I tend to subscribe to the train of thought that "off specs" should bring incredibly powerful buffs that don't stack in any way. Survival Hunters are the perfect examples. Making some totems raid-wide would help. I also think Blessings and Warlocks curses should be capped at 2. I would love to see Heroism made raid-wide and a debuff added that prevented you from getting heroism for 90 seconds: basically capping the heroism bonus to 3 Shaman and removing the need to swap groups mid fight (which I personally don't like as a mechanic).
It seems like Blizzard is moving away from the idea of "off specs" entirely. Certainly with the Priest this is true.
So I initially stated that I saw no reason why all party-based buffs could be changed to affect to whole raid. The reason this sounds absurd is the assumption that the effect of Bloodlust and Mana Tide, to name a couple, would be overpowered. There are plenty of changes that could be made to each ability in lines with the AoE caps to make them suitable. Remember that each of the buffs/spells will apply only to people within a certain range; if you don't want your Bloodlust affecting healers and thus lowering its contribution to DPS, you have to work out appropriate positioning. Circle of Healing will already be changed significantly when it becomes a raid-wide heal, so even if strictly limiting the power of the buffs in relation to the number of people affected isn't an elegant solution there are other possibilities.
Specific examples with Shaman in mind, the main group buffers:
Strength of Earth Totem: Increases Strength of all raid members within 20(30) yards by X. Increase of Strength is reduced if more than Y people are within range.
Windfury Totem Totem: Enchants the main hand weapon of all raid members within 20(30) yards to give a chance for an additional attack with X additional attack power on each successful melee attack. Chance to gain additional attack is reduced for each weapon above Y enchanted this way.
Mana Spring Totem: Restores X mana every 2 seconds distributed evenly to all raid members within 20(30) yards.
Mana Tide Totem: Restores a percentage of each raid member's mana every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. The more players affected, the lower percentage each receives.
Bloodlust: Raid members within 20(30?) yards have their melee, ranged, and spell casting speeds increased by X% for W seconds. Duration reduced for each affected player beyond Y.
Unleashed Rage: Whenever the Shaman deals a melee critical Strike, the attack power of raid members within 20(30?) yards increased by 10% for the next X seconds. Duration reduced for each affected player beyond Y.
In all cases, Y would most likely be 5. Note that if rogue poisons become strong enough and/or there are good BoP BS sharpening stones, Windfury could be given to just those who really need it. Whether the non-totem buffs would be affected by totem mastery and their exact radius of effect would have to be determined through testing.
While having the buffs weaken the more players involved somewhat detracts from the whole point of allowing them to buff the raid, I would expect the scaling to not be linear (X people get 5/X the effect) but some other function that would slowly reduce the effectiveness of the buffs while having them increase in power the more people they effect. It would also give a little more thought to overall positioning in a fight; there might be a benefit to stick everyone in range together, but it would weaken the buffs on their intended targets.
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Regarding Chain Heal, so this is slightly off topic.
A large "problem" with Chain Heal is that the initial heal receives the full 2.5/3.5 coefficient for +heal despite the fact that it can jump and get a potential additional 2.5/7 + 2.5/14. Yes, the fact that the AI is directing it to precisely the targets in need is perhaps the real reason why the spell is so damn good, but that's an integral part of the spell that can't really be scaled back. The coefficient can be. Reduce the coefficient to provide the same HPS increase as it would under the assumption that it will bounce twice, and you get a spell that is still very effective but wouldn't have the absolutely ridiculous scaling that we see now. The exact coefficient would be 4/7 of the current value, or 20/49.
Of course, not having raid-wide AoEs would go a long way, but I'm not so sure. If Shazzrah was a Sunwell raid, would people keep melee in and just heal through the Arcane Explosion? What about on Baron Geddon? If Rain of Fire occurred on the melee on Gehennes, would you bother moving or just heal them? Already I've seen speculation that keeping the entirety of the raid in melee on Void Reaver might be a justifiable way to avoid Arcane Orbs, and at very least having all Shaman and Paladin healers eating Pounding might be reasonable.
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.
This. 240 +healing for everyone in the raid is very powerful. That's more than one tier of gear, good enough reason to at least bring one mage.
More on topic. I don't really see the problem with totems and stacking. Maybe because we don't do it in my guild and we're quite successful. To say that a raid with less than four shamans is gimp is ironic, we killed Kil'Jaeden last night with two shamans in the raid and no blessings from outside the instance (a certain horde guild had four blessings, one paladin in the raid - that should be fixed in Wrath). It certainly didn't feel like a gimp raid, I can assure you.
Group buffs are fun, makes raiding more interesting, as you need to consider raid composition and setup carefully. If totems, battle shout and other major buffs become raid-wide, it will be too easy to get a good raid performance. You can just get all the basic buffs and then throw in random DPS with these new ideas.
This. 240 +healing for everyone in the raid is very powerful. That's more than one tier of gear, good enough reason to at least bring one mage.
However Amplify Magic repeats the very problem this thread tries to address. All you need is 1 mage to apply it. It doesn't makes it so that you have any reason to go above 1 mage.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
His point was a very valid one being that 3 shaman fill 3 entirely different roles and support different classes. Mages, no matter what the spec, always fill the same role, so having a lot of them in the raid has diminishing returns. The problem of course is that Warlocks have 3 different spec lines that are all caster DPS as well yet they are still highly soughtafter.
I'm with Gurg, we don't need any huge sweeping changes. Make Heroism have a 10-minute Forebearance, combine CoS and CoE, and maybe boost mage DPS so it's at least equal with a Warlock's using CoD. I won't even touch on chain heal since it sounds like Blizzard is changing the healing dynamic a lot already.
It's still a problem, though, if each role is considered as a separate class for the issue of raid representation. Druids have 4 roles, obviously this shouldn't imply that it's okay if they have 4x the representation of Rogues with a smaller playerbase.
Like I said, the major problem behind this is the fact that there aren't enough healing specs to avoid stacking 2+ of various types, and then having hybrids of the same class leads to over-representation. This is unavoidable without more healing specs being added, and something worth being addressed imo.
Strength of Earth Totem: Increases Strength of all raid members within 20(30) yards by X. Increase of Strength is reduced if more than Y people are within range.
Windfury Totem Totem: Enchants the main hand weapon of all raid members within 20(30) yards to give a chance for an additional attack with X additional attack power on each successful melee attack. Chance to gain additional attack is reduced for each weapon above Y enchanted this way.
Unleashed Rage: Whenever the Shaman deals a melee critical Strike, the attack power of raid members within 20(30?) yards increased by 10% for the next X seconds. Duration reduced for each affected player beyond Y.
In the example you give on shaman totems, it will still affect how many of a certain class are stacked. Why would a raidleader take more than Y melee dps, if it would decrease the effectiveness of them? Even though the overall power of the totems would increase with more than Y members in range, the single target buff would decrease.
I for example would just have ranged stay out of the totem range (20 yard, as it would be less risky for wasting buff power), and only have the wanted melee in range of the totems.
What I mean to say, this wouldn't really help towards the general problem, only change totem mechanics in a unhandy way.
However Amplify Magic repeats the very problem this thread tries to address. All you need is 1 mage to apply it. It doesn't makes it so that you have any reason to go above 1 mage.
Yes indeed, just wanted to point out that Amplify Magic is one of the strongest buffs in the game.
"Pure" classes (mainly rogues, mages and "non-buffing healers") obviously need higher throughput than classes that bring buffs along with their own performance. I don't see that making buffs raid-wide would solve that issue though. Just making raiding less interesting
I beleive one problem is theorycrafting always by nature finding the best of the best gear/setup/cycles/etc. I don't beleive that Blizzard analyzes potential of classes nearly as much as the theorycrafting crowd does. So, while blizzard may have intended for Shamans to do medium DPS, but boost DPS of their party members, I don't think that anyone at Blizzard REALLY crunched the numbers and balanced out the benefits.
I think that just due to the nature of theory craft, we will find the best of the best and abuse it until it gets nerfed. I don't beleive it is possible for us to not stack classes in raids despite the best balancing efforts on Blizzard's part.
Card carrying member of the Inapropriately in Love with Hilary Duff Society.
"Yeah, well, if we could all get what we want I would be eating dinner out of Hilary Duff's skull right now" - Salabesh
Focusing on additive-type buffs/debuffs rather than multiplicative ones might do it. It would make things much more boring, but you could do it so that it was have basically no effect in 5-mans or 10-mans, but those buffs wouldn't stack quite so powerfully in 25-mans. Like if all the Ferocious Inspiration buffs just added up instead of multiplying, or similarly for CoS/SW/ISB/Misery/etc. Or you want to have them scale worse, turn them into +haste, +AP, +shadow, etc. The main loophole is the same as gear - the more you can spread out between different categories, the more you can get, which is only a problem for uncommon categories, like I don't see a way to keep Windfury or Tranquil Air from stacking with everything else.
If things wind up moving the direction of raid-wide totems, it would be interesting to have a much smaller range on them, pushing people to be more aware of their positioning.
I beleive one problem is theorycrafting always by nature finding the best of the best gear/setup/cycles/etc. I don't beleive that Blizzard analyzes potential of classes nearly as much as the theorycrafting crowd does. So, while blizzard may have intended for Shamans to do medium DPS, but boost DPS of their party members, I don't think that anyone at Blizzard REALLY crunched the numbers and balanced out the benefits.
I think that just due to the nature of theory craft, we will find the best of the best and abuse it until it gets nerfed. I don't beleive it is possible for us to not stack classes in raids despite the best balancing efforts on Blizzard's part.
I disagree with you a little here, I think that blizzard is aware of the numbers but are left in a tight spot because they can't balance completely around an ideal group in a raid boss setting, if they made the enhance shamans self dps contribution too low, how would they compensate that in say a 5 man instance? Arenas? Farming capabilities? To the majority of readers here, those things are irrelevant, but I think blizzard still needs to make those play styles viable.
Just to throw the idea out there, why not convert shaman buff totems to more of a bard model and away from totems?
Example:
Shaman buff-only totems are completely done away with and, instead, when a shaman 'casts' what used to be a totem buff, everyone within, oh, 15 yards of the shaman gets the buff. 10 if you want to make it 'difficult' to get (or 'require skill' in some minor way). The buff will act just like every other class' buffs--you get a buff icon, time remaining, etc. etc.--and still act as totems were in that you can only have one buff from each element on you at any time; however, the shaman can buff different groups of people with different buffs of the SAME element (but he only retains the last one, just like a paladin changing his own blessing). This will reduce the number of shaman required to buff different groups AND slightly discourage shaman stacking as one resto shaman can buff windfury/GoA/TranqAir on the whole raid just as well as one resto and one ele (at least, I think there aren't any talents in resto/ele that buff WF/GoA/Tranq; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!).
The flip-side to this coin is that, unfortunately, the buffs themselves will require nerfing and twisting totems becomes completely impossible (overwriting element buffs would occur immediately just as pally blessings do). If one shaman can WF/SoE the tanks/melee, GoA/??? the hunters, etc.--basically take care of all of the non-talent specific buffs that a raid would need all on his own--then those buffs should probably not be as strong as they are currently. Fortunately, a small 5-man group can still see some return on this change as you can put the casters in one spot, the melee in another, and at least get two groups of buffs out of the mix. Three buff-groups for either 10-man raid trash or anything in a 5-man is probably a bit over the top but still doable. Heck, you can even increase the duration of the buffs to match paladin buffs now (10 minutes) and everything would still 'work' and the poor shaman or two (or three) running around a raid would probably feel that only having to do that once every 5 or 10 minutes (7.5 'feels' right to me) is at least a moderate amount of compensation.
So, aside from still having some talent specs providing better 'totems' than others (Resto with Tide, Enh with better SoE/GoA, etc.) you reduce the stacking problem that we currently have--at least by a little--without even nerfing chain heal* or bloodlust/heroism. To be honest, if bloodlust was given a 'forbearance' type debuff and turned into a 30-yard raid-wide buff--tweaked from its current form to not be 'overpowered' of course--that would work just fine in my book. Also, talented totems would probably have to get tweaked in some way to keep them from providing way, way too much bang for their buck (1 Tide affecting 15 mana-users? probably a bad idea. 1 Stream doing the same thing might be balanced though!) although nerfing the amount based on the number of people affected doesn't feel like the best possible solution to that issue.
Oh, and shaman would get to move away from the stuck-to-the-floor-where-they-dropped-them totem model, allowing for 100% buff viability during mobile encounters (another bonus!).
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*chain heal is even almost passively reduced in use simply because at least some resto shaman will need to toss 'totem' buffs up on the different groups during some fights. Considering a worst case of 3 buff groups with 4 elements each (w/a 1.5 GCD), that's about 20-25 seconds worth of buffing, per cycle, that they simply wont be able to cast CH during.
I think something interesting that I'm noticing in this thread is an overall trend of most people to desire diminishing returns on additional members of a class over say 3. Why not aim for the goal of having classes be fully interchangeable within their roles?
Coming from the EQ tradition, there were DR on many classes simply due to the fact that only so many debuff classes were needed to debuff a target, only so many CC classes were needed to CC targets, and everything else was dps. I think it would be much more interesting to say that Hunter DPS could be balanced so that it is equal to Warlock DPS with only gear and skill providing the difference between any 2 players. That way a guild could simply say "looking for another DPS" and have several different classes apply for the spot, therefore allowing more people to "play what they want".
I guess the problem with what I'm suggesting is that without synergies, with every class doing theoretically equal dps, would the game be too easy? I mean part of the 'challenge' of end-game raiding right now is group composition. One of the most blatant issues I see with so many of my friends that are in SSC guilds is that their group makeup is either atrocious, or they don't have the right classes to have good group makeup. If we were to allow every class in a given role to be interchangeable, then would that simply be a dumbing down of raiding, or would it be an improvement in allowing people to enjoy the game the way they see fit?
I think something interesting that I'm noticing in this thread is an overall trend of most people to desire diminishing returns on additional members of a class over say 3. Why not aim for the goal of having classes be fully interchangeable within their roles?
Coming from the EQ tradition, there were DR on many classes simply due to the fact that only so many debuff classes were needed to debuff a target, only so many CC classes were needed to CC targets, and everything else was dps. I think it would be much more interesting to say that Hunter DPS could be balanced so that it is equal to Warlock DPS with only gear and skill providing the difference between any 2 players. That way a guild could simply say "looking for another DPS" and have several different classes apply for the spot, therefore allowing more people to "play what they want".
I guess the problem with what I'm suggesting is that without synergies, with every class doing theoretically equal dps, would the game be too easy? I mean part of the 'challenge' of end-game raiding right now is group composition. One of the most blatant issues I see with so many of my friends that are in SSC guilds is that their group makeup is either atrocious, or they don't have the right classes to have good group makeup. If we were to allow every class in a given role to be interchangeable, then would that simply be a dumbing down of raiding, or would it be an improvement in allowing people to enjoy the game the way they see fit?
Let's just say blizzard WANTS this for the sake of argument. Do you think there would even be a slight chance blizz would get the numbers correct? I can't imagine it getting done.
I think something interesting that I'm noticing in this thread is an overall trend of most people to desire diminishing returns on additional members of a class over say 3. Why not aim for the goal of having classes be fully interchangeable within their roles?
They're just two versions of the same goal. Being forced to balance things is an interesting challenge of WoW and I don't think they'd toss that out anyway. Dealing with guild roster issues and sitting some people out a lot more than others isn't interesting or fun though. Maybe other people don't have that problem, but the problem synergy creates for me is a situation of always needing to bring certain people and having to sit out others a lot.
Why does this have to go past making some totems raid wide buffs with a range of 45-60 yards? Everything you'd need to change to need only 3 shaman:
Grace of Air
Wrath of Air
Windfury Totem
Mana Spring
Healing Stream
Strength of Earth
Totem of Wrath
7 Totems, 1 spec specific, raid wide, 60 yards. Make the rest of the totems group wide and 60 yards. No need to stack shamans past 3, unless you want more Heroisms, or on fights like Archimond 2.0 or Viscidius 3.5, but hell if you want to throw Tremor and Poison/Disease Cleansing Totems on that list too, would it really make that big a difference? Rogues, Warriors, Ferals, and Not-healing Paladins get to double dip into Windfury and Agi without Totem twisting. It's not that big a deal. Mana-Tide doesn't need to be raid wide, you just put a restos in your healing group, and call it a day.
They're just two versions of the same goal. Being forced to balance things is an interesting challenge of WoW and I don't think they'd toss that out anyway. Dealing with guild roster issues and sitting some people out a lot more than others isn't interesting or fun though. Maybe other people don't have that problem, but the problem synergy creates for me is a situation of always needing to bring certain people and having to sit out others a lot.
It's not the same goal at all. In one case, you have a large number of classes that get brought to a raid because of their unique benefits. The sum is greater than the parts. In the other, you have a small number of classes brought to a raid because one just happens to be the best at what all are used for. If warlocks don't help mages, and mages don't help warlocks, then whichever does the best personal DPS gets stacked, no matter how small the margin, and that's bad business as it means that everyone who rolled the lesser now has to reroll or quit.
Synergies are good, as they promote class diversity outside of 'gimmick' fights like spellsteal tanking. The problem we have right now is that some of these synergies are too good, promoting stacking of a certain class beyond what would seem optimal with the number of classes and raid spots we have.
[edit]
Originally Posted by Phlis
unless you want more heroisms
Yeah, this is actually the big one. People aren't stacking six shamans in five groups for the totems, they're doing it because H/BL is such a huge DPS benefit that it outweighs a lot. Adding an exhausted debuff afterwards would go a long way to removing that ability.
Another way to fix it is the Alchemy "solution": make fewer things stack.
This would be complicated, working through every combo, but imagine for example if Curse of Shadows and Shadow Weaving didn't stack. Yeah, you want to have either a warlock or a shadow priest, but bringing both doesn't help as much as it used to. What if Totem of Wrath and Boomkin aura didn't stack? Et cetera, et cetera.
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.
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?
The only real reason not to bring 10 warlocks and just not bother at all with melee or other dps classes at all is the loot system is not entirely token based. Every warlock after the 3rd in a typical raid gets to cast a damage curse for 175-225dps, while taking less debuff slots than a mage.
It is kinda bad when the perfect raid(assuming you could gear up as quickly) on a 2 tank 8 healer fight(going 7 healer due to 4spriests) is something along the lines of:
Prot Warr
Feral Druid
Enh Shaman (for tank threat)
Ret Paladin (for devo/judgements/threat)
Resto Druid (mainly for hot rolling/aura)
3x Lock
Spriest
Resto Shaman
3x Lock
Spriest (4th lock probably brings more dps but the reduced raid healing required is huge)
Resto Shaman
With needed paly buffs/spirit/fort, ai coming from group 6.
Anyways if totems don't get nerfed and moonkin get buffed as much as it looks like they will, I would not be surprised if shaman/moonkin both became mandatory in caster dps groups forcing out mages even further(because unless the best mage spec is arcane 3 locks & 1+ Spriests are needed). I would be really annoyed if caster group composition got to as strict a point as melee has become. With as many encounters are anti-melee as there has been in the past I find it hard to believe many guilds will be going to a 2 melee dps/with enh shaman standard, and if death knights don't have stackable raid utility they compete pretty directly with rogues and fury warriors and very few guilds are bringing 5 rogues to fill out another melee group at the moment. Of course if they do have stackable buffs/debuffs that might very well lead to the second melee group.
Let's just say blizzard WANTS this for the sake of argument. Do you think there would even be a slight chance blizz would get the numbers correct? I can't imagine it getting done.
If you are saying that you have no faith in Blizzard's ability to balance classes against each other, then it seems to me that you have no faith in the OP's intent either. Any form of balancing is Blizzard "getting the numbers right" so it doesn't matter how we talk about balance, rather that we trust Blizzard's ability to get it right. My post is intended as a question as to the intent of the OP's idea, not a question of whether or not Blizzard can do their job.
Originally Posted by Papajan
They're just two versions of the same goal. Being forced to balance things is an interesting challenge of WoW and I don't think they'd toss that out anyway. Dealing with guild roster issues and sitting some people out a lot more than others isn't interesting or fun though. Maybe other people don't have that problem, but the problem synergy creates for me is a situation of always needing to bring certain people and having to sit out others a lot.
The situation of bringing some people and sitting others is exactly what I am trying to address. We have had nights, and people have posted similar examples in this thread, where you have to say "sorry warrior2, rogue2, hunter2, we can't take you tonight because the 2nd Enh shaman didn't show up". My point is that at the same time, I want to avoid the case where we say "sorry enh sham 3, can't take you today because we don't have enough rog,war,etc to fill another melee group with you in it." Why not make DPS classes so interchangeable that we don't have such constraints on attendance anymore. Rather than saying "we can't take you because of your synergy" or in the OP's example "because we have too many of your exact class already", instead you simply cut it down to "we have enough DPS in the raid, period."
I think there are two big reasons to expand most group buffs to the entire raid-
1. 10-man raiding
If there are truly difficult 10-mans that require solid group/DPS composition, then group stacking becomes insanely important. If the raid leader can't slot in a generic DPS because of the group situations, and the raid has to be canceled, that's a bad situation. To use a couple of examples (assuming no CC/decursing/special abilities and that the generic DPS of the classes is equal), the inability to replace a rogue with a mage or a boomkin with a ret paladin is annoying and could stall 10-man raiding.
I'd also hate to transition from 10-man raiding to 25-man raiding, where the problem that existed previously (2.5 10-man groups = 6-7 healers, some of whom were healing off-spec in Kara) gets increased because they're going from 4-5 melee to 10-12 melee in a single 25-man raid group.
2. The 6th melee
There are many classes that get so much benefit out of buffs, that they go from acceptable/awesome DPS to awful if they are in a non-synergistic group. Melee DPS really suffer from this, but other classes also run into problems (Mages without external mana regen). This is mostly because of the power of group-buffs... the shadow priest mana regen, shaman totems, etc. It also leads to some annoyances in the raid as each person tries to argue why they should be in the shaman/shadow priest/moonkin group, or the raid leader has to bench the third rogue because there's just too much melee. As Praetorian noted in the original post, the problem is only going to get worse with WotLK and the melee-focuses Death Knights. Groups are either going to seriously look at going up to ten melee, which then squeezes out the ranged DPS slots OR they will stay at five melee, which squeezes out the melee DPS slots.
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Getting involved in the numbers or figuring out which buffs should go where and how the numbers should be implemented is kind of silly. The main point is that there are two very good reasons to make most buffs raid-wide, based on the current TBC raiding situation and extrapolating it to WotLK raids.
...and if death knights don't have stackable raid utility they compete pretty directly with rogues and fury warriors and very few guilds are bringing 5 rogues to fill out another melee group at the moment. Of course if they do have stackable buffs/debuffs that might very well lead to the second melee group.
Death Knights currently have a 30 second targeted buff in their Blood Tree that reads "[increases] their Physical damage by 20% [for 30 seconds] but [causes them to lose] 1% of their total health every second". I can see a HUGE synergy with a Retribution paladin, or any other paladin for that matter, right there; even if 30% of total HP remains ~3000-5000 HP, pallies will get, what, 3-500 mana from receiving outside heals for that much? Downside is of course that their Command swings may not receive any benefit (based on wording) but that's another matter.
Last edited by Feorthas : 05/27/08 at 3:26 PM.
Reason: wording
Once I started to raid lead in SSC I kept telling everyone that "raid synergy/raid buffs are the new consumables." The leaked changes to Tree of Life show that Blizzard may have realized the same thing, but that will only have a minor impact on the problem. I don't have much more to say beyond what has been posted here already, but I do want to push for a debuff after the use of heroism.
One additional problem comes with tuning fights to be harder for smaller raid setups; it begs for roster rotations between fights. Rosters were supposed to be easier to manage with the 25 man cap but with Sunwell it seems you need to have a MC sized group just to get to the end of that zone. Things could get a bit more complicated with the addition of DK's. I believe part of this problem could be solved if people were able to play a class and not a spec. There should be an easier and quicker route for raiders to gear up multiple specs.
If you are saying that you have no faith in Blizzard's ability to balance classes against each other, then it seems to me that you have no faith in the OP's intent either. Any form of balancing is Blizzard "getting the numbers right" so it doesn't matter how we talk about balance, rather that we trust Blizzard's ability to get it right. My post is intended as a question as to the intent of the OP's idea, not a question of whether or not Blizzard can do their job.
Look at Wow Vanilla raid balance and the current raid balance, when has blizzard gotten the numbers right?
Look at Wow Vanilla raid balance and the current raid balance, when has blizzard gotten the numbers right?
All the time. Blizzard more or less knows what they're doing, but it's a very complex game with a lot of moving pieces. This type of comment isn't constructive at all.
There should be an easier and quicker route for raiders to gear up multiple specs.
From the look of the leaked priest and druid trees and the tier 10 shadow/balance talent which reads 'converts 20% of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage' they may be heading in the direction of only having 1 gear set for those 2 specs, which would work quite well. Assuming ele shamans get the same thing, it would allow the hybrids to change specs between healing and DPS without changing gear.
05/27/08, 1:35 PM
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