Benita

If you balance it around 5 healers, bringing 6 will make it absolutely trivial. On the other end it's not that much harder to dps with 15 what is balanced around dpsing with 16. 8-10 healers+2-3 tanks+12-15 dpsers is a good call for balancing.

"Real hybridization" would require more than a total of 25 players if you take all phases of an encounter or hybrids actually doing 100% healing and dps of the specialists. This would make hybrids either very overpowered in other aspects of the game or just as required for stacking as the specialists, both undesireable. The same goes for dps/passive healing hybrids. Its either not worth mentioning like iLoTP or overpowered already like VE on aoe damage fights.

So the solution would be to turn more speccs into healing, which would be a drastic change or live with an imbalance in speccs that at least on the 9-10 healer fights can be countered by respeccing. The last option also gets easier with the upcoming gear changes.

The spellpower and hybrid changes make only the farming level of raids better, but balancing shouldn't involve too much of that part of the game. There are already tons of options to get through this part reasonably fast.

 

Scallyphant

One interesting development is highlighted by today's introduction of a One Potion Per Fight mechanic, Potion Sickness. There are other elements of WotLK which suggest mana management might be coming back as an important concern for raiders. Downranking has been nerfed. Most base spells have had their mana costs approximately doubled.

From an overall game design perspective it seems like a correction that perhaps needs to be made. The game was designed with three different power points systems. Rage is perfect for Warriors, you either have to take a beating or dish one out to get some which makes it perhaps the most visceral and hands on system. Energy is fed to the character more or less at a flat rate. Mana in the past has been the power point system for the cerebral player, involving planning, consumables management and OO5SR manipulation of your regeneration.

However to some extent in raiding mana users have shifted from mana management to cooldown management. Unless you slack with the potions you won't run out of mana often. Having to move out of fires makes this even more true since most casters consume less mana when dodging environmental effects.

That's made classes that are supposed to require careful planning of your mana become to some extent classes where you hit your button every time it refreshes.

It seems reasonably clear that that was an unintentional consequence of spell mana costs, top end gear, consumables and synergies in TBC. It makes sense that they are fixing it in WotLK.

What it does seem to create though is a whole slew of other unintended consequences.

If people are going to be running out of mana on a regular basis then raid leaders will have to plan for it. One technique used by some guilds at level 60 was taking a couple of extra healers so at any given moment you have two healers just standing there doing nothing except regenerating mana. You can rotate the mana tide shamans into your crucial casting groups in the same way people swap in shamans for bloodlusts. People can have a +spirit weapon swap for non-casting moments.

But you also have to
- stack healers so some of them can spend part of the fight doing nothing.
- stack mana buffers (shadow priests, survival hunters, ret pallies, resto shamans).
- depend on certain classes to show up. Without judgment of wisdom for example you might have to cancel the raid. If mana is tight you might need to stack warlocks (ie in the respect that they are basically mana users without mana issues) and not be able to progress if you can't recruit good ones.
- marginalise certain classes like rogues, dps warriors as they don't buff other people's mana. For example if you're taking 9 healers and you're looking for someone who can fit in a group not synergised for dps then a Ret Pally maybe beats a Rogue even if you already have 5 Paladins since he tops up the healers for a small dps hit.
- especially marginalise mages since not only do they not help anyone else's mana crises they have mana problems of their own.

Of course they may lighten the burden on healers in raids by encounter design or some other mechanic but it seems good to the game to re-introduce the mana manipulation sub-game (which I used to love on my Priest) and decrease raiders' potion (gold) requirements. But probably not good to make certain classes so much more necessary than other classes. Will be a bit bad if you can't do 10 mans or 25 mans without a Paladin and a Shadow Priest.

Hopefully once beta people start raiding they will look at this and confirm whether it is in fact a problem and if so develop solutions.

 

Zorac

Or they will just balance the fight around the fact that healers cant chain chug mana pots? Seems more likely to me, yes this does encourage the manasubgame which is nice ofc, but it wont rely on you having to bring more healers. Unless they fail completely at the dps checks parts of the fights.

It might however like you say make a retri pally 100% needed or they will make the fights shorter, or the casters manage regen has improved alot. Simply too early to tell. If they do fail at this though you will see more locks and boomkins than mages runinng around in raids.

 

Desall

Let's hope they don't go down this road or I might just stop playing a healer.
Having to stand around waiting for mana and effectively not healing what you can heal because it would result in a wipe due to being oom doesn't strike me as fun.
The game will have to be balanced so you can heal (=play) from start to end within the parameters of your responsibility with some room for flexibility.

I understand why people want to discuss the impact of the mana potion change but honestly I don't expect developers are thinking healers aren't standing around doing nothing enough during boss fights.

 

Douglas

Know one I'd like to see?

Don't have wanding interfere with spellcasting. Know how with hunters, autoshot fires even if you're in the middle of a steady shot cast now? Do the same thing with wands and spellcasting.

Why? That way, every caster with a wand can get continual ticks from Judgment of Wisdom the entire time they're casting. And on top of that, it's an additional bit of interactivity, a little more involvement in the fight.

This mitigates the issue for every mana-user except the relic users. And even though my own healer and tank are both relic-users, I think I'm okay with that.

 

Phlis

Yeah, I'd know some Druids, Shaman, and Paladins who'd have issue with that. This basically wouldn't affect 3 out of 4(5 counting Disc/Holy as seperate specs) healing specs and 2 out of 5 DPS casters. If anything the change really just increases the value of shadow/disc priests in WotLK, and of course, playing smart.

 

Scallyphant

How effective do veteran raiders feel the TBC dps checks have been?

Theoretically there should be game mechanics that force raids to take 15 dps and 5 healers to fights that you couldn't beat with 10 dps and 10 healers. I'm quite sceptical about whether this has been a success.

I can see that timed release of mobs as in Mount Hyjal is a dps check. You must kill a wave before the next wave comes. However just looking at Bosskillers though they recommend 8-9 healers for every boss but Kaz'rogal. That's not stacking dps, that's almost as many healers as dpsers.

For how much of the raid game you really couldn't beat that boss if you stacked healers?

Take Gruul for example. I was in one guild that took about 5 healers and needed him dead by about grow 12. I was in one guild later that took about 9 healers and were comfortable up to about grow 17. The mechanic didn't seem to me at all effective as a method to force raids to stack dps.

Kazzak is another example of where you can just stack longevity over dps and simply cope with the Enrage and keep going. Wowwiki states:
Even bosses like Void Reaver with a hard Enrage timer I remember doing this with appropriate level gear with 10 healers (Bosskillers recommends 6). In fact when we went with 6 we usually had too many dps die to be able to kill him.

 

• Arawethion

They've been generally effective at discouraging raid stacking, if that's what you mean. If the sort of min/maxing raid groups that are common these days had encountered a fight which could be undermined by bringing a huge number of healers, we would have seen it happening everywhere. Some fights might come close (Archimonde, Twins), but by and large, DPS requirements are an important force keeping raid groups balanced.

Note that this isn't new--it was basically the whole concept behind Patchwerk (and now Brutallus, who's functionally a rerun of Patchwerk).

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Dralmoo

BT and Hyjal are terribly tuned, period, probably because they were balanced against pre-2.1 gear, but who knows. You can see this on a boss like Supremus, for example - most guilds new to the fight win with a lot of people dead. The volcanoes do a ton of damage, so it's quite easy for players to die, but it doesn't matter because he has a 15 minute enrage timer and also doesn't hit the tanks so hard that 5 healers can't keep them up.

Illidan falls into that category too. My guild still doesn't DPS at all during phase 4, there's no reason to take the risk when you can just have a "safe" 16 minute kill.

I think tier 5 is better tuned in that regard - try and do Vashj or pre-nerf Kael with appropriate gear and 9 healers, and you would have had trouble killing things fast enough. In fact I think a lot of guilds who struggled on Vashj could have used less healers than they would 'usually' bring and gotten a kill much faster.

 

Touf

The simplest way to enforce 5 healers is to have dps checks with really strict threat limitations. That way you can't cheese it with overgeared dpsers, since the threat cap forces you to bring those extra bodies. Threat wipes can be dealt with in a variety of ways, one being Leotheras/Hydross type threat resets.

 

Benita

That would only be simple if no class can reset their threat on their own, otherwise it favours those classes vastly over those who can't. It is also not very motivating for a dpser if it has no impact that he got better at dpsing because he has to stand around doing nothing. Healers standing around doing nothing for mana rotations like back in BWL got removed from the game for good reasons, i hope dpsers wont have to do the same just because they are in the most crowded job.

 

Shakes

The basic problem with DPS checks is that bringing an extra healer often makes sense anyway, since if it's tuned to need your DPS up and firing, then keeping them all alive for the entire fight but starting with one less is better than losing a few half way through. Certainly judging by the WWS reports of the raids I've been on, raid DPS is usually better when we bring 7 healers than when (due to people not being online, not by choice) we bring 5 or 6.

Maybe the way to fix that is to make the "don't stand in the fire" mechanic not be one you can heal through. If instead of killing the player, the fire had more effects like a "no DPS for 30 seconds" debuff, then you'd still need players to not stand in the fire, but stacking healers for when people stuffed up wouldn't make sense, you'd instead want to stack DPS.

 

Scallyphant

Thanks Shakes, you've thought of a very creative and very good solution to the problem I was concerned about. I would love to see them implement something along these lines. I think it's a super idea.

 

Zorac

I dont really agree with that shakes. In my experience that only applys to trash when my raids arent as focused and people die due to various things. Then brining in that extra healer can make a huge difference. Problem is that you cant really look att ssc/tk/mh/Bt, they have all been pretty damn shit as far as the dps tuning goes. Look at swp though, you just cant do brutallus/felmyst/twins/muru with too many healers. Yes its not perfectly balanced in the way that you need a huge roster to be able to do all thease bosses effectively. But it does force you to min/max. For instance, bringing 10-11 healers on twins is needed, atleast for my guild. My healers just cant keep up otherwise. Now that we have more practise on the fight I bet I could take 12-13 healers and still meet the dps check, but on our first kill when we had 11 healers, we killed them right as they enraged. Which is just as it should be when its your first kill. It was the same with brutallus and felmyst, atleast for us.

All in all if blizzard learns from their awesome job at swp, I dont think we need to worry, they know how to balance now. I just hope they make it hard in early wotkl and then after a few months nerf the first raid instances, so both hardcore and casual guilds can progress on challanging yet tuned content. A very nice example of this is m'uru: I consider my guild to be quite good, we dont raid too much (4 days a week) and yet have steady progression. We have been working on m'uru for ages now it feels like and now finally after the nerf we are getting close to a kill. If you dont have a raid where everyone had the best gear and plays perfect, m'uru was insanely hard. Yet its still a big challange for us after the nerf. It just shows that blizzard now knows what they are doing.

Making something like where the fires would prevent you from dpsing for 30 seconds if you happened to get caught in them would only be frustrating. I would prolly hate the fight even though I rarely get caught in a fire. Its a nice line of thought however, and I guess its worth exploring.

 

Shakes

Well you wouldn't implement it as not being able to do anything, maybe more like the Anetheron healing debuff where you're at 25% effectiveness. Still a penalty, but obviously just standing around for 30 seconds is no fun.

 

Fragged

I think you're kidding yourself if you think they didn't know how to balance back at 60 by naxx. The reality is that there are three fundamental issues with early raid instances:
* Unforseen consequences of class mechanics changes (some of these inevitably happen.)
* A need for introductory content (while the types of players in sunwell now don't need it, the reality is that something like sunwell if it were the molten-core of the next expansion would be a huge flop for most raiders, most people don't enjoy sunwell very much even though a small group of players enjoys it alot, and that larger group still wants to raid.)
* A less firm understanding of profession implications.

The reality is, they needed karazan to be an easier instance (and it was) at launch, and it still got nerfed pretty hard if you look at the place today compared to the old versions of nightbane/romulo/etc. The nerfs were a good thing, but more to the point, if karazan had started out designed like Sunwell is, it would hurt blizzard significantly. They need bosses like attuman to keep the masses happy. Sure many guilds starting in the original karazan got blocked at one of mocurator/opera/aran but that still gave them a large number of easier bosses they were successfully killing.

Personally my hope is that the raiding curve starts in a sort of tiered system, hopefully they have a introductory newbie/casual friendly raid instance (that sadly we'll probably all be stuck farming for the wotlk equivalent of a broken item like the lightning capacitory) and then they simultaneously have a more difficult raiding instance that is more execution focused than gear focused (but potentially mitigated by gear) so that better raiding groups can jump right in while weaker groups can spend more time farming the introductory instance until they gear up enough to compensate for the more technical fights required in the next instance up.

 

Zorac

I guess you have a point. Naxx was balanced, the fights in essence were alot more about executing a tactic than it was about each player not screwing up their part (basically I mean that you could do the fights with 5 ppl doing big mistakes aslong as you had a few healers a few dpsers and a tank or two who did their job very well). When blizzard lowered the raid cap to 25 man they also raised the skill level of their encounters and each individual became alot more important. Now naturally this required some adjusting when trying to balance out the content.

I never said I didnt agree with the fact that a instance should be nerfed now and then to end up at a suitable level for the casual players to enjoy (karazhan beeing a perfect example). I just hope they can find a way to balance the upcoming instances so that they prove to be as challanging as sunwell is. Naturally I say "hope" because with a new expansion, a new class and new abilities this isnt a easy feat to accomplish. I kinda doubt that naxx in wotkl will be as good as I hope its going to be, simply because of the facts just mentioned. But there's nothing wrong with hoping =)

In addition to this you also have the 10 man version of each instance coming out, which in my eyes should be aimed more toward the introductionary content than their respecitve 25 man versions. Im quite sure that most guilds who are semi hardcore or more will burn through the 10 man versions pretty fast and I hope that the 25 man content is where the real challange will be. Mainlybecause I dont think that you can build hard yet tuned content based around 10 man (although I didnt belive you could with 25 pre tbc so what do I know.. :P)

 

• Sirloin

I like the idea of more encounters where "standing in fire" results in DPS penalties rather than simply damage. Long silences, mana drains, attack speed debuffs would add some variety to effects are intended to be avoided by quality players. Obviously these would need to be present in fights that were tuned tightly for high DPS to avoid being trivial.

My Steam Profile (Aether) Cherish the difference between 58° and 59°.

 

Grungo

I'm going to echo the support of this idea. As people have said, this would help raid stacking to an extent by not allowing you to bring more healers to compensate for stand-in-the-fire type DPSers, but it would also scale back the current trend of AoE healing being the best healing if damage once again got more focused on fewer targets.

Plus, it might help those stand-in-the-fire types who don't even realize that they're stand-in-the-fire types. I get the feeling sometimes that people think they're entitled to be healed for any damage they may take, and don't accept that a lot of deaths could have been prevented. By punishing those people with damage-reducing debuffs rather than damage, they can see for themselves, "Hey, I always do half as much damage as everyone else on any fight with 'paralyzing flames' (or whatever)". Granted, the type of person who wouldn't accept a death as their own fault is also likely the type of person who would say, "I always get such bad luck on this with fires hitting me," but at least it might help some people strive to improve.

 

Mendoza

How balanced is it when you have 11 / 25 people healing when only 5 / 30 talent trees are healing orientated? It makes no more sense than requiring fights to have 10 tanks.

I like the 'stand in fire = dps loss' idea. I have a feeling though that they're going to play up the passive healing side, since in addition to shadow priests using VE etc there's now blood death knights that can keep their group topped up on health. With sufficiently high dps requirements and depending on how encounters deal damage you could force a raid to cut its number of healers way back in order to beat enrages etc and rely more on passive healing for general environmental damage with dedicated healers using appropriate heals for the specific encounter with less of the CH and CoH spamming.

 

Scallyphant

Problem with the incidental healing effects can be threat. With Shadow Priest one can find the situation of having to either throttle dps or stop putting up VE so you can keep your threat controlled. I'll own up here (hope my former guild leader doesn't see this) to deliberately not putting VE up so I can push for a higher place on the damage meter. I'm being a little facetious to make my point. Even conscientious raiders don't enjoy having to throttle damage in order to provide some other function since we will be judged to some extent on the meter, at least by some people.

With Death Knights they have to take a deep Blood talent (2 points) to get the group healing effect. Not only is it 2 talent points spent that don't increase one's own damage but deep Blood may well not be the optimal raid dps build anyway. Folks here probably remember when one Paladin healer per raid had to put 31 points in Ret just to get Kings with the other 30 points being filler. It would indeed be a shame if Blood Aura became the raiding Death Knight equivalent: a required raid talent you spend 30 points of filler to get. And of course getting it might, in addition to gimping your spec, push your threat through the roof, making it even less attractive to a dps death knight. I honestly don't know to whom Blood Aura healing threat is assigned, perhaps a beta tester could comment.

As for tank death knights taking this would be at the expense of survivability. I don't think many tanks would want to go deep Blood.

There certainly is a lot of potential. If you will forgive me for linking to one of my own posts elsewhere here's a write-up I did looking at stacking every conceivable Death Knight heal. It's actually quite a long list of + life gain abilities. I include it here as players may not have realised quite how large the scope for Death Knight healing actually is in the current Beta build. I actually rather astonished myself in the process of researching it.
WoW-Europe.com Forums -> The Death Knight healer

Interestingly the Feral Druid group heal spreads its threat around the recipients. A much better model in terms of convenience to the player but perhaps balanced by the fact that it's a lot less powerful than the other two group damage to healing effects. [Edit: changed to zero threat in the 2.1 patch - thanks Jone!]

It seems to me that if incidental healing is to be part of the answer to the excessive amount of healer spots in raids then threat must be addressed and the talents should become either base skills or much more accessible for Death Knights. The healing probably needs to become raid-wide too if it's going to matter enough to be worth dropping healers for.

Another option is to incorporate this mechanic onto gear. Think Battlemaster enchant with enough healing for a Rogue to justify not enchanting for damage because his raid healing is so valuable. That might be a nice way to open doors for classes that lack built-in raid synergies through itemization.

I'd actually love to see this happen. I think a method that allows you to add 2 more dpsers to a raid at the expense of two healers would be a very good move. It's been used in Age of Conan and will be used in Warhammer. I think fundamentally, for most players, whacking something with a big sword is more fun than spamming Flash of Light and so consequently raid design should be more accomodating of the former and less requiring of the latter.

 

Jone

The feral druid heal on crit effect has no threat since 2.1. Some complained it would hurt their tanking, but most agreed that the +threat made ferals a liability in a high DPS melee group, so I agree that Blizzard will probably have to do something similar for DKs.

 

Cuer

It sounds like this issue will be explored further in the upcoming patches. Interesting ideas about class balance/choices for raids from Ghostcrawler, one of the main class developers:The idea that totally different specs/classes could provide the exact same debuff is an interesting one; they've played around with this before with the armor debuffs (Demo Shout, Demo Roar, Curse of Weakness) and others, but this sounds broader than those narrow options. It seems like a difficult task, to provide multiple ways to get the same buffs and debuffs, without making the classes too homogenized in abilities; there will no doubt be a lot of tweaks back and forth in beta to try to get it just right.

 

Mendoza

Perhaps; it really depends how much relative threat we're going be generating in WotLK. But consider the new Mark of Divinity ability which means that you can be passively healing the MT for 30-40% of your dps. It also frees up priests in general to not be MT healers, since they can focus exclusively on other targets and still be healing the MT. With 3 priests in the raid it's effectively like having a free healer.

 

Axanor

The biggest problem is still that healers have 5/30 talent specs, but make up 7-8/25 or 2-3/10 slots in an average raid.