For the average guilds trying to imitate that will just turn into a loss. They cannot equip these stacked classes fast enough and will most likely not be able to recruit enough skilled players. You can't change that people tend to be stupid. If for example a rogue does 3% more damage than let's say a hunter this is assumed the players have equal gear and skill. For most guilds a better player will be a bigger advantage than a better class.

This kind of thing only works if you are able to recruit skilled and geared players of the flavor of the month classes from other guilds. The point for a normal guild is much more to keep these players and tell them that the flavor changes usually quite a lot and that in two months they maybe won't have their secure raid spot anymore in a guild that switches players out because of very small advantages.

I was a hardcore raider back in the day, but now my raiding experience is much more about enjoying the conversation and the mixture of personalities in the guild. What I don't get about the recent changes is that people who enjoy raiding for similar reasons as myself were never inhibited by the old system. On my current server (Scilla) there are roughly 2 guilds alliance side, and one guild horde side for which these changes will have any significant effect on their ability to achieve their goals or enjoy the game. In the last several years, I can't think of a single example of a hardcore raid-minded player who didn't ultimately find himself a slot in a progression-centric guild.

The one thing I'm concerned about these changes is that raidwide buffs won't necessarily affect the whole raid. For instance, if Battle Shout is still limited to 20 yards, or if shaman totems are still limited to 30 yards, the whole raid is not necessarily going to get all these buffs.

There are plenty of fights where the whole raid is spread out (Fankriss, Skeram, Gruul, VR, just to name a few) and some fights where raid members are teleported into entirely different sections (C'thun's stomach, Kalecgos). What is Blizzard going to do with these fights?

At least with party based buffs, you could guarantee that parties would get all their buffs by having them (the parties) stay in one general area. Not so much with raidwide buffs. Of course, Blizzard could just give everything 100yd+ ranges

Battle Shout was changed to 45 yards in the latest build, but I understand what you're saying. I think thats part of what makes the encounter challenging. An example of this on live would be the collapsing and spreading out of the raid, and the effect it has on Shaman's Chain Heal.

Well, with the turn that buffs have taken, I was almost entertained by the thought of encounters that might push the "departmentalizing" of raid setups. Take for example a M'uru type encounter, that requires you to place certain parts of your raid in certain places on different targets, trying to achieve as optimum a setup as possible. With buffs as spread out as they are, these types of encounters would actually help to centralize things, so that every raid isn't pursuing this hypothetical setup of 10 - 12 buff classes, and 13 straight DPS classes. You might, for example, need both an Enhancement Shaman and a couple Death Knights, so as to provide the different DPS groups with appropriate buffs. Likewise, you'd need that Affliction Warlock / Moonkin too, so that the other group got their 13% increase on spell damage.

Blizzard is giving themselves more wiggle room, and if handled correctly, I think that the outcome should be ultimately more pleasant, allowing for a greater amount of versatility and variation in 25 man raiding.

Does anyone share my fear of this change knocking WoW back to the stone age? (Class pigeon holding)

Once people have come up with the way to buff the raid as much as they can whilst leaving room for as many others as possible, the stacking issue will shift to fitting as many of whatever class does the most damage/fits best for the fight (Combat Ress/Cloak of Shadows/Ice Block).
An offspecc will never be allowed to perform equal to a "pure", this would cause chaos because of the mindset. The logic currently is that because they bring buffs, they have less damage capabilities, correct? Well now that the buffs are gone (or redundant because of the presence of another buffer), those players are useless and the logic is gone. But the mindset remains; if a hybrid can match a pure, why bother with pures? And because of this [mindset] balance can never be achieved with the new system.

Also a small sidenote: Anyone think it's funny how a mage or warlock buffs the raid with more than an Elemental Shaman at their current situation. Who's the supporter, really?

The problem then becomes that if you're balancing content around most of the DPS doing ~5% less than ideal the content becomes "cheesed" by those guild who can field 15 rogues or 15 hunters or whatnot. Patchwerk balanced around each DPSer doing 5% less than ideal would be cake for a guild that can field a perfect setup while becoming a major block to those who can't. How could the account for this?

Elemental Oath and the new ToW aren't really trivial, by any means. Nor is Bloodlust if you don't have 3+ shamans.

I think people may also be going a bit overboard with the "everyone will bring 10 rogues" stuff. What about when there's a fight, which there inevitably will be, where melee aren't ideal, or have an effective cap like on Kil'Jaeden or C'Thun or Kel'Thuzad where if you have a dozen melee zerging the boss, things are going to chain and kill them all? Ok, then you bring 10 mages instead?

And yes, the points regarding how inefficient it would be to gear up a roster of 10 rogues also have merit. They might be strictly more efficient under optimal circumstances, but when you're splitting your leather drops a dozen ways, they probably lag behind a more balanced raid where the DPS all have better gear.

And yes, the SKs and Nihilums of the world can just recruit a dozen pre-geared players of a given class, and yes, perhaps this will give an advantage. But hey, guess what, the SKs and Nihilums of the world also can field a roster that can raid for 60 hours in under 4 days. Can you? Don't worry about them. Speaking from the perspective of a "good" guild that is top 20 or so in the world, we sure as hell aren't going to be stacking 10 of one DPS class. You're arguing about literally 0.001% of the playerbase here. Two or three guilds out of millions of players. Relax.

This is impossible to account for unless all classes are PERFECTLY and exactly balanced. Otherwise the door is always open for someone to go to the extremes (15 rogues for example) and make the fight "easier". As has been said ad nauseum here though, those extremes are the minority. And if the margin is as low as 5%, giving those who do go to extremes that minor edge (unlike the current edge you get from stacking which is fairly large), then it seems reasonable to actually just balance for the lower 5% and consider the extreme people trivializing the content for themselves an acceptable "loss".

Easy, change in boss design. A move away from the gear-check bosses such as Teron or Brutallus toward the "skill"-check bosses like Kalecgos/Felmyst/Archimonde/Gurtogg where knowledge of your class and simple game mechanics, such as fire=bad, are all that is required to defeat an encounter.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, since bosses like Brutallus are needed in an attunement-free raiding environment. We saw it with SSC and TK when the attunements for MH and BT were removed. BT had no gear-check boss really... Teron kinda, but he wasn't on the level of Brutallus. But with the ease of the 4/5:4/9 bosses people skipped Vashj and Kael entirely because they were harder encounters with loot that paled in comparison to the MH/BT loot. If they go ahead and design the encounters around an ideal of non-raid stacking, we may see a lot of skipping around in progression by guilds looking for the easy path through content.

Something also bothers me about this. If anyone remembers the Blue post a while back about Warlock damage vs. Mage damage, it was basically said that Blizzard's class design theory is ,"The more utility you bring to a raid, the less DPS you should do." With these raid buff/debuff stacking changes, are they going to continue on with this design theory? If this is true then we can assume that it will be the Destruction Lock, Combat Rogue, and Beast Mastery Hunter still topping meters in WotLK, seeing as how each spec brings very little if any raid utility compared to their counterparts.

Something I brought up in the paladin thread, but haven't seen mentioned here: The current implementation of Replenishment effectively kills mp5 as a raiding stat.

The math: 1mp5 has the same itemization value as 2.5 intellect. With BoK applied, 2.5 intellect yields 41.25 total mana. Replenishment then gives you 0.206 mana every second, or just over 1 mana every 5 seconds.

In other words, the replenishment returns from intellect alone outweigh the mana given by mp5. (In addition to all the other benefits of intellect, of course.)

Honestly, idiot-check style fights favor certain classes at least as much as Brut does. If I do something stupid on Archi/Council/Alar/Kalec/whatever, I die. If a DPS warrior or ret paladin makes the same mistake, he dies. If a rogue makes the same mistake, it doesn't matter if he can press his Cloak of Shadows button fast enough. Conversely, my survivability is better than a DPS warrior or a ret paladin, because I have reincarnate and shamanistic rage and I don't have to worry about shit like Seal of Blood or Recklessness. I'm using melee as my example because it's what I'm most familiar with, but there are other and they're not always hybrids vs "pure" classes. Mages have iceblock, warlocks don't. Hunters fare either much better or much worse than other classes on aggro-sensitive fights.

I can already hear the canned response that if you die one of these fights it's because you're bad, but realistically these fights are tuned on the assumption that people will die to them while learning them, and anyone who claims never to have died to something stupid is a liar. If the learning curve is lower for certain classes, why not stack those classes? All moving to idiot-check bosses would do is change the raid stacking to be about survival abilities rather than DPS.

They didn't really slove the scaling problem with mana regen effects by the replenishment change, as touched upon earlier in the threat, they simply made it scale with mana pools instead of the damage of your mana batteries. It'll have to restore mana on base mana pools for this to make sense and even then it'll be of differnt value to the different classes.

I don't see why it can't just restore a set value at 80. Not like the mana cost of spells is changing wildly with gear.

While I agree with your sentiment, it's not to ignore how much said guilds - and others - inspire the rest of the raiding base. They are trendsetters in many ways, and I think that trying to "ignore" said trends set by first kills and raid stacking etc is not very wise. No, not many guilds will do the proposed 10 of 1 DPS class, however they may WANT to. In the end the only way this will work out well for the majority of players/guilds is if Blizzard does a good job at balancing content.

I think this change in direction of raid group managing is great and it has really great potential to make balanced content, but it'll all come down to how stuff is implemented. Right now there's alot of buffs and alot of synergy that when you're done stuffing it in a raid, you don't really have alot of extra spots for the "pure" dps'ers. This is not ideal, I doubt anyone disagrees, however with these changes it simply just frees up alot of spots, but for what?

If content is tuned very tightly (read very difficult, ie. initial iteration of M'uru):
That would mean those extra slots are going to be filled with pure dps'ers (of the best possible dmg output) or gimmick classes for the encounters making things easier.

If content is tuned more loosely in terms of x y and z required gear/dps/hps:
That would mean IF you take those theoretically best of the best setups with alot of 1 pure dps class, then content would be trivial.

I'm not preaching that the sky is falling, I'm still awaiting more information about the dps tuning they will do and raid content. When we went from 40 man raids to 25 man raids, we had to sit/loose alot of players. Now it's almost the same situation where most, if not all, guilds are very hybrid heavy.

It just presents a great dilemma for both guilds and players alike. Right now, you can have ~2-3 of each "pure" dps class in your roster, and almost have the same amount of hybrids. These changes more or less cut the need for more than 1 hybrid of a type in each raid and leaves alot of free spots that you will not want to fill with hybrids most likely.

To make an example: What do we do with the 3 great shadowpriests in our guild that most likely will be redundant beyond the 1st in a lvl 80 raid setup, same with 3 enhance shamans?

I'm optimistic about it and on paper it's a great way to alleviate alot of the problems that currently exists with balancing, classes and encounters alike, but I'm skeptical about the impact it's going to have on guilds. It's all in the hands of the encounter designers and ultimately how well balanced the different classes are going to be after the dps tuning.

Except that MP5 works from the moment the encounter begins. Replenishment only works when the person who puts it up is actively DPSing, and only if you're among the lowest 10 in total mana, which stacking int avoids.

I think their problem is that they don't want it to scale with the caster's stats (cf. Expose Weakness, Judgement of Wisdom changes) on the one side, but do want it becoming better while you progress.

The only problem with the sentiment (which is clearly what they intend) is that Intellect is a pretty terrible stat for everyone at the moment, and is sill only really "useful" from a DPS/throughput standpoint for Hunters and Enhancement Shamans in Wrath. The amount of spell crit a point of intellect gives is so small it really could be considered nothing at this point and 15 mana isn't terribly great for longevity. Perhaps the idea was to make intellect more of a desired stat.

Then of course you have the problem of classes who have very small intellect increases between tiers. The most notable are ret and prot pallys, who by Blizzard's own admission will get exactly 0 intellect between Tier 7 and Tier 9000. Hunters and Enhancement Shamans are also in this boat, receiving very small intellect increases (or in some cases decreases) between tiers.

I think the idea behind it is sound, but the current implementation leaves much to be desired. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets changed between now and launch.

With 2 mana batteries in a given 25-man or even just 1 in an UBRS you are pretty much gaurenteed to get and keep Replenishment for a very large portion of the fight. I would guess even with the least efficient battery (ret pallys, given that they can only put up new Replenishments every 8 seconds versus 3 for spriests and somewhere in between for hunters) you won't see much downtime.

That is unless Replenishments stack from multiple people, which I very strongly doubt.

No, they'll stay hybrid heavy without effort, because there's zero cost to bringing an extra shadow priest (he brings the same dps after all, remember), and in addition he can respec for healing if you need him to.

The previous design meant that the over-represented classes (priests, paladin, shaman) would have seen a reduction in their raid spots since Blizzard's goal was ~2.5 of each class, with 3 of the heal hybrids because you wanted extra healers.

It's a harder argument now for why you'd want someone who doesn't bring the flexibility of a respec in order to fill a roster hole for a raid-stacking encounter, for extra heals while learning, for extra tanking to make trash easier, or because someone is on vacation. If everyone offers the same thing during the raid encounter, then weight falls on those who offer utility outside of raids: i.e. able to respec to fill that 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man to be what you need.

10-mans especially will be very very hybrid-friendly since they bring so much to the table. I expect the rerolls to trend towards hybrids in general and druid especially, as they're the class able to fill all three roles, plus bringing very strong raid buffs as moonkin, plus battle rezzes.

It will be easier to get a 10-man raid spot as a hybrid.

It is incredibly difficult to keep 2 or 3 complete sets for multiple jobs updated to the current tier required when working on non-farm content. Just because you can respec at the touch of a button doesn't mean it is the best course of action.

The thing about that is, guilds who are going to try and min / max, and reach those standards, are going to be those who are still higher up on the PvE ladder. And those guilds, generally, have a pretty good understanding of the mechanics and what exactly is going on. I'm not too concerned about the trickle-down effect here, simply because, I think that if you're running a guild, that intends on doing progression content, you should have adequate knowledge of what is and isn't required, so on and so forth. The guilds that fail to this, will most likely be the same group of leaders and players that continue to make similar mistakes now a days. People who fail to understand mechanics, and only grasp trends and obvious results, never end up making it far enough, to even let this type of thing have an impact. This would be my take, albeit a harsh one.

[/quote]
If content is tuned very tightly (read very difficult, ie. initial iteration of M'uru):
That would mean those extra slots are going to be filled with pure dps'ers (of the best possible dmg output) or gimmick classes for the encounters making things easier.[/quote]

But see, I feel as if M'uru provides the perfect counterpoint to your argument. In a room, where your DPS is generally spaced out enough, that the two DPS groups would NOT be able to provide each other buffs, you would still get a situation, where you would want redundant buffing. Which would in turn, open up an opportunity where you would not only want that Enhancement Shaman on one side, but also the Death Knight DPS / Tank team on the other, to make sure all of your DPS were getting their essential buffs.

The same really goes for almost any sort of multi target, movement based fight, where your raid will be divided into regions. If anything, Blizzard has given themselves more room to accomplish such things.

Well, that really only brings about the same issues as there were Pre-BC. You had to downsize from 40 to 25, and see where the extra people would go. These types of things, tend to alleviate themselves, with the passage of time. You will certainly still want to bring up to 3 of a class, meaning that your shaman in total will probably go down, but they will come in a various number of specs. You can have a bit more back up in case of burn out, and some players will, inevitably, leave. On top of that, you have a brand new class that people will be wanting to try out. This will allow for some of your players to change classes / specs, to help accommodate the new types of raid you will inevitably be running.

I think that most guilds should be able to survive the changes, with very few adjustments. I don't think that most guilds will tend to lean towards this min / max, more so because it results in placing all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. If your main melee DPS buffers end up dying, and there's no one else to bring those buffs, what happens then? Your Feral druid DPS dies, which would normally mean that the Hunters just lost a big chunk of DPS as well as all those melee. But now, your Fury Warrior, is still alive, and can still give everyone that 5% crit.

It's more flexibility than a DPS who can't do it even to a slight degree. And don't forget, for the caster/healer side of things, the gear looks to be virtually identical so you don't even have to get a second set of gear for the most part.



I find it interesting people arguing here for "no really we won't min-max" when this is the boards claiming mages are useless because they lag ~120dps behind a warlock doing CoD and bring "nothing else to the raid" (although right now some of those same people are arguing saying that spellsteal, poly, counterspell *are* all excellent utility and reasons to bring a mage -- which is it, gentlemen?) and who bring more than 3 shaman just to stack bloodlusts even though that second lust isn't doing close to what the first one did for RDPS in the vast majority of guilds.

If the only thing holding people back from stacking hybrids or rogues is "but they won't find enough" then I'm not sure that's really a design that will withstand multiple years of game play.

I'm not sure if we're on the same page here. You're arguing that because Hybrids have the option of getting secondary and tertiary gear and specs we shouldn't be able to do as much damage as "pure" classes?

Sorry, but I really think you're insane. Right now I could tank because I'm a Paladin. I don't because my tanking gear is mostly kara crap and I would be a detriment to the raid attempting to fill that role. Getting 3 sets of gear takes a massive time and cost investment (ever had to enchant and gem 3 sets of tier gear? yeah, its quite the money sink).

The old system used to say "you bring utility and you bring lower DPS". They have clearly changed this on it's head. Everyone, pure classes included is bringing utility buffs and debuffs. Not only that, every single class has another class that brings an equal buff (except Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild, but 1 pally and Druid in a 25-man is pretty much guaranteed anyway).

That means if we take your idea that "hybrids can't DPS as well" they can have their positions replaced by a "pure" class that brings the same exact buffs/debuffs and better DPS, making there exactly zero reason that hybrid should exist. So what do you get then? Well I would assume all your hybrids would then be filling one role, healing, since you pure classes will never be able to touch that. Where does that leave us?

1.0

Do we really want to turn the clock back 2 years? I'm not saying that havign every class do near equal DPS is a good idea. It makes balancing classes for all content flat out impossible. But pigeonholing hybrids again because you're afraid they'll take your raid spot because they can collect a few off-set pieces is a pretty silly idea.