Just did another 10 men run and class balance just seems completely horrible. Purely failed on patchwerk due to setup of our raid, contrary to what Blizzard is trying to achieve. Recount screenshot of the wipes after we gave up:



Shandar (unholy DK), Reilonaa (spriest), Descobane (arcane mage), Kalthar (enh shaman), Quantz (arcane mage), Kais (affliction warlock), two warrior tanks, paladin and priest helaing.

Obviously the pala going ret would have been nice, but that was not really a possibility. Basically the abscene of hunter/rogue meant we didn't have the dps. I dunno about the DK, but he did alright dps anyway. The two mages, the shadow priest and me (warlock) are all in guilds that killed KJ top 50+, so I doubt we are completley clueless. Don't think we potted dramatically, but we were flasked/oiled etc and couldn't get him to less then 15% when the berserk wiped us.
Even though there was a spriest in raid, the mages were wanding the last few % before we died. And they were specced arcane and not fire, otherwise they probably would have been oom even faster (at least that's what was said, I have no idea personally).

Seems like they are still quite far from any balance, the previous times with hunter/rogue doing 3000-3500 dps that was never a big problem. Kinda shocked me how badly we failed on dps with a 2 tank/2 healer raid with the dps all in SWP+ and quite a few lvl 80 epics. Before that we 1 shotted all bosses other then 4h due to some people never seen the fight and they did some nasty stuff on the pull with 1 tank spot being vacant. Dunno, just a bit annoyed atm how blatant class balance is off, I know they keep saying they are looking at it, but atm all I see is 3.0 on PTR, wotlk date announced (somewhat reliable at least) and dps classes not being updated.

Anyway, what's clearly worse then dps balance is the two mages going oom and having to wand in a five minute fight using evo with a spriest in raid. That's just awful.

Were your mages still in "full" dps gear with little or no mana regen on their own? Blizzard has specifically stated that an spriest will NOT be enough to get rid of all mana issues (like it currently is or is close to).

Now I'll grant balance is still off, but if those DPS numbers are sustained that means there is a SIGNIFICANT loss of DPS even after 10 levels with full talents and new gear.

You missed the point. Dps gear or no dps gear, there's not much regen gear available, not that you can freely get tons more of it, they were arcane that get's tons more regen compared to fire and they were wiping on 15%, no amount of regen would have made that kill happen.

At this point blizzard's "bring friends not buffers" policy isn't even close to working, unless they mean "bring friends geared for all their specs, make them respec, reglyph not buffers". Considering who this change is supposed to be addressed to, this is massive failure at this point, all hardcore guilds will have the drive to do what it takes, the "friends" most likely not.

This is not accounting for the fact that even with full buffs, 15% is still a long way away. Add Naxx supposedly being easy, a group of that caliber shouldn't even come close to the enrage timer which means for all intents and purposes, they should have probably killed him with around 30s - 1min before.

Add that class changes are supopsed to come on live in what, 2-4 weeks at an absolute max ...

Here's to hoping they already fixed most of it on their internal builds, but I can still fear about the status of dps/bugginess in 3.0.2 considering it's an old branch of Beta.

With both mages being Arcane, aren't you missing the 10% spell crit debuff in the raid?

Also, shadow priests are currently terrible for mana recovery because everytime they deal damage, their Replenishment buff is renewed and the incoming tick gets pushed back.
So they're only about half effective for mana regeneration.

Even in a setup like yours, mages under 1.5k DPS are doing something really wrong.
If they really have mana issues, then deep arcane specs are the completely wrong approach.


Your other DPS that was lacking was the enhancement shaman, but they can't do much with Windfury not working.
I don't know, but 15% HP left seems quite doable if your DPSers would step up a bit.

Some observations about the new itemization in the 25 man:

• Each boss drops 4 items.
• Each boss that does drops 2 tokens (Gluth drops 2 of anything, including the chest at least).
• Nothing is seems gemmable besides the set pieces (could be blizzard finally realized the itemization value of them was so cheap they had to tone the frequency down).
• There is more hit and expertise than you will ever want. Plate seems to be itemized for the new TG hit requirement for fury warriors... actually pretty much everything seems to be itemized for that.
• Bosses seem to share item tables to some extent, it appears wing based (end bosses not included) at first glance.
• Trash epics are back to hilariously low levels (we got I think like 10-15 the first time we cleared it with premo when the trash was dropping the 10 man stuff, and 1 last night).

Overall I'm really happy about the token change as the non-set items which were necessary for maximizing your gear set (especially weapons as seen with the arena weapon binges every season) are now much more common. I'm not sure yet what their reasoning behind the token availability on the badge vendors is yet (I can only see I think leggings and shoulders as a DK on the 25 man vendor at least), though.

Tier tokens on the badge venders in many ways makes the most sense. My guild has gone 10 weeks without seeing a single T6 Protector Glove token drop, in that time those people have accumulated 80 badges from him and the bosses leading up to him. I'm sure they would be happy to spend those badges to fill that hole that otherwise they are stuck waiting for. It also means they don't have to create a large amount of alternate badge gear sets and try to pick and choose what holes to fill, it lets everyone fill one hole of their choosing every month or so. Also, it's not like people will be able to run heroics and do dailies to get Naxx-25 tier gear, you have to run content at that level.

Regarding the dps struggles on Patchwerk, it seems much more likely that the dps is undertuned than Patchwerk is overtuned, if a large part of your dps players were in broken classes that will hurt you a lot, plus it's clear that the mana regen tactics need some tweaking. Quite frankly, I've been much more disturbed by how much people have been burning through the place in what should be crappy gear, maybe this is a sign that they are finally bringing it in line somewhat. Easy and introductory doesn't have to mean mindless pushover, especially what could be the seminal gear check fight of the instance. They still have 2 months to balance skills at 80 (three months really for the general populace), especially the bolder changes like buffs and regen, so they really aren't that pressed for time. LK is going to end up having spent three weeks longer in Beta than BC did.

Right now the only truly 'difficult' boss of Naxx 25 is Gothik. The fight still requires a good deal of pacing and unlike the rest of the zone you can't simply 'do it harder' to trivialize it. But I guess it really remains to be seen how difficult Naxx mechanics will be to those who this zone is designed to challenge. Obviously we have little trouble with them (especially with some much needed improvements - here's looking at you Loatheb) but I'm fairly certain more than a couple fights that seem easy right now will be the bane of terrible guilds everywhere. Gluth, for instance, seems like he'll plow over less coordinated raids with decimate spam and the unending kiting now in the encounter.

They said that in relation to encounter tuning, not gear requirements. Level 80 blues and Naxx-10 epics are far better than Sunwell gear. There's just no way Blizzard intends for people to clear Naxx-25 a week after release still wearing full Sunwell gear, especially if Ulduar isn't in a well tested state. The instance can be easy but still require a certain amount of gear in order to complete. Every boss that they tune on the Beta servers could easily hit live with far more HP, and hit harder, and still be perfectly balanced and easy. Numbers are easy to tweak and balance once things are stable. I'd be shocked if people are pugging KT by Christmas.

That's the whole point of Naxx 25, entry level raid. Nobody's supposed to do Naxx 10 to get into Naxx 25 (well, not gear wise). It's the Karazhan of Wrath, just better placed as it's 25 man not 10, in a parallel raid progression setting to the 10 mans.

There is no more hard Naxx, at least that's my understanding of the whole Blizzard intended system, an easy starting instance for 25 mans so guilds don't have to do 10 mans, in split groups to be able to do 25 mans.

And let's be fair, getting 1-2 good items from crafting and a couple level 80 blues isn't something hard to do at the current difficulty level. I mean even the normal instances are tons easier than TBC's normal instances, at least that's my impression.

And if Naxx 25 isn't cleared in the first raiding week by the good guilds what kind of an entry level instance is it?

Looking back at the BC timeline, the first Gruul kill was Feb 3rd, 18 days after BC release. Karazhan was cleared about a week before that. It was another 2 weeks before the first Hydross kill. So I guess an easy Naxx isn't that far out of line with that pace. It does mean Ulduar has to be in a decently playable state within a very short time of release, because people are going to be trying to push into there very quickly. Since they don't seem to want to have a lot of attunements, one would expect a pretty significant gear check to be waiting at the beginning.

That's right! The bind to account items will help a lot of people keep coming back I think.

Besides the scaling to level ones, Blizz said they would implement some high level only ones that were actually good.

Huh? If spirit is as powerful for shamans/paladins as Mp/5 is currently, then how would wearing spirit cloth help you? You would be getting the same stats and less armor value.

He is saying that if paladin healing plate mp5 was converted to spirit at a certain rate to maintain overall the same mp5 returns, due to usually higher spirit values on cloth gear it might then become preferable for PVE holy paladins to sacrifice armor and stamina for higher regeneration found on caster cloth.

The item budget is the same really, armor type doesn't matter. Let's compare two items from naxx:

Chestguard of Bitter Charms
2298 Armor
+75 Stamina
+67 Intellect
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 77
Equip: Increases spell power by 118.
Equip: Restores 26 mana per 5 sec.

Digested Silken Robes
308 Armor
+75 Stamina
+69 Intellect
+63 Spirit
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 77
Equip: Increases spell power by 118.

According to the gem conversions (a 20 spirit gem is equivalent to a 8 mp/5 gem) 1 mp/5 is roughly 2.5 spirit, so the plate chest would have 65 spirit. What's the difference then?

Note: I'm not asking for spirit to give more benefit to paladins/shamans than mp/5, just that they be made equivalent, their regen while out of the five second rule should not increase. I don't want to change the mechanics of the class. Though it does make them benefit from kings and innervate a little more.

Does Heartstrike affect her? If it did a Bloodtank spec could be useful there, no haste bonus and +50% healing from HoTs during webs once a minute.

Something tells me the plate chest would hypothetically have had 63 spirit, not 65, but that's just me being nitpicky. Ignore this red herring post. :P

I think that a significant factor in dps balancing at this stage is mana longevity. Mana per spellcast definitely isn't tuned, and for example restoration druids have to actually be trying hard to even go below 90% mana.

I'd be surprised if casters are doing below 2.5-3k before mana issues come into play, which is closer to what rogues/hunters seem to be doing. Not 100% balanced just yet, but much closer. Definitely not as bad as what some of the parses initially seem to make out at the moment.

There's a flow on effect though; even if Ulduar was playable on /near release, putting it out shortly after the first Naxx clear might lead to a long delay before the next raid is ready. It might be worth staggering the releases artificially, to prevent the kind of delay that happened between BT / Hyjal and Sunwell.

69 int instead of 67, maybe?

The biggest problem with MP5 is that it was designed and budgeted when mana regen was a direct and linear function of spirit. X spirit meant Y mana/5s out of 5s rule, and some percentage (depending on buffs and talents) in 5s.

That principle went out of the window when the mana regen was redesigned to work off the product of SPI and the square root of INT. That means that SPI gains in power, per stat budget, as your INT increase. The coefficient for SPI goes down as your level increase, to compensate for the stat inflation in each expansion, but it still causes problems. Even at 80, if you want to balance the cost of SPI vs MP5, at which tier of progression do you balance it? If you balance it against that expansion's tier 4, MP5 is overpowered in low tiers. If you balance it against dungeon blues, it becomes steadily weaker as you progress in raids.

As a stat, MP5 is fine. It's linear, just like STA is linear, the various ratings are linear, AP is linear, and so on. The problem is SPI (and, on a lesser ratio, INT), whose effect varies with your current stats, even though its budget is static.

Suggestion: ditch the INT factor in mana regen and go back to static SPI regen. It was introduced to make INT more attractive as a stat, so make it more attractive in a static, linear way. If you want INT to be interesting as a mana regen mechanism (rather than, say, increase your spell hit rating like it does for crit, or haste, or spellpower), then change the mana regen formula to work on the sum of SPI and INT (with a lower coefficient), for example. With an addiiton instead of a product, the derivative of SPI and INT power is static (and that means its contribution in item budget stays static). Problem solved.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was responding to the "then change paladins/shaman/hunters to benefit from spirit as much as they benefit from mp/5 currently" part. There would need to be a load of changes made to make that happen. Not saying it's impossible or a bad idea, just saying it would need a rehaul of the paladin class, as it relates to healing, and all our spell costs to make it happen.

Int is, in practical terms, a mana regen stat in raids due to the mechanics of Replenishment. It's linear there too.

I'm not sure Replenishment will stay that way long. Notice that the recent priest group-based regen works off base mana instead of total mana?

Simple question regarding raid composition. How many healers excatly does blizzard expect us to bring for the 10man. I hear alot of comparisons to how its designed to be the Wotlk Kara. When we started kara, considering our gear it required 3 healers, but today its doable with only 2. So, we going to start with 3 healers, gear them up then drop one for another dps, or start with 2 right of the get go?