Lamaros

I think the suggestion has merit, but the problem is that if we take party buffs of Shamen and allow them to be raidwide don't we just then turn to the class with the next best party buffs and boost their numbers instead?

If you are going to gain a significant advantage from certain buffs in parties then whichever class provides the best buffs is going to be in demand, changing shamen totems will only pass this issue on, not outright fix it.

 

Prinsesa

Which class would that be, then?

Hunters? I doubt Ferocious Inspiration nor Trueshot Aura is worth stacking raids for, and Expose Weakness is already the kind of "great buff, but raid-wide" angle we're looking for.

Druids? ILOTP isn't worth stacking raids for. It's possible Improved Moonkin Aura might be, but that's assuming the currently wildly overpowered version actually makes it to Live and stays that way.

Paladins? Ret Paladins are already limited to just one by virtue of their mechanics, and Paladin Blessings in general are the kind of thing raid-wide totem buffs are trying to emulate.

Mages? Both the Winter's Chill and Improved Scorch debuffs are already in the same boat Expose Weakness is in.

Priests? Misery and Shadow Weaving, again in the same boat as Expose Weakness. VT is a concern, but WOTLK is nerfing the group gain from VT while giving casters more mana regen options.

Rogues? Hemo(/Expose Armor?) is in the same boat as EW.

Warrior? Sunder Armor and Blood Frenzy are in the same boat as EW.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Anedris

A couple points:

- Several people have touched on this already, but the paradigm should NOT be one of every class/spec in a raid. I would love to go back to 40-person raids but only if someone else was organizing everything for me (and yes, I'm the guild and raid leader so no one would be). They were a logistical nightmare. I like the smaller raid size and I think what Blizz should aim for is to make every class/spec bring something worthwhile (whether in personal DPS or in group/raid benefits) and no class/spec essential. The other factor that makes the "one of every class/spec" idea fanciful is, as already pointed out, healer numbers. As long as raids require more than five healers you're going to have to have duplicates of the healing specs.

I like the raid-wide totems idea. We're on Brutallus now and I am very much noticing how gimped the groups that I can't find a shaman for are.

- Regards small-group content, a lot of people have mentioned hybrids being poor at this due to lacking a CC. What if they just gave every hybrid a CC on the same level as polymorph (or at least seduce/trap)? (It seems to me this would make shamans at least fine in 5-person content - bloodlust is ungodly good when it affects your entire "raid" (a.k.a. 5-person group) and the boss fight only lasts 1-2 minutes.)

 

Prinsesa

One would have to take into account the PvP implications of such a change. Instead, giving Warriors (and DKs) enough multi-mob tanking abilities to make them comparable to Paladins would be another way of getting hybrids consistently into 5-man groups while minimizing impact.

The Thunder Clap and Shockwave abilities and other Prot ability/talent changes seem to be moving in this direction.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Lamaros

It's more a general point from a design standpoint. As long as they are making party only buffs then the opportunity is there for those buffs to become significant enough to force group makeup. If what we want to do is get away from a situation where a specific spot in a group is reserved for a specifc class or spec then all group buffs need to become more or less trivial, or more or less equal.

 

◊ Kyth

I understand that you view it this way, and I understand your reasonings, but speaking as the class who is being reduced down to one element in my nuking tree with the current WotLK changes (shadow nerfed, and the new talents only affect fire), I'm watching the mage trees very very carefully, because if you all run to frost or arcane, my destruction tree is no longer a valid raid build.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to totally dismiss scorch.

By your logic, since we don't have any frost or arcane damage, and since our shadow lock puts up CoS and one of our fire locks always puts up CoE, those are also personal debuffs so shouldn't have any bearing on this discussion. (particularly since if you mages go away from fire to use the rest of the aspects of those debuffs, our dps drops tremendously. Slightly less so if the priests stop using our CoS and we lose shadow vulnerability.)



That aside, while I disagree with some of the minor points of Gurg's post (I would never, if dps were equal with a lock+CoD and a mage, take a CoD lock over a class that makes trash easier, can iceblock/blink out of bad luck on the boss, has more range, and doesn't require any additional healing beyond what a normal ranged class requires), the general thrust is sound, and I've been very much hoping that something like this will be a part of WotLK.

CoE/CoS in particular just flat out needs to go and never should've made its way into TBC. We should've had CoMagic (or CoV or whatever) from the start. (And CoR really needs to be 5 minutes, not 2 minutes.)


As for all the ideas to make warlocks not a dps class:

WoW so far has avoided making support classes, and the ones that are closest are all hybrids and able to play in multiple roles. I'd far rather Warlock curses be reduced in power and appropriate dps increases done to the various mage/spriest specs than play a class that can't do anything but DPS and can't do that really well but "I can cast this curse once every 5 minutes! and, umm.... maybe banish something somewhere.... oh and I made healthstones 10 minutes ago."

Mages do not like their active raid utility (good post a few posts above mine detailing that), they'd rather be warlocks: nukers and not able to do much beyond that because it'd reduce their own dps. But pure passive utility, which is what warlocks have (curses, HS's, the occasional gimmick fight for soulstone), isn't exactly awesome design either.

The problem with giving warlocks more utility is that we already have tons -- it's just either an overpowered dps boost (curses), or doesn't apply on raids because it comes from our pets. Try to give us more utility and we become overpowered in any situation in which we can use pets. Unfortunately that results in a fairly bland raiding class, which would only get worse if you knock them down to the hybrid level of dps just because they cast a curse once every five minutes.

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Mearis

Gurg, you missed the elephant in the room though. Resto shamans aren't just taken for the totems, though the totems are certainly huge - chain heal is right now the best heal in the game to cover for heavy non-constant raid damage. CoH is absurdly powerful, but is limited by groups, and very many abilities do not target players by groups.

CH spam is just amazing throughput and incredibly mana-efficient. While I agree with everything else in your post, raids would still be stacking resto shamans just for the healing at this point in the Sunwell era of insane AoE damage.

 

Naze

accidental dual post

 

Naze

Rather than making shaman buffs (and other buffs) raid wide, whether they be full power or some diluted version, here is a alternate solution:

* Buffs are retooled similar to elixirs.
Screenfulls of buffs are a memory. Jamming a shaman into every group is no longer useful. Exploiting synergies requires serious consideration of tradeoffs. Raid boss tuning becomes easier.

* Make roles overlap even more.
Shamans will not be the only effective buff class. Nor will they be the only effective multi-target heal class. Nerf WF totem inline with other weapon imbues, allow rogues to poison my MH, etc.

* Include talents to make multi-role talent specs more viable.
Classes remain unique because they fulfill a *unique combination* of roles.

Bullets 2 and 3 happened somewhat already in late TBC patches. I expect bullet 1 in WotLK.

 

Hate Monkey

No, it's not so much that mages don't like their active raid utility, it's just that mages excel at being kings of cc and control on trash, and that's where it ends. When was the last time since Majordomo that a mage was required to use Polymorph? You could say M'uru, but that varies with strategy, and if you say Akama, failed boss designs fail. Sure we gained a non talented Ice Block, and we have benefited greatly from it, but it's still a long way from the actual raid benefits warlocks give.

You see, when it comes down to actual boss fights, mages bring jack shit nowadays. Sure Imp Scorch is nice for the Fire Locks now, but I'll be damned if mages ever got a maledicted CoE from a warlock. Not to mention Imp Scorch stacks to 5 and only lasts 30s, and only affects Fire, why the hell can't it affect Frost too? CoE affects both, lasts 5min.

But this isn't a "Mages suck" thread, it's about how to balance class issues, and bring mages up(?) or warlocks down(?) to the same levels.

If Nature and Holy ever get merged into an existing curse, or a new curse all together (this would be a failure), it would do wonders to bring those magic schools up to the level of existing classes, and make them a much more viable option raiding. But there is still the failure of such debuffs as Stormstrike, Imp Scorch, Expose Armor, Expose Weakness, Blood Frenzy, Imp FF, and Shadow Weaving. Whether it be from the duration, how the debuff is refreshed, or just the way the debuff acts, they all fail as debuffs, but also increase rdps substantially, so that's where the problem occurs. Expose Weakness stacks with Blood Frenzy, Imp Scorch stacks with CoE, so why doesn't Expose Armor stack with Sunder Armor? Why is the Stormstrike debuff much more powerful for an Elemental Shaman or a Moonkin than the Enhancement Shaman?

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

 

• constantius

As a note for those who are comparing CoH to CHeal: this will not be a valid comparison in WotLK, so you should assume that if something comes along to replace CHeal, it's not coming from priests.

(Current leaks on CoH put it as a 8 second cooldown *raid-wide* instant-cast AE heal)

This makes CHeal even more valuable, and likely contributes to continued shaman stacking.

Also, re: Disc Priest regen -- current numbers put the cap-out on their group-wide regen at ~ 100 Mp5. Tops. Shadow priests will still be able to pull 250-300 with the scaling to dps and the VT changes. You won't bring a Disc priest for Rapture, you'll bring him for Grace.

[e] As much as mages cry about warlocks bringing more raid utility, Arcane Brilliance is actually a reasonable buff, and one that is integral to modern raids. Warlocks bring dps curses, you bring a passive mana/crit buff. It's not the same thing, but it's comparable when it comes to looking at what you bring to the table. Add Counterspell and Decurse to the list; I'm ignoring Spellsteal since it's gimmicky, like Tranq Shot.

Don't try to make warlocks out to be all-powerful and boo-hoo-hoo poor widdle mages don't have anything to be proud of ... get real. Mages are a powerful and viable class, and attempts to make them seem less than warlocks are really not worthy of this forum.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

james

I'd say this is more about stackability. As I primarily play a Holy Priest, my class is said to have very little stackability except for "our awesome healing power". Now it's often tempting to think that the solution to a classes woes would be to give every class some level of stackability - give mages auras, priests Blessings, give druids totems, etc.

But I think that they should make classes LESS stackable. By less stackable, I mean less desireable after the first of that particular spec, or certainly not stackable past 3.

Paladins could have their Blessing system reworked to offer a similar system to elixirs, i.e. Guardian Blessings (Blessing of Light, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Salvation), Battle Blessings (BoW, BoM, something else).

For shamans, shadowpriests, I would just increase the group size to 10. I would leave the raid size at 25 (or maybe 26) but I would increase the maximum amount of people allowed in 1 "raid party group" to 10 people.

For Karazhan/casual friendly WotLK 10-mans, everyone is in the same group. Your new raid leader doesn't have to worry about group synergies, he gets them given to him.

For 25 mans, you'd have a lot of flexibility. Some raids would run with 2 groups of 10, 1 group of 5, some would run with 2 groups of 8 (ranged + melee DPS), 1 group of 9 (Tanks + Healers). It wouldn't look as pretty in Grid, though. I really like the idea of having a shadowpriest in the MT group with the healers, providing a constant VE based HOT.

For 5 man instances, only 5 of the 10 slots would be used.

 

Mearis

I agree. Chain heal right now is the main reason for resto shaman stacking, simply because every other healer cannot even approach the throughput that shamans offer in most raid healing situations.

I am convinced we could kill twins with 4 resto shamans not using their totems easily enough, but there's no replacement for talented 4-piece t6 chain heal.

 

◊ Kyth

And this is why these conversations go nowhere, and why I wasn't even going to post on the thread. http://elitistjerks.com/759623-post75.html is the post I was referencing with a commentary on the non-polymorph utility aspects of mage that you are trying to ignore.



I agree with Mearis on the Chain Heal point, but that's similar to the mage/warlock point here: Gurg I think was trying to talk about pure dps and debuff/buff aspecs of the classes.

Unfortunately whenever you do, the conversation inevitably turns to other aspects. The role of decurse/counterspell/nova/survivability versus banish. The role of chain heal versus the far weaker (with the WotLK changes to CoH) AE heals etc.

It's hard to separate them in people's minds.

That said, I'm not sure anyone would disagree with the premise of "you should not be obliged to take more than two of one class to a raid." The question is just what changes to make, and what that does to rest of the class desireability if you make them.


That all said, player reports of class imbalance are almost always greatly exaggerated. Drow took 4 mages to their M'uru kill and 1 hunter -- does that mean mages are very overpowered and all the mage complaints are wrong? Other guilds swore you couldn't do it without two perfect melee groups, with 4 rogues, 2 dps warriors, and 2 enh shaman -- does that mean casters are too weak? We and quite a lot of other guilds took a perfectly balanced raid (except for the four shaman) and didn't feel the need to stack any other classes whatsoever.

I think being concerned about what a handful of guilds are doing on their KJ kill and using that as the basis for declaring a class underpowered or overpowered is not a good road to travel. Classes will never be 100% the same, so one class will always have an edge, and those with the rosters/drive to exploit it will. The question is, can the content be completed reasonably with a balanced raid?

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Maledict

If you're going to contribute, you need to at least have some basis in reality. There is absolutely no comparison between a paltry +40 to intellect, and 6% more physical DPS and 10% more magical DPS for the entire raid + Soulstones + Healthstones. None at all. Calling the games weakest buff "integral" to the raid is beyond ridiculous. It isn't comparable at all, and you make the rest of your arguement pointless by invoking it. Mages bring a weak buff, and have a couple of fights build around their other abilities (Basically spellsteal). Warlocks bring the most powerful DPS increasing buffs in the game, and have a couple of fights built around their other abilities (mostly tanking, e.g. Illidan, Capernian etc). How on earth you think the two are comparable is just...scary. Especially as you also happily ignore the main point of Praetorian's post - in that you bring MORE to the raid by adding in extra warlocks, whereas by adding in extra mages you don't add anything at all. Mages and rogues leech buffs off others, warlocks add more the more you bring. Mages do not stack. Warlocks stack extremely, extremely well.

You should at least be arguing that mages bring Amplify Magic, a buff that actually is very powerful on most fights, and that most guilds should be using more often.

 

panny

Anyone comparing TBC Warlocks to vanilla warlocks needs to remember that vanilla raids were 40-man. Back then, 2-3 of one class was a crap representation of the class. Now, it's perfect.

I don't think Chain Heal is a big issue, it's an advantage that Resto Shamans have healing localized raid damage, but not an overwhelming one.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

• constantius

You entirely missed *my* point, which isn't surprising, since this is a mage vs warlock discussion, where everyone happily goes off into their little corner of the universe and makes it out as if somehow their class is being robbed. Mostly mages, I've noted ... honestly, you guys whine so much. Notice how I said "it's not the same thing" -- my point was not that somehow you should compare AI to CoS or CoE. It was that the classes bring those buffs to the table when being considered for raid spots. And if you're going to do a valid comparison, you have to consider all of the factors ... not just yell about Imp Scorch vs CoE.

You're not warlocks. Get over it. You're still a valuable class, that does reasonably high dps, while bringing raid benefit. No raid would ever run without one mage, and most would say 2 is reasonable. Some bring 4+. Yes, you don't have a lot of synergy or raid-stacking built into your class. You still bring a passive buff to the table that everyone who uses mana *does* want, along with a more active one in the form of Amp Magic, as you noted.

Warlocks having curses which are amazing doesn't somehow make you less powerful. How many classes truly can say, at this point in WoW Raiding, that they are desired for raid "stacking", where stacking is 3+? Do you really think you are losing your raid spots to warlocks? Most of the time for us, the mages lose their raid spots to either shamans or shadow priests; we run 2-3 locks. 3 is desired, obviously, for the range of curses ... but you know, we bring 3 paladins too, to get 3 blessings. OMG WE RAID STACK FOR PALADINS! Maybe the priests should be scared ... except, you know, somehow I'm not, even though the paladins out-heal me on a variety of fights in Sunwell.

Mages used to be the cock of the walk, when rolling ignites ruled the day and Naxx guilds (my own included) brought 6-8 to a raid. Just what exactly do you all think would be required to make you *happy*? Note that you probably can't justify beating rogues, ever. Or being any higher than hunters. So I'm a little confused as to what you all *want*, since you seem to think that mages are so hard done by.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Maledict

Please, go and re-read the original post in this thread. Then realise this is about more than mages versus warlocks, the post was about stacking raid synergies and how some classes get better the more you add, whilst others don't do *anything*. You are gibbering on about stuff that makes you look stupid and as if you aren't reading the damn thread.

Sure, many guilds run with 3 mages - mine does, as the players behind them are extremely good. That doesn't change the fact that were those players playing warlocks, they would be better, no questions asked. And that's no a mage versus warlock thing, it's a class stacking thing - the more warlocks you add, the better the raid. Again, see the first post in the thread. You get NOTHING for stacking extra rogues and mages, whilst there's a very good arguement that the minimum number of warlocks you bring is 3, and due to their stacking any on top of that is golden. Same for shaman - is there any guild that isn't running with at least 4 in SWP, or that wouldn't want 4?

Again, please re-read Gurg's post and understand this isn't about stupid class rivalries, it's about the fact that buffs and raid synergies are making certain classes far more desired than they should be, and that stacking them is far better than having an even spread of classes. The ideal is for every class to have 2 slots, then you fill out the rest of the raid as you can. Gurg pointed out exactly why warlocks stack better than mages, everyone knows this to be the case, so the aim is to try and fix that issue - not pretend AI makes a difference, or just write it all off as "mage whining" and "you're not considering everything". Doing so is a disservice to the aim of the thread, and pretty crappy as far as arguements go full stop.

Also, I never raided Naxx, so I don't care what you experienced then. It's two years later, get over it.

 

Varrah

Avoiding the topic of why X class is worse than Y class...

I may have missed it, but has any serious discussion been given to the bigger groups idea? Ten seems like a reasonable number, so I'll use it as my assumption for now. Five man groups, click "convert to raid" and the groups become able to fit ten.

What would be the benefits? The downsides?
Benefits:
Less of a need to stack party buffers.
More fun party chat!

Downsides:
Stacking of too many buffs? (melee might get LOTP, WF, GOA, FI, etc). This could be controlled with group size? (I'm becoming partial to the idea of groups of 7).



The other issues of stackability are what a class brings to a raid.

Well, obviously there's going to be *some* balance issues, and we'll have to live with it, but serious discussion seems a bit premature, at this point. How good is the druid AOE hot going to be, for instance? If there's lots of boss fights that are friendly to AOE hots, then obviously druids will become more powerful. And theoretically we want all classes to give the same rDPS increase, but obviously this is going to require adjustments, which blizzard does (anyone remember when mages had a coefficient reduction if they talented for faster fireballs?) But we (and blizzard) won't really know what those issues are until release.

The only other issue that is begging to be addressed in terms of stackability is warlock curses. The fact that this takes a category of it's own suggests that it should be fixed. I'm hesitant to introduce +10% magic damage, as it will have big effects. Off the top of my head, other than hybrid classes gaining DPS, is the issue of pally threat skyrocketing. Sure, threat is not an issue for skilled warriors, but you don't want unskilled pallies having threat on par with the best warriors.

As a final aside, I'd like to point out that it's not all about optimization, either. Those that raid content a bit less than optimally with slightly less skilled players should still have a bar set for them. The pally threat issue is just one such example that would become imbalanced at a less hardcore level.

 

Snagawaga

No, the shamans are about the utility, not the heals. A priest can do the same raid healing assignements as a shaman. I've done them as a priest in tier6 and on 4 bosses in sunwell.

 

Mearis

This seems to be 'you are weaker than warlocks, deal with it'. I am not sure if that's how you meant for it to sound, but read it again.

Considering that most encounters are now focusing exactly on that type of damage, that's a pretty big advantage. If druids had a very strong advantage over warriors on tanking 'mostly physical damage mobs' could you dismiss it if 95% of the encounters are exactly of that kind?

You can usually use a CoH priest in place of a shamans on a few fights, but there's several fights where the damage is localized by position but not by group. As a dumb example, using chain heal on the main tank to splash heal the melees is a great way to provide extra healing on the tank and extra ancestral fortitute uptime, but most of the time circle of healing on the tank won't hit the melees.

 

• constantius

Some classes get better the more you add, basically without limit. This it the situation with shamans. You can easily run with 5 shamans in a raid; I've seen 6 and 7 done without any net loss, when the extras are Restos. This is a very real problem, and one that presumably can be solved through creative tweaking of totem mechanics.

Some classes get better the more you add up to a *static* limit. This is a different state, and one that paladins and warlocks (and shadow priests) belong to. You don't really need or want more than 3 paladins. You don't really need or want more than 3 warlocks. You don't really want more than 2 shadow priests -- their mana return is awesome, but their dps suffers tremendously to pay for it, so the tradeoff is fairly severe when you bring a 3rd.

Sure, you can bring more ... but it's suboptimal. If you bring 4 warlocks, then you start pushing yourself into a caster-heavy raid, and you could just bring 3 hunters instead, because hunter stack really nicely up to 3 in their own group, and can do even higher dps than warlocks on some encounters *while* providing non-threat-worry-ful dps.

And finally, some classes just stand on their own. They don't stack particularly well, but they do their job inside a context. Rogues are one of these. Rogues do awesome dps, but they require very precise group compositions to do it, and don't stack particularly well in 1s -- you need to build melee groups (a point Gurg makes in his original post). So if you want to bring 3 rogues, you better be prepared to bring 2 enh shamans, and so on ...

My point is that mages belong to the 3rd class, and easily justify 2 raid slots. They may not justify a 3rd. If the objective of this thread is to suggest ways to make *every* class viable in 3+ raid slots without some inefficiencies, I think I missed Gurg saying that ... as far as I could tell, the objective was to discuss ways to *reduce* raid stacking and the promotion thereof.

Warlocks getting CoMagic and CoPhysical drops them down to a 2+ world; mages already live there. That's balance, unless I'm missing some reason mages need buffs?

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Mearis

That's completely different at least from how I read your previous post. Gurg is suggesting a nerf to warlock DPS such that mages would outdamage a warlock using a utility curse - that's probably a 10% nerf or so. I got the impression you believed the status quo was OK, which is completely different from what you are saying now.

 

Kegsta

Mages:
Always have been and always will be kings of 5 mans, and most trash pulls in raids, Polymorph is your raid utility, it just doesn't work on bosses. Imagine clearing to Kalecgos if every mob was immune to CC, would not be fun times.
Amp magic is a nice little buff for most fights it sunwell, its just stupidly tedious to apply.

Warlocks:
Do a little too much damage, the pet and dot class that doesn't use either just seems a bit broken. With the massive AE damage going around, a 13k hp, unlimited mana, 20% easier to heal, ranged dps which is the highest damage dealer in the game that also provides massive boosts to raid damage. They also got given the best AOE in the game which was a bit much. Add in soul stones and health stones and you can understand why mages are sad.
What can be done?
Nerf one of the many shadow multipliers they have, having that many % multipliers is just nuts, I love the curse of vulnerability idea since i play an elemental shaman who only gets misery as a multiplier.
My alt lock loves affliction, but with every item sporting crit and haste the spec just can't compete, a 41+ point talent for affliction that converts crit and haste % into + damage for dots is what I would like to see in WOTLK.

Shamans:
Since we run with lots of shamans (4-6) I haven't personally experienced the problems other are having by not being able to recruit enough of them, most of our shamans are rerolls, we didn't use an enhancement until sunwell, one of our MT's alts is now our main enhancement shaman for sunwell.
From an elemental POV shamans are about right, doing around 75-80% of the dps of a pure class as well as providing nice group buffs which make up the rest, however we all know resto and enhancement are different stories.

I like the spirit link idea from the first page, allowing an enhancement shaman to buff 2 groups would be great.
Raid wide totems? It could work, but would require a bit of reworking, elemental and enhance would need to buff there groups even more to justify there spots, or simply do to much personal damage. The range on the totems would also be a factor, raid wide totems with 20 yard range could be possible, but it’s yet another factor to balance for boss fights.

For resto, the best solution is probably to nerf the basic totems and to use talents in the other trees to buff them up to acceptable levels, so a resto shaman buffing melee or hunters isn’t going to provide almost the same buffs as an enhancement in that group.

 

Maledict

Indeed. as Gurg pointed out, it is worth stacking warlocks over three, because a destruction warlock + Curse of Doom is the highest caster DPS you can get. Even reducing the curses down to 2 doesn't change that stacking feature - it just means the third gets to play with big numbers instead of the fourth.

As someone else pointed out, sometimes you get the feeling the designers don't realise the destruction tree is there for warlocks, or that Demonic sacrifice exists as a talent...