I really hope Blizzard is just writing Melee instead of Physical for the haste buffs or Hunters have been left out. Though in the current beta neither Improved Icy Talons or WF totem are affecting ranged attack speed.

I'd guess intentional, since judgements currently don't stack with anything anyway. Notice that a lot of the other things they didn't mention (e.g. Inspiration, Power Infusion) also don't stack.

One potentially big omission is the various threat reduction abilities (Hand of Salvation, Pain Suppression, possibly whatever replaces Vigilance). The focus of the post was persistent buffs and debuffs, so it may just have been offtopic, but it would be nice to know if they'll stack.

This is exactly how I feel about this. At least on my server, the comments that Awake (while he was in Nihilum) made about paladins with talents in anything but holy, took a long time to wash away. I would say that it wasn't until sometime this year that the pickup KZ/ZA groups realised that paladins can actualy tank and do ok in those places. Going as retributon is still a big "not welcome" to most heroic/10's.

I don't blame him for all of this because at that time and as a guild, I am sure they did just fine without "offspec" paladins. The thing is the message this sends to other players. Those that don't read up on every other class skill and patch note there is. It is easy to missinterpret something like this and can doom a talent tree for a long time, even after it has extensive changes.

One point that I think many people have missed (in particular, the people going on about 10 rogues, warlocks, whatever) is that, if top end dpsers are within a couple percent of each other, stacking whoever comes on top might be better today, but it's a lot harder to gear up a group like that, which means that you'll eventually lose that edge to imbalanced loot distribution.

Another criticism that keeps getting repeated is the "omg, wow is teh ez-mode now, yuv liek dumbd it down". To be blunt about it: Bullshit. To this day, developers had [/i]very[/i] little wiggle room in which to develop fights. Either you develop for stacked raids, or you make fights easy for that sort of guild. Fights have a tendency to assume warrior in the tank spot. The key design point for WotLK seems to be "Differentiate people on how they do things, not in what they do". For the encounter designer, this means a few key things:

You can assume shield wall and last stand will be available for every single fight, and all available tanks can do that.
You can safely assume a full set of raid buffs without locking out not-so-hardcore raids or making them easy mode for hardcore guilds.
You can safely assume that nobody will get more than two bloodlusts in all but the longest fights, and you can assume
that the whole raid will get those.
(etc)

You can really assume a lot more stuff without completely screwing people up. That means you have a much more solid framework for building encounters on. And a more solid framework means that you can come up with much more elaborate mechanics without fear of that going completely FUBAR when it hits the player base. Perhaps the most important assumption you can now make is that, given a raid group doing bleeding edge raiding, players are there because of the player, not because of the buffs he brings. So you can make things proper harder rather than just tuning the numbers up a notch. If anything, this change has massive potential to "dumb the game up", not down .

This really sums it up.

The simple truth is that
1) Only Nihilum and co even have the ability to pick and collect those 10 mages/rogues/whatever. The rest of the crowd have to go by what they actually have access to in terms of roster/possible recruits.
2) Only Nihilum and co don't have to take the 'skill'-matter into account. I'll take a moonkin that dispells Grip over a Mage that runs through Doomfire any day of the week thankees-very-much. 'Normal' guilds do have to make that decision and it won't be won by that Mage, even if he does do 2-3% more damage.

I'll acknowledge your point about their opinion being leading somewhat (though seeing Nihilum go without Ferals and Curse with two on their first kills or something similar will be easy enough to calm down the fuss a bit), but the stacking crowd here is making assumptions that just don't fly for the vast majority of guilds.

I can sympathize with the difficulty this must have caused you. But I think you're missing a big point, which is that back when TBC first came out and Awake made his comments, prot and ret paladins actually were pretty bad. Remember when Ret paladins had no innate threat reduction? Remember when Prot paladins were permanently stuck at ~1.2khp less than a warrior? You didn't have to be listening to Awake to come to the conclusion that offspec paladins sucked back then; all you had to do was actually try to use one in a raid.

You say that offspec paladins only started getting respect this year; perhaps that had to do with people finally "getting over" what Awake said, but that was also the time that Prot and Ret paladins actually got a lot of much-needed buffs to bring them up to true raid viability.

Basically, I think rather than worrying about what the ultra-hardcore guilds are going to think about each spec, the developers should simply focus on make sure that each spec doesn't suck. If they do that right, public opinion will take care of itself.

This.

Fact is, you don't need 5-6 shaman to do sunwell. Nor do you need more than 2-3 warlocks. Nor do you need to remove all but one mage out of your raid. Nor do you need to go down to 2 paladins max and bot the rest for blessings.

But read EJ, read the Blizzard boards, and you hear that kind of stuff repeated everywhere -- why? Because people heard it from some fast-progressing guild guild, assume it's gospel, and soon everyone is repeating it.


Stacking is bad even if it's DPS classes this time rather than shaman.

That's more an issue of bad guild management and not raid contribution. I'm pretty sure most decent guilds still use common sense and don't just copy other guilds behaviour. e.g. Why would any guild want to replace a terrible rogue with a decent mage because his potential dps is 200 higher?

I like the changes and I'm pretty sure these changes stop class stacking almost completely.

This could create a really weird second-order progression differentiation where all the crappy guilds are stuck because they're sheep trying to recruit their Nth undergeared and underskilled FotM, while the progressing guilds are those with enlightened enough officers to recruit by skill rather than class. I'm not completely sure, but I don't think I have a problem with this.
[e] This may even create some sort of balancing effect, since the bad guilds will be sucking up all the FotM classes, they'll be under-represented in the guilds that are server-best, countering the impression from world-best guilds. Possibly. If the server-best crew have enough of a progression lead they'll be getting the good players that happen to be FotM as well. But people will have more role models than just SK/Curse/Nihilium, and those ones closer to home will not be stacking as atrociously.

That already happens now.

The difference is those extra rogues that you stack may eek you out another 3-5% DPS as opposed to now when an extra 3 heroisms makes the difference between being able to do the encounter or not.

Plus stacking is easy enough to combat. Have Boss1 do a nasty Whirlwind that severely limits the amount of time that melee can be in, and give him some shadow resistance. Have Boss2 do ranged AoE that has your casters/hunters moving and give him some fire resistance. So if guilds want to stack, they must keep 10 rouges, 10 mages, 10 hunters, and 10 locks and swap them out for each encounter in order to squeeze 5% more DPS or they could just have a well rounded raid with minimal swapping.

Let's put this into perspective on "needed" Bloodlusts.

I just pulled up the lock spreadsheet and found that, for a 6 minute fight, a second lust adds 61 DPS, to take the predicted DPS from 2774 to 2835.

Your first lust is higher, since it's synced with cooldowns, etc., but it's a very rare raid where absolutely every lust is synced perfectly with cooldowns -- and even if it is, then you're not in execute range. Plus, if the lust applies to anyone lower than 2835, it's going to add less dps (and remember melee only have part of their damage benefitting from lust.) So I'm pretty comfortable with that 60 dps as an average for a second lust (i.e. more than 3 shaman; 3 shaman isn't stacking, and once you get beyond 3 shaman you're talking double lusts, so this situation applies.)


Swapping a shaman into a group (for the 4th+ shaman) means lusting 4 people basically. Most often some will be support classes, but we can even assume that they're all dps classes and all gain 60 dps.

That's 240 dps gain for a bloodlust. About a 8-10% increase if that increase were concentrated in a single person (i.e. if you're crediting the dps boost to the shaman, and he was doing ~2800 dps.)


So even at only 8-10% difference between classes/specs, you're already talking as big a dps difference that caused you to already want to stack an extra shaman for a lust. 10% is only 200 dps difference at 2k.


(disclaimer: handwavy numbers, which is a sin here, but the general thrust is my point, even if my numbers are a bit high or a bit low.)

This whole notion of removing the desirability of a specific spec of specific class just feels so foreign to the game as it stands. How much of recruiting is done based on needing very specific class requirements? Across any level of guild? Almost all of it, am I wrong? How many people are able to get into guilds by selling themselves not as just a good player, but as a good player occupying a necessary position?

Basically I'm afraid that this ability to take the people you want that don't happen to be the specific class you need comes at the expense of being forced to expand your social circle within the game.

It seems to me that Blizzard is addressing with consolidated buffs is it's own innability to properly balance raids. I don't think the real issue is raid stacking. I'd say the vast majority of raiding guilds currently don't have the rosters to support stacking. If they do stack a class/spec it is because they have numerous people of that class/spec who are worth taking. It is only the top % of end game guilds who really stack heavily for progression content. Most guilds take whoever is online, and sometimes that means being unable to do content because there are not enough tanks/healers/whatever class is needed for a specific encounter (oddly enough, I've never had a situation where we could not do content because a buff/debuff was missing)

But, Blizzard seems to design around those "best-case" scenarios, with every buff and every consumable, because they are possible. It seems to me it would be better to design content for something like an 80-90% scenario. The chalenge in new content then would have to come from encounter design. The best guilds get a boost from being able to stack classes, sure, but the real reason they are ahead of the curve is because they are skilled and have the ability to figure out new content. These guilds will still lead the pack, still be the first to pass new content, but it will speed up the curve for slower progressing guilds. This is a good thing, and I think this is Blizzards goal.

I also think most people here are looking at these changes from the POV of 25 man raids. I think Blizzard might be making some of these changes to address a shift to 10 man content, but I think it will make it even more difficult. If you have 2 major buffs and one is taken by somebody else in a 25 man, no big deal, you can pretty much assume all the buffs/debuffs are present. However, if somebody else is taking one of your buffs in a 10 man then maybe your spot would be better suited for a class that could have provided 2 unique buffs? What if 2 people are taking up both of your unique buffs? Then you really are dead weight.

Not to mention the fact that balancing personal dps versus raid boosting dps is going to be incredibly hard when you have to assume 2 different raid sizes. Not all buffs are of equal value and not all classes scale equally with buffs.

Too big a gap. Same problem that we had with consumables a year and a half ago. The gap between buffed and unbuffed was so large that if you tuned anywhere but near the high end of that range, content would be trivial. Similarly, things like lust rotations, raidwide damage increases of 10% or more, stacking buffs and mana return abilities, etc., made such a tremendous difference. If you tuned around an "80% min/max'd raid" then you're putting the content out of reach of a majority of players who simply can't consistently field 2 spriests, 1 ret paladin, 1 enhance shaman, 1 survival hunter, 1 feral druid, etc., every raid. And then if you tuned around, say, a 50% threshold, you'd end up with content that was trivial with anything resembling an optimal class mix.

It's the same problem that's been repeating itself for years in different forms -- when the gap between X and "Not X" is too large, you can't meaningfully tune around X and must either require X, or allow X to trivialize content. Reduce the impact of X (consumables, alliance/horde differences, etc.) and now you can tune.

Addressing raid-stacking is the only way to impliment what you're talking about, because the current raid synergies give a stacked raid too much of an advantage over a 10th-percentile raid. They need to narrow the difference between a stacked and unstacked raid in order to have an instance that's simultaneously doable with an average group, and not give a stacked raid the power advantage comparable to overgearing the instance by a tier or more. The end result is exactly what you're talking about, balancing a raid around average people with average raids, and I am quite convinced that it is not possible without lowering the effect of synergies on raids. If a person can justify his raid spot compared to another while lobotomized because of his raid spec, top-end guild progress is going to be determined by raid-stacking as much as personal contribution.
[e]Beaten, in time and eloquence.

It occurred to me that the removal of raid-stacking from a raid-leader's problems is similar to the simplification of the bag-space mini-game that occurred from DII to WoW and DIII. It's streamlining something stupid that should not have been a core part of gameplay.

My own experience is that you are wrong -- personally, I've never encountered it.

Which is not to say it's rare. It's just that mileage can really vary.

But almost all of the guilds I know are just people who like to play together. Most don't recruit at all, and the ones I've seen that do recruit do so based on personal chemistry. "Try out a few runs with us, and let's see how it goes, eh?"

Obviously I'm not talking about "hardcore" guilds. But I don't have any direct personal experience with any of those. None the less, before TBC I had accomplished a little bit in Naxxramas. (I have not gone far in 25-man in TBC, because my own interest in anything larger than 10-man has been completely destroyed at this point. But I have friends doing BT runs and SWP trash runs.)

So, the main problems with the new system, as I see it-

1. If a class somehow gets a DPS lead over the other classes, raid stacking can come back with a vengeance. I expect Blizzard to avoid this because it's a lot easier to fix that now (Step 1. Everyone has the same buffs, so no more guessing how much a single class gets. Step 2. Plug in the spreadsheet numbers). I do wonder how much of a gap is reasonable between classes to avoid stacking - I suspect if everyone is in the same 5% range it won't really be noticed for standard raid groups. And I don't mean one class consistently 5% over everyone.


2. Some classes have turned into buff/debuff machines - Druids, Shaman, Warriors, and possibly Death Knights. This could lead to some ugly groups in 10-mans. The simple solution is to spread out the debuffs more.


3. Talented buffs/debuffs need to have a self-bonus to avoid making the points feel wasted if the group makeup is different.


4. An effort does need to be made to make sure that flavor abilities (combat rez, vanish, ice block, etc) don't overwhelm specific encounters now. It would be a bad situation if raids started bringing 6-7 mages to the "hard" encounter in the latest raid instance because Ice Block or Mage Armor nullified the big debuff.

--------

I love the new system and expect these problems or issues to be addressed. It's a lot better than trying to figure out how to get each DPS a totem in their group or ditching a melee class because that group was full.

I think a large part of this really comes in to how closely Blizzard can balance the classes. Yes, if Nihilum runs with 8 rogues because "rogues do the best damage," other people will want to have that too.

But "best" by 30% and "best" by 5% or 10% are different things. Not for Nihilum, who'll stack either way, but for the rest of us, because personal skill will make up for smaller differences, and people won't recruit someone "for dps" to replace people of other classes able to outdamage that individual due to their own skill and focus.

Very few guild leaders are smart enough to know *what* the trends are and dumb enough not to know *why* the trends are that way. If they know people are bringing tons of rogues because they do more damage, but the they can't find rogues who outdps their top dpsers of other classes, I doubt they'll put much effort into recruiting them.

To put this in perspective...
WWS Scoreboard
WWS Scoreboard records the highest damage done by different classes to Brutallus. Yeah, Brut favors some classes slightly, and yes, he can be gamed, but it still paints an interesting picture.

The top 15 Druids did between 1920-2130 dps. (Average 2025)
Hunters: 2930-3206 dps. (Avg. 3068)
Mages: 2540-2750. (Avg. 2645)
Paladins: 2170-2420. (Avg 2295)
Priests: 1660 - 1750 (Avg 1705)
Rogues: 2870-3090 (Avg 2980)
Shaman: 2280-2480 (Avg 2380)
Warlocks: 2710-2810 (Avg 2760)
Warriors: 2550-2870 (Avg 2710)

Now, okay, these numbers aren't perfect, especially because they cloud issues like spec, as I'd bet none of the top Shaman were Elemental and none of the top Warlocks were Affliction. Bloodlusts, stacked groups, etc also definitely play a role. But even so they definitely tell an interesting story. We see that at the high end, a Priest does about 50% of what a hunter or a rogue does. A druid can do two-thirds. An Enhance Shaman a bit more than 75%, and a Mage about 85%.

What if the Shadowpriests were slightly above where Druids are now? Other Hybrids slightly higher than where Enh Shammies are and Mages, Warlocks, Hunters & Rogues all within a few percent of each other?

I think a lot really depends on how tightly Blizzard can tune.

I threw together a spreadsheet where you plug in your raid composition and it spits out the buff categories that are covered. For 25 mans, there are myriad ways to get every single buff category covered. It will give us a lot of flexibility in how we can do a raid and your inclusion will become far more based on your ability.

But for 10 mans, it's a little different. If you want to max out buffs you're going to need certain classes. This is my "perfect" 10 man raid, according to my analysis.

Feral Druid
Prot Warrior
Balance Druid
Fire/Frost Mage
Ret Paladin
Combat Rog
MM Hunter
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
Disc Priest

This only concerns trying to get every possible buff with no regards to what the DPS potential of a class might be. This is at least one configuration that I could come up with that covered as many buff categories as possible while trying to have a tank/dps/healer balance. Feral can DPS where only one tank is needed. Assuming three healers will be required and try to have single target/HoTs/raid healing covered. Good CC coverage.

This group covers every category except "Physical Vulnerability Debuff" (only Blood Frenzy, with a TBA ability coming) if I set this up correctly. Ret Pally and Boomkin fortures seemed to have turned quite a bit. Seems to me they're near requirement for 10mans, those two cover quite a lot.

I can make the spreadsheet available. I need to clean it up some so it's easier to use.

Frankly, as a Druid, that list scares me a bit.

Seeing Druids listed as 2-3 in most of those lists people makes me a bit anxious, especially since some classes don't even get a mention.

It's because they're starting from the current system, where some classes had weaker DPS because of buffs they brought to the raid. As they go through builds, hopefully they spread out the buffs. It's pretty much a requirement to make 10-man raiding a viable progression path.

I agree, but druids are the class that brings the single most raid boosts outside of direct buffs/debuffs. Personally, I'm not waiting to become the new 'shamans' as it were, especially not after the frequent influx of Arena Resto Druid rerollers.

Blizzard promised proper scaling and have done quite a bit of work in that direction. I would like to see some of this picked up by Rogues or other classes at least. I could quite easily see a Blood Splatters or something similar being reworked to include some basic (de)buffs, or - similarly - Ferocious Inspiration/Expose Weakness and Find Weakness being equivalent.