Rather than clog up the 25-man cap "is it good or is it bad" discussion with a sidebar, I'm interested in discussing a different part of the 1up article (http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3152830). Namely: will there be a real role for hybrids in the expansion?
Edit: feel free to delete this thread, merged with the main thread where lots of people are talking about hybrid roles.
With smaller raids it just makes it very, very encounter-specific. Until we see what the instance design is we have no clue.
On the plus side it opens up even more min/max theorycraft for those of us bored at work. For posterity, I forsee that Itemrack will become integrated into the core UI whenever you roll a druid. Gogo socketed items.
It really depends on encounter design, and individual guilds. If a guild has members who are willing to log outside the instance and be on standby then they can min/max their raid per encounter and this will go a long way towards making hybrids less useful. However, I can't see too many guilds having this kind of capability. Only on the bleeding edge of content will this kind of thing happen.
Even in this situation, hybrids have their uses. Say an encounter has two phases. The first is healing intensive, and the second is dps intensive. The hybrids heal out the first phase, and hop in for dps on the second phase. This kind of encounter would go a long way to prevent hybrids from being eliminated.
I'm not so much intrested in the 25 man raid instance ( I really like the idea) but more so with the amount of guilds who will blow up internally to achieve a transfer from a 40 man raid guildto a 25 man raid guild.
They think that lowering the raid cap to 25 will allow hybrids to truly fulfill their hybrid role. To me it just seems that it would be the opposite. If we're only brinigng 2 druids, we can't have any of them be kitty cats. If we are only bringing two paladins, we want them to be holy. At least thats the way I'd see it...
It's all depending on how much effort they put into making encounters unique. The more unique encounters there are, the more value a hybrid has. Think if they had 8 bosses like ZG, you could wait at each boss while you switch in 3 nessesary classes or you can try it like Blizzard intends and do it with the classes you started with.
I guess what it comes down to is, are you in the game for challenge or just for the ability to keep saying "SERVER FIRST!" In EQ it mattered cause they weren't all instanced bosses, but in WoW everyone gets the same opportunities every week.
Originally Posted by missiletoad
I get enjoyment out of constructing buildings out of my fries and demolishing them with my chicken nugget army as I make monster noises. But you people. You people are FREAKS.
They think that lowering the raid cap to 25 will allow hybrids to truly fulfill their hybrid role. To me it just seems that it would be the opposite. If we're only brinigng 2 druids, we can't have any of them be kitty cats. If we are only bringing two paladins, we want them to be holy. At least thats the way I'd see it...
Perhaps as the way the game is now but in the expansion its hard to tell how powerful some classes will become, for example will priests healing capabilities hugely excede what a druid/paladin/shaman is capable of to the point where its actually possible for hybrids to fill a hybrid role in a smaller raid group without being detrimental to the raid? We have 10 extra levels to get through, and new abilities to learn. We cant really judge how important each class is for expansion encounters without knowing what encounters we may face, or how some classes may evolve. Thats how i see it anyway.
My biggest problem with giving hybrids a bigger role is quite simply the non-hybrids. The more important they make it to bring hybrid classes that can fulfill multiple roles the more screwed over the pure-classes get. I play a rogue as my main character in a well-off raiding guild. We've done MC, BWL, AQ20, ZG, Up to HH in AQ40 and killed raz in naxx. As a rogue I see other classes, mainly warriors, coming closer and closer in DPS and damage but still being able to tank, take less damage from the AoEs and have more HPs then me. With druids (example) becoming better at DPS, Tanking and Healing where will I stand as a pure DPS class? If a fight requires classes that can switch between healing, tanking and DPS in one encounter,l then I am completely fucked as a raider as all I can do is DPS.
Who said they won't make fights that require "pure" classes? A fight based on kidneyshots rotations?With adds you can blind/gouge? Can hybrids even come close for those? Druids sure have a stun, but it's on the same diminishing return cooldown than all the other stuns, hammer of justice, intercept, conc blow etc. Rogues have their own stun timer on kidney. It wouldn't be hard to make a fight rely heavily on good rogues. A fight rogues wouldn't be top dps, but would be CCing everything around with other people while another class takes the dps role.
Warriors are a pretty bad example to talk about hybrids tho, they're the only true hybrid, because they can actually fill the tanking or the dps slot, and be the best at it. Other hybrids can fill roles but usually come second. My guess is that warriors will somehow get nerfed down, or rogues will get more utility(poisoning other's weapons? aggro transfers like the Thief class in FFXI?).
Discussing future hybrid roles when we don't even know how far they'll take the hybrids and the non hybrids during the expansion is pretty pointless tho. If they can change the paladin role from the current healer/buffer to a tank/buffer, they might very well change other classes to something slightly different too, like rogues from the full dps to CC/threat control dps class.
Kidney shot rotation? isn't that sartura? :)
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Yeah, I read up on the thief class for FFXI a while back and I like the aggro transfer thing they get. I also agree that discussing future roles is kind of pointless with no info on what is coming. But what else is there to discuss?
The exact description of the paladin's new taunt intrigues me - you cast it on a target, and it taunts any mob that is currently targetting that player.
Blessing of Protection is a fantastic tool for controlling aggro in the heat of battle. Not only does it protect the targeted party member from physical damage, but it also serves as an aggro wipe for the time that it is in effect. If that certain Fire Mage follows a critted Pyroblast with a critted Fire Blast, the mob will most likely turn to attack him. A Blessing of Protection takes him out of harms way and places the mob back into your tanking graces.
Think of Blessing of Protection as an emergency taunt and this talent will allow you use of that emergency taunt more often. If you travel with a normal group of players, they will eventually take this buff as a warning that they have pulled aggro and to back off a bit on their damage output.
*clip*
# Battle: Losing Aggro and Other Problems
Yes, it happens. The Rogue has to prove hes the top damage dealer. The Mages Talisman of Ephemeral Power is ready to use. The Warrior flat out doesnt like you and wants to prove youre a terrible tank. Whatever the reason, someone else has pulled aggro and the mob is running around chewing on others instead of trying to kill you.
Paladins do not have a taunt. We do not have an ability specifically designed to pull snap aggro and it can be a major hindrance. If you have Judgment of Righteousness or Holy Shock up, cast it and hope thats enough threat to regain aggro. If its not, then we use Blessing of Protection.
Blessing of Protection is a fantastic ability that serves two purposes. First, it grants whoever you cast it upon full immunity to physical damage. Second, and more importantly, it acts as a temporary aggro wipe for the target. Yes, the Fire Mage pulled aggro, but after having Blessing of Protection cast on them, they are now ignored by the mob and it will return its attention back upon the Paladin.
In essence, Blessing of Protection is a player-targeted taunt ability that lasts 10 seconds.
But remember, while the party member may be safe for those 10 seconds, they still retain their current level of threat, do whatever holy damage you can in that time to climb back on top. Most intelligent players will back off when they are hit with Blessing of Protection, understanding what has happened and not casting to allow the tank to regain aggro. Those that dont will most likely be killed after it wears off and while they blame the healers and tanks for their demise, the blame rests squarely on them.
The proposed Paladin taunt is designed for this tactic - it's an improved tool for the task, but you'd use it the same way.
It's also ideal for aoe pulls - the ones with lots of little mobs that are normally impossible to tank because you can't hold aggro on that many targets at once, so the aoe has to burn them down while the healers desperately try to keep them alive, or (in raids) there's a challenging shout rotation. Tanking those kinds of pulls in a 5 man is already the single best situation for a paladin tank.
Sartura is a decent example of how you can design mobs that are stunnable, while not making it too easy by stacking rogues(whirlwind timer making it immune to anymore stuns and raping rogues who were too late getting out). There's also giant eyes on chtun that use very basic mechanics in the game, that are over exploited in pvp. Chain silencing healers or stun locking people isn't something new. It's been used by every decent team in a guild vs guild match in PvP. It's just weird that it took them so long to figure they could actually have stunnable mobs in PvE, and not make it trivial, by adding for example, heavy melee AE. Risk vs Reward concept, will you go and risk getting shred to pieces by a whirlwinding flying bitch to build combo points, or will you play it safe and bow it, for terrible dps and waste of a raid slot. I found sartura on my rogue pretty fun(but well I had pretty smart priests, it helps).
It's not like rogues ONLY bring dps to raids. It's just that mobs are immune to everything else(well besides a few crappy mobs in naxx that you can get thru without using anything but dps anyway). Mobs need to start being affected by gouge/kidney/cheapshot/blind, on a large scale, but with counters(a mob has very powerful melee attacks and isn't tankable, you blind it, for 8secs it actually stops moving and start spamming spells, but do no melee attack anymore...). The fact that very little encounters are designed to use some of the rogue abilities doesn't mean rogue bring nothing but dps to raids. It's just that you see the need to have additional tanks(dps warrior utility to offtank like, faerlina adds) or AE(basic utility of mages, can be considered dps but it's a very different form of dps, totally ineficient most of the case, which is why I consider it utility) more often than you see the need for stuns(yay anub mobs, too bad you can taunt them making the need for stuns close to zero... noth casters, are a bit better for that, but even then you can usually take them down before they get out of intercept stuns)
And yea I didn't bother explaining myself about FFXI, but to sum it up, the Thief class in FFXI has 2 special attacks with very high multipliers, pretty much like backstab and ambush, that you can use with specific positionning. You position yourself behind a tank, who's meleeing a mob, and all the threat you generate on these hits(it's actually really huge instant dmg, imagine full crit executes, not ambush) is transferred on the warrior you were behind. You then go around the mob and do it again with another warrior, or stay behind the warrior facing the mob to do another move that does less dmg, but secure threat on only one tank. The goal is to do maximum damage while generating threat on the tank. Really clever system imo, and would be very interesting to use in a wow concept.
On the same order of ideas, I'd like to see a way for warriors to block incoming attacks on other people by positionning themselves between the agressor and the target, and it would be great if it worked in pvp, and worked on ranged attacks. Would make being protection fun, cause you'd actually PROTECT stuff, not just stand there and try to be a terrible CC with the dmg output of a hunter pet. But I disgress ^^
Sartura is a decent example of how you can design mobs that are stunnable, while not making it too easy by stacking rogues(whirlwind timer making it immune to anymore stuns and raping rogues who were too late getting out).
Except that there is DR mechanics for stuns in PvE.
Originally Posted by zeidrich
Women's breasts can be modeled as a cone and measured as V = (Db^2*h*.785)/3 and since breasts can be thought of as an amorphous fluid, you just have to worry about containing the volume of the breast.
Yea there is, but stacking rogues would still allow you to get full combo points kidney 3times in a row, for a total of... erm 5+2.5+1.75secs isn't it? Add to this normal stun for the same amount, you're looking at 17.5secs of stun, if timed perfectly, so probably closer to 12secs. That's still an insane amount of time, especially if you can repeat it in a cycle between every WW. Currently, there's no real point in stacking so many rogues because they lose quite a lot of dps stunning, and you can't maintain decent cycles because of the power of WWing which forces you to be cautious or else you die.
The concept that intruiges me is that, formerly, there was always debate about letting in offspecs- because 2 offspecs == something 2 'pure' specs/classes can do better. Now you may well have multistage fights requiring swapping composition, ect...
I forsee a lot more specific roles for wierd specs in addition to the hybrid concept. Encounters instead of bosses, with adds, coordnation, teams, and advantages to different ways to tackle encounters. Focus on short waves, counterspells, burst damage vs sustained.
So perhaps I'm being stupidly optomistic- I think they're really going to be focused in not only every member contributing but contributing in a unique and interesting way. I really have gotten the sense that Blizz detests classes/specs not being desired, and that will end up being how they choose to balance raiding encounters.
Of course, I could just be giddy that people will want shaman for dps, so feel free to ignore me.
Originally Posted by bartolimu
It makes me want to hit Marge Thatcher on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
I think that is just it: 25-man raid may give people more opportunities to contribute as individuals. But if Blizzard thinks that is all it will take to make hybrid classes viable they are sadly mistaken.
It will likely require the tanking/dps/healing gap between hybrids and specialist classes to narrow some so that using a shaman for dps isn't gimped.
It will require encounters that emphasize changes in requirements. A simple example is that currently not every encounter requires the same # of tanks, the same # of healers and the same amount of dps. But most raids use the same #'s regardless because the gap isn't that wide. Sure its nice to have a couple of druids offtank post-emps trash but you know what? We can do it without them. But if we had wide swings where one encounter needed 2 tanks, 15 dps, and 8 healers while the next needed 8 tanks, 15 dps and only 3 healers suddenly hybrids become more viable. And if you tie these requirements into phases of a single encounter so raids can't swap new players in every 15 minutes then hybrids go from being viable to essential.
In short, 25-man raids make this type of change more viable. But 25-man raids alone won't fix the problem.
Actually, it was always about minimal number of healers needed then anything else.
If Blizzard wants to make the fights that truthly let hybrids shine, they have to attempt to add some encounters that have stage of heavy tanking (many adds) but relatively low healing required at the same time if all targets are tanked (some pallies/druids and that point switch their role). Next stage would require heavy healing but less tanks, then another not that much tanking/healing but extra DPS. Otherwise people will still prefer stacking specialized classes for particular fight and relegating hybrids to healing only.
IBut if we had wide swings where one encounter needed 2 tanks, 15 dps, and 8 healers while the next needed 8 tanks, 15 dps and only 3 healers suddenly hybrids become more viable. And if you tie these requirements into phases of a single encounter so raids can't swap new players in every 15 minutes then hybrids go from being viable to essential.
In short, 25-man raids make this type of change more viable. But 25-man raids alone won't fix the problem.
I dont think that would be all that easy to implement. If you need 8 tanks chances are that you need a fair ammount of healing to keep those tanks alive. After all if they dont do any damage why bother tanking them at all or why not have 1 tank grab more than 1 mob.
I dont think that would be all that easy to implement. If you need 8 tanks chances are that you need a fair ammount of healing to keep those tanks alive. After all if they dont do any damage why bother tanking them at all or why not have 1 tank grab more than 1 mob.
Some sort of distance based group ability that multiplies mobs damage? So they have to be tanked away from each other? Still, don't see it happening in more then few fights.
IBut if we had wide swings where one encounter needed 2 tanks, 15 dps, and 8 healers while the next needed 8 tanks, 15 dps and only 3 healers suddenly hybrids become more viable. And if you tie these requirements into phases of a single encounter so raids can't swap new players in every 15 minutes then hybrids go from being viable to essential.
In short, 25-man raids make this type of change more viable. But 25-man raids alone won't fix the problem.
I dont think that would be all that easy to implement. If you need 8 tanks chances are that you need a fair ammount of healing to keep those tanks alive. After all if they dont do any damage why bother tanking them at all or why not have 1 tank grab more than 1 mob.
Curse of blood style ability that stacks is an easy way to do it. If they're split out they hit for not much, or spike for reasonable amounts (think 2 HoT's keeps them up) but you need to keep them spread. You have a 3-4 healers keeping things stable, you have mages swap to decursing, and your pally's shaman go in to Mke up for the DPS gap. Lots of ways to do it - but the essential point is there:
Hybrids need to hybridize into a role that's frequently required - and they need to do it without giving up "too much" of their primary role.
The real point is that every single class can have raid utility doing whatever they find to be the most enjoyable aspect of their class, assuming that encounters are designed to ask for that.
The problem with wow and hybrids is mostly related to mechanical issues in all 3 classes that are billed as hybrids. (druids vis a vis armor and stat value to each form, pally/shaman vis a vis faction balance). It's odd, because there are classes that can play as hybrids - they're just priests/mages. It's very easy to do an excellent job as a healing priest in +dmg/healing gear and still contribute dps so your mana bar isn't wasted. It's very easy to do an excellent job as an off-tanking warrior in dps gear and still contribute dps once your add is down so your time isn't wasted.
Classes with homogenous statistics do a much better job of hybriding than "hybrids" because they don't give up as much to change roles. We'll see how that changes. I could easily design an encounter that forced you to bring 5 paladins. It's not hard - 5 mobs that must be tanked, they only take damage from holy. Good luck. You can do the same thing with each class. The real issue is that blizzard has to actually do some of that if they want the hybrids to hybrid.
On a side note - druids are not hybrids. We won't be hybrids until major itemization changes happen (changing armor in combat, or having the stats on your armor change when you shift) We'll see how it works out.
First star to the right, and straight on till morning. in BSG 15
Encounters don't have to be contrived to let hybrids shine. THey just have to be more dynamic with on-the fly adaptation, something many have always asked for.
A raid boss that randomly splits the raid 5-ways and each group needs to perform an objective before meeting up again. An encounter where short-lived adds are spawned but you don't know in advance how many of each and where. Any encounter than spreads the raid out thinly and then has random objectives that need to be done right away. They could also introduce true burst healing.. like the naxx gargoyles for healers: an ancounter where two healers can keep the tank up for most of the time, then 10 seconds of massive OMG HEALS (think raid-wide AoE damage or a undispellable 95% healing debuff on the tank).
I have little faith in Blizzard's ability to pull this off successfully. On one hand, you have the problem where if you decrease the available slots, it makes more sense to fill those slots with specialized classes. On the other hand, if you try to counter that by making hybrids much better at each of their possible roles, you lose much of the incentive to play a specialized class (other than perhaps a couple unique abilities).
You can't use the argument that the hybrids can do one role for Phase 1, then another for Phase 2, because typically those roles require vastly different gear... with no way to switch. A druid in feral gear can't heal worth shit, and a druid in healing gear can't tank worth shit.
This whole situation is additionally annoying because Blizzard still hasn't addressed issues that plague the specialized classes. If you've read the 1UP article, you've seen that they think that Stealth is a really great ability. The thing is... it has no value in raid setting, and is kind of a joke in the PvP environment against opponents who aren't incompetent. If they can't come to terms with legitimate issues that the community has been waving under their nose for over a year, why should we expect them to do better with smaller instances and enhanced hybrids? Call me bitter, but I just haven't been very inspired by their record so far.
Call me bitter, but I just haven't been very inspired by their record so far.
Just because wow raised your expecations well above all of it's competitors, is no reason to be bitter that it did not fulfill your wildest imaginings.
I'm very impressed with wow when I compare it to every single competing product. It's like looking at color tv against handwritten correspondence.
The only frustrations I have with wow, outside of administrative "I can't believe I'm having to play internet psychologist", are when I look at how much design space is available, and feels readily obtainable inside of wow but hasn't made it there yet. Yes, I'd love for the rogue class to be as good as the warrior class in raids, but I don't feel that blizzard has somehow failed my inner child when they aren't. I don't regret paying for my time in Wow, and I think you actually have been inspired - it's why you're bitter.
First star to the right, and straight on till morning. in BSG 15
08/11/06, 11:29 PM
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