Currently a lot of these threads lately on the board have been dancing about the same question. The hunter thread, the warrior thread, the warlock thread, sustained dps thread and so on. Classes feeling marginized by the abilities of other classes. In some cases there is more truth to it than others, but it still boils down to one question. That being what is the optimal raiding group? For sure it is clearly not 5 of each class. As a former raid leader and someone who has played 3 different classes to 60 I would like it if it would be optimal to make the ideal composition 5 of each class. Now I know each guild has different numbers to work with so that would not always be possible. (well bigger guilds like EJ could probably do it just fine, but the 55-60 player guilds might have an issue) But still I would like a system that really promotes taking between 4 and 6 of each class and starts penalizing raids when certain classes are trivialized (like warlocks are now) by reducing them below 4.

So my questions are (I'm not the best theorycrafter but there are some outstanding ones here):

1. As a raider what you think is the optimal raid composition as of patch 1.12? And no that's not min/maxing for different encounters. If you had a generic dungeon with a variety of encounters what group would you think is most ideal? I'm curious to see how this might change between horde and alliance.

2. What do you think would need to be done to existing class balances/dmg/abilities to make a 8x5 raid group optimal?

4 to 6 of each class.

5 of each class can still work, but with so many encounters (like Faerlina for instance) being balanced for 6 warriors, drop a lock for a 6th warrior. Drop another lock for a 6th priest, and another lock for a 6th rogue maybe?! I really just can't see need for much more than 2-3 Warlocks in a raid to be honest.

But yeah, if you are talking about a non-stacked raid group and something that is just balanced, 5 of all can still work.

Just my view, but my optimal (Horde) raid group for most encounters would comprise:

3 protection spec Warriors
4 DPS spec Warriors
5 combat spec Rogues
5 frost/arcane spec Mages
3 Warlocks
5 Hunters
1 shadow spec Priest
4 holy/disc spec Priests
4 restoration spec Druids
3 restoration spec Shamen
3 DPS spec shamen


This, of course, assumes you have access to 40 well-geared and skilled players.

In the real world of course, you have to build your raid to the strength of your personnel. If your bottom 1 or 2 Hunters get outDPSed by rogues, then stack a few more rogues in at the expense of Hunter spots. It's all about finding the right mix for your guild.

Erm? Why?

our average raid group is something like 7 warriors, 8 priests, 3 warlocks, 3 hunters, 5 rogues, 6 mages, 4 paladins, 3 druids, with the odd spot going very frequently to an 8th warrior - because hey, why not?

On crazy solution could be to have 1/2 druid tanks ?
While we are FAR FAR FAR from bleeding edge, we havent met anything yet that couldnt be beaten with 5 or each class.

I think a large part of the problem arises from the fact that warriors are arguably better hybrids than druids. A warror can be both the best tanking class and the best dps class with a change of gear. Druids can manage to be second rate tanks or second best healers. Then you reach the situation where, instead of taking 5 druids and having bear tanks on encounters needing many warriors, you take 8 warriors and just have them DPS on encounters that need fewer tanks.

People wouldnt be tanking 7/8/9 Warriors if fury warriors were not oustripping so many other DPS'ers in a raid, while being able to throw on 8/8 wrath and tank with the best of them.

There is not one fight in the game where I would rather have a druid in bear form instead of caster form. On Faerlina for instance, if I went with 5 Warriors I would just have 1 warrior tank 2 adds the whole fight, as opposed to wasting an additional healer and poison cleanser. It's not like the fight is impossible with 5 warriors, but a 6th one gives you more flexibility most certainly.

Maybe Patchwerk ? Druids can hit armor cap without inspiration and have more health than warrior.

Well sure, but thats a fight already where healing is stretched to the limit. Unless you already had a dedicated feral druid there would be no point in taking a healer out to bolster the warrior force. And not many guilds have or allow dedicated feral druids, since its well not that optimal. Maybe if in cat form they could have a more reliable agro dump they might be viable. But right now even if they could get all the AQ gear to get their dmg up that high, they would pull agro and die.

I was hoping there would be a bit more talk on my second question. I know shadow priests are mainly a faction problem. Alliance just makes them so much more viable. But is there anything that would do the same for ferals, oomkins, shamans or pallies? Or is it just pvp spec vs pve spec? I feel the game often just forces people too much when endgame into certain specs. I know rogues, hunters, priests, shamans and druids are fairly shackled, especially rogues and hunters which seem to not have much choice at all. (Combat rogue has what, 1 or 2 points to spare from what I read on the rogue threads) Mages and warriors seem about the only classes that have at least 2 quite different effective builds. Warlocks seem to have quite the variety of builds, but I'm not sure how effective they are.

Put it another way, would you bring 6 protection warriors to Twins ?
Would you tank 6 protection warriors to Noth ?
Anub'rekhan ?
Huhuran ?
Maexxna ?

They why would you be willing to bring 6 warriors to AQ, or Naxx?
Because your dps warriors can tank with 95% of the effectiveness of prot warriors and then for twins whack on DPS gear. If Warriors couldnt tank and dps as well as they do with one spec, people wouldnt be so willing to bring 6/7/8 of them to raids. Basically warrior dps is too good, therefore on fights requiring multiple tanks you dont bother with a druid, you simply bring 6/7/8 warriors instead and then watch then top DPS charts on fights that require 1/2/3 tanks.

If those same 3/4 additional warriors were 20-25th on the damage meters (instead of 1-10th), would you be so willing to bring as many warriors as you do now ?

Our you can ask your hunters to scattershot the adds. There are always several ways to do it. Even though our raid officers devote a lot of time in studying new encounters on any kind of information availible we still have to make it work for our raid. You might have outstanding dps warriors or rather mediocre like our two (our askhandi/kalimdors revenge arms warrior seldomly is in the top 10-15...). You might have only resto specced druids or ferals as well which you can utilise.
Imho you should have at least 5 warriors, at least 4 hunter, 4 pallies (more are better), 5 mages, 5 priests, 5 druids. We really feel if we have only 3 of our paladins attending. They are much more than buffbots. Foremost they can take quite a beating even in healing oriented gear. They are even more important in naxx where many encounters include offtanking adds who might run rampant. The rest of the dps classes may vary though I feel an adequately geared rogue will outdamage most of the other DPS classes if both players aren't top performers.

Our usual core setup is 5-7 warriors (most of them defspec, we might want to change this towards a more dps oriented setup), 4-5 priests (we would prefer 6 of them), 3-5 druids (5 would be perfect imho), 4-5 pallies (sometimes only 3), 4 rogues (sometimes 5), 3 warlocks (would prefer to add a fourth due to several reasons), 5-7 mages, 4-6 hunters.

Q: What do you think would need to be done to existing class balances/dmg/abilities to make a 8x5 raid group optimal?

A: Re-design WoW character classes completely, from the ground up (excepting much of the stuff like graphics code.) Include things like even scaling mechanics for all classes. Cross-class interactivity mid-fight for classes other than healers. Create actual raid roles, perhaps multiple roles for each class. Maybe even stepping away from slavishly following the rpg model created by D&D.

Though, when I say "re-design," I really mean to actually do it for the first time.

1. Make no encounters that have mobs of such melee DPS so that you need more than 5 warriors. Like on Faerlina, make the followers do only a small amount of melee damage, but lots of AE.

2. Make it such that 5 warlocks can each easily maintain an individual debuff curse on the mob that is powerful enough to want 5 warlocks.

3. Make no encounters that do much better with more than 5 group healers(Vael)

4. Do something with hunters that makes them good and stuff.

That would go a long way to helping out alliance guilds at least, I don't know/care about shamans. I know my guild usually runs with 5 paladins/4druids/6 priests.

I think the following raid composition works well enough on any encounter, but provides good edge to Dps and survivability, and on top of that doesn't leave out a class totally. Whilst for new guilds who are just starting, recruiting for a totally optimal raid composition might be easy. But for a guild who's already raided forawhile, it's very likely to have quite a balanced member base on each class (as 5-5-5-5-5-5...). This composition doesn't ruin the harmony between classes and is still a stronger choice than 5 of each class.

4 Druids to start with will provide 4 innervates and 4 combat resses, which is quite enough of both in my opinion. Without enough of either encounters might get harder than they really are, and errors due to lack of combat resses might get fatal in many fights.

4 Hunters Should be enough to provide working tranqulize shots for all the encounters their used on. For alliance 5 hunters might be a good option for certain bosses due to Aspect of the Wild, but with some clever group setup this can be easily overcome and otherwise the 5th hunter's just hogging a spot from a more usefull class.

6 Mages cause they are at the moment the best ranged dps class.. as with correct build and BOS it's very hard to gain aggro anymore. Also frostbuild mages can keep themselves up extremely well and won't need huge maintanence in most fights, and they won't run out of mana either. Then again if you decide to have 6 fire build mages, they'll be doing some disturbing Dps even tho with the cost of survivability.

4 Paladins provides all the blessings and taking 1 more would seem like a waste, Because in healing they loose to both druids and priests.

6 Priests will with no doubt bring edge to the healing, and are the strongest healing class so it's only fair to grab more of them along.

6 Rogues because of their good dps output and fairly good aggro management. Rogues can very well stay alive alone if they won't pull aggro, though theres many battles where secondary targets (in many cases melees) will take some sort of damage was it then to close proximity aoe (whirlwind, blastwave etc.) or something else.

4 Warlocks means 4 Imp staminas in 4 different groups, and on top of that all curses and quite reasonable damage with okish survivability. And as Warlocks are quite much "discriminated" by many guilds, I chose to take 4 into my composition. Ok, I agree 2 warlocks can pretty much provide everything needed and taking more might seem a waste, but taking 4 is quite ok and won't "ruin" your raid composition and also will make the warlocks happy puppies when their taken with.

6 Warriors and needless to say taking less than 6 will make some encounters harder than they are (seriously). If every encounter in the game is doable with less than 6 tanks I don't care. Like someone pointed out in an earlier post, warriors can dish out immense damage (fury) and tank very well with a dps build. Though I'd go with 1-2 Prot spec warriors per raid.


What you can see is that I took 14 healers instead of 15 or more. Some guilds like to take even up to 17 healers to hard fights, but to me it seems like a big waste, it might help in learning a few encounters. But I don't really know a fight yet where 14 good healers can't keep up the raid.

Much like the above poster we have been raiding Naxx with 14-15 healers and more DPS than normal. Likewise we have been taking more warriors / rogues / mages and less hunters / warlocks simply because the DPS that hunters and warlocks do is almost always exceeded by a warrior, rogue or mage in some way. The only way this really changes is if we bring a shadow priest (we have one dedicated shadow priest for this purpose) who can trigger all kinds of shadow vulnerabilities on mobs. That results in our warlocks pretty much evening out with mages then.

I can see hunters being necessary on Gluth; they are needed in other areas too (tranqs, speed for Anub etc.) but on the first ~7 bosses in Naxx I haven't found a particular area where I found myself saying "if only I had more hunters".

How have other guilds been doing Faerlina? We usually line up all of our dps, countdown pull and just chain burn one of her adds down within seconds, thus removing the need for a 6th tank.

We tried to do that (killing one or two adds), but finally we killed her dpsing all out on her while offtanking everything else. Our offtanks were tanking the first to sacrifizes. It worked though we had to burn the last 15 % or so through the enrage.