julored

This sounds like what you are describing, though it may be out of date: Raid Stacking 101 (A Dwarf Priest)

 

• Chicken

It's also most likely to prevent situations where you have someone respec in or out of their raid buffs based on who else is available to get optimum DPS, which would get annoying after a while. "Okay Death Knight, we have enough Shamans so we can use Windfury, so you can spec out of Icy Talons so you have higher DPS" etc.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

rayijin

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that all the hp buffs are limited to one class:

I'll add in commanding shout being warrior only, and in a 10-man it's most likely a choice between this and kings even if you do have a paladin. A warlock can provide blood pact but currently it's about half as effective as a warrior's shout.

Seems like a fairly big oversight. It's not as big a dps boost as other buffs, but it gives "beginners" a lot more of a buffer to work with (HP) when learning new encounters / being undergeared for an encounter.

Thinking back to some of the hardest fights to learn in early TBC days, the lack of kings could make or break a tank's survivability on an encounter. Obviously this is dependant on tuning, but a group without a priest or paladin would be at a very significant HP disadvantage compared to one with every stamina buff available.

In general, wasn't until later fights that the demand for higher DPS began to be more critical than tank/raid survivability.

For a raid where I take my friends / beginners to WoW, I'd rather give everyone 20% more hp than 20% more DPS.

Suggestion: Make kings and mark give the same bonus. Make fortitude and commanding and blood pact give the same bonus. Balance around players having less HP total, as opposed to a perfect beginner 10-man needing a warrior, priest, paladin and druid just to get the stamina buffs.

 

Pheroz

Commanding and Blood pact are already redundant/Interchangeable.

HP doesn't matter much though. Fights where having set amount of HP for anyone other than the tank were few and far between.

And I cant imagine any 10man being tuned so tightly that unless your horrible undergeared for it (IE, showing up to ZA's with 0 epics), your going to need any more than 2 of those HP increasing buffs for survivability.

 

Tuftears

What about the Lynx boss in ZA? That always struck me as a 'tank check' in the sense that even with saber lash split between two tanks, you still wanted your tanks to both have 17-18k HP to give you a cushion to heal before a follow-up hit could take your MTs down. This can be a difficult number to achieve for some tanking classes such as paladins.

I think it's a legitimate point. Making Kings and Mark similiar would make sense and ease the necessity for paladins to spec into Kings if a druid is handy, and vice versa.

upstart feline miscreant (47 feral/14 resto)

 

flyingtoastr

Kings would have to be made baseline then. GC specifically stated they are never make a percentage increase to all states baseline because it is too powerful, so it would also be nerfed to the stats, resistances and armor that mark is.

 

Duilliath

I also recall GC stating fairly early in the beta that they were thinking of making MotW 'as powerful' as BoK. Don't have the exact quote at hand, but can't be too hard to dig up.

I think a more pressing reason not to do so is that, quite simply, Druids (and Moonkins in particular) already bring a slew of important Raid buffs. They most definitely do not want the (arguably) most important Tank buff coming from a Balance druid as well.

 

GSH

MotW could be 5% baseline, and then Imp MotW could bring it up to 10%. That way we get overlap, but the baseline vs talent really isn't an issue. (You could even make a 5% Kings baseline, and have Imp Kings bring it to 10%.)

 

flyingtoastr

It's not an issue of "could it be done", it's an issue of this comment by GC a while ago (in response to a "why the hell isn't kings baseline yet?"):

(Source)

The most elegant solution really would be exactly as you describe, but because of the "don't want such a powerful buff baseline" (which I really don't understand given the history of Innervate, Evocation, Symbol of Hope, etc.) I don't think we'll see it.

 

• sadris

I always wondered how MOTW would fare if it didn't have so much wasted "item points" (?) on the resistances

It does, however, make sense to have MOTW match BOK for the purpose of consolidation.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

flyingtoastr

On a side note about consolidation, can anyone think of a reason Wrath of Air doesn't have a counterpart? 5% spell haste is absolutely massive DPS and HPS boost to the raid, and given how the devs want to move away from the "stack 7 shamans and win!" attitude of TBC you would think they wouldn't leave such an incredible unmatchable buff on the class.

 

• Adoriele

Perhaps because Wrath of Air can be dropped by any shaman, which you're almost guaranteed to have in order to cover the other raid buffs, and they don't stack because they're raidwide, so having more than one shammy doesn't mean more Wrath of Air. They don't need to add a counterpart, it inherently neither encourages nor discourages stacking.

 

flyingtoastr

Right, but the argument about BoK is "if you don't have a pally you're screwed because no one else has it". Isn't WoA the same exact thing?

 

Ashen

I think the issue with BoK is that it actually could hurt some specs, as opposed to WoA which IS baseline, and the only sacrifice is not dropping another type of Air totem (The only other kind BEING Windfury, which now has a counterpart in Death Knights). For BoK, you have to put some points into Protection, which isn't necessarily the best option. Retribution gives some talents that are better for a Holy Paladin. And the Retribution Paladin (IF you have one) has Might to possibly buff as well. And then, Protection Paladins would probably prefer their 21 pointer buff than using this one. So.... that's the problem.

 

Sebalot

I think the biggest danger when it comes to stacking is survival advantage. Mages and rogues that can CloS/Iceblock stuff is one example of classes that would be very valuable on the newer versions of Archimonde/Brutallus. Warlocks have a great talent in the new and improved Nether Protection. For obvious reasons raid damage tend to be magical in nature, otherwise we squishies keel over quickly.

The only abilities that comes close to special survival skills when it comes to stacking is combat res and blessings (up to a third). So I suspect Blizzard has to watch carefully so mage and roguestacking doesn't become an issue, simply because of their abilities to survive Very Nasty Stuff(tm) , even if it would fit with the recycling of Naxxramas.

As for flexibility: with the marriage of healing and spell damage into spell power all your healing priests/shamans/druids should be able to turn into competent casters at the cost of 50g without having to rely on stuff that would be sharded anyway. That should help a lot with keeping raid roster smaller than previously. At least to those guilds that are open to the idea that your amazing healer perhaps is capable of producing decent dps too.

 

Bohemienne

The 50g limit on respec fees costs less and less relative to everything else in the game, just as the need to respec more frequently has grown. (How many serious raiders had a dedicated "PvP spec" at level 60 that they respecced to every single week? With the rare exception of tanks and maybe a few healers who wanted to melt faces, DPSers rolled into battlegrounds with the exact same specs.) 50g is not steep at all at level 70, even though people respec far more frequently as arena teams and tricky Sunwell fights dictate, and if the fee remains 50g it will be exceedingly trivial relative to the average level 80's cash flow. I'd much rather keep the same token cost than a debilitating 12-hour our any-hour cooldown. We have raid members who might respec three or four times a night in Sunwell (warlocks and pallies tanking for particular fights come to mind) and then respec post-raid for arena teams. While Blizzard shouldn't design entire zones with the expectation that the entire raid will spend half the night at their trainer, it's better than locking players out from respecs completely in order to "simplify" raids.

 

Sumie

Here's what I'd like to see done with respecs -- to make it more fluid while at the same time retaining character identity.

Each player upon hitting max level 80 creates one, and only one, default spec. You should be able to "reset" to this default spec for free at a trainer, with no cooldown.

At a trainer, you should have the option to either clear all your talents for 50g, change your default spec for 50g, or unlearn talents one by one for 2-5g each. This way you're not penalized for making slight mistakes. Moreover, you can min/max your talent points accordingly based on your current raid composition.

As for respeccing mid-raid, Blizz should give one of the professions the ability to "summon" a trainer to the spot, much like a repair bot.

 

rayijin

Pre-consolodation (or even pre-tbc), the most game breaking raid/group buffs were:

1) Salvation
2) Kings
3) Windfury

1) Was fixed by being baked in.
2) Still problematic.
3) Was fixed by being nerfed repeatedly, and finally given to multiple classes.

Suggestion to blizzard: If kings is so game-breakingly powerful that they can't give it to any other class, why not remove it and balance around not having it, just like with salvation?

With regards to fortitude/mark, perhaps making those two buffs equal would be more acceptable, as neither buff is scaling.

 

Totemtoter

I don't think survival advantages will matter for stacking nearly as much as the remaining unique buffs. Assuming players are smart enough to not kill themselves, ice block is a lot less useful to the raid than an innervate.

 

Duilliath

With that argument, we can entirely discount Battle Res or Ankh.

 

Exiliad

There aren't that many unique buffs left. And it seems like Blizzard is intent to spread any remaining ones left so that there are no buffs/debuffs that are unique to a class.

After you've fulfilled your buff/debuff quota with the appropriate classes, stacking for survival will definitely be popular. Have we not seen the precedence of soulstoning a majority of the raid already in TBC? If all dps classes perform evenly (as has been stated is the intent) then clearly you're going to get the edge by stacking survival.

 

Pheroz

Then why don't we see it in practice already?

I understand Brutallus is tuned in a way that your DPS needs to be so spot on that you can't bring a bunch of rogues, mages and pallies and just remove more then half the burns. But Felmyst is a perfect example of a fight where survivability is king and the DPS requirements are tuned to the point of perfect optimization not being necessary.

Are guilds really sitting warlocks for added mages to try and get a higher % chance that the encapsulate can be removed?

Do people bring shamans becuase they can get up when they die?

IF stacking survivability is key, if the most important thing is not dying, that's far more determined by the player then the class. Idiots with ice block will stand in fire. Excellent raiders will survive the kitchen sink.

If I'm stacking survival, I'm rarely thinking about class, and almost always thinking about the player.

 

nfw

Survival is easy to balance, they can just make it so the really nasty stuff cannot be removed; or jump to someone more important instead.

 

Exiliad

I see this argument more often than I'd like. I'm not claiming class will supercede idiocy when it comes to raid composition. As far as I'm concerned, idiots shouldn't be in the raid regardless of what class they are. That said, assuming your players are in fact paying attention to things other than just the <insert favorite dps/heal/threat meter here> then clearly classes that have soulstone / ankh / battle rez / ice block / bubble / CloS will be preferred over ones that don't to fill the remaining 10+ spots once buffs/debuffs are taken care of.

 

Sydane

It's a fine line to walk. Is it good or bad that a terrible player can do good dps and stay out of the fire as a warlock because all they have to do is spam shadowbolt and watch for fire? Do you give credit to someone who knows their limits and takes an easy class, or someone who chooses to be a healer but struggles at times because there is so much multi-tasking to do? Sometimes the difference between good and average is nothing but luck. In over 50 attempts I've never been ghosted by Teron. Not even once. Is that any different than the rogue who has used a well timed vanish to avoid them all?

I think often judging the difference between good and not is more marginal than those of us on forums like this one would like to think. We also get accused of being "spreadsheeters who can't really play," which is like the old "book sense but no common sense" argument that is so stupid. I know people I personally don't consider good players who have cleared most of Sunwell. Yet you could argue that you can't clear Sunwell without a raid full of good players. So much is subjective and little more than perception, and I think in the end, even at the highest level, it just as often comes down to playing with who we like, or who has convinced us they are good, far beyond anything that can truly be measured empirically.

Empathy does not imply approval.