I have used this phrase million times recently but with enhancement the devil is in the details.

If the 10% is applied after other buffs then it will be awesome. If it is applied before, then it will be mediocre.

If weapon buffs work on offhand it will be awesome, if not then mediocre.

If you take a group of 4 rogues/warriors and give them Strength of Earth, BoK, BoM, Battleshout and GoA I think most of those guys will be sitting much closer to 2000 AP than 1000 and the shaman would likely be closer to 1500. In this scenario the Shaman gives around 800 AP to the group from the buff and another 800AP to the group from the 2 totems. Remember that they will nerf wf totem to just white attacks so GoA will gain in popularity. Furthermore GoA will help shaman keep the buff up.

So the Shaman contributes 1600 AP to the group and roughly 4 crit to the group. Obviously they will do less dps than rogues/warriors but the buffs and flexibility will be very useful.

With JoW/BoW (and in optimal conditions, own mana spring) enhancement shaman will have potential mana regeneration that restoration shammies can only dream of (see numbers for mp5 from JoW in previous posts). It will easily allow them to just burn whole mana bar (granted, whole in this case means 3.5-4k) on heals/burst DPS if needed and have it back to full in very reasonable time. They are still healers, only with added DPS/buffing potential. They simply don't have to be mana efficient the way normal restoration shaman had to be until now.

In the end though, it will entirely depend on encounters design in new raid instances.

I thought they said they weren't going to do this?

After editing my second post, I think perhaps the formulation of raid parties will change.

The standard thinking when considering a class for the raid is "Do they tank, heal, or DPS?". Crowd control, AE, tranq shot, stuns, cures, buffs, etc, are all secondary considerations for raid makeup, because those values differ widely depending on the encounter.

Perhaps a new thinking will happen with the hybrids. It really stinks that we don't know druid info yet, because it would be nice to see how they mingle with the rest, but:



1 Resto shaman
1 elemental shaman
3 mages

3 Priest
2 Resto Druid

1 Enhancement shaman
3 rogues
1 Fury Warrior

1 Warlock
1 Hunter
1 Tank
1 holy paladin
1 Feral Druid

1 Prot paladin
1 Fury/Tank Warrior
1 Holy Paladin
1 Warlock
1 Hunter

This setup has
8 dedicated healers (2 off-healers in Ele shaman and Fer druid)
1 dedicated tank (4 off tanks, including prot pally and feral druid)
9 DPS melee (included feral druid and enh shaman)
6 caster DPS (included Ele shaman)

I didn't know how to describe the protection paladin. Perhaps just leaving that out and adding another DPS class would be good, but I wouldn't think more healers were necessary.

I don't know enough about paladins to give any input on raid composition including them, and I wish more would post here so I can get some perspective.

I personally think the value of off-specs will largely been determined by the types of encounters blizzard create in BC.

From the new skills/talents we have seen so far, it appears blizzard are actively encouraging a wide range of "off-specs" in raids. So it stands to reason they will be designing encounters that mesh well with these new lvl 70 talents. Blizzard seem to be using BC as a good chance to redesign parts of the game that they don't like, such as the paladin/horde imbalance, raid size, debuff limit - and it would seem raid roles should be included in that list.

Once blizzard designed the basic raid sizes, raid roles for the first couple of large raid dungeons it was near impossible to change them without redesigning class sets, existing dungeons to fit the changes. But BC wipes the slate clean (to a degree).

If blizzard get the talent trees right, and design encounters that support them, I don't see why there will no longer be "off-spec's" for raids, as they will ALL be useful for various roles. I suspect they will reduce the total amount of healing needed, but put in requirements for extra burst healing at times … perhaps something like:

- Boss who does only medium dmg to the MT (by today's standards) and little or no AoE dmg so that a small number of primary healers are all that’s needed to keep the raid alive.
- However, every 2 minutes, he does a massive AoE pulse that does dmg to equivalent of 25% of the persons hp every 2 seconds, for 14 seconds.
- Without massive amounts of burst healing, people will die. If people die, your dps drops and you will have to try and survive more and more aoe pulses (in which more people will die). So you can't stack healers and you can't stack dps.
- So the ideal raid might have 5 primary healers, 1 tank, 12 pure dps, but you can't stack more healers (dps will be too low) and you can't stack more pure dps (or you won't survive the aoe) so you need a bunch of people capable of contributing short bursts of healing, while also adding enough dps to the raid to get the boss down in 3-4 aoe pulses.