Mekasha

Currently I'm sure many guilds are accustomed to and use optimized dps groups, ie melee groups with a hunter with TSA, warrior with talented battleshout, or a druid with lotp; and caster groups with atiesh auras/new shaman caster totems/moonkin aura.

So I got to thinking, with shrinking raid size in BC, how detrimental to encounters would it be to allow group aura effects work on the entire raid?

Right off it seems a little over the top, but when you consider the shrinking raid size, and therefore less people of each class, dmg optimized groups like this seem even more important, with the one downside of instead of leaving 5-6 people out of that perfect group, you're now only leaving out 1-2.

Example:

We'll assume that your average 25 man raid in BC will have approximately 7 dps casters. This allows a spread of 5-6 warlocks/mages and two slots for a shadowpriest/moonkin/elemental shaman. Also in the raid we'll assume at most 3 paladins, though that may be pushing it, not really sure on the healing dynamics of what'd be optimal to bring along. I only mention paladins due to them being the only healing class that really benefits from +crit, and while ~7 paladins getting +10crit (moonkin/totem/mage atiesh) from raid auras currently is a little overdoing it, in the context of BC, 2-3 paladins getting 9crit (nerfed mage atiesh) doesn't seem as overwhelming.

Ideally you'd currently stack the Atiesh-m and moonkin along with 3 other mage/destrolocks, and the Atiesh-w with your affliction warlocks/SP. But that's also assuming 8-10 total mages/warlocks. Reduce that number to 5-6, and now you're only leaving out maybe 2 from receiving the group buffs.

I'm not particularly good at pushing my point, but that's my prime example. So the question is, would this be too overpowered or out of balance given game mechanics, or is it a small change that would be nice but not have too big of an over-arching effect?

To me it seems this solves alot of problems in deciding who gets X group buff, be it windfury totem for melee, totem of wrath for casters, etc. The only real forseeable problem I notice would be paladin/shaman/hunter resist auras, though that can easily be rebalanced by slightly lowering the resist values on the crafted resist gear for X encounter.

 

songster

I think this goes against Blizzard's intent. It you allow all auras to affect the raid, you get a min/max effect where you need to have (at least) one TSA, one feral druid with ILOTP, on tree druid, etc. It defines and limits your raid compopsition.

By contrast, with the current system, they can balance the raids on the assumption that raid members do not have every single possible buff. That then allows the raiders to mix and match, and you'll have *several* viable compositions with similar levels of DPS/healing/etc.

You could either have a treeform druid in the MT group to buff MT healing *or* a moonkin in a healer group to increase healing output. A melee group can have either ILOTP or a TSA, but may well not get both. You can have a pally aura *or* a shaman totem, but not both. Or if you *do* manage to squeeze in both, then you won't have Blood Pact.

Of course, some combinations will be better than others - Blood Pact will be better for a tanking group than for a caster group, and putting an oomkin in a melee DPS group is just silly. But the intent seems clear: multiple different ways of organising your group, thus there are many optimum solutions instead of one, and group composition becomes more flexible.

 

Darkchani

While it may sound nice to not have to deal with group making, i think that's quite the opposite blizzard would want to achieve. Wheres the fun, or at least the thinking, in making group if everyone gets all buffs anyway ? it doesnt make sense anymore to have 8 or 5 groups, just throw everyone in as they get invited by an /rainvite 70 !

If you start with druid auras, then you have to do TSA, then battle shout, then obviously paladin auras and shaman totems and shadow priest VE and VT... wheres the cut-off line ? and how do you balance an encounter with rogues having TSA, FI, BoM, BoK, BoS, Sanc. Crusader, ILotP, BS, WF, GOA, SOE, Unleashed Rage... and how do you balance it so raids without all that can still do it ?

edit : too slow :x

 

Mekasha

Well the deal is with the changing raid size, and them seeming to want to promote off-specs you can already have 2-3 rogues with all those listed buffs, since 2-3 are all you're going to have in a raid. Obviously melee benefits far far more from buffs than casters do, but when you look at the full list of buffs available it really doesn't seem that over the top.

 

Crowbite

But you run into problems with things like LotP. That 5% crit to everyone including warriors, rogues, shamans, pallies, hunters and feral druids. Now a buff that gives a total of 25% crit max now works out to be closer to +100% with the ability to heal anyone that crits for a subtanial amount. Now they have to design with that in mind, thus forcing a feral druid to be part of the raid.

 

• sadris

I don't think so. The reason that hybrid off-specs are made possible currently is because said person would be riding on the backs of 39 other people. If he/she could now only ride on 24 other people, then the content becomes much more difficult to complete.

Things might be a bit different with the classes which provide a serious DPS increase over having another parent class (Enhancement Shaman, Shadow Priest), but for the most part the group buffs are fairly weak (Moonkin, Paladin).

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

◊ Lord BEEF

While it may or may not be all that overpowered, it would take a lot of strategy out of group making and that's part of the fun. All you'd be left with is deciding who gets prayer of healing for their group (unless you want to make that raid wide as well, haha).

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Axanor

They want group composition to matter, hence now being unable to change groups in combat, and much stronger party buffs for offspecs.

 

Kody

Um? This is completely untrue. Being unable to move people around in groups is a UI bug with using certain raid UI's - I was perfectly able to move one of our paladins into the group I was in when I died. This was on beta, in Karazhan, of course... so it may be different on live, but it's certainly not intended if so going by what's possible in beta(which is a newer build).

 

Shalas

Not being able to change groups in combat is a CTRA "feature" to work around that the results can be somewhat buggy with the current build on live.

 

◊ Quigon

Most of this is going to be simply old-news to Horde raid leaders. You'll find out quickly that min/maxing groups isn't all that bad. Still - 25 mans leave a lot to be desired when it comes to diversity, especially with 9 classes.

 

Kazanir

It's been our experience that if you are using CTRA or Perl, you won't be able to change groups unless you are dead and thus out of combat. There are probably other UI mods that lock all your frames inside combat to prevent silly errors.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

◊ Anias

Several of those effects are borderling broken at 5 person effectiveness and you want to increase them to 25?

Erm.

Let's go with, this was a bad idea that you didn't think through, but we'll let it go and forgive you. (At least I hope you didn't think vampiric touch for the entire raid was a sane idea?)

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

• Arawethion

See: Blessings for the possible repercussions of buffs that scale too easily beyond 5 people.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to the raid-leading challenge of having more meaningful group setup choices.

Basically, it would be wrong on every level. Less interesting, harder to balance, and more restrictive of raid talent choices.

Read before asking questions:
Moonkin guide/spreadsheet, http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
Resto guide/spreadsheet, http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t88239-r...al_discussion/

 

Evert

While I agree that having aura effects work on the entire raid would be dumb, something thats always bothered me is how things like Battle Shout and Tranquility only effect your party. Seems like they should effect everyone in range... or to prevent it from being stupid exploitable: A number of people in range limited to 5.

Naturally this has some problems, such as what 5 people get buffed or healed if more than 5 are in range? I guess some sort of priorty system would have to be in place.

I don't know if its feasible, but standing next to a warrior going '"RARRR BATTLE SHOUT" and me being like "I'm just not hearing you man" is silly.

\"Listen, I\'m trying to have a serious conversation about ferret bras and you are not listening\"

 

Lamaros

Horrible idea. Will just end up with the notion of exact required raid makeups, raids will be more powerful, harder tuning on raids as a result, etc..

It's much more fun when there are several ways to solve a problem than just the one.

 

Whiteknight

I have never liked the party-wide aura limitation in WoW. It has always been unintuitive and a significant block to game immersion.

As pointed out above, things like battleshout selectively affecting players based on some artificial group selection just go to show how unintuitive it really is.

I'll grant that there is some skill involved in setting up groups effectively, and in rearranging the groups during a fight. However, this is a skill that only one player can participate in. Additionally the majority of the work is setup or 'prep' much like prepotting resist pots. Often it takes a significant amount of time - time where the majority of your raid is standing around waiting while one or two players discuss the raid setup and implement it.
Raid adjustments during the fight involve popping up a dialog and adjusting the order of players in an artifical grouping. Firstly that takes you right out of the game - no longer are you focused on what the group is doing, but you're fighting with a list. It's mechanical and distracting.


In order to make a system that is at once intuitive, involving skill on the part of every player and interactive - while still being balanced is undoubtedly hard. However it seems that there is definitely an obvious starting point. First make all aura effects raid-wide - i.e. affecting all allies. Secondly, reduce the range of effect. This means that effects such as Devotion Aura will require interactive positioning on the part of the paladin, and the various folk who require the buff. Battleshout will affect all the people near the warrior shouting, so if you can place your warriors and rogues near one another, they get buffed.
Spells like PoH could have their range reduced, or alternatively have an AoE cap much like AoE damage spells. Say it hits the 5 most damaged players within range.

Immediately, we have a system where player interaction is enhanced. Player positioning is now a cooperative endevor to optimize buffs. Similarly, encounter design becomes much more important - if the boss has knockback abilities, he might knock your paladin out of range of the MT - and hence cause the MT to lose Devotion Aura. Boss AOE becomes much more interesting - if you're grouped up for buffs, more folk get hit by AOE, hence a dynamic immersive tradeoff that has to be resolved by in-game cooperation of players controlling their avatar (as opposed to a single player adjusting a non-immersive arbitrary list of players into equally arbitrary groupings).

I'd also like to see visual cues for aura buffs - similar to how auras caused a visual effect at the feet of buffed players in Diablo 2. This would help significantly with players adjusting position in order to ensure appropriate players are buffed.

 

Tehehe

I think you're missing the point he's trying to make, which is that if you increase the auras from party-wide to raid-wide you're only slightly increasing the group that is actually gaining real benefit from the aura. For example, in a 25-man raid with only 7 DPS casters, changing Moonkin aura from group-wide to raid-wide is only going to benefit two new people. How game breaking is it for the 2 more casters to receive the aura as well? Obviously this is ignoring the benefit the rest of the raid is getting from the spell crit aura which be negligible (warriors/rogues) or arguably significant healers).




I think this is much more important to consider. Someone mentioned that this was just a limitation imposed by a mod, guess I'll have to test it out later. I think the ability to change groups in combat opens up the potential for things that I think we can all agree is not the path we want raiding to go down.

Back when my guild was learning Vael I wrote a mod (mostly just for proof of concept) to basically keep the whole raid's group composition dynamic to maximize the Priests' POH healing. In short it would put the people that needed healing the most in groups with priests spamming POH.

It never really got tested because of the lag created by switching groups in combat due to some people's raid frames (and lack of necessity), but it shows the potential. Imagine this sort of thing to keep the raids groups ay 100% maximized efficiency (e.g., moving dead people out of groups w/ auras) throughout combat without any (or little) human interaction. I know I wouldn't want that to become the norm.

 

◊ Oggie

Admittedly, I was hoping that this might be a thread on potential layout and party composition that wasn't going to be heaped, but the PTB here have been decidedly against that line of discussion till we get more raid data.

As to the OP.....I don't have the link available, but I'm sure some others remember, there was an interview of some description with regards to why group composition should be important. Being a raiding horde having rerolled from a pally this made me laugh so hard I briefly lost conciousness, but I think the sentiment is one that they've pushed towards.

I actually kind of like the choices, and they allow for non-optimum raid compositions that wouldn't otherwise make sense- the second enhance shaman doesn't make a signficiant improvement in raid dps (unless you meant for that buff to stack?), and anything past the 4th shaman could never be shown as being useful (since everyone would have every totem all the time). I'm not saying that this stuff should be that strong and/or optomized, but I'd argue that raidwide effects further cause rigid raid structuring because of the min/maxing.

So while obviously as others have mentioned, there are some balancing issues that would have to be worked out, I don't think it would be impossible to fix, merely inadvisable.

Edit:
And to sum up my point, someone else did it better than I could:

 

• sadris

You cannot programatically change groups whilst in combat, but you are able to do so manually (drag players in raid frame). This is so you can't have a decursive-like mod based on swapping group members.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

Tehehe

Sure you can, take a look at: http://www.wowwiki.com/API_SwapRaidSubgroup

 

Bekah

I believe the comment was more relevant to Vampiric Touch. It's currently virtually impossible to go mana infinite with one shadow priest in a group unless you reach a +dmg cap that's not currently in game. With 2 Shadow Priests, however, it's a hell of a lot more easy, and with 3 it's not only easy, but it's likely.

If VT were to scale to raid you would take 3 shadow priests and no mana using members of the raid should ever have to worry about mana again. It benefits dps casters and healers... and anyone who can stand 20 yards back from the boss, even if you nerf the aura to 15-20 yards they'd have to design all fights with forced spread out caster dps.... or nerf the shadow priest to hell and gone.

Similar deal with VE. You've got 180 hps at 600dps per shadow priest. That's 540 hps for 3 of us... for every raid member within 30 yards.... and 600 dps is a low ball number. (I hit 700 with raid buffs at 663+dmg and have another 50+dmg in just blues on Beta) At that point, all you need is 2-3 people to heal the spike damage.... because remember they'll never have to worry about mana again.

Basically you'd have to totally dismantle to shadow tree and rebuild it if a change like that came out...

It's only one terribly broken part, but how do you change that kind of thing without turning the shadow priest into an entirely different beast?

It's an interesting idea, but one that Blizz doesn't intend to push live given the fact that VT even exists.

 

• DeeNogger

Why must you tease me so?



In my mind I would love for TBC group comp to be kinda a grab bag event. The raid leader would populate the raid with the basic standard raid comp (as far as healers/tanks/dps). Then, he would go to the next level. Oh, today we have a imp LotP druid, he goes in with the rogues. Whats that? shadow priest? save your mana pots healers, shadow priest goes with the druids... etc etc.

Every person has their own special flavor they can add to the raid. Instead of just being one of many healers, or the same old tired combat daggers rogue (yawn!) there can be something special. More specs doing different things for everybody. TBC brings freedom for this shadow priest, and freedom tastes good.

I write things The word of DeeNogger -- New Blog Post November Something