play the overpowered class du jour, I will be overjoyed when they get booted once they are no longer needed.

While no doubt some poor players do get recruited because of their class, it's also true that some people are good players who happen to play a class that's in demand. In fact, you find good players have often switched to classes that are in demand to help their guild. Any changes to raid composition hardly only affect poor players.

As I said, I don't think it's actually going to be a huge problem: surely I'm not the only shaman in the world relieved that shaman are less needed so we can choose to play something else without feeling guilty. But as with warriors losing exclusive hold on the tank spot, or priests shifting from uber-healer to shadow being more desirable as we saw in the BC transition period, for some guilds it will no doubt cause some hardship.

In BC, the guild I was in, and most guilds I knew, went through massive reconstructions simply because that's when people who've been playing a class for 2years decide it's maybe time to roll something else. If your shamans think they won't be quite as useful, they might roll something else if they feel inclined too, they might be displeased with shaman future changes, or interested in other's class changes. Hell, you might even have to end up recruiting more shamans because all of your current ones decided to quit the game, switch class, switch server or whatever.

I wouldn't fret about such things currently, most guilds were unable to raid at 100% for early BC simply because of the fluctuating roster. You could argue the same happened if preBC you were clearing naxx and had like 8-10warriors in your guild. At BC release, if I remember correctly warriors weren't needed anymore for DPS because they weren't so good, so you ended up only needing 2-4 out of them. Still wasn't an issue as most rerolled other classes, such as paladins if they felt like helping the guild(or shamans depending on faction) and others just felt it was the right time to leave the server and go play with RL friends since they could get a fresh start.

Nerfed raidwide VT is almoust imaginable. Raid wide imp VE(with better spriest dps) is just Op and untankable. With Wotlk talents and SWP gear 2000dps isn't too high estimate. Best/worst case scenario 500hps * 25 = 12500hps. If they add long CD and short duration(2min, 20s) its would act like raid wide tranquility and thats not what VE is designed for.

I've evasion tanked an enraged Brutallus for 7 or 8 seconds, with only the tanks and 1 or 2 dps down. (Do ya feel lucky, punk? I was that day, right up until I wasn't.) You can have a Paladin run away when enrage is about to hit, ranged-taunt him to make him run away from the raid, bubble/die to let him go back. And I'm sure there's other tricks.

No, they were nerfed because there were too many pills you could pop and the net effect of popping all of them was so powerful that raid encounters had to be balanced around full consumables, meaning everyone interested in endgame raiding (casual or not) had to farm max consumables, which is Not Fun and leads to less customer retention for Blizzard.

Desperately extending a fight for a few seconds past a hard enrage with creative use of game mechanics is fun, however, and hardly gamebreaking. Besides, on any given encounter, if Blizzard really wants you to be 100% dead right at enrage they can just cheese it. (Think Archimonde's raidwide death touch ability.)

And raidwide Prayer of Healing would be overpowered aswell, thats why it was never mentioned as an idea healing 25 people, due to this being obvious. Most of the party affecting buffs/heals will just be limited to 5, either close by or some other means of selection (low in hp). In my opinion the first version is the best, if done properly it would switch raids to be more about positions rather than group compositions. You could even go so far to just have a raidlist of 25 people and not the ancient restriction of 5*5.

No what i said was with 2 required, 3 being optimal, and 4 being workable, that the enhance shaman is on thin ice.

Frankly I'm of the mindset that all spec's should be PVE viable; with perhaps the non-hybrid classes having one pvp focus spec that is sub optimal for pve.

Enhance shaman do about 90% of rogues dps.(best non-glaive 2750dps on wwscoreboard vs 2482dps)
Attack power effect to dps is least 60% of total. So +10% ap give least +6% damage to all melee. So you need only two other melee that enhace shaman is worth of raid spot instead of another rogue.(two tanks and one melee is option too)

We are not first people who should fear losing raid spot.

From a strictly lore/asthetics point of view, I think most if not all buffs should be available to a group as long as they are within range. A warrior shouting and giving those near him increased health or attack power, auras, trinkets, etc effect those near them makes it better. Min/Max the raid, and not specific groups. To me is makes sense if you are trying to increase the epic feel of a raid, but I also know their are ways that this can be exploited. As someone mentioned you could have 5 shamans on a "schedule" to use mana tide every minute for the raid.

Just my 2 cents.

I want to go back to pointing out we still have a ratio of 5:27 (healing talent trees to DPS/Tanking talent trees). As someone already stated if we view talent trees as the measure of possible types and builds to take to raid isn't the current requirement of 8-10 healers per raid essentially giving those 5 talent trees almost double their fair share of raid spots?

Ok before healers get mad and rip me a new one for advocating this but shouldn't Blizz be thinking of re-tuning the encounters to only need 5 healers or so to allow for better Class (talent build) balance in the raid? I do not have Sunwell experience but from my experience up to BT and Hyjal I can say we do have problems on several fights if we don't stack healers up to 10 at times. Yeah we have gone up to six shamans in raid at a time too. Archimonde and Gurtogg come to mind as examples. I am sure once we begin to outgear some of those encounters we can get by with less healers but I think in general that is the one "type" of opening most guilds have all year round. Looking for "healer"! Getting DPS and even tanks is much easier than getting a solid healer and for good reason. Just read through some of the things a Healing Leader has to think about in this thread:
Raid Healing Leadership

It is a thankless job and most of the player base is not interested in it so why have it be such a prominent portion of the raid?

From a tanking perspective there are 3 talent trees out of 27 and we usually never take more than that three "tank" types in a raid of 25. We sit out or switch out extra tanks when we need more DPS, never sit out healers. Healing in general is way overemphasized in raiding encounters IMO which also leads to gross imbalances in Classes present at raid.

The numbers thing is a specious arguement, until you take it a bit further. Some specs are not raiding specs, like shadowstep. It is not a goal to have 25 of the 27 specs equally represented. For rogues and mages it's argueable there's only one raiding spec out of three since only one will give top damage (depends on the threshold of "viable"), so having one spec be doubly represented to fill your healer quota isn't that far off. However, classes with a healing tree tend to have three raid-viable specs, meaning that either one spec gets unduly represented or the class as a whole gets unduly represented. I want to say that class representation in raids should match class distribution overall, but overall class distribution is often a response to the ideal raid makeup, so it's a bit circular. There's also a difficulty in designing a raid for 17 DPS slots and 5 healers that a) can't be made much easier with another healer b) requires all 17 DPS to play at full. The more evenly balanced the role distribution is, the tighter you can make the overall raid difficulty requirements.

I agree generally and would love to see the healing requirement for raids more closely match that for 5-person groups (5 healers out of 25). If for no other reason than that finding good healers who want to heal is always harder than finding good DPSers.

The problem tends to be that to make an encounter require a small number of healers you have to, as Garak alludes to, tune it extremely tightly. M'uru is the obvious example. The DPS check has to be extreme, because when a healer messes up the encounter is usually over, whereas when a DPSer messes up the encounter just takes a little longer. This thus favours stacking healers (to avoid the "healer messes up" case through redundancy). The way to prevent this is to make that case of "takes a little longer" fatal - either a hard enrage like Brut, or add spawns like M'uru. These encounters tend to be heavily min-maxed however, and thus only appear at the high end of raiding (Brut isn't actually a low-healer affair, of course, but he could be if they tuned his damage down and increased his health or decreased the enrage timer). (Hydross and Leo pre-2.1 would also qualify.)

I'd like to see raids require around 5-6 healers too. I know quite a few people healing for raids, who'd be happy to raid as a dps spec, but their guild needs healers. There's also a greater shortage of healers than dps or tanks for raiding. Like said above, doing this isn't very eas. If you go from a raid balanced for 5 healers and 18 dps to a raid with 6 healers and 17 dps, each individual healer's healing burden is reduced by 17%, while each individual dps needs to do only 5% more dps. Unless the encounter is balanced around maximal raid dps like in Sunwell, you could be making the healing requirements too easy.

Blizzard can set high dps limits in Sunwell, because most guilds have been farming Black temple and Hyjal for months. It wouldn't be so simple for a mid-level raid, unless you expect everyone to farm lvl 80 Naxxramas for months before moving on to the T8 instance of WotLK. There are big differences in the raid dps different raids had when first killing Void Reaver or Vashj for example. If they balance the amount of healing needed for 5 healers, a lot of guilds would just take 6 or 7 to make the healing trivial, and still have enough dps to not hit the enrage.

Currently their idea of challenging healing seems to be to just increase the amount of raid damage. I wonder if there are more interesting ways of designing encounters to be healed with 5 people, without making them trivial for 6-7?

I'll put your "turn up with a <class> and win" remark aside and focus on reality rather than sarcasm.

The downside to making individual encounter challenges able to be completed with various classes is that ONE class will always do it better than the other class. This means that they need to dumb down or lower the number requirement on that challenge in order for it to be possible when using the sub-optimal method. This means its easier and less challenging when using the optimal method. You end up with guilds obviously using the optimal method, and that particular part of the fight is less challenging.

This is one of the fundamental reasons why 10 mans will always be easier than 25 mans. You cannot balance a 10 man around having an exact raid of 1 of each class, but you can balance a 25 man raid with having a minimum of 2 of each class (and can reasonably make it 3).


So in an imaginary encounter, an ability needs to be countered using... say, kiting:

In a 25 man, you can count on there being hunters. So you can balance that challenge by including things such as:
-Requires 30% runspeed. (cheetah)
-Requires ability to slow target by 50% while moving. (conc shot)
-Requires good threat while kiting (multi/arcane/distract/pause-auto/serpent)
-Requires 35 yard range on abilities to pick up/keep aggro/etc.
-Requires spell interrupt (silencing shot, scatter shot, wyvren sting, or intimidation)
-Requires aggro drop at some stage. (FD)
-Requires tranq shot (tranq shot).
-etc.
All of those things can be included in the challenge

Now in a 10 man (or in no-class-based-challenges 25 mans that you propose), you need to let a raid without a hunter complete that challenge. So they balance it around having either a hunter, mage, lock or a shaman. Now you can include:
-Requires regular run speed.
-Requires ability to slow target, but only if: specced and reduced % amount (CoEx), closer range (Frostshock, Earthbind), or standing still for a short period (rank1 Frostbolt). All of these abilities can also resist even when hit capped, so it needs to be possible accounting for a resist by using backup abilities (a hunters Conc cannot miss when capped).
-Cant have high threat requirement.
-Requires 20 yard range on abilities.
-Cant require interrupt
-Cant require aggro drop
-Cant require tranq shot.

As you can see, the first ability list is far more challenging. A hunter could do the second list easily, making that part of the encounter much easier than it could have been had it been designed specifically for a hunter to perform.

And that's just one challenge inside of an encounter.


EDIT to include your example:

Ok, so instead of spellsteal, lets say Council Mage Boss was doable by a mage, warlock, and hunter. All those classes are known to tank either ranged that cant be tanked in melee. So what special ability and challenges can you give that Council Mage Boss to make it challenging for all of those classes? Well you cant have spellsteal anymore. Sure you could include it, and say that a hunter could arcane shot it off, or a non-tanking raid member could purge it for you if you were a lock, but then you need to lower the damage done by the Boss because a hunter and warlock wouldnt have the spellstolen resist buff. And by lowering the damage due to that reason, it makes tanking it with a mage even easier. Leading to, gasp, an easier, duller encounter.

Piling on more responsibility onto healers and tanks is what Blizzard loves to do; it burns good players out too fast. I'd like to see more responsibility piled onto the DPS, and more instances like Black Morass, or DPS race fights like Gruul.

With that said, I don't think current healers and tanks would move to DPS roles if that became the "hardmode". There's only a few ways DPS can be made more difficult, and most of the time DPS boils down to "smash x button, then y button, then repeat" over and over again. Hunter DPS is hardmode (if you don't use a shot rotation macro) yet we don't see an exodus of players rerolling hunter.

Good players become tanks and healers because they get frustrated with never being able to find tanks and healers for groups or raids, or because their raid group's progress is held up because they don't have enough good tanks or healers. No one rerolls hunter because no one's raid or instance group is being held up due to lack of hunters. My read on the situation is that good players choose the tanks and healers because they know they're in demand and the raid can't function without them. It's partially a selfless help-the-guild move and partially a selfish keystone-of-the-raid move.

Re: gimmicks, I disagree that opening them up to more than one class is detrimental. I don't think spellsteal really adds anything to an encounter... In the Illidari Council iteration the only challenging part is the pull, and that's only challenging due to Zerevor's weird pathing behaviour. After that the mage just stands around nuking and doesn't even have to dodge the AoEs that the rest of the raid is dealing with. I would hardly call allowing Zerevor to be tanked without spellsteal a nerf to the encounter... in fact, it would be a lot more interesting if he threw dampening fields around the room and the tank had to run and stand in each field to avoid getting gibbed. Then various classes would have different strengths - mages have blink, warlocks have more health, and a boomkin would have dash and barkskin.

Kiting is another case where the fact that many classes can do it makes it more interesting, not less. You cite a hunter as the optimal kiter but we found an elemental shaman to be far and away superior for Vashj. Obviously that encounter nullifies the hunter's movement advantage due to the damage flying about, but guilds do that fight with warlocks, shadow priests, frost mages, or shaman kiting.

With 10 classes, someone will have a snare (and someone will have an extra snare to cover a 1% resist) and someone will have an interrupt. I can't remember the last raid role that required an aggro drop or tranq shot (Gluth for the latter?).

Roughly, spellsteal and tranq shot, when they are required for an encounter, are pretty boring. Inventive mechanics that can be overcome in different ways with different abilities are much more interesting than "press this one button of this one class to nullify this one boss ability for the next 30 seconds." Our hunters always hated the tranq shot fights, and I think spellsteal is much more interesting when it is an optimal way to deal with a boss buff but not the only one - for example, pyrogenics on the Twins encounter, or lifeblooms on Malacress.

A spellstealable 90% magic shield and 40k pyroblasts means that you require a mage to tank the encounter. A 25% shield and normal-size nukes means that mages are optimal for the encounter, or that glass-cannon mages are competetive tanks with SL warlocks, or that a mage tank can put out more threat because they need less stam gear. It's a matter of degree.
Personally I like having more control over who I want doing some part of the encounter, because the encounter becomes more about player skill than character class. It makes for a more strategic encounter when there are actual decisions instead of forced actions, especially when those actions are trivial like "bring a mage!" I would also like the fire destro warlocks to have improved scorch up on the nights where only one mage shows up to Gruul or Kael, or say misery and shadoweaving when we're tight for priests on Instructor and Faerlina.

But how does "bring a <class>!" even pop into your head? Its a raid, of course you already have a <class>. The spellsteal/massdispel/intervene/shieldblock/whatever just means that player has an extra complication to work with.

No, it pigeonholes specific people into specific roles. Alot of tanking jobs can be done by 3-4 people in the raid, even more with respeccing. Class-specific jobs can only be done by 1-3 people in the raid and only rerolling or gearing an alt makes it doable for others.
If it would never be doable, then it wouldn't be in the encounters, but its not a good design.

We "tanked" Firehand with various ranged and could heal those up simply because we outgear it, its just way too difficult aka not intended. I also think that you could kill Felmyst with 2 priests by now, its not helping either though.
The distance from optimal class to second choice has to be shorter, so you can actually have a choice and less of a pain organizing the raids and less people bored on stand-by outside. As a side-effect you also have more people that are able to participate in a "fun, gimmick" part of an encounter.

I sometimes wonder if the people argueing for making organization of guilds and raids a hard part of beating new encounters ever were seriously involved in that. It is not really the most fun part of WoW in my opinion.