◊ Kyth

No, I'm saying it's a problem with the design when you mix hybrid and non-hybrid classes in a game like this and then make them interchangable on raids.

I don't know the solution if you accept their current list of buffs/debuffs and class designs as they are now, I'm not saying the solution is less dps, I'm saying it's a problem since a lot of people are posting here saying it's not a problem.


I do think it's a problem though, and a big one (due to issues with granularity in recruiting. If I have as many of each hybrid DPS class as I do pure DPS class on a raid, then you'll end up with 5-6 of the 3-spec hybrids and 3-4 of the 2-spec hybrids on a raid, leading 0-1 raid spots for the pure dps classes, meaning you either raid without a rogue when 'that guy' takes the night off, or you recruit 2 rogues, one of whom has to sit out from half the raids. Not so the shaman, where if one of my elemental shaman takes a night off resto can just respec and we can keep going, bringing an extra healer from another class. There's no option for the healing rogue to respec to DPS for that evening.)

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Duilliath

Honest answer ? Who the hell cares. If the morons want to take in 15 rogues because they think they're the reason Nihilum got their first kills - let them. It sorts out the really crappy players and gives them a home. Not as if most people give a rat's ass when they know what they're doing.

@ Kyth: I could respec Balance. I could also respec resto. Fat lot o' good that would do the raid when my healing kit is around Karazhan levels and my Balance gear even below that (hello green level 69 cloak and blue BoE robe). Even if I might be on top of DKP, I can forget about taking the Illidan staff before our locks/mages/shadow priests/whatever had their share. Similarly, I can forget about pretty much all the healing gear unless our Restos and possibly priests/shamans had their fill. +1700 healing or thereabouts ain't gonna cut it when we're killing Illidan. Showing up with +900 damage and not even hit capped will get me laughed out of the raid. And rightfully so.

 

flyingtoastr

Look at the converse of that though. If Mages, Warlocks, and Hunters do 15% more damage than any hybrid and bring the exact same raid buffs/debuffs why would you ever even consider bringing a ret pally or an elemental shaman? Now right now I think the way buffs are distributed is kinda wonky (Boomkins bring wayyyyyyyyyyyy too many buffs) but if they were equalized a bit more what would happen?

And again, you're still not addressing the gear gap.

To use an example from my guild, we have 4 raiding paladins. I myself have high level Ret and Holy gear but no prot gear to speak of (Tier 4 tanking gear doesn't work in Sunwell). Our full-time prot pally has Tier 5 level healing gear and no ret gear. Our other holy pallys have high level Holy gear, decent prot gear and bad ret gear. If our prot pally can't come one night on say Felmyst we can have our other holy pally respec and it works okay. He dies a bit more often and makes me work harder healing him, but it isn't the end of the world. What happens on Brut though when I can't come? None of our other pallys have the ret gear required to do the DPS needed, so we're SoL. What happens if all the pallys except for I are absent on a Felmyst try? Well my tanking gear is nonexistent so we're better off just calling the raid. The ability to respec doesn't mean you can fill those roles.

In progression content (assuming we don't get another stupid 8 month gap like BT>Sunwell) you will only have 1 set of gear acceptable in that tier. That's just the way loot works.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Anedris

Some people choose pure DPS classes (non-hybrids) precisely because they don't want to be that guy who always respecs when the healer doesn't show. They don't want to heal and they don't want to tank so they roll a class who can't do those things.

You can't penalize a DPS hybrid's DPS on the basis that they can respec to heal. Why on earth would you ever bring that hybrid to the raid? If you want a healer, you bring a healer. If you want a DPSer, you don't bring a suboptimal DPSer who can respec to heal.

Why would you have a raid with only one rogue? What's the point of stacking so many hybrids, given that almost all of their buffs are duplicated by someone else? I agree that if we see another nightmare of role balance like the Eredar Twins you'll have a point, since that encounter obviously favours any and everyone who can respec to heal, but as long as the raid designers keep healer/tank/DPS numbers within reasonable bounds there's no real reason to bring more than 3 of any class, be it a shaman or a rogue.

 

Vhad

I think my point got rightfully lost in my first post.

I'm overall very optimistic about this change for all the reasons that have been outlined in several posts. What I'm skeptical/worried about is the redundancy of hybrids once you get all the buffs you want in a raid. Naturally this will only be balanced through content design not favoring stacking 1 class to dps to make fights easier/trivial (from my first post). It's just ALOT of thought you have to put into each new encounter, and it would be very easy to tip the scales and make a near impossible encounter with a "normal lvl 80" setup that would want us to fill all those undefined raid spots with pure dps'ers. Unless ofcourse, hybrids and pure dps classes are going to be somewhat interchangeable.

I don't want to take more than a maximum of 3 per class to my raids, we do it right now cause of the obvious edge it gives, however that's simply just a result of how group making and synergy turned out to be in TBC.

Ofcourse we'll find a way to work around it, just like guilds had to with the 40->25 from vanilla to TBC. I just don't think it's as simple as has been suggested so far. Only raid content will tell, which is very different from changing the format from 40 to 25 man raiding.

What!?

 

◊ Praetorian

Why do people persist on transplanting consideration of WotLK changes into a pre-WotLK context? There's no such thing as +healing anymore. There's barely any such thing as "balance gear," even. There's spellpower leather that may have some secondary stats that favor one spec or the other, but which will otherwise largely be interchangeable.

 

flyingtoastr

That "secondary stat" does make a large difference though. "Healing style" gear may have more points invested in longevity stats which are nearly useless to any serious DPS. You're still getting the problem of bringing a suboptimal DPS/healer, which is exactly the case of now where we have "suboptimal" offsets because you can't really collect more than one set in progression.

And of course none of this applies to Enhancement, Feral, or Paladins in general given that they all wear radically different gearsets for their spec(s).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Duilliath

As an illustration, by and large. The gap will still remain in WotLK - even if the difference between Resto and Balance might well narrow, I can forget about using any feral gear for either. Paladins can forget about using Prot gear in as their healing outfit. Enhancement gear is radically different from Elemental, as I'm sure you know. The removed clutter will do nothing to merge Melee and Caster or Tank gear.

 

dinesh

As an aside, this sentiment is somewhat ameliorated by the fact the bosses get tuned over time as well, and while some fights are sometimes made more difficult, in general they get nerfed.

This means that guilds which are most likely to be willing to go to extremes to get the best possible performance are also the ones who will be facing bosses who are tuned to need to more, not that they will get trivial encounters to defeat.

Granted, not all bosses have this sort of dilution over time, but we see it over an over again - it's a repeating phenomenon in boss tuning and design.

 

◊ Kyth

I can only conclude you guys must be pre-Sunwell or run extremely large rosters. (or handwaving because you don't want to play more than just your DPS spec for your hybrid.)


We won twins *because* our DPS respec'd to healing so we could run the 11-12 healers necessary. Was their gear 100% perfect? No. Did it matter? Not in the least.

We also had a resto druid respec to tank Brutallus when we were learning him and one of our tanks was out.

None of the protadins we use in Sunwell are full-time prot, they're *all* healers who respec prot for that boss.


And this is before the WotLK gear, which is far more friendly to offspec usage.

Guilds like Juggernaut II, who are about to get KJ down despite rerolling on Mal'Ganis mere months ago are easily proving that skill outweighs gear.



(edit) to clarify: I am not saying the above posters are in a bad guild.

I am literally saying I have absolutely no clue how you guys are getting through sunwell without respecs.

You're sitting here arguing with me that even with WotLK gear *designed* so respecing is far easier, that you can't imagine respecing ever working, when as far as I know every guild is using respecing to get through Sunwell.

It wasn't meant negatively, it literally is meant in wonderment and "I can only conclude" because I don't know how else, other than a huge roster, you'd be coming from the perspective that someone can't respec even with today's gear and do a bangup job and get your guild through a boss.

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Anedris

Think about it though.

Right now, if you don't have enough healers, you have your hybrids respec. This is because hybrids can heal as well as any healer in the game (indeed, there are no pure healers, they're all hybrids). Now imagine if hybrids did say 15% less DPS (and I mean total DPS, not just personal) than pure DPSers to "balance" the fact that they can respec. Now M'uru is a bit of a DPS check, so those 5 hybrids who respecced for Twins are going to have to sit for M'uru, because they can't do as much DPS as a pure DPSer.

There's no point penalizing people because they can respec. This is what pre-BC was like, and it had a very simple outcome - all shamans, priests, paladins, and druids healed. Had there been a "pure" healer class that was 15% better at healing, there would have been no place for the hybrid classes at all in the top guilds.

Logistically, Twins was an abomination of an encounter and I hope it is never repeated. It's simply dumb to require that many healers, because yes, it necessitates a hybrid-heavy raid, a deep roster, lots of alts, or all of the above. Most encounters are not Twins. In most encounters, there is no place for a gimped DPSer which means that hybrid is either allowed to output the same DPS as a pure DPSer or that hybrid will be a full time healer.

 

GSH

Recruiting is also very different once you step down from the top tier of guilds. In the second or third tier, you take what you can get, and you sometimes you just aren't able to recruit a specific class. Even skill or class buffs pales compared to "actually shows up to raids."

As a personal example, when my old guild was attempting Void Reaver, we had no resto shamans or holy priests. Even though everyone says Void Reaver is a trivial fight, it was a bitch of a fight for us. To be honest, if VR had been tuned to a proper level for its placement, I don't think we would have been able to beat that fight, at least until we recruited some holy priests and shamans. Our leadership was trying to recruit, but when you're third tier, there's not a lot you can offer to classes which are rare or in-demand.

I think this change is aimed at guilds like mine, to allow us to still progress with odd or unbalanced raids, without having to trivialize the fights. The high end guilds are going to stack, regardless of what changes are made. If this change makes recruitment less of a headache for the lower tier guilds, then it is a win.

 

◊ Kyth

If any of this were true, we wouldn't have brought any of these "gimped" hybrids to raids pre-WotLK. And yet we did.

Why? Because the hybrids brought unique utility.

Unfortunately they still have much of that unique utility (brez, lust, blessings - only priests lost their stranglehold on significant boss utility), plus subsuming the dps classes' utility (e.g. there is nothing a lock can do, without talents, that another class can't do better outside of healthstones, which can be botted easily now that you can hold only one regardless of rank/imp-HS -- even brez trumps soulstone by a huge margin), plus getting equal DPS, plus still having the respec advantage. Where's the downside here? All they're missing is AE -- which is definitely key for some fights, but it's easy then to sub in an alt or two if your mage and lock are both out that evening.

And as you marginalize the dps classes more and more, as I said, you have the granularity problem in the roster. No one likes being the second guy when you only bring one to a raid, and he can't respec to fill another role. Sitting half the time sucks. 25-man is a challenging enough granularity issue.

Designing things so you end up with relatively few of an entire class is a far bigger granularity problem than having relatively few of just a spec.


Just because you can't think of another solution to the problem off the tip of your head other than "drop all hybrid dps by 15%" doesn't mean Blizzard's solution as it stands today on 8/31 is a good one.

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Hildegard

One point not mentioned yet (at least I didn't find it in any search) is about magic resistance. I think the current system is based on a very RNG value and would work better if the outcome was a bit more predictable. A flat damage reduction like armor for physical damage with a dimished value when stacking it further seems in my humble opinion as a good solution.

If this topic is not welcome in this thread please let me know and I will delete any text in this post.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Duilliath

Of course - we killed Illidan four times now. Sunwell was made for those who farmed BT/MH for 6-8 months. Naturally, you'll have off-spec gear up the wahoo. People hitting the place in a regular progression pace do not have that luxury. It's nice n dandy that you have Restos respec Feral for Brutallus. If we do that, they go splat, as Karazhan DPS pieces don't quite make for a proper tank set.

Do keep in mind where you are compared to most guilds. You're in a luxurious position where everyone has suitable gear, even for off-spec. You're in a luxurious position because, with 2 hour BT clears, you can attract well-geared raiders. Or, at the very least, have new raiders/alts up to par in a week or two. As the third-fourth guild on a server, you can forget about all that.

Being 'Pre-Sunwell' is hardly a crime. In fact, I'm starting to think it's giving us a more realistic view at these changes than those who are bored with their Sunwell farm runs.

 

◊ Kyth

Neither Serious Casual nor Juggernaut II farmed Illidan for 6-8 months, they went right from BT/MH to Sunwell. Both guilds are on KJ right now. I know from reading their forums that SC definitely has had people respecing as their roster shifted. They haven't seemed to have significant issues such that they'd rather recruit an extra-large roster than simply having people respec as they move through bosses.

The fact is that since you can pick up the offspec gear *while you are there in the raid performing your normal fuction*, it's actually more efficient time-wise to gear up an offspec than it is to gear up second person. Far less loot rots, and more people get geared up better in the same time period.


I'm not saying it's a crime, I'm saying if you haven't even tried having your people respec (because you're pre-sunwell) you aren't in a good position to evaluate how reasonable it is. It was in response to multiple people claiming it was unreasonable to expect a hybrid to be able to respec and perform in a raid adequately enough today.

Not to mention how much easier it will be with WotLK gear.

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◊ Praetorian

But NEEDING pretty much 2.5 of every class for the raid to be efficient isn't any better. That's the underlying issue.

Is it different than the TBC picture? Sure. We have six active shamans on our roster and bring 5 to every farming raid. On the other hand, we pretty much never have more than 2 mages or rogues, never more than 1 DPS warrior, etc. Are we going to have shamans sitting a lot more in WotLK? Sure. But that's not really qualitatively better or worse than having rogues and mages sitting. And moving away from group-based to raid-wide synergy adds a lot more flexibility in terms of being able to field a competent raid. If you have 35 raiders, 10 are going to be sitting at any given time. No way around that. But at least this way we also won't have situations where we need an extra DPS and are stuck because we only have 2 melee DPS around but have no more room in the enhance/battleshout synergy group, or where we may as well cancel our raid because we have no DPS warrior to provide battle shout and blood frenzy.

 

◊ Kyth

*Needing*, no. I was nervous with DK's as much as you were I think, imagining how big my guild would have to be to accomodate exactly 2.5 of each class in every raid.

But as I said, I think the unique utility should go to the DPS classes who can't fill multiple roles rather than those who can, otherwise you're better off raiding with a raid of hybrids since it covers every possible armor type, role, and almost all utility, plus can respec if someone is out or you need to bring extra dps/heal/tank to a particular boss.


As you know from other threads, I like this solution better than I liked group-specific buffs and a nightmare of rostering.

One solution proposed (Pewsey was pushing hardest for it) was -10% dps for hybrids. Another (mine) is to remove the unique utility from the hybrids and give it to mage/lock/rogue/hunter instead. Give rogues lust (remove it from shaman.) Give warlocks battle rez. etc.

There may be others. But just because we don't know of a better solution doesn't mean there aren't problems with this one. I'm frustrated with what I think is insistence that what we know on 8/31, plus increased hybrid DPS, is the best solution out there.


I don't think you'll have more shaman sitting, I think you'll have very similar raid comps because, why not. And over time, more hybrids and fewer pure classes.

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Leaflock

But this "unique utility" you keep talking about doesn't make sense in a WotLK context. Utility, in the BC sense, was bringing group buffs to make up for a lack of solo power. In Wrath, utility is being made un-unique through these raid buff/debuff changes. Beyond that, we're back to discussing the opportunity costs of swapping different classes/specs. The other "unique" abilities you're talking about hardly seem gamebreaking. You beat Twins because you had enough players capable of healing-- did you beat them because you brought extra Innervates and Battle Rezzes? A soulstone vs. a battle rez hardly seems to herald the slow demise of warlocks. As for Lust, the new cooldown on it ensures that the cost of bringing more shamans is the same as whatever other class you might consider for the role.

So, when we talk about needing to rebalance hybrids, the question becomes: can respeccing really be considered a "unique utility" that heavily outweighs any other benefits a "pure" class might bring? I think the answer, from a raid comp decision-making standpoint from fight-to-fight is no. If that actually does become a problem, it's a clear failure of design and of Blizzard's current stated intentions.

 

Last_Human

If the ability to respec is not considered as a balance point and a hybrid can output the same dps/necessary raid utility in a raid situation as an equivalent geared pure class why would a guild recruit a pure class unless they offered something unique to the raid?

It's not an easy thing to balance as the problem concerns both raid performance, guild roster efficiency and gearing efficiency.

Also bear in mind that for hybrids doing 25 mans the 10 man of the same instance will provide a suitable offspec set in addition to what you may pick up in the main raid, coupled with the increased mobility between caster dps and healing sets (retain the throughput at a cost to regen) I believe gearing up off specs will be considerably easier.

 

Anedris

Come on, pure classes DO offer unique things to the raid. From the top of my head...

- Hunter: Misdirection, no threat issues
- Warlock: Soulstone, CC
- Mage: CC
- Rogue: Cloak of Shadows (this is *huge* in Sunwell), stuns, good threat control (even better with the new ability giving them a mini-misdirect)

Mages and warlocks are perhaps a little weak, but assuming two of each class is a necessity (and is anyone arguing against that?) all that for example the third shaman brings is an air totem (unless the encounter lasts more than 10 minutes in which case you get another bloodlust). More to the point, classes that are weak in this department can simply be buffed. Give rogues some unique poison and so forth.

 

Leaflock

Because you're not making this evaluation in a vacuum. The two players you're deciding between will each offer something based in skill, personality, experience, and the various major and minor abilities their chosen spec and class brings (some of which Anedris just pointed out). This all factor in to guild roster decision-making. I'm not saying, for instance, that the fact druids can respec doesn't make them flexible. I'm saying: does that flexibility really weigh so heavily in hybrids' favor that you'd actually want to stack them on your guild roster?

For a moment, let's risk violating the Praetorian Edict and consider the BC case of feral druids and prot warriors. Early balance and gear issues being resolved, the two tanking classes became essentially equally capable of tanking most fights in the game. Each one has arguable benefits, but, gimmicky fights aside, they're pretty well-matched for the MT role. This case seems representative of Blizzard's goal for the homogenization of raid roles. You can tank with a Feral; you can tank with a warrior. Neither one's benefits or unique abilities so far outweighs the other's that you would consider eliminating one or the other solely on that basis. I'm looking at the macro, guild-recruitment level here. You'd add the more skilled player to your roster. And, if they're equally skilled, as so many of the hypothetical whining scenarios assume, wouldn't you want to take both?

 

Last_Human

Well of course pure classes all have their own little unique abilities- but so do hybrids. The intent was not to go over and point out every single possible raid useful ability a class has rather to say that if the required raid debuffs and functions are fulfilled (be it threat management, CC, survivability, whatever) and hybrids and pure class compete on an even footing I believe that the pure classes might be a slight disadvantage in demand by guilds.
The converse of course, if pure classes outdo hybrids by a significant margin, is true and then guilds would aim to minimize hybrids.

This is not an easy balance problem but is superior to what we have in tbc so far.

It doesn't necessarily have to be an active process of stacking, if we receive two feral druid apps today, if the are both of the same caliber but one of them has a really good resto set which one do you think we choose? Moving forward to WotLK if we receive a feral druid and rogue app for a melee dps slot (as both would provide roughly the same dps) and the feral had a good resto/moonkin set, again both of the same caliber, being honest I have to say I'd be hard pressed to take the rogue the way things are standing now.

 

Valen

In reality when you do recruitment, you will look for a certain class that benefits your current situation more. If for example you look for a warlock, and you don't find one in the appropriate time interval then you might take a mage. So the mage ends up being second priority.

Denying that class efficiency plays an important role in recruitment, even in wotlk, is just wrong. When you got room for one extra player, ofcourse you go for the one that brings more to your raid, even if the difference is minimal. You also got to remember that redundancy always plays a big role in guild management. You will want an extra shaman to make sure your now "raid-wide" and therefor even more important totems will always be there. Same goes for every buff.

That's why in general, the balance between utility and dps should be there. You would be surprised how much the skills like self res, combat res, innervate etc. matter, especially on first kills.

Some also pointed out that "Even if you were better off stacking same class X, you won't find them anyways". I'm sorry, I guess you missed the times that priests rerolled dwarf for fear ward. You can't base your design philosophy based on that. If a class is so much more funtional in a raid, sooner or later you will find enough people to recruit.

When we started working on vashj, we had zero shamans on regular basis. Now, 1-1.5 years later, every guild runs with 4-6. Same goes for shadow priests. Of course the difference will be smaller in wotlk, but the process of recruitment is exactly the same. You try to get what gives you the most benefit, and that will put some classes in a worse situation.

 

Tyrian

I will not be looking at future apps with a "We need a warlock/Shaman" attitude so much any more, it'll be more of a "Can this guy bring these buffs/debuffs to the raid?" mentality.

Recruitment will be much more about the player and their (shared) buffs/debuffs, less about the class. We all know that even a 'bad' warlock can achieve great DPS with shadowbolt spam. Recruitment in WOTLK is shaping up to be more about

- What buff/debuff categories can you fill
- Whats your level of skill

Again, some guilds can very specifically demand a certain type of spec/player/class and recruit that. I think i'll just be looking at the buff categories and seeking any class of good player who can fill it. Judging by how the designers are trying to shape WOTLK, class differences shouldn't be the determining factor in raid spots - at least to the extent they are now.