I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that judging from the changes made to SV hunters and Spriests, they're going to increase the personal DPS of these two specs so that they can bring their Replenishment buffs while at the same time doing more personal DPS.

So they provide SOME utility, but not too much as previously in order to legitimately lower their DPS.

By removing some buff/debuff synergies those specific specs that brought most utility but low DPS/HPS can now get buffing in those departments.

This is kind of like saying "great ideas, but if you stuff them up it'll be stuffed up". You can stuff things up if you just continue with more of the same too, at least this way has the chance of being better.

You dont have to guess. That've actually explicitly said this. Everyone has buffs, everyone has dps:

Ghostcrawler on the beta forums.

Read Ghostcrawlers posts, HERE, if you want clear reasoning for why this is happening. Read all his posts in that thread. He's pretty lucid.

In the case of Swift Retribution and other similar effects I'm looking at it more as Blizzard giving one of the effects to the "ranged" group (>30 yards) and one of the effects to the "melee" group. Seems like more of an insurance plan for movement based fights than anything else where the aura might have a chance of out-ranging, or fights that require the whole raid to spread out over a large area.

EDIT: Missed that part I guess, thanks for the clarification.

My minimal list of all buffs is 8: Moonkin, Enh shaman (usig WoA for air totem), arms warrior, fury warrior, frost DK, ret pally (with BoK), mage, disc priest (with inspiration). Adding in 6 other healers and a second tank, that leaves room for 10 rogues. Or 10 mages. Or 10 hunters, or 10 warlocks. If you want to stop that sort of stacking, it's easy. Not all fights are Brutallus or Patchwerk. design the encounters to favor 10 mages on fight, 10 rogues another, 10 fury warriors the next. I can guarantee you no guild is hardcore enough, not even SK or nihilium, to keep a roster of 70 players for 25-man raids. They'd shoot themself in the foot trying to gear up, too. (Option B: nef-style class calls, where any stacked class is hilariously lethal autofail)

Edited for Kyne: Read closer. Most fully-talented fully-sacked buffs will give the exact same bonus. Battle Shout and Blessing of Might was the actual example given. Your BoM is not underpowered, merely redundant... unless you don't have an imp and need commanding shout, or whatever (and it lasts longer).
The spellpower buffs I suspect are getting overhauled. IDS is currently pathetically small because it stacks. If it doesn't, maybe they'll up it to 25% of spirit and we'll all be happy.

In the post, he actually explains that battle shout and BoM, talented, will give the exact same benefit. If anything BoM makes battleshout completly obsolete (done before engage, not lost due to paladin dying, long duration, easily reappliable).

edit: slow

Judgements are conspicuously absent from both the buff/debuff list, and the list of abilities that went self-only. Oversight, or redesign?

Actually, I read that otherwise. Because a Ret pally going for kings is going to be short of talent points (King baseline already!), and the increased mana tightness that it looks like the change to mana regen will create, they're likely to be sans Imp BoM. What this seems to mean to me is that you'd give everyone BS in a little stack, but 3 minutes into the fight, the hunters iBS would fade and they'd be down to a normal BoM.

Also, all this discussion is severely confused by glyphs. How vital would a Blessing of Kings that also adds 3% AP be, for instance?

edit: Spelling.

You don't need all your paladins to have kings.

This would be in the realm of the few percent difference for min/maxers compared to more casual players.

What balanced things in TBC (or late TBC to be precise) was largely the fact that bosses didn't like melee stacking. Virtually every boss in the Sunwell has some mechanism which hurts a melee-stacked raid in some fashion, generally the hurt increasing exponentially as the number of melee increases (both the chance of someone in melee getting hit and the number of melees who take splash damage as result of that). Balancing melee and casters can mostly be done by boss armor value tweaking then (except hunters which are mechanically more like casters but still benefit from low armor values - even they must put the pet in melee range though).

Stacking can somewhat be alleviated by giving melees a generally better DPS but making stacking increasingly harder to heal - there will be the inflection point when adding more melees isn't better than adding casters. For 10 man instances boss armor can be higher thus resulting in melee having no significant dps advantage. 10-mans are hard to stack even on best of days since getting the "required" buffs will take up most slots either way.

That still leaves the problem of balancing between melee and ranged. Half of the job to prevent stacking will be taken care of by synenergy requirements. A quarter can be done by restricting gear availability. Just because 10 mages might work on arthas doesn't mean that it's possible to predict this and gear up 10 mages unless, of course, there is a long-lasting trend in advantage of the mages accompanied with a sufficiently long gearing-up period. Long lasting trends are something Blizzard can react to - it's also something they can proactively affect by doing more thorough calculations on DPS output. Wotlk should make damage scaling somewhat more predictable than TBC simply because there are less things to stack. There are also some more options to scale a class up or down without that change propagating to other classes (such as the synenergy between warlock & shadow priest).

Nothing will eliminate stacking completely, of course.

And from what Ghostcrawler posted, they're not nearly as interested in what a SK/Nihilum will do as the raids that are now still progressing. He explicitely stated the top 1% of the guilds will always find ways to stack the deck in their favour and it's not something that can easily be avoided.
The emphasis here is more on the 'normal' guilds not desperately seeking a 5th Shaman that doesn't completely suck because they need that extra Heroism.

Basically, encounters will be beatable by pretty much any solid raid composition. If Nihilum push for the world first kill with 10 mages, so be it. 3 Mages, 3 warlocks, a shadow priest, hunter, elemental shaman and a moonkin should do the job just about as well. If the difference really boils down to that 1-2%, for the rest of the guilds personal skill will be the deciding factor. Not everyone can just recruit the top of the creme de la creme.

In my opinion, Blizzard moves from class-balanced raid setup to a setup where you have much more freedom to bring your friends who accidentaly didnt roll a shaman.

If top guilds want to progress with 10 mages because they can do 5% more damage than the rest, i dont see a problem there. First, it will take longer to gear up such a raid. Second, in next patch mages may get a slight nerf to put them back in to place and said top guild will need to recruit 10 different people.

I am really pleased with this change.

Given that all these changes seem to be aimed at reducing the requirement of having any particular spec in the raid I wonder what the implications are for the shaman spirit link talent. It's not included in this list and as written is insanely good for tank healing and as close to a must have as I can see in the current setup.

To an extent this will happen. However the big question are: what are the margins. How big the margins are is ultimately what decides if missing a spec can become a blocker for a progressing guild. Smaller margins still matters, but when margins get smaller it really only starts mattering for topend guilds. Currently the advantages of stacking are extremely high, much so than they can ever be in wotlk without disastrous class balance messups.

You have individual DPS classes producing (based largely on class instead of player skills) differences of up to 20*% from some others doing similar role (ranged or melee DPS). Synenergy classes (DPS shamans) can go as high as 20% compared to lacking them while warlocks can be up to 20% ahead of others when it comes to sustained AoE - while providing excellent raid buffs via curses. For most guilds, there's a whole world of difference in one class being 5% ahead of others (top guilds will still stack up if they can get geared good people) and some specs being *required* by providing DPS increases up to 20% more of what would be acquired by any other DPS class in their place.

Ultimately I think much depends on Blizzard's willingness to react. They can only plan so much ahead, but what they can do is react to balance issues.

* Yes, I pulled 20% from a hat. 20% is probably *cautious* when it comes to enhancement shamans or warlock aoe for M'uru presently. Even so, 20% is huge, it's virtually impossible to mess up the balance between raw DPS of two classes this much as long as you perform rigorous testing & theorycrafting.

The problem is that the PTR testing is done by those guilds that use 10 mages and the initial scaling will reflect those 5%. The top guilds will do this by having people constantly rerolling and gearing up 2 chars. The "casual" guilds would be those who have to recruit to get the extra 5% to kill a boss or wait for the nurf bat. This situation is similar or worse than in BC.

If blizzard changes their behaviour and fix balance changes faster, then yeah this might turn out good, but if you look at BC the top dps class was that for a rather long periods, at least long enough to shift recruitment choices or let/make some reroll.

It will really depend on how close the classes are in doing their job. Best case scenario would be that its simply a choice of flavour/player skill who you take after you got all buffs/debuffs covered, but that would need all to get an equal part in this synergy mix, otherwise the dps has to reflect the better utility.

Doesnt that change lead to "every dps spec with raid benefit does same dps" and "every dps spec without benfit does higher dps but same as other without"?

Would help for "We want players to be able to form raids and parties based on who they want to play with, rather than who has the correct talents and abilities to min-max their raid performance." atleast.

There are other things than damage/healing output to balance with in Pvp.

The problem I have with redundant buffs is that they are making them all equally valuable to the raid, but they are not all equal in cost. Some of those skills are baseline while others are talented. Some have different costs in talent points. They all are going to have a variable opportunity cost which will probably decide who picks up what buff. If one class/spec pretty much has to pick up a buff in their talent progression (not many other viable alternative) they are going to pick up that buff every time. If the other class that picks up that buff can skip it and pick up a talent that increases their personal dps instead they are pretty much going to ignore the buff every time unless they know for sure that nobody else in their guild will provide it.

What they need to do, at least with all talented buffs/buffs improved by talents is to make them have an added benefit for the caster if another redundant buff is available. That way even if your skill isn't buffing the raid at least you are benefitting from it and it isn't entirely wasted talent points.

edit: not to mention this only solves the problem of raid stacking around buffs - you still will have raid stacking around who does the best dps/heals or provides the easiest crowd control.

There seems to be lots of concern about how a player will earn a raid spot if they don't have a special buff and aren't the best DPS/healing class.

In my experience leading raids, the raiders that are invaluable to me are the ones that show up prepared and ready, ones that if you assign a job for them, you know it's going to be done - that do not cause drama and take instruction/criticism well. I want to be able to choose that person over a heroism.

The flip side is players will not be able to overcome a below par skill set by having invaluable buffs i.e. shaman. Right now, you can be a T4 geared resto shaman and get into a guild midway through Sunwell. If that isn't a sign that the current way of doing things is broken, I don't know what is.

Those normal guilds would have been fine with whatever they brought to raids in WotLK given the individual class changes that have already been made or will be made. Shamans for CH/Heroism, Palis for AFK-AE tanking, BM hunter stacked groups for FI stacking, etc have all been nerfed, scaled back, or had other classes bring similar capabilities to lessen the need to stack these in the future.

The trouble is with the additional changes of raid-wide buffs, they've actually made it easier to stack raids now. Despite what some here and blue posts have said, it is important what the SK/Nihilum crowd takes to their raids. That's where these trends starts, that's when the normal guilds get an idea of what they think they need.

Relying on Blizzard to effectively balance all these classes so stacking is unlikely is also a tall order. There's been very few times their predictions seem to pan out in actual gameplay. It's hard to blame them though, as that's a tall order to accomplish. The real question will be once the players actually figure out what works and what doesn't will Blizzard come in and cut back said class and buff others to achieve this goal they have now? In the past they've rarely done that, instead usually waiting for major class reviews or an expansion to do this. They won't have that option in WotLK or the 'we need more of X class' syndrome will actually get worse.

As written, I'd expect Spirit Link to break very quickly on any raid tank, in most situations. That surely is the primary reason for the "break on a >30% of maxhp" hit. It's a tool for PvP, 5mans, maybe 10man and some niche raid use, but it's probably safe to say that tanks will be taking >30% spikes and few others will.

The thing is "normal" guilds can't stack because they don't have 10 skilled, geared mages on their roster. And if mages become the flavor of the month, trying to find and keep 10 mages will not really be possible.

Once again, if you assume that every guild will have access to an infinite number of every class and spec it desires, then raids are easily stackable. If guilds are struggling to find 25-30 competent, skilled raiders of any class/spec, there is no way they can get picky enough to stack. That is a luxury 98% of guilds in the world do not have.