The url: MMO-Champion RaidComp - thank you Bibi for hosting! For example here you have Last Resort's regular setups for M'uru and KJ.

Short description
Raid composition is an important aspect of WoW PvE. RaidComp (from now on denoted as RC) aims to be to raid compositions what talent calculators are to talent specs; allowing everyone to play around with and share different raid compositions online. RC also helps raid leaders by giving an overview of the different buff and debuff categories. It won't do all the thinking for you, raid optimization is complex, however it should be able to do most of the grunt work and highlight some of the categories and abilities you need to look closer at.

How it works
RC marks categories and abilities in three different ways:

Inactive - not present in the raid.
Maybe - probably present but there might be a problem.
Active - present in the raid and reasonably sure it will always be active.

RC assumes that players are able to coordinate on their own within their class but not between classes, that's where you, the raid leader, come into play. If there's any doubt that an ability, even though it can be provided by someone in the raid, might not be active all the time it's marked as "maybe". This is key for understanding how RC works.

An example: let's say you start with an empty raid and add a Shaman. You need at least two to ensure that both Windfury Totem and Wrath of Air Totem are active all the time and thus both spells (and their corresponding categories) are marked "maybe". You then add a frost Death Knight that provides Improved Icy Talons. Since Improved Icy Talons and Windfury Totem are in the same category and Improved Icy Talons is always active that category is now marked "active", the Spell Haste category that Wrath of Air Totem belongs to remains as "maybe". You check out the "maybe" category and come to the conclusion that the best move is to tell the Shaman to drop Wrath of Air Totem since the frost Death Knight got the other category covered.

The above example illustrates how RC is meant to be used. You can trust the "active" mark but as soon as you see a category or a spell get marked "maybe" it means there's something you need to look into.

There's a lot more to running an optimized raid than just making sure you cover every category; some abilities in the same category might be better than others, some can be improved by talents while others are just a pain in the ass to spec into. RC tries to cover some of these factors by adding short but informative tags next to abilities.

RC uses the following tags:

• [e] - the ability is from an exotic pet.
• [i] - the ability can be improved through talents.
• [p] - the ability is from a pet.
• [w] - the ability is significantly weaker than the other abilities in the category.

RC was created with the following assumptions/principles:

• Everybody has invested at least 51 points in their main tree. The other 20 points can be spent in any tree. Yes that means that the tool is aimed at level 80 raids.
  
• Players are able to coordinate buff and debuff usage within their own class but not with other classes.
  
• Some abilities, although available in one way or another to a class, might be a pain in the ass to supply to the raid.
  
• It’s better to give a false "maybe" than a false "active".
  
• If the tool becomes too good at figuring out how to manage buffs and debuffs it will end up hiding important decisions and choices from the user.
  

Help and feedback

RC can never be as accurate as ingame addons (*) like InTheBuff: WotLK raid buff checklist, the goal is to make it a compliment that's reasonably useful for the novice and experienced raid leader alike. This is where I'd love to get the community's help and feedback.

Stuff I need help with:

• Tags - to be used in moderation but I'm sure there’s more out there.
• Abilities – I haven't looked into changes made during the last couple of big beta patches.
• Bad assumptions – perhaps it's too much to assume that every Paladin is specced into BoK or that every feral Druid has IW (potentially mark as a "maybe" like Hunter pet abilities are now).
• Browser performance and layout – I won't be supporting IE6 (people should really upgrade) but for example Safari on a Mac remains untested. RC uses a lot of JavaScript and performance differs a lot between browsers. If things are overall bad I can add options to disable the automatic generation of the buff and debuff windows for example.
• Everything else! Have I taken a bad approach to buffs and debuffs? Is something really annoying? I appreciate all feedback I can get.

* If Blizzard implements an easy way to swap between two specs and puts the info on the armory it might be worth the trouble of offering an "import guild from armory" option which would make RC 100% accurate. Right now the chance of catching people in PvP specs or whatnot makes the data from the armory way too inaccurate in my opinion. If you disagree please say so and I might make it happen.

Thank you for your time.

From what I can tell, IW should be a definite maybe. Pure tank specs will pick it up, but partial hybrids might not be able to find the points. Similarly, not many Ferals will pick up the improved versions of Demoralising Roar/Shout if they can at all avoid it and Improved MotW will likely be skipped as well.
I'm not sure if it's your intention to only show if that particular ability can be buffed through talents, or if that spec will (be able to) buff it through talents.

It looks very intuitive so far. Nice job.

This is certainly a useful tool; great work on it!

To go along with the points made so far, I'd offer two suggestions, if they aren't too hard to fit into the UI:

1) Put in links to the talents that can improve the power of a buff/debuff; perhaps by clicking on the [i] next to a buff/debuff, that would display the list of talents, via WoWhead, that can be chosen to improve it.

2) Add a reverse display, so that a mouse-over on any class currently in the raid will list which buffs/debuffs that particular character is expected to provide.

Both of those would help raid leaders become more comfortable with the new raid setup, and what talents/buffs/debuffs a particular class should be providing in a raid.

Few things...
- You assume that every death knight is a tank. This is not the case. Don't know how you'd actually be able to differentiate though, unless you create 6 different roles.
- Ret pallies will usually have kings with their raid spec. Prot is almost definitely no (too much bloat to get stuff in their own tree), and holy is up for grabs depending on sub-spec.
- When hovering over the buffs/debuffs, it displays the buffs, but it doesn't show what spec, if necessary, provides them.
- Ranged Attack Power can be safely removed. It's hunter only and really only benefits hunters. If that somehow changes in the future, then it deserves a spot.
- Spell Critical chance - Should be a maybe for arcane mages, they sometimes go enough into fire that they get improved scorch.

Is a fair assumption I'd say, because every DK (Even without tanking talents) is supposedly in theory supposed to be capable of OTing during bosses and whatnot.

Every warrior/paladin/druid can do that too, and yet they aren't all listed as tanks.

Changes made as suggested in the thread. I'll look into tooltips on what abilities a spec can bring to the raid, but I think it's better to only display this for the list on the left and not in the middle area. Some form of highlighting may also make sense when you hover over specs for categories (and wise-versa), I'd like to make sure that there's not too much going on though. Maybe I’ll add some simple checkboxes for enabling the feature.


Currently it's if that particular ability can be improved.

I placed both feral Druids and DKs in the tanking category. It didn’t seem like it would make a lot of sense to add additional draggables just for some semantics.

No, so few bosses are can be disarmed. You could include disarm itself as a general category and let rogues, warriors, and survival hunters do it.

Awesome tool! Some changes:
- Holy pallys won't be providing Imp. Devo Aura, but may provide Heart of the Crusader.
- You missed listing Blessing of Wisdom [i]
- Demonic Pact comes from a pet

I'd disagree here re Kings. Viewpoint is that of a Sunwell Tankadin with PvE only focus.

• Every PvE Ret pally should have Kings. No excuse not to take it other than "PvP-only" talents. Go play arena then, nubcakes.

• There's almost no excuse not to have it as prot. It's almost impossible to come up with a sensible spec that has less than 2-3 points in Kings, at which point you may as well get all 5 points. You miss out on very marginal talents like "Imp HoJ".

• Holy can get Kings, but it's always a sacrifice. Best case they lose 3% spell crit (and crit is v. important to holy).

So for the RC tool, my suggestion would be:
• Ret has kings
• Prot has Kings
• Holy doesn't.

All that said... if you only have one paladin in-raid, he's about to hearth and respec into kings if he doesn't have it.

Well, if things stay as they are Marksman Hunters provide a better %AP buff than Shamans and Deathknights, because of Glyph of Trueshot Aura which boosts Trueshot Aura to +12% AP instead of 10%.