Here's the thing—the way they've thus far demonstrated how to do this is to slap an aggressive enrage timer on a boss, forcing a raid to bring a lot of DPS and few healers, like Muru. Of course, fights like this still feature raid-wide damage as a significant portion of the challenge, so classes that can actually raid heal, will still be "stacked" for encounters like this. Blizzard needs to discover that part of a healing challenge could be calculated, efficient mana use, as opposed to "spam as much throughput as you can."

Especially with the addition of Death Knights to the WoLK roster, I'd really wish for 10 man groups and 30 man raids.

If you:
Drop to 4-5 healers.
Drop frost, marks, arms*, subtlety, demo, and whatever DK tree ends up being 'the pvp tree' from the list of specs there's any notion of fitting into a serious raid.
Kind of 1/2 drop arcane, assassination, affliction, survival as conditional upon raid makeup, gear, etc for used in filler spots.
All of a sudden you're looking at a lot better "class / spec to raid spot alignment."

Then you realize that even assuming everyone is willing to respec, you're looking at the huge majority of the player base that wants to be playing a 'pure dps' class all fighting over 1/3 of so of the raid spots. On the other hand, I'm not sure that's a bad thing, especially around time of an expansion where people are basically free to choose what they want to level.



*I know arms currently is very raid viable unlike those others, I just think that's stupid and BF should be in fury to create a distinction between warriors specs as pvp dps, pve dps, tanking.

Expanding on the issue of healer over-representation, it is interesting that the 7-8/25, 3/10, 1/5 ratios are pretty consistent throughout all the content. Twins required more and M'uru less, but as has been pointed out the only way to require less is to have a difficult enrage timer to beat. What exactly makes 7-8 healers the usual number? Is it really optimal, or is it merely convention? Could this be adjusted somehow without seriously changing the nature of encounters? I don't have any good thoughts here, but it seems like these are questions worth asking.

I think original WoW was designed with the paladin/shaman classes acting as the "5th-man" in a 5-man group. They sort of backed up the tank and healer at the same time, while handing out buffs, and generally smoothing things out. That means you're closer to 30% healers in a 5-man. Extrapolating those numbers out gives you 12 healers in a 40-man raid, and 7-8 healers in a 25-man.

In TBC, shamans/paladins ceased being fluid hybrids, and moved more strictly into the Trinity roles, and 5-mans thus dropped to 20% healers. Raiding did not follow suit though.

If Blizzard limited raid usefulness of hybrid classes to two healers and one DPS, then some specs would just die out. I can't speak for all classes but elemental shaman is already the rarest spec of the three. The DPS suffers from inability to take advantage of curses or vulnerabilities, the buffs are second-rate and let's not ever get into the PvP aspect. And if there is no intention to make the spec work in neither PvP nor raiding, why bother with it at all?

Raid-wide totems would be great but that would not stop people from stacking the mighty chain heal. Every class needs to get worthwhile multi-target healing in order to relieve the pressure to stack restoration shamans.

I don't really remember offtanking or meleeing anything while raiding in vanilla. :P Shaman in a raid was resto, fullstop.

Kind of a side note, but I can't agree more, at this point (if you run ONE melee group like most guilds) you will only bring one dps warrior, and for BF it is usually arms. So this leaves fury as a pve spec when rogues are on vacation, and terrible in pvp? Alot of the changes to Wotlk talent trees should fix this (unlink flurry and enrage for gods sake) and hopefully swap deathwish and sweepingstrikes back where they originally started.

It's been touched on in other threads, about the supposed hybridity of shamans/druids/paladins, et. cetera, and the general theory consensus was that a specialized 41-point character offered so much more in their narrow field than a possible 20/20/21 hybrid could.

However, with Blizzard seemingly wanting to lean in the direction of homogenizing all classes so that everyone is on equal ground, how viable is it (and is it even fair?) to revisit the preference of a true hybrid as opposed to specialists? Obviously current talent trees do not support this, as top-tier talents are much too shallow, and the resulting hybrid would be too weak compared to 3 different players specializing in the 3 different trees. But with enough tweaking, hybrids could make a comeback. Rather than agonizing over 3 paladins of different specs, perhaps in the future we could take 2 or 3 paladins who choose to be hybrid-specced, who actually make effective raid members?

Just a thought that I had.

http://elitistjerks.com/756785-post3682.html

I had one additional idea, which may seem foolish. If talent points were removed and everyone would have all talent points spent it would be very helpful in many ways. Of course chances for this idea be realized are marginal at best and many things had to be rebalanced completly.

But it would open up a lot of possibilities in encounter design, where role switching could be needed. It would allow everyone to take the fun talents (which rogue wouldn't love to have ShadowStep when raiding oder soloing ?), it would remove the need to respec all the time (as off-warrior while tanking or arena to raiding etc.). You could still have very different playing styles (shadow form or not, daggers or swords, shield or twohander, different auras, seals, totems, forms....).

Ok - perhabs this idea is stupid but...

Back to topic:
Raidwide totems could also have some negative effects. Windfury and parry haste come to mind for example.

Even before massive amounts of expertise floating around, I don't think you could find a tank (besides feral obviously) that wouldn't want a windfury totem.

If we're going to discuss raid stacking, isn't it also pertinent to discuss the actual raid composition, with regard to the number of tanks, healers and dps?

For the cutting edge guilds, I understand that min/maxing is of utmost importance, and raid stacking is key - and thus has potential to become a major problem. But for some guilds like ours, with a larger, more fluctuating raid base( probably on the order of 45 "active" raiders/week ), emphasizing a certain class is much less of a problem than limiting the numbers in specific roles.

As a tank, I notice this quite frequently. I've seen Archimonde die once in the 4 months we've been killing him, and that's only because my guild was desperate. Why bring in an under-geared, unpracticed healer to an already annoying and periodically frustrating fight if you don't have to? Why bring that OT prot warrior into RoS and risk potential wipings - and then a delay in progression attempts - when you can use your MT and prot pally?

Our guild's beginning to see this as we do Sunwell as well. Only two tanks on Brutallus mean that even as the 2-3rd best geared tank in the guild (with the one I'm tied with being a feral druid), I won't see a kill of him for several weeks after we down him, unless the other tank doesn't make it online and we're desperate.

And it's not just tanks, but healing as well. We're looking ahead in Sunwell, and certain fights are going to need 10 healers, and some only 6.

I guess my biggest complaint is with the tanks though. Even if you only bring 6 healers, you're still likely to have at least one of each class in there, and if you're as good as the next of your spec in your class, then you'll be interchangeable. With tanks, the numbers required in a raid go from 1-3, and when it's only one it's a lot harder to swap around on.

Totems, as others have already mentioned, really are a problematic mechanic. They're designed such that a full group of people who want the same totem gain far more than a random group, or a solo player. So long as they are group based, how can you balance out the enhancement shaman sitting in a melee group in a raid with that same enhancement shaman PvPing in AV where there's nobody within 100 yards who is also grouped with him? Obviously totems can be very weak or very powerful depending on the level you are able to tweak the scenario in your favour.

One way of bnalancing totems without making shaman too weak in 5 mans is to set up the class such that they don't scale as well with raid buffs as other classes. That way in the solo or small group case they can be balanced to be about as good as a pure class, but in 25 man raids they fall a bit behind but bring specialised totem buffs to make up for it.

I don't think the fundamental problem with the shaman is totems or chain heal though, it's totems and chain heal.

I play a resto shaman, my partner in healing crime plays a divine spirit priest. In order to get his group utility, he loses his best healing spell in a number of situations. What do I give up? To put the shaman and priest on par, it would be as if the good caster totems were 21 points in elemental, the good melee totems were 21 points in enhancement, and good chain heal ability was 41 points in resto.

It's really not that totems or chain heal is overpowered, but rather having them both on the same class is a bit much.

As far as chain heal goes, I'd keep the coefficient as it is but remove the auto jump. The shaman player could choose the jumps, with some kind of marking outside the normal cast/GCD mechanism. If whoever you've marked is out of range, no jump. This would allow you to set up a pretty static set of jumps for healing multiple tanks, or dynamically alter your jumps while the heal is casting for raid damage. Those with the best reactions, anticipation and ability to watch the battlefield as well as health bars would be better healers, rather than the current situation where even if my health bars tell me the first heal will be completely overheal I can let it go off safe in the knowledge the AI will do the work for me and still get 3/7 of the heal.

As far as healers in general go, it is a bit problematic that you need so many. However I'm not sure the population survey sites you see tell us much. My personal experience is that just about every single healer I know has a DPS alt, if only for farming. Where as DPS classes seem to be about evenly split between not having any alts/having another DPS alt/having a useful (ie tank or healer) alt.

So I kinda suspect that although the survey sites don't show it, the population of "healing capable" mains is actually probably slightly above perfect balance. Which means that although certianly the number of healer spots is "overbudget", it's not quite as off the ideal as it seems on first glance.

I think the bigger problem is what Denogran alludes to, that you can (and on the cutting edge have to) role stack on an encounter by encounter basis. Not sure how blizzard fix this without making it a complete PITA if someone has to leave for the night. In an ideal world you'd have to continue on with what you started with, which would open up hybrids to actually take on different roles for different fights, and indeed might make it practical to spec half/half specs that are useless at the moment because you may as well swap people in/out.

Maybe you could get a buff when you kill a boss that lasts for the rest of the raid? That way you could swap perople out if you had to, but it'd clearly be undesirable. On the other hand that might burn people out with the "You were here for boss X on Wednesday, now you have to show up every day until reset because we need you and your buff". Like I said, I have no idea really how to stop the encounter by encounter composition tweaking, but if I was working on class balance, it'd be the #1 priority for me.

First, a small tangent:
I think the differential between having windfury and not having windfury for some melee classes is far too high right now. They probably need to raise the base dps for those classes while lessening the effect of windfury, or maybe provide better alternatives. Any single classes' viability in a raid should not be completely controlled by another.

Regarding the DPS synergy situation, I don't think there's any real problem with mages not bringing any DPS synergy to the table. The problem is they are also weaker than Warlocks when everything is put aside, and that just leads us to stacking warlocks and other hybrids. If putting everything aside, mages without any raid debuffs could output more DPS than warlocks who had the benefit of their respective curse, then I think this problem wouldn't be as apparent. At least the mages would be bringing hefty DPS to the table even if they did not provide any benefit to the rest of the raid.

As for the Shaman issue, I agree with the forebearance debuff for bloodlust/heroism. While I kind of like idea with the guardian/battle totems, without changing any of the underlying mechanics, I think the easiest way to take care of the totem issue would be to provide weaker raidwide versions of totems. For example, the group windfury totem stays the same, but the raid version doesn't provide the attack power bonus. Something like with one shaman, you'd have the raid windfury for the 2 melee groups, with 2 shaman, you'd have raid windfury and raid grace of air, and with 3 shaman maybe you'd do 2 group windfury and 1 raid grace of air. This doesn't hurt their 5 man situation, and plays along with the concept that a shaman brings fantastic buffs with only normal DPS. Additional shaman would continue to bring DPS buffs to a certain point, but after you get the first one or two, there are diminishing returns on the DPS synergies that the shaman provides, which are outweighed by the higher base DPS of a rogue or warrior.

I'm not sure anybody is asking that a spot be reserved for every hybrid spec.

Remember how we got into this situation with hybrids:

The argument starts that "Hybrid specs can't be as good as 'pure' specs at any of their roles." This is the basic construct from which flows all evil. First thing that happens is we realize there aren't enough people playing healers because the only 'pure' healing class is a priest and there just aren't enough priests. And since none of the other classes are as good at healing, nobody really wants to bring them to a raid if they can stack priests instead.

Okay, so we let hybrids be 'as good' as the 'pure' class at healing. So now we have four healing classes with reasonably balanced healing abilities.

But they still can't dps as well as the 'pure' classes - apparently the priests weren't as good at defending the purity of their territory as the dps classes. Which means nobody wants to bring a hybrid to dps. Much angst ensues as there are lots of people who read 'hybrid' when they were creating their characters, not realizing they had misread what was apparently supposed to say 'healer'.

Finally, after a few false starts pre-TBC, Blizzard makes a concerted attempt to make hybrids valuable in off-spec roles - while still kowtowing to the pressure that they can't do equivalent dps - so Blizzard gives all of the hybrids lower dps but some sort of dps synergy. Life is restored to some sort of balance. Or apparently not.

Speaking as one of those hybrids, I'm not looking for a model that says "Raids that don't have an enhancement shaman, moonkin or ret pally are gimped". I don't think hybrids are asking for a guaranteed spot for every off-spec. What they are asking is viability so that when choosing between, say, a third rogue or an enhancement shaman the answer is not "lol, shamans can't dps". A really top notch player who enjoys the style of a moonkin shouldn't be consistently passed over in favour of a mediocre player who happens to have a mage. Raid synergy fixes that problem.

The problem of "make them just as useful but gimp their dps down" is fairly intractable though. You are trying to balance apples and oranges - pure dps versus raid/party buffing - and its hard to do that without favouring one side or the other. Just how much synergy does a hybrid need to make up for crappy dps?

It's a little beside the broader point of this discussion, but warlocks could probably be balanced by nerfing CoS/CoE and buffing Malediction to compensate (say, 6% untalented, and 15% with 3/3 Malediction). If locks had to actually make a choice between doing top-notch DPS and providing significant raid utility, they would be more in line with other classes.

Any solution has to consider the play OUTSIDE of the raid too. If you boost the damage of Rogues/Warriors/Retadins, you have to be careful not to unbalance them in solo play/5-mans/PvP. And it really isn't just Windfury anymore, it's the combination of WF/UR/Battle Shout.

It's not really a problem to have a class have a large boost in effectiveness in a raid. At worst, it's a separate issue from class stacking/group composition.

Of course solo/5man/pvp has to be taken into consideration, but this can be balanced with talents in general. Slightly bloated trees that force the choice between key talents for both PVE and PVP can take care of this.

The problem is not with a class having a large boost of effectiveness in a raid, it's the class not being able to be competitive without the boost. Having a little stick in the ground influencing the performance of any raid member to the point that they might be benched just because said stick doesn't affect them is the problem.

I think you've pretty much gotten to the heart of the issue at hand. TBC hybrid philosophy, at least as it eventually panned out after the various buffs, nerfs, and changes, is that hybrids are limited to only one role, which they choose by specializing deeply into their tree of choice. In most cases, this role provides buffing/debuffing utility in exchange for decreased raw throughput. In TBC, for anything beyond 2 or 3 man groups, "hybrid" actually means "specialized" for anyone who isn't a feral druid, and even then it's only because feral druids have two roles contained in the same tree. At the level cap, playing a shaman, paladin, or priest as a hybrid is not viable in any non-solo PVE content.

In TBC, Blizzard chose to make hybrid classes viable by strong buffing synergies, most notably with shaman and shadow priests. In the process, however, they made hybrid classes viable only by forcing them to actively ignore a very large subset of their abilities. My question is this: is it feasible to rebalance hybrids by replacing some of their overwhelming synergy with abilities that promote a viable hybrid style of play (i.e. being able to split duties between multiple roles in the same fight)? How could this be accomplished, and would it be beneficial to do so?

Affliction sucking ass is a blessing in disguise; a 25 man raid simply doesn't have room for a player who uses as many debuff slots as a AWarlock does.

Bumping the number of debuff slots up a bit is quite obviously something they are able to do, they've done it before, so this shouldn't be an excuse.

This is the point I was about to make.

Effectively, that you need an enhancement shaman to justify any other class or spec is wrong.
A ret paladin should be able to justify themselves a raid slot on the back of their own dps + buffs, they should not require an enhancement shaman any more than an enhancement shaman should require them.
If on any given day your 5 melee dps consisted of a Blood frenzy arms warrior, a fury warrior, 2 rogues and a ret pally, you should be able to raid put them into a group and not notice any considerable difference to the overall dps than if one was changed for an enhancement shaman.

Elemental shaman seem about right in this regard, they are a useful addition to a caster group, but they don't make or break it. Enhancement shaman simply offer too much to their group as it stands, making totems raid wide would just mean they offered too much to everyone.

There are other examples, but enhancement shaman are the most glaring.