f13.net

Splitting off from the thread Some Thoughts because it's going to go in a different, more awesome direction!

I skipped over this at first because my posts were WALL OF TEXT enough without arguing with people agreeing with me.  I am going to preface this by saying I am not making this up.  Everything you are about to read is true.
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So our guild got it's first 25 man raid together.  WOO WOO!  Sure, we had to get a few pugs, but still!  We were in fighting shape again.  We started off with the plague wing.  One shot's and booze for everyone!  We look at spider, but then men of sterner stuff (Such as myself) cried out,
"Fuck spider!  All the pugs go to spider!  Let's go to CONSTRUCT!"
"To construct!"
"TO CONSTRUCT!"

To construct we went.

After the first wipe on Patchwerk, it was time to start playing the blame game.  It's easy to justify carrying bads when you're dropping bosses but that shit stops the moment you start wiping.  It was pretty clearly the healers fault, but we had enough time during the run back and recovery to start looking at the meters too.

That is when I met Vill.

Vill had been in the guild for as long as I could remember, but in all that time I'd never grouped with her.  She played a hunter back in BC but had switched to a druid main for whatever reason.  Perhaps she was worried she'd lose her raid slots if all she could do is DPS when druids could dps, heal, and tank with respecs.  Or perhaps she was just bored.  Whatever the reason, Vill was completely and utterly terrible at her class.  No, terrible is not the right word.  This is her complete combatlog from the first patchwerk attempt.  I have changed the names to protect the innocent and guilty, but otherwise have not in any way altered or excluded anything.  This is all she did for the 2:47 failure.

19:17'55.797   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 2836 Arcane. (279 Resisted)
19:17'59.391   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 3120 Arcane.
19:18'03.063   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 2842 Arcane. (279 Resisted)
19:18'06.141   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 3091 Arcane.
19:18'09.047   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 6130 Arcane. (Critical)
19:18'11.453   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 2761 Arcane. (272 Resisted)
19:18'14.563   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 3051 Arcane.
19:18'17.375   Vill Starfire hits Patchwerk for 6280 Arcane. (Critical)
19:18'42.313   Vill Regrowth heals DPSDK#1 for 3127.
19:18'44.781   Vill Regrowth heals DPSDK#1 for 3109. (3109 Overheal)
19:18'50.422   Vill Regrowth heals DPSDK#1 for 4615. (Critical)
19:18'52.781   Vill Regrowth heals DPSDK#2 for 3223.
19:18'53.469   DPSDK#1 gains 609 health from Vill Regrowth.
19:18'56.797   Vill Regrowth heals DPSDK#1 for 4714. (Critical)

Once we realized she was functionally AFK, there was a brief discussion about what to do with her.  I said to keep her because I was interested in watching what she was doing via /focus because really what the fuck else is a tank going to do on patchwerk to keep himself busy?  On the next attempt, I told her to just spam healing touch on the DK tank.  She cast regrowth instead, so I'm not sure that counts as even passing a Turing Test.

19:35'29.860   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3285.
19:35'29.860   DKTANK gains Regrowth.
19:35'32.688   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3212.
19:35'35.078   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3299. (3299 Overheal)
19:35'37.891   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3228. (3228 Overheal)
19:35'40.969   DKTANK gains 627 health from Vill Regrowth.
19:35'41.110   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3223. (1630 Overheal)
19:35'44.328   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3272. (3272 Overheal)
19:35'47.406   DKTANK gains 627 health from Vill Regrowth.
19:35'49.172   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3308.
19:35'51.953   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3287. (3287 Overheal)
19:35'58.047   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3172.
19:35'59.750   Vill gains Nature's Grace.
19:35'59.985   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 4666. (Critical) (4666 Overheal)
19:36'02.406   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3118.
19:36'04.719   Vill gains Nature's Grace.
19:36'04.844   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 4825. (Critical)
19:36'07.328   Vill gains Nature's Grace.
19:36'07.625   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 4680. (Critical)
19:36'10.781   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3333. (3333 Overheal)
19:36'13.906   DKTANK gains 610 health from Vill Regrowth.
19:36'14.094   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3236.
19:36'17.235   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3134. (3134 Overheal)
19:36'20.297   DKTANK gains 610 health from Vill Regrowth.
19:36'22.953   Vill Regrowth heals DKTANK for 3221.
19:36'25.953   DKTANK gains 609 health from Vill Regrowth.

Keep in mind she did not die at 36:22.  She lived until 36:43.  In that time she failed to cast a single spell.  On the next attempt, the following was her entire combat log.

19:43'05.781   Vill Regrowth heals Mirror Image #3 for 3147. (2590 Overheal)
19:43'05.781   Mirror Image #3 gains Regrowth.
19:43'25.313   Vill resurrects Gobbeldygook using Rebirth.

...what

As far as I could tell, she was getting up and getting drinks not just in between attempts like civilized folk, but casts.  As the night wore on, she seemed to pay more and more attention as we paid more attention to her like some perverse twist on Schrodinger's Cat.  She was still consistently doing half the damage of lowest tank.  She wasn't the only epic failure; It wasn't until we got to Thaddius that I noticed she wasn't in moonkin form.  She was just casting spells in ye olde standard caster form.  Had she specced moonkin form?  Yep.  She just wasn't in it.

After the raid, I asked in Officer chat what the fuck she was doing in the guild.  In all my time playing WoW, she was the worst player I had ever encountered.  No other player I have encountered before or since could compare to her sheer, raw incompetency.  I believe such a player could exist, but they would have to knock zombies into gluth to limbo under this bar.

"But she has such a nice, sweet personality!"
"She said nothing in vent or raid chat all night!"

My unshakable beilef that we should not tolerate afk raiders ultimately lead to my being gkicked.

Translation: She's either one of the other raider's SO's, a flirt, or the guild has it's share of desperate nerds. (Assuming it's a female IRL, which may not matter.  :uhrr:)

Naxx isn't really serious business.

People have different circumstances in life that lead to them possibly not being crack video game players. That's all I can say. If you can't possibly fathom what they may be, then life experience -------->.

Now, I don't mean to seem like a dink to you. But you also shouldn't necessarily have been a dink to her either, if you were.

Let's just remember that online games are for everyone, not just those who are "good".

If you're in a serious, top 3 server raiding guild - then no, that may not be the place for her.

Of course, there does exist the possibility that an officer just has a crush on her or something, and she's perfectly capable of playing well but she just either chooses not to or doesn't care to be told how to. In that case, yes, a little annoyance is appropriate for sure.

But that's only one possibility of many, I suppose would be my point.

In a display of self-control, I never said a word to her besides my amateur turing test.  It was actually in writing this up that it hit me what was probably going on: Her son was probably playing her character that night without us being informed, which would also explain pretty nicely why she didn't say anything all night.

RE: Nice personality - It was one of the women folk defending her having a nice personality.  Vill's married and her husband played for a while.  So, someone was genuinely defending the performance on the grounds personality.

What?

25 slots. 1 slot filled by someone who isn't inattentive or bad but is not there. Is afk.

If you're in a more casual guild the first two listed above are fine. The last (afk) should never, ever be tolerated. She's not playing.

So is this your first time playing WoW then?

If there's a problem with a player, you could maybe ask them what's up rather than going on a passive aggressive rant on a message board that doesn't know anything about the people involved?  Dunno.  Just a thought.

The only problem with MMORPGs is the other people.

The guild leader issued an edict that since we were a friends and family guild, anyone besides the raid leader was forbidden from discussing someones performance with them.  I am not kidding.

Note the past tense.

Whoops!  :awesome_for_real:


That actually sounds like a sensible idea. It would cut down on teh dramaz when people get full of beans and whiskey over a raidwipe or whatnot.

I don't know how much drama it would actually cut down on, if you consider that there's a lot of opportunity for one of 10-25 people to get frustrated with people goofing around when that one person's time is limited and precious to them and they absolutely, on fucking-no-uncertain-terms, do not have the spare time to goof around and wipe for nothing.  Serious business and all that.

I think this is a good thing for you.  That guild is obviously not meshing well with how you want to play, so what better time than now to look for greener pastures.  It also helps you down the road to have a general idea of how well things may go for a random PUG if it contains one or more members of your former guild, although that isn't always the case.  Shitty guilds can have one or two outstanding exceptions, and top-notch guilds aren't always without their one or two village idiots.

I booted a guy from my raid recently for being afk. Here's the meter.

Note Felara, who was a feral non-tanking dps druid. If my numbers are right, in a 2 hour raid, he was dpsing for about 8 minutes. I have no idea WTF he was doing the rest of the time because he was there for every ready check. Anyway, it's not about sucking, it's about being lazy. He had full epics for heaven's sake. Oh and that's a healing priest who almost caught him.

(http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7648/wowscrnshot021009163442ke7.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

This is reminding me that I should reinstall recount.  :grin:

I hope yensid was in greens or came in to the raid late.   :ye_gods:

Sorry to go off topic, what's SO?

Yeah I'm not sure what to about him and another mage that are constantly in the bottom rungs. The raid is a fun raid, so I don't punish people for coming in last. However, I do punish people who screw around, don't play with the group, and expect rewards.

The top 5 DPSers you see there are pretty regular, and have procured decent gear. I was tanking for a long time, but I switched over b/c we had so many people who wanted to do it. As it stands now, there's the top 5, a middle 7-8 that stays within a couple percentages of each other, and then 3-4 that fall below/equal the tanks.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Proudmoore&n=Yensid (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Proudmoore&n=Yensid) That's Yensid's gear profile. As you can see, his position at the bottom makes zero sense. His Beimba ranking is 447 points, while Outkastedelf's is 437. Yet, with lesser actual gear, Outkast is 12 ranks higher on the meters. Obviously, it boggles the mind.

EDIT : SO = Significant Other, Llyse

Significant other.

Yeah that number is pretty low. My mutilate rogue is basically one rung of equipment below that dude's armory in every slot and 1400 is just.... bleh.   I would expect that equipment to be ~2000 dps on trash and ~3000 on melee-friendly bosses.  Especially in a 25-man.

Dude's AFKing. Probably just on trash, since "trash doesn't matter."  Start running a WWS log (Or switch Recount over to "current fight" on bosses) so you can see if he's under performing there.

Maybe she's fighting with her SO, or maybe helping with her kid's homework.  In any case, she ought to at least speak up and say something, or not go on the raid.

This is one reason why I don't raid.  I can raid if something's on farm, but my responsibilities around with my family come before anything I do in front of a computer screen.  I simply cannot fill a vital role in a game.  My kids are older now, so they can wait for me to be finished, but a few years ago?  No way.

This.  Our guild is struggling to finish content with all guildmembers for the first time.  Someone afking or flat out ignoring what we say is going to be a big problem trying to get things done effectively.  We wiped 3 times on the first pull of Obsidian Sanctuary the other night and I'm still not sure why since half the group is fully decked out in pretty nice purple gear.  We seem to have quite a few issues with people either just ranomly DPSing some mob that the tank isn't working on (and thus causing more work for the healers) or going all out and pulling tank aggro.  Luckily it got better as the night went on and we finished without much issue.

This is a design flaw.  The more people a raid requires, the less accountable each player becomes.  Having a raid require more than 2 groups means that this will be a common occurrence between inattentive players and players dual boxing. 

I thought they learned this lesson years ago in EQ.  Planes raids were full of this crap.

Conversely, the more people a raid requires, the less vital every single one of them is.  There are things I definitely liked about the 40-70 person raids in EQ, and that was one of them.  Every role is filled enough times that there is rarely a single ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL individual, unless your guild recruited poorly or decided to gear up one or two individuals to the exclusion of all others.  That means that, hey, you need to go AFK every 5 minutes?  No big deal.  Just make sure you're here and paying full attention on bosses.  Definitely good for people who want to play but can't afford to sit down and focus for two or three hours to the exclusion of all else.  Instead you get a few critical stretches during boss fights where you can't go AFK, and the rest of the time you can come and go.

Raiding in WoW tends to require a lot more scheduling and careful planning of groups and such in my experience, while in EQ it was 'raid time, everyone get to <zone>!" and we started to raid.  The massive amount of content didn't hurt either, because there were (at least in the later years, particularly Dragons of Norrath on forward) always one to two dozen potential raids ranging in possible size from 24 to 40-something players.  And you could often get started on a raid with 15 or so, cause there's plenty of trash to clear and the trash can be done with far less than the capacity of the raid.  If it wasn't for other reasons, I doubt I ever would have quit EQ, because those raids are in many ways vastly superior, in my opinion.  I can definitely see the merit of the other side of the argument, but EQ raids honestly felt a lot more casual than WoW raids because of the variety and the ability to just book it and go.

It's not that I like or endorse AFK during raids, but in WoW raids it grates on my nerves in a way it never did in EQ, because in WoW that one or two people being AFK seem a hell of a lot more important and they can often hold up the entire raid.

It sounds like the problem solved itself.  The guild (or at least the officer core) is approaching the game in a completely different manner as Gob.  I couldn’t play in one that didn’t hold its members somewhat accountable for their performance either.

The problem, if you take it as a problem, with WoW raids is all of them are tuned to a max population.  Each person is expected to contribute at a certain level or you can’t win.  Any feet dragging has to be made up for by some hard work elsewhere.  It’s much more relaxed now then it has been since MC but you can still have 2-3 people ruin a whole guild’s night if, and this is a big if, most of the guild is getting its fun from progression.

EQ raids could be solved by throwing more people at them.  So if your guild sucks or you just don’t wanna crack the whip or be selective about recruiting you don’t have to.  You just deal with the logistics of a slightly larger raid force.  Not my cup of tea really. I don’t see the appeal.

It’s like any team or group activity, take people that bring the same level of involvement and enthusiasm as you or its just gonna be stress.

You weren't an officer, were you?  Plus I'll guess your guild didn't do the upper end Kunark stuff while the "big badasses" were running Planes.   I know my guild leadership core spent HOURS prior to our raid times scouting what was out, and who was there.  If our raid was at 7am PST on a Saturday morning (so we could avoid other guilds who started later) then I know the Guild leader and our "scouts" had been on since 6 or 7am EST figuring out what we were going to kill that day.

The time scheduling in WOW comes only because it's so accessible and you try to accommodate people's schedules instead of requiring "you login now or you're booted out."   Also, you can go ahead and do old raid content in WOW, it's just not reasonable to most people because "why do Molten Core/ BWL when that stuff is crap."  It's part of their 'soft' reset on itemization with each expansion that drives this.  In the EQ model you'd have people in WoW still being forced through BWL before they were allowed to consider getting in a raid for Karazan.     "What's that, you just started playing? Well I guess we can drag your noob ass along on our alt Karazan/ SSC runs but you're not going into Naxx with us."   This is not a superior model, IMO. 

It's true that's about how it was in the earlier days, but I was referring to the later, Omens of War, Dragons of Norrath and beyond era where between 70% to 90% of the stuff was instanced.  In the Velious Age in particular it was definitely time-demanding to get to a raid as soon as it was called AND get through it fast and flawlessly, or else someone else would grab the mob, since usually by the time you reached the mob another guild was on your tail just hoping you'd wipe so they could clean up.  I often spent a lot of time scouting the Western Wastes in the earlier days when Kland, Zland, and Sontalak were due to spawn, and popping into the Temple of Veeshan for checks on the spawns in there the days they were due.  That competition was fun in its own way, at the time, but I don't think I'd specifically want things to be the same again.

But by the Planar Age, that had reduced considerably.  The lesser mobs were often left up by the Time guilds, and the Time guilds were practically forced to work out some damned 'rotation' crap since it was only semi-instanced at the time and they could screw it up for each other so easily that nobody would ever be able to beat the place if they didn't work it out.  That meant that 'raid time is X', scouts went out 30-45 minutes earlier and popped into the various zones for a quick check - and since all the relevant zones were directly off of Tranquility, it didn't take long to check - and so on.

In the Omens of War and Dragons of Norrath age, outdoor bosses had become the rarity, and they were rarely, if ever, vital to progress.  The King and Queen in Riftseeker's Sanctum are the main ones I can recall specifically looking for.  The two outdoor bosses in Wall of Slaughter tended to be things we killed if they were up, while we were on the way to the Trials of Mata Muram, though by the time we were in Anguish we basically didn't bother with those at all anymore.  After that, they were really pushing out the expansions fast and most of the content was instanced, so we knew what we couldn't do by looking at our lockout timers, and anything that wasn't on lockout was game to be jumped on.  After we had Anguish access, we didn't even bother with outdoor bosses for the most part until Prophecy of Ro, as far as I can remember.  I cannot think of a single outdoor type boss that we even bothered to check on with any regularity in the Dragons of Norrath or Depths of Darkhollow era.  And at that point, we usually began our scouting  30 or so minutes before raid time for the few outdoor type bosses that existed, - mostly during Prophecy of Ro, all the later outdoor bosses I can recall having much interest in were from that expansion.

And while perhaps having to do old raids to gear up for new raids isn't a superior model, having only two to four raids reasonably available at any given time is, I think, worse.  That's why I dislike the soft reset, because when paired with the glacial content production rate, it means the relevant content is a fraction of what it could be.  Now, I'm not going to say it's really better to force everyone to go through all the old stuff before they can try anything new either, but...well, I like having dozens of things available to do at any given time, not barely a handful.  I don't know how to solve that without keeping old content relevant, other than making ten times the amount of new content than what they currently make.


And, while earlier EQ raids could be solved by throwing more people at them, the instanced ones were indeed all capped just like the WoW ones were.  The difference, I think, is that they didn't tune the difficulty so carefully.  They just kinda threw in a bunch of mobs, created interesting and clever mechanics for them, made the numbers bigger for the 'harder' ones, and playtested enough to catch the most glaring bugs.  The mechanics and the fights weren't perfectly tuned so that they would present the exact desired level of challenge.  So sometimes a fight was easy enough you'd plow through it the first time through, and you could do it with 10 or 15 people less than the max.  Other times a fight was so damned hard it took a month and a half of practice to get to perfect execution in order to beat it (Sendaii sticks out in my mind as being the latter).

He specifically stated DoN and forward.  At that point most anything worth raiding was instanced/triggered including Time, Tacvi, and Anguish.  Now Kunark era, completely different story.  I fucking hated scouting and sitting around waiting to find shit to kill. 

Raiding in WoW just seems so silly after doing Uqua+ in EQ.  I really enjoyed the candy land end zones EQ offered, especially Tacvi and Anguish.

Do you think behavior you describe is common in raiding? As in a given raid someone will be disinterested to the point of being functionally AFK? You also mentioned it was only one player, do you think you'd still succeed if there were 2-3 people like that?

AFKing or plain not trying is A LOT more common in BGs than anecdotal horror raiding story. BG AFKs happened ALL THE FUCKING time back when you could honor-grind decent gear. The only reason it isn't as common right now is that gear you can get this way is completely and utterly garbage-quality.

While this is true, there are other methods to deal with AFK bgers than to have crappy gear for honor rewards.

People that afk during raids aren't at the raid for the fun of the raid itself.  There exists a subset of the gaming community that would prefer that the game allow them to pull the arm of a slot machine for every X hours played.  My solution would be to decrease the size of raids to a point where EVERY player must participate at a reasonably high level in order for the raid to be successful.  This is why I'm a fan of 5 man heroics. 

If you want to keep the subset happy, just make slot machines in game that allow you to buy pulls.  Of course, then the hardcore will bitch that their "hard work" has been rendered meaningless.  It's pve... I don't get why anyone would give a damn about what anyone else has anyway. 

It legitimizes the hours and hours and hours they spend at the computer doing nothing else.  I spend way too much time myself, but damn, the guys I see arguing in /2 and general about how 'ez mode' the game is these days are ALWAYS on.  And always in the cities.  If can login in the morning to check auctions, there they are.  If I login after work, there they are. 

(http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/thumb/2/26/Leotheras_the_Blind_noUI.jpg/200px-Leotheras_the_Blind_noUI.jpg)

This is the picture you wanted:

(http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/article-illustrations/titan_grunk.jpg)

I don't get the hate.  If the game doesn't pose a challenge, what's the point?  It just becomes an exercise in spending time to get a pull on the slot machine. 

I'm not a gaming elitest.  Hell, I'm barely more than competent at most games.  If an encounter doesn't have some risk/reward balance, I get bored and quit.  Large scale raids are little more than organizational affairs.... and in the case of WoW, having the right gear.

Challenge is an tricky problem.  On one hand, you do want to prevent players from breezing through your content, so you want to develop interesting boss fights, and then try to vary them a little so people don't just follow tactics posted on the web.  On the other hand, when something like 95% hasn't seen your current high level dungeon, as was the case with the preTBC Naxx, maybe you've got the wrong type of challenge.  You want the challenge to be in the encounter, not the preparation for it.   Challenging encounters designed for smaller groups are better than the epic rep/gear grind for 25 people vanila WoW was.

Mostly what Delmania said.  Pulling the slot lever is one thing, but when we start talking about risk/reward and challenge, it tends to be used by the nutters who yearn for the days of 24 hour Guk camps and being kicked in the nuts repeatedly as opposed to people who are looking for actual game play.

My point is: If people can afk and your raid remains successful, then it's stupid to require that many people for your raid.  Everyone should be contributing.  If some people don't have to contribute, then those people shouldn't be required for completion.  Make the bosses tough enough that everyone in the raid must do their job for the raid to be successful.  You don't have to make it stupid hard... just have it be tough enough that everyone is engaged in the event. 

That kind of thinking gave us fights like we had in TBC, where if one person died you were fucked. I don't think you should design fights where everyone has to be active all the time because of death rates more than AFKs. "Perfectionist" fights as I call them are never fun. Expecting 25 people to all stay alive is fine on certain fights where there's not a lot of boss AE or abilities, such as Patchwerk, but on fights like Archimonde it was horribly retarded.

That's exactly why I think that large raids are a dumb idea.  They either produce a situation where one person fucks it up for many or a situation where a few people do nothing and are bored out of their skull. 

Keep raids to 5 or 10 people at a max.  More than that and people stop playing the game (or, as you pointed out, become frustrated). 

Reducing the number required to 0.5 to 2 groups is a step in the right direction.  It's also, in my opinion, the easiest step.  The next steps are more challenging.  You also need to reduce the difficulty of the trash fights while increasign the difficultly of the boss fights, and also try to reduce the gear requirements.  With WotLK, WoW seems to be going in that direction.

How many unique classes or even roles do you want the game to support?  You can only reduce raid sizes so much before you sack a lot of unique and interesting boss encounter mechanics.

And with all the lockout timers on the more expansive content what happens to the guild that doesn't want to split itself into 5/10 man teams every week?  Most social circles in-game exceed five people, some don't.  Probably why they do both raid sizes now.

Here's a novel thought.  Shorter or nonexistent "lockout" timers.  You aren't locked out in single player games. The only reason you are in MMOs is to enforce rarity of items and limit their flow into the economy.  EQ did this via the mobs themselves only spawning once a week or so.  Wow does this via lockout timers so that you aren't catering only to the 'It's 5am the spawn is up get your ass online NOW' crowd. 

However,  WoW failed to realize that the fact all of their gear is BoP accomplishes the rarity and removes items recirculating into it entirely.

There are only 3 roles: tank, support, damage.  LotrO does well with raids that vary in size from 3 people to 12, hence half a group to 2 groups.


They can still do the 25 man raids, we're just asking for more content for those of us who can't dedicate our lives to the game.

Unique and interesting boss encounters?  Are you suggesting that you can't make fun and interesting bosses for a 5 or 10 man raid?  I'd say that you can.  Matter of fact, the fewer people you have to coordinate, the more complex the encounter can still be abd be finished successfully.  More people = more chances for a fuckup.  

As for variety, I'm of the opinion that the more player variation in a raid should be rewarded.  I dont' know about all encounters in WoW, but it would be interesting if encounters were to be significantly easier if there exists a wider variety of classes/specs present.  That's not to say you can't still complete the raid with fewer classes, but I'm dying for a game that rewards player diversity beyond the dps/tank/healer paradigm.

The game would have to be designed with keeping that paradigm out of it in mind.  Wow and most DIKUs embrace it instead.  Why, I'll never know. Much as I like DIKU_level_grind I hate the 'you must have a healer' aspect.  CoX did a very good job of reducing it to almost nil.. too bad there wasn't enough game and too much grind there to keep me interested.

If the encounters were all built with only the three vanilla roles in mind how do you treat all the different skillsets?  AoE damage, crowd control, mana drain, longevity vs. burst capability, movement, interclass synergies, any number of things that one class does better then another.  When you reduce raid sizes to the point where you can’t or rarely bring all the abilities to the table one of two things happen.  Either the boss is reasonably killable without using those skills best suited for it, or it isn’t.  Which means if you don’t leverage those skills the boss is either trival or extremely frustrating.

The alternative is to build bosses that can be beat with good old tank and spank, or have unique mechanics that don’t lend themselves to any class in particular.  I doubt you can do that for long and keep things from getting stale.  Those types of mechanics tend to get exhausted in the solo quests and such.


Definitely.  To my mind chances for fuckups is where most of the fun is.


I agree but how much variation do you have in a 5 man group?  You've only brought about half the different classes in game with you.

None of this is meant to imply small scale isn’t fun.  But there is certainly something to be said for larger scale encounters.  Not 40 man though, fuck that shit.

Lockout timers aren't just to limit flow of items into the economy, but also to keep people busy longer.  Remember all the guilds that had cleared Naxx after 2 days of the expansion being out or whatever?  Now what if they could have walked out, reset, cleared it again?  Two or three weeks later every one of their members would have been fully geared out in everything they want, because they'd probably clear the place two or three times a day.  And then all those people would have nothing to do until Ulduar.

I do see a lot of merit in removing lockout timers, but it would make the high-end game a lot less "sticky", since people would push very hard to get all their gear quickly, then once they get it all, they're somewhat burnt out from the constant raiding, AND there's not a damn thing left to do.

I do wish they'd remove the lockout timer on heroics entirely, though.  I see a little use for that, but people don't typically do ALL the heroics every day now, so it wouldn't really increase badge influx by a significant amount.  Reducing the lockout timer as raids become 'lower end' would also be nice.  If when Ulduar comes out, all the lower raids drop to a 4 day lockout timer, for example, that would be quite helpful.

The other reason lockout timers exist in WoW is to allow raids enough time to finish an entire instance without having to kill the same bosses over and over again.  Weeklong lockouts allow freedom in scheduling for guilds that need two or three nights to finish a raid like Naxxramas.  Of course, you could easily create a system that had shorter lockouts, or no lockouts, and preserved this benefit.

I'd like to see a system where there's a lockout timer, but it doesn't automatically reset the instance after a week. Give those who haven't cleared everything yet the option of fighting those end bosses.

Go back to the old lockouts where you could schedule when your lockout started and ended by your group.

I know why they took that out, but I liked the fact that guilds that were primarily weekend raiders could clear their farm content in MC on saturday night and be able to spend an hour or two working on that boss all the way up until Friday night. Instead of now where if you are a weekend guild, you get stuck with little time to work on new shit because of the Tuesday lockout reset.

How many of those various skilllsets are mainly playstyle differences?  Tanks must all hold aggro and be able to withstand large damage, healers must be able to heal and cure status ailments, and damage dealers must be able to deal damage.  Those mechanics are still there, regardless of say, warriors and druis tanks, mages and warlock damage dealer, and druid and paladin healers.  Stylized fights like that are incredibly annoying.  For example, do you know Funus is?  He's the second to last boss encounter in the Caer Sidi in Dark Age of Camelot.  He had a interesting mechanic, he could only be defeated by clerics.  Any other class wold just heal him.  The only problem was thayt clerics were ins hort supply.


The alternate would be to have the boss alternate his or her strategy based on the class makeup.  Basically, more AI thank just simple DIKU style beats. 


Definitely.  To my mind chances for fuckups is where most of the fun is.



WoW has 4 tanks, 3 healers, and all classes can do damage.  There's plenty of variation there.

None of this is meant to imply small scale isn’t fun.  But there is certainly something to be said for larger scale encounters.  Not 40 man though, fuck that shit.
[/quote]

No, they took it out because of the massive amounts of lockout theft that were happening.  Once a boss was killed, everyone in that raid has that raid ID.  Smaller guilds working on progressing were inviting pugs to do 40 mans, often time those pugs would then sell that raid slot to alts of uberguilds  or start up their own raid soon after the guild group broke-up for the night and would proceed to clear the rest of the instance. 

The inconvenience for smaller guilds was also part of the solution.

Uhn. I feel tired and burned out just reading that.

Such as?

Also how are you going define AFK? Is player that is watching TV while not paying any attention and barely being there AFK? What about morons knowingly sabotaging your team's success chances by not following objectives?

You're wrong.

So yeah, on the initial topic:

If it's a hardcore raiding guild, ditch the dead weight.

If it's a friends and family guild, deal with it.

Either way, the officers are supposed to deal with shit (in a non outwardly hostile manner), and if the GM won't let them deal with problems, the GM is the problem.

It's possible to run a hardcore friends and family guild, but it requires the officers to be on top of their game nicely prodding people in the right direction for performance, and nicely asking what the hell was up with the earth elemental in the middle of a boss. Or why your resto shaman is totally fucking up injections.

Tanks: Paladins, warriors, druids, death knights.
Healer: Paladins, druids, priests.

What did I miss?

Just off the top of my head -

There's a mod called TuringTest AFK Reporter.  I've used it, and it works great.  I bet Blizzard could incorporate something similar for battlegrounds.
http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?p=mod&m=5064 (http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?p=mod&m=5064)

Honor could be distributed according to certain criteria.

I recall reading in these threads other solutions about how to deal with afks in battlegrounds - surely you've seen those as well.

Resto Shaman.

Whoops, thanks for reminding me.

Ugh, beated.  Still, yes, shamans.  Poor neglected forgotten shamans.

Wait.. people still play shaman?

Playing one caused me to quit.  I want to love the class, but Blizzard refuses to let me. 

By play, you mean there are totems in a raid.

I think one of the DK trees has them, though.

serious edit: Resto Shaman are actually pretty fun for 10 mans, and can fill any raid healing role well. I dropped mine for a priest in TBC due to lack of healing options, but the synergies in the new resto tree are actually a lot of fun.

I love my shaman.  Unfortunately for him, I love my DK more.  But, one of our main healers is a resto shaman, and she rocks at it. 

As to buffs, all DKs have Horn of Winter, which is basically the Strength of Earth totem buff.  Frost spec can get a haste effect that basically acts as a windfury totem, I think.  I've not tried Frost yet, though.  And Blood can get an unleashed rage type buff. 

You've already got complete parity between 10 and 25 man content. How much more do you want? Add in 5 man content and you have way more than 25 man content.

Auras are pretty nifty too.

I'm just poking fun, I have my DK, too. You got all the clone buffs, though Horn of Winter is shittier than most SoE totems (talents make it better). Shaman are still just amazing to have one or two of for totems alone, no matter the spec.

There are more then a few fights where I wouldn't trade disease/poison cleansing totem for the World (of warcraft)

... for some reason, I had a visual of a crazed shaman dropping that totem during a Grobb fight.

Seriously? Apart from about one patch worth of time at the start of Wrath, my shaman has been great fun. (Mostly elemental spec, which was weak at the start of 3.0, but has definitely been fixed.)

Parity in number of options, not in loot quality.  Although that's pretty close too.

Elemental spec was fun solo but dps is done better by many other classes.  Too much downtime for my tastes.  Then again, I didn't have top of the line gear and was used to playing a 70 mage and a 70 rogue before playing my shaman.  My shaman was rejuv and paladins, priests, and druids were almost always taken on raids before me.  I won't even get into the fact that I played on a pvp server.   

If that raid selection stuff was happening in TBC, your guild was waaaaaaaaaaaay outside of the mainstream for class selection. The standard operating procedure for 25 man raids was 'get as many resto shamans as you can and chain heal/heroism to victory.' That pendulum has swung a bit now but resto shamans are still good, and elemental dps is plenty competitive now as well (as it was at 70 pre-3.0). I have little experience with enhance, but the dogs are annoying as shit in pvp...

Enhance was a wonderful way to level solo.  I was enhance to level 70 and then played with resto and elemental. 

I never did a single 25 person raid.  I don't like people that much.  I just noticed that noone wanted shamen for 5 man heroics or for pvp, so I quit. 

That was because early on, heroics were "you brought CC, right? RIGHT?"

But honestly, I resto healed heroics Fine in TBC. Earth Shield is hax.

I would go so far as to say that a resto shaman, in a vaccuum, would have been my first choice for any instance that didn't need shackle. At least once we all figured out on the Alliance side what shamans actually DID other than spam frostshock on you in WSG.

Going back to the other derail, why even place strict limits on the number of players in a raid? It wouldn't be so hard to let players bring ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty-seven players into an instance and scale all the mobs accordingly. If you must have special look-how-leet-I-am indicators hardcoded into the game, there could be better gear and slightly more complicated encounters at beyond, say, twenty-five people or something. But if you can have basically the same content for 10 and 25, no reason to exclude all the numbers in between.

Just another post from the "every game should be more like Diablo 2 and/or CoX" department.

If all mobs were 100% tank and spank, then yes, you could do that. It is slightly less then trivial with the current raid encounters though.


-edit- words, letters, stuff.

What Fordel said. A lot of the current fight mechanics couldn't scale properly to N players. That said, doesn't CoX have a cap on players in a mission? It's just the Monster types that scale to your level and allow N players to engage them.

I think group size is 8? I dunno how the one raid works though.

This may seem odd, but i always wished WoW raid had a more 'here's me, and there's the mob I need to face' style of raiding. Instead of 5 (or was it 6) people beating up on one guy, why can't we have 6 players vs 12 mobs that everyone can take 2 each? So at least we know who's really doing anything and why the other guy suck at what's he doing when he faceplanted first and spread uneven load on the rest?

Because that would be hard.  MMOs aren't meant to be hard.  They are meant to give the illusion of difficulty, so that the person feels good about himself/herself.  See the "why isn't MMO mob AI better?" thread for details. 

Well you have this guy (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=15727), he's sorta like that. Also fits the bill (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=24560). Can't forget this fucking prick (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=29311). Heck, even good old Darkmaster Gandling (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=1853) had a little element of that.


The main issue is the class/specs themselves aren't designed around the idea. You either dumb the mobs down back to solo quest trash, or you just tell a bunch of specs they aren't allowed to raid anymore. You also have to deal with the fact the players themselves will always work cooperatively unless specifically forced away from it.

Not necessarily a bad thing. I don't particularly like the "Every spec should be raid-ready" mindset Blizzard is going towards. I for one rather like the PVE-PVE-PVP setup for talent trees, where the two PVE specs were significantly different. Telling Disc Priests they can't come to raids, or Ret pallies that can't come, because that isn't what their spec does, isn't a bad thing.

Specs should indicate playstyle, not function.  If you tell a ret paladin they can't come because the raid is full on dps, that's one thing. Telling them they can't come because "lolret" is quite another.

Having useless specs was bad, and having pvp only specs was also bad.

Now, having a SHITTY spec is something entirely different. But going "lolret" or "ahahaha. HAHA. ha. You're disc. HAH." were horrible from a gameplay and a social perspective.

I disagree. Having a pvp only spec is definitely a good thing. It helps to draw the line between PVP and PVE, which helps a great deal. All too often people will come to a raid with a PVP spec, and claim that since there is another person of the same tree in the raid, there's no reason for them not to be there.

Well, you're wrong. Just because some people suck at speccing, isn't a justification for making multiple specs terrible at huge chunks of the overall game. We tried that in WoW-Vanilla, it sucked. We moved on.

If someone is trying to justify a Bad spec (and putting out bad *whatever his role is* in the raid with it), fuck em.

But making entire trees "olo, you just pvp with that" is just stupid. If you show up with pvp only talents, be prepared to be mocked for it. I did all the time, just ask Ingmar! But it's far better for the game's health to allow every tree to be at least somewhat viable in it's pve role, even if the tree has PVP only talents.

This is the crux of the problem with WoW (or all diku MMO's for that matter).  If they bothered to balance abilities properly, then there would be no good or bad specs, just specs that play differently. 

Enh, there's also just clicking buttons randomly and ending up with a bad spec. I'm sure I could throw craploads of points in conflicting talents and wind up with something Horrible (grab pvp, pve dps and pve tanking talents all at once without just trying to move up a tree).

But that's different than saying "haha, subt rogue, gtfo"

You couldn't create trees that didn't have better or worse specs without severely limiting what talents could do and maybe how many of them there are. If there are any synergies in the talent trees at all, then there will always be bad specs.

I'm fine with games that let you make 'bad' specs as long as those choices give something to the player making them.  It would be nice if other players weren't so ready to turn down playing with them because they don't have the most optimized build though.

Was like that before they allowed people to inspect specs.

It's much better to have the option. MUCH. Seriously.

 I'd expect this sort of talk in a game with a truly heinous spec situation (e.g. shadowbane),  but not in WoW where the developers very much hold your hand through the spec process.  You can get 90% of the way there by just picking a tree, clicking every talent that gives you a new ability or makes your numbers bigger and then picking another tree once you run out of talents.  The major ways I've found of screwing this up:

-Tunnel visioning, e.g. 0/71/0.
-Picking talents that are obviously antithetical to your role.  If you're a DPS or healer, you don't need any of the survivability talents in PVE.
-Doing it wrong.  If the way you intend to play is wrong (e.g. chain casting arcane missiles), optimizing for that is just going to lead to sadness.

I like that there are obviously terrible specs and ways to gem your gear.  It makes it easy to spot good players that happen to have bad gear and vice versa.

I think we've already demonstrated a very different play philosophy already.

If I look at someone's spec it is purely out of curiousity.  Others seem to use it as a way to weed out the chaff.

There is min/max optimized, and there is "what the hell are they supposed to BE?"

PVP and PVE are two completely different aspects of the game. Saying Tree 1 and 2 are for PVE and spec 3 is for PVP is not a problem at all. It gives more room for room for differentiation in the trees, rather than having to limit all trees to having some amount of PVP and PVE talents.  Admittedly I don't PVP much, but if I understand the archetypes correctly they are:
DPS - Hit things until it stops moving
Healer - Make sure one or more players is not going to die
Tank - Make the big guy hit you, and be able to survive those hits
PVP - Kill something which is actively attacking you before it can kill you

Saying each class' talent trees are "Pick 3 of those archetypes", having one as purely PVP, and two as PVE doesn't seem that aweful.

Now, this is more or less a moot point. I can't see Blizzard going back and re-designing the talent trees for this, but if from the start it was balanced that way, so that each class had 2 PVE trees and a PVP tree, and considerations were not made for the PVE trees in PVP and vice-versa, there would be far more room for expansion and class differences. Now they've got to try and balance 36 different possible major spec-types, plus hybrids for both PVP and PVE. It means all the classes have to have more or less the same tools in both, and doesn't leave a lot of room for uniqueness.

This. I generally don't look at someone's spec unless they are showing themselves to be totally inept at their class, so by and large, I don't give a crap about someone's spec, because I have not actually run across THAT many people I would consider truly terrible. But if someone is, I'll take a peek at their spec to see if something there is making them make the jump from "not very good" to "actually really bad."

More often than not, though, it isn't the spec.  :drill:

Actually, going from a "I thought these talents looked cool" build to one of the cookie cutter builds you find on WoWWiki and the like, the ones that are designed to put out the most dps, heals or similar, will generally show a large increase in DPS numbers for most players (After a given period of time, where they have to re-learn the play style).

Anyone putting out under 1500 DPS in a raid should have their spec looked at, with even a moderately optimal build, they should be doing that as long as they have decent quest blues. We had a Shadow priest recently join our Naxx raid, having hit 80 hours before, and not have a single epic item, putting out 1700 dps. Likewise, we've had a few people doing 1300-1500 dps and after a sit down with a more experienced player of that class who said "Get rid of those talents, get these instead" they were doing 1700+.

I appreciate it when there is something in a talent tree whose potential initially goes unnoticed and then suddenly people are like, "Whoa, look at at that!" Honor Among Thieves builds for rogues is a good example. At first glance, HaT just looked like a kind of ok talent, but it's deep in the Subtlety tree, where mostly PvE raiding rogues don't go--then more and more people started to play HaT raiders, because they realized if you were in a larger raid with ranged dps, you could essentially spam Eviscerate constantly.

On the other hand, I hate class designs where there are abilities that really serve no useful function at all--that no one in their right mind would choose--or abilities that for some reason you simply shouldn't use.

What's wrong with taking an ability because it makes the game more fun?  I don't have to be the most dps efficient or heal efficient to have fun.  There's more to fun than min-maxxing a toon and waiting for hours to gather widgets from the slot machine. 

Other players shouldn't be able to easily see your spec and gear.  It allows easy elitism.  If they want to see my gear or spec, it should require my permission.  Then people would be forced to judge other players based on ability (and how annoying they are in ventrilo).

That is a good thing.

Easier for you to get away from elitists. Easier for elitists to get away from people they think will suck. Everybody wins.

Nobody I play with will kick someone out due to having a talent that makes the game fun for them (unless it's Improved Earth Elemental: Reduces cooldown by 18 minutes)

We'll quietly go  :ye_gods: if your spec is insane, like having a axe mastery and no sword mastery on a sword using character, or like 1/5 in tons of random talents. But we'll also only LOOK if something is really odd, like you're clocking in right above the holy priest on the dps charts, or putting out shit all healing (healing meters: useless shit for the most part), or if you're the tank and just got instagibbed by trash. And if it's really bad, I might have a private nice conversation trying to explain the game mechanics behind why X Y or Z might be a better setup for their playstyle. Not everyone loves the math behind the games, so they don't go into detail of why something random like Epidemic is actually a really great pve talent.

I'm not looking for you to be PERFECT. I am looking for people to not waste my time and be indistinguishable from an empty group slot. Likewise, I won't attend raids I can't pull my weight in: I won't be the jackass wasting everyone else's time.

We've looked at specs to politely suggest that maybe someone's poor DPS is due to spec, but it's mostly noticing the poor DPS and then going through and trying to figure out what is going wrong.

Our SWS is entirely for "what went wrong" and a few of the more powergamey types going all *math* on it and being on an epeen arms race with themselves. It's all about the style of guild you get involved with as to how hardcore they're going to be about set specs, dps minimums and whatnot.

Speaking of which, I should see if our stats from last night are up yet and who I get to make fun of.

I've rarely ever even look at someone's spec unless there's due cause. There's a DK in my guild that mentioned he went 32/39 but was wielding a 2hander.  He had altered it to work with a 2h spec.  Guy could have put out 800 more DPS with 2 cheap one handers  and a minor talent swap given the overall quality of his gear.  Still was beating my output (and I applaud him for not dual wielding  :drill:) so I didn't say anything.  There's a few people in my guild though that need a talking to.  When you don't break 1k DPS, you're doing something wrong.  Like a hunter in my guild that's still wearing 2 pieces of Kara level gear.  His talent spec looks like it's best suited for farming meat.  Ohh god, our bad fury warrior is 0/71/0.  I never looked.  :ye_gods:

I know I'm just an overpowered DK, but I shouldn't be thrashing everyone's DPS in a 10 man Naxx with exactly zero looted epics on fights I've never done before.  You just want to ask them, "what the hell are you doing?".  It's very hard not to shout at the druid who's DPSing in bear form when not off tanking.

The best thing was in TBC when I did a Shadow Labs instance with a prot paladin that couldn't seem to hold aggro worth crap.  0/61/0 with exactly 0 spell power on any of his gear. 

Oh god.. I tried running a heroic Mechnaar with a guy like that once.  He was bragging about all his avoidance and stamina while we were assembling.  Then, after the 2nd wipe of everyone but me (hunter) on the first 3 pulls my buddy (whose main is a pally) and I checked his gear and spec, then dropped group.  Sure, he had over 1200 stamina or something ridiculous, but he had 51 spellpower and the mobs kept eating the healer.  :ye_gods:

I have no problem with people not min/maxing specs.  Play how you want, but at least be fucking EFFECTIVE (not necessarily ubermax)  in that role if you're going to group with other people. 

FUCK that motherfucking elemental RARGH

Being able to inspect gear and now talent specs are great terrible group avoidance tools, which are nice to have if you do a lot of PuGing and want to keep your sanity.

Inspecting talents is also great for other reasons as well.  Now instead of people asking about your spec or you asking about other people's spec you can just inspect each other and be done with it.  That is a nice time saver in lots and lots of situations and not only that it can be used as a learning tool if someone cares to take the time.  If you see someone really excelling at their class/role you can check their talents and see if there are any significant differences in their talents compared to someone else of the same class and role.

I had a rogue in an HVH PUG last night that was putting out 850ish dps.  I dropped the group after the second wipe on the first boss (consortium guy, tank could not understand "YOU MUST KITE ORBS OR WE ALL DIE.")  The other two DPS were not much better, clocking in around 1500ish for one, and 1200ish for the other.

I don't care if you do something stupid with your build, so long as you don't take so long to kill stuff that we're having mobs spawn out of portals before you kill the ones on the portal we're currently in front of.  Do that a few times, and you'll go mad with just how stupid this is.

It's even more frightfully insanely painful for me because I could respec back into ret, and outdps probably 90% of the server.  Yet, I'm stuck healing if I want to actually do heroics, because we have no active tanks left in the guild, and finding PUG tanks+ healers is like winning the fucking lottery.

I love the game.  There's plenty for me to do, and most days I'm happy just running around mining, doing some dailies, and fishing.  Even so, I'd like to fucking WIN AV every once in a while, or run enough heroics so I can buy an emblem mount on my fruitless effort towards getting 100 mounts collected.

He's the guild mascot.

Fuck you, some healers dont position themselves properly and get out of range of me, thus tank dies, and all die.   :oh_i_see:

Wha, next you'll bitch that running laps around kerikornflakes in nexus  like crazy is bad tanking?

... yes.  If I had a tank that ran around the last boss in Nexus, I would blacklist them.  Particularly since jumping removes the debuff just as effectively.

Your first comment is almost as stupid.  I'm not talking about a bad kiting job, I'm talking about tanking the boss in the center of the room and standing there while the orbs blow up everyone.  The second time we tried the boss, he did a really bad job of kiting it, was getting everyone killed again, and then, to my amazement, we all got summoned by... something, at which point the orbs blew us all up.  I never had seen that happen before, which again, I attribute to BAD TANKING.

You have a LOT of play to kite things in any shape you want without ranging the healers, honestly. Just don't make me fucking chase you <3

It was quite awesome when someone pointed the jump thing out to me after the first wipe  :why_so_serious:


Sarchasm. It is cruel.

The boss pulls the whole group to him at a point in the fight. Did that every time we killed him.

What I'm saying is that the game should force you to judge me by my ability.  Sadly, WoW metrics judge players by 1) gear, 2) spec, and 3) ability.  It's a common diku flaw.

And what we're saying is that the game should give me the option to judge you by your rad skillz.

Feh, sorry.  I hate WoW PUGs, they reduce my will to live, while raising my hatred of humanity.

I've never seen the boss summon the entire group, I suspect mostly because I've been DPS most of the time.  But yes, tank kiting too slowly, group nearly dead, then being summoned into the middle of all the orbs = me leaving group.   :heartbreak:

Part of the ability in these games is picking a decent spec and knowing how to upgrade/gem/enchant your gear.  Pretty much standard RPG skillset.  Then there's knowing how to play your class and standard twitch skills.   

Yes, gear can be a big hurdle.  Speccing is not.  It's part of the game and part of knowing how to play your class for the chosen activity.  Speccing is not going away.  I'm not sure what your aim is here, but you might be able to accomplish the same thing by yelling at a brick wall. 

Judging your ability is easy in WoW.  Did you spec like a retard? Ok, you might suck at this game.  Do you continually die to standing in fire or standing in front of dragons/other-giant nasties? You might stuck at this game.   Sure there are tiers where you're going to ineffective with your quest greens, but there's also tiers where you will do just fine. And people that are good at this game will sometimes be able to our perform their current tiers.   

Not saying I love the DIKU framework.  But it is what it is and it's not like that hasn't been railed on here before for its shortcomings.  /cue Talking Heads.

That boss summons, but last time I did it the summoning broke if you kited him around on the ledges.

90% of the time when I leave a pug I leave before it even starts.  You can tell if the failboat has set sail usually well in advance. "My hearth is on cool down, and I'm in Org. I'll need a summon."  *silence for 5 minutes*.  :awesome_for_real:

Funny you should say that, this is exactly how it began last night.   :oh_i_see:

My guild is checking everyone's gear and giving feedback on how to improve.  I'm in the "not quite ready for primetime" group.  1100DPS which is fine with me, but no purple gear or heroic drops.  And then everyone says "why don't you get better gear?" to which I respond with "because you bastards won't run heroics with me."  Then I get websites I am supposed to go check out to find out exactly which boss in which instance drops my upgrade and go work on it.  Umm... I hated that back in pre-TBC WoW when we had to run Scholo and Strat over and over and over and over and over again, only for Paladin and Hunter gear to continuously drop (on Horde side).

I still did just fine in taking out mobs and bosses in the groups we go with, I just don't look good on paper and people raz me about it.

Pretty much any heroic can be done with decent tank/healer, and one (1) good dps. There's little excuse for not dragging along a guildy who's in scrubby gear just because they can't break 1600 DPS, whether it's Naxx or a heroic.  Now, if you drag them along, they hoover up "teh epix", and still don't improve?  That's a different story altogether... depending on the temperment of your guild, of course.

Without seeing your armory, at a guess you are lacking hit rating.

That is exactly it.  Crafted blue gear (Eviscerator's set) and blue quest rewards.  When I hit it's great, when I miss it's not so.  Better gear would help, but that's like effort and stuff.

Go prot and find a friend who can heal decently well. Takes about 300g in Crafted BoEs to hit 535 defense for tanking. You won't have much health unless you're willing to drop an extra 1000g+ on some of the tempered titansteel stuff, but you'll have good enough gear to do some of the easier heroics (Nexus, Gundrak once you learn the snake boss, VH as long as you don't get the void guy, UK isn't bad). Sure, you might not be getting the gear you wanted, but I found the game quite a bit more enjoyable when I could stop worrying about tank/healer performance in heroics.

I think as DPS WoW tends to judge you more by ability first than equipment. At least to me. Yeah, that Phat DPSSSSS makes the fight shorter and is needed for tight enrage timers (not that there are any really tight timers currently) but if you're specced right (picking an effective spec and using it right is ability IMO) and know what you're doing you aren't a liability even if you're rocking all quest-greens in a heroic. If you're not standing in the bad things/eating cleaves, and DPSing the right targets you're helping a lot and lessening the "work" of the tank and healer.

Pugs base 99% of their invites on gear because you're banking that even if the person is a complete retard they might be able to mash their face on the keyboard and put out acceptable DPS or healing if they got dem' purps'. Yeah, that dude in the quest blues/greens/crafted blues may be a really good player who hasn't gotten to do much yet, but you don't KNOW that he's good or not since...well, you're pugging people.

Are you sure we're playing the same game?

Most certainly not.  :oh_i_see:

We're definately not.  In the game he's playing, Hunters are are a melee class. ;D

Hybrid.

Gotta also remember that, in the game you're playing, their pets are ranged.  :awesome_for_real:

That's not what I said, but you're messing up my teasing here.

Goes for both of us.

I shall make you rue the day. Rue.

I keep trying to figure out when leaving a pug because the people in it are people I just don't want to listen to on Vent is ok. I was in a Naxx-25 pug the other day where everyone was geared, playing pretty well if a bit loose, but after a while, I was feeling a Big Meh about the whole experience. Half the people on vent were drunk, loud, sharing every obnoxious opinion they had about politics, talking about their pathetic sex lives, talking about their genitalia. Nothing that was so awful that I just said, "see ya", but it basically gave me a headache after a while. There were also two unbelievable loot whores, though thankfully the raid leader kept telling them to cool it, plus some guy who felt obligated to post Recount after every fight (even though he was about tenth or eleventh in DPS).

The only reason I would check a person's gear is to see if they have a lot of it and aren't putting out relatively similar dps. For example, if a rogue is putting out 1500 dps with 3/5 Valor and full epics, I'm going to probably pull him aside and see WTF he's doing. That's not "elitism" that's simply trying to figure out the best gauge of ability. If he had blues and greens, I wouldn't even approach him about it. I'd just assume it's a gear issue and see if he improves as he gears.

We have at least one of those in our little raid alliance. Although he doesn't, like, actively hoover epix or anything like that. But his DPS is ... well, once back in Karazhan, I was smiting on my priest and was beating his rogue ass until we finally got to a hard boss (our tank was overgeared and Kild always snipes my heals). He ... he has not really improved since those days.

If they wanted your opinion, they could easily give you permission to check their gear in the system I'm suggesting.  I think that allowing anyone and everyone to review your character just opens the door to elitist behavior. 

I'm not saying that you (or anyone else) is a gaming elitist, but most that are are in denial about it. 

Elitist denotes people who have access others don't.

Wowwiki, the Blizzard forums, and ironically, Elitist Jerks, shits all over this notion.

I think you need to look the word up.  You can have an elitist attitude without having different or unique abilities.  Something along the lines of "if you aren't doing it my way, you're doing it wrong."  I see it all the time in academia.  People stuck in one train of thought because they can't see over the side of their little box. 

Disconnect from vent, claim problems with your headset, inform the people on the raid that you are no longer on vent because your headset isn't working properly, if you need to be told something, please use /raid.

The worst thing about vent is the number of people who think their lives are interesting to strangers.

Voice chat is the devil.  It reminds me of when I used to work in retail.  I don't play online games to be reminded of the hell that was retail.

I found out last week that my laptop has a mic on it somewhere (we hadn't used TS since I'd started using it to game)

I now feel I should stop watching movies and chatting on the phone during raids <3

This game would be boring and dull without voice. If I wanted just a video game, I'd play single player.

Some may hate the people they raid with, but I like the ones I raid with. Of course, I'd NEVER pug w/ voice.

Not that bad, actually. Most people are shy in Live 5man Chat.

So then the people who persist in being utterly fucking stupid in face of all reason, because they think they're better than me, are also elitist?  Which leads back to... "You are doing it wrong, go look at Elitist Jerks, they have good specs listed for your class."

I've claimed a non-working mic for longer than the past year.  On KT, "don't type out of if you get frost blasted, call it out".  "Sorry, no mic".  Guess what, didn't die to frost blast.  I could buy a new mic or try getting mine working.  I can never seem to get it loud enough (dumb lapel mic) for anyone to hear me,  and I don't feel like spending money on something I don't really want to do.  Plus, my wife is a light sleeper when it comes to noise and the office is right next to our bedroom. 

I don't mind the people I raid with, I just don't really want to talk to them. And I really don't even want to listen to a pug or another guild.

I hate when people go "I'll do that!" or "I need a cleanse!" over voice, since 90% of the raid sounds exactly the same thanks to the drive through window effect.


Say who you are or just die quietly in a corner.

If only there was some method of communication that would indicate who was asking for the cleanse every time.

Just run around Dalaran naked then. I'm frankly puzzled why anybody would give a crap about people looking at you. Maybe the spec thing, but I mean shit you can look at what people are wearing when you walk down the street.

I can't even imagine doing it in a raid.  I was five manning yesterday and someone was all, I need a cleanse!  and I was all like, WHO ARE YOU MYSTERY VOICE?

For better or for worse there are encounters in the game that don't go well without voice coordination, unless you set up a crapload of macros and spam them. Blizzard seems to have designed it this way on purpose.

You guys are aware that there are mods that display the chap's nick in game when he talks on vent/ts, right?

There you go. (http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?p=mod&m=2075)

Sorry, you shouldn't need voice for anything that mundane. If you do, you're doing it wrong. Cleansers should NOTICE when someone needs a cleanse. That's their job. Spend 5 minutes and install an addon if you need a giant 'cleanse now' button. (you should, anyway).

DBM goes nuts when someone gets iceblocked. DBM goes nuts when sarth's flame wall appears. DBM catches every single debuff on every single raid. That's it's job. All this shit is known. Using the correct addon is faster, less annoying, and more effective than some random voice shouting at you. You shouldn't NEED to direct people like they were children. Voice should be saved for unexpected shit - adds, emergency tank assignments, things of that nature.

"Heals on the tank" - NO SHIT. I have a giant bar flashing at me that is already telling me this, my spells are already casting and if I waited until your voice queue the tank would have been dead two bosses ago. You don't have to repeat what I'm already doing like a semi-retarded mind-reading parrot on a 3 second delay because you know what? I've got that shit covered. I had it covered before you even noticed there was a problem.

No thanks to voice chat.  It has it's good and bad points, but when it comes down to it I feel uncomfortable using it and would much rather type at people.  It is easier to hold a conversation with me because I process verbal and written communication quite differently.

I don't mind too much people not talking on vent, as long as they have voice chat open to listen to, as long as at least the tanks can talk for calling stuff like 4H switches or OH GOD FLAME WREATH DONT MOVE. We don't really use it as social hour like some guilds seem to. I have had some really awful experiences with PUG vent, like the one time this dude who sounded kind of like Larry the Cable Guy doing a bad impression of Hellen Keller started calling some other dude in the chat a 'coon'.  :ye_gods:

So yeah, fully understandable why some people hate it.

Meh, Vent doesn't bother me. I've been in Vent for PUGs with 4 teenage boys and Vent for 40 man raids.  It's all dependent on who you're running with. Like Bohdi, I like the folks I raid with so Vent is a nice expansion and interaction. (Off raid, Raid time is srs bzns and none of us chat other than mid-trash.)  Then again I've also found myself getting more social over the last 4 years than I was in the past, enjoy people watching and don't give a flying fuck about what Johnny Internet is saying.  If he gets too obnoxious I can always mute him.

My own guild is great to be on voice with, but that's because we're all professionals in the same field, and most of us know each other pretty well, and have roughly similar temperments. We join up with another guild that we like where most people are similiarly grown-up, etc.

It's just PUGs where I have no idea what's coming in the voice chat--sometimes very quiet, focused on what we're doing, other times it's like being stuck at the worst social event I've ever been to in my whole life. And the problem is that there's a few things in Naxx-25 where it is genuinely helpful to have everyone on voice, I think, so I'm not unsympathetic to people who would prefer a pug to be on voice.

Another thing I'm getting sick of is bullshit faux-elitist "I'm checking gear" (I know, we're talking about this in other threads) when I know already that I'm more geared than the asshole saying he's checking my gear, and I also know that I know the fights better than he does, because I've pugged with him before. Or in another case, the assholes who were spamming LFG for *two hours* yesterday looking for a DPS who fit their really narrowly specific criteria to do EoE-10 with--at some point, guys, just grab someone and go, you know? If you have to pug it, you're already obviously not in a l33t guild anyway, so just give it a shot. There's a lot of this kind of stuff going on in Wrath, I think. I quit a 5-man heroic Drak pug the other day because some dps-warrior twat was running Recount and complained that I was "only" doing 2.4k with my rogue at the top of the list when he was fourth on the dps list with 1.3k, above only the healer and below the bear tank. In his opinion, I should have been doing 2.7k "at least"--somehow a lot of players have gotten weird ideas about skill and gear and quality and entitlement in an expansion that is actually incredibly forgiving to undergeared players, where you can make it through most things pretty well. Most people are having fun with that, which is why I'm even less tolerant of people who aren't.

Its not elitist to say "This spec is better, switch to it" if there is math to back it up (And as long as you're right, there is math to back it up). If you take a look at Elitist Jerks/Wowwiki/other general reference, the specs on there are backed up with some crazy ass spreadsheeting. That's not being elitist, its saying "Everyone needs to be pulling their own weight here. You can do go spend 50g and change you talents to pull more. Go do it." Its only slightly more demanding than saying "Its great that you have an offset to tank heroics with. Tank gear goes to the current tanks first, if they don't want it, it can go to your offset."

As far as vent goes, we're probably pretty bad about it. My GF and I have and one of the Guild Leader and his Wife since high school, so once we getting on Vent we usually socialize quite a bit. We tend to get on Vent a little before the raid, and stay on after though, so most of the guild isn't there for it. During the raid we'll chat a little, and often tend to drink a little more than we should (One night we started singing "I'm a lumberjack" during Heigan since we got bored - it was a 23 minute fight). Once a boss starts though, its all about the encounter. Most of the chatter is about "Remember the XXX is coming up" or something similar. Once the RL dies, he tends to call out cleanses, mainly so that I can pick up the ones I can too (I play a Tankadin, so I'm usually not paying attention to my cleanse bar). We also call out directions, and probably call a little too much out over all, but as long as it breaks the tunnel vision its worth it.

It is elitist because maybe, just maybe, I picked this other talent because I want it, not because it's "mathematically" better.

This argument. It is redundant.

If that's your reason for being a unique snowflake, you're an elitist.

Not being the best spec is fine if you've got people who can pull your weight, or so long as people don't mind dragging you through content you're not smart enough to spec for.  It's not fine if your guild is trying to progress through something difficult (sarth+n comes to mind) and you decide you want sparkles on your shadowbolts or some damnfool thing that reduces the damage you do.

Raiding comes down to teamwork, at its core. If you want to be bleeding-edge-hardcore-successful, you have to put the needs of the team ahead of your own, which means crap like respeccing to teh exact thing they need for an exact fight via hearthstone and getting resummoned, etc., etc., etc. That kind of play doesn't have to be elitist; it just needs everyone to be on board with the plan.

Of course you can also raid without doing that sort of thing, like we do, without specifying how people have to spec or whatever, but to do that you have to accept a certain amount of struggling with encounters, etc., like we do.

Elitism only comes into it, IMO, when it comes to how you treat people who don't play the same way you do. Not taking someone on a Zul'Aman bear run because they can't put out the required DPS for the team to complete the run in the required timeframe is not elitist. Not taking someone and telling them they're a scrub who sucks and should go back to UBRS is.

My spec is based on what works most efficiently for me when I get to solo (since solo'ing is 90% of what I do).  When people tell me to put points in a certain place because EJ says so or because it is a rarely required ability that gives me 0.5% more chance or doing something only when I am doing a certain aspect of a raid, that becomes more of a "meh, who cares."  My spec is pretty good for most of my characters, so I rarely get complaints like I did back when I was an arcane\fire mage in the MC\BWL raiding days.  My thoughts are if not spec'ing a certain talent is going to make the difference between success and guaranteed absolute failure, it's a poorly designed encounter that I likely won't be interested in doing on a regular basis.  If my guild members are gearing up just like I am and are on the ball, chances are that one or two talent points not being "EJ Approved" optimal isn't going to hurt.  If it does, we aren't ready as a group anyway.

This all goes out the window if I decide to do something stupid on my druid like spec half resto, half balance, and then try and DPS as a cat in a 10-man or heroic.  People who do such foolish things (like spam Arcane Missiles over and over and over and over) get ridden to "see the error of their ways" and if they refuse to change, they just don't get invited to go all of the time since we know it's going to be wipe city on a regular basis with them essentially not contributing.  Nothing personal, I just don't care to drag someone along who is basically going to be spitting on a forest fire (and then gets mad at the rest of the group for the wipe).

Gotta do it times 25.

Like I said, if it is *that* bad of an encounter that not being on the A++ game that night and not having all of your talents optimized to the last 0.1% mandatory is going to make it a waste of time, it's a sucky encounter of the cockblocking variety.  I'm talking about 1 or 2 talents here or there, not completely fucking up your tree to make pretty pictures.  Those people who can't decide what they want and just randomly spec useless talents or ones that don't synchronize well (like a resto\balance druid trying to be feral) are usually pretty obvious and rarely care about seeing the end-game content anyways.  Just be nice and don't /gkick them or anything.

The funny thing is, the god damn spreadsheet elitists always go nuts about how this or that does OMG the most, and they calculate exactly how many times something with a proc should proc etc etc.

It is all based 100% around a person having 0 latency, no framelag, never moving an inch, never taking damage, nothing EVER going wrong for the shit to work. They also calculate with maximum possible buffs, using X on every cooldown, never ever ever being in the GCD etc.

It is part of why I am glad I no longer raid. Too many people rely 100% on what they read on EJ or whatever and do not use their own experiences or observations to make decisions. The raid leader in the guild I was in who never played a hunter for 2 seconds in his life actually said on vent during a Malygos raid that "hunters should be much higher since they are so overpowered". This when it was BM that was doing nuts damage, on a fight where 60% of the fight the pet is not even attacking and hunters have a terrible time getting to minimum range because everyone has to be "in the sparks" when your melee is giving the boss a blowjob instead of being at max melee range. Fucking ginormous dragon hit boxes. But you could not explain how unlike him on his fucking shadow priest that could be standing inside the dragon's body and still do damage because he would never listen to anything but what he reads on forums.

You haven't read EJ enough.

You said .5 the first time. 25 members rocking that way, raid output is down 12.5%. That's a sizeable ammount.

Most EJ models do allow you set your lag and your own 'human reaction' time these days.

I try to find a balance between what's most efficient, what's most fun and the concept I have for the character.  Yes, my characters are actually characters and I won't stray too far from my concept.  That said, I do like my characters to be the best they can be within that framework (which is generally pretty broad).

As far as I'm concerned, as long as a character reaches the threshold of being able to perform her function well, then I don't worry about squeezing every last little bit of performance out of her if it means giving up something else that's fun.  If spec A is tip top efficiency but kind of a pain in the ass to play while spec B is also very good but much more fun, then as long as B is still passes the threshold needed to fill it's role well that's the one I'll pick every time, even if A is a few percentage points 'better'.

What Nevermore said.

Wait.  If someone doesn't want to play with me because I didn't choose to use the exact spec they want me to have, I'm being elitist?  Wha?

As long as they're not idiots, I'll give anyone a chance.  That's quite the opposite of being elitist.

In all cases of poor performance, short of your #1 or #2 raiding guild on the server, it is the person behind the keyboard, not the spec. One or two talent points is not going to make or break a raid. Not having all 213 items is not going to make or break a raid.

Frankly, the bar is set pretty damned low right now so much so that if pugs can do it, you should be able to as well. Anyone who starts bitching at someone should be complaining about their personal performance, not their spec, assuming they are 'close' to one of the common ones and have at least semi-decent gear enough for the instance.

Ok this argument is stupid. Some are going to crack out the spreadsheets and the math and tell you in certain conditions how certain things within the system will work on various fights. At that point they will pick specs that work the best for those fights and declare them the best. Within the system that they want to play, they are right. They have the math, they know the system, and they spend god-awful-countless-pointless hours defining this crap to get a minor edge.

That's what they are. There isn't one word you can throw out there to encompass that. There are thousands that might sum it up nicely, but saying "Elitist" (which you are currently having a debate about the semantics of, again) is stupid. Stop arguing over words, and accept the fact that there is no RIGHT way to play the goddamn game. There is no objective beyond what you intend.

You hold the belief that you can sacrifice the group in favour of the self. That's elitism. Wanting to exclude yourself from the company of gents like that is also elitism.

Or you could just hear the coin drop and realize
what others already have.

ugh, this demented mangling of semantics is fucking stupid.

Right. What we're really talking about are different cultural and personal orientations to play. None of those are objectionable in and of themselves, but it's when you get two or more fundamentally different assumptions about play that the problems really begin.

Your definition of 'elitism' is incorrect.

In effort to rerail this topic, here's a current situation I'm dealing with.

I have a healing paladin who used to be one of the best healers we had back in the pre-TBC days. He went away for a while during TBC, had a kid, did the family duty thing for a couple years, and now he's back. The problem is that he's the worst healer we have, and he's geared. Worst as in dead last in healing, and highest in overhealing. Now, I realize a part of that comes from player skill, and some of that comes from paladins having major issues healing well in the current iteration. However, what percentage do yall believe is skill and what is circumstance.

Also, are there any tips from pallys that actually heal what you should be doing in raids to heal. Having only healed on a priest, I have no idea on the mechanics of the healing paladin or any tips/tricks of the trade I can give this guy to get him back into shape.

I'd have to see a recount or a WWS to give you some idea of what's going wrong.  Also - link to char.

At a guess, he's emphasizing spellpower in gemming, which is leading him to two problems - mana shortage and overhealing.  I would also guess (no slam here) there's not clear healing assignments, which leads to him getting sniped a lot in heals.

Also, anyone who says paladins have trouble healing in the current iteration... is dead wrong.  Sacred shield is a wonderful tool, beacon is nothing short of amazing, and if gemmed for int (not spellpower dammit!) we have the mana to heal like mad.

Also - Holy Shock (with crit!) plus instant FoL or hastened HL is absolutely amazing.  I've pretty much instantly healed a tank for 12k with that, which really really nice if the tank gets spiked and needs heals right now.

Hm... tips.
- Sacred shield the tank.  Not only does it reduce damage, but it increases your crit on flash of light.  (You may not get to use that in some fights, but hey.)
- Judge wis on a target.  Returns mana to people who hit the target, but more importantly, gives you 15% haste for a minute.
- Beacon the right target.  Most of the time it's the tank.  If it's a fight where everyone takes damage, the beacon target is probably the healer.
- Don't be afraid to have your mana at 0 at the end of the fight.  (Still something I'm working on.)  Use your cooldowns wisely, i.e. if you must use divine plea while healing like mad, use avenging wrath to bolster your healing a bit.  Otherwise, try to use divine plea during a slack time, or ask for help covering heals while regenning.
- Have the paladin heal the tank.  That's what they are best at, that's what he should be doing.

If his total healing (effective+overheal) is high, then that at least indicates that he's trying to do something; he's just doing it badly. The quality of all healers (as solely recorded by meters) varies hugely from fight to fight and from 5mans to 25mans too.

My guess would be that his reactions are just slower than your other healers, leading to his heals getting sniped, or he's trying to use Holy Light inappropriately. I'd ask him politely what add-ons he is using, is he using Grid? If he is using grid, does he have it set up to show incoming heals so that he's not wasting heals on someone else's target. Look at his recount, on a fight-by-fight basis how much healing is being done by FoL, Holy Light and Holy shock, Beacon and glyphs? Use recount to look at who he is healing, if he's a paladin trying to raid-heal exclusively in 25-mans then he'll end up with a very low effective heal as CH, CoH and WG will top off 95% of targets before he lands a heal. He should be focusing on a few number of targets and punching big heals into them to match big incoming damage. WWS reports have a breakdown of healers that lets you know if they favour a single target or multiple targets. How does his effective heal vary between fights like Patchwerk/Anub/Gluth/Raz and Sapphiron/Thaddius/Sarth? Then look at other activity, is he dispelling? Check dispel-heavy fights like Noth (cripple), Heigan (Disease),l Heigan Trash (Disease), Maexxena (Poison), see who's doing the dispel work on those fights.

Once you've looked at all this, and can't see a way to improve, then I'd label him as bad. However healer performance is so hard to measure.

EDIT: A WWS report would be useful, yes.

Try putting him on the main tanks. That's pretty much what holy pallies do best anyway. They aren't nearly as good at raid heals. It's easy, effective, and frees up your more versatile healers for raid duty. He can pretty much stand in one place and spam holy light or whatever that pally spell is and still be very valuable.

I'll post the recount on him after tonight's run if he is on it. I've already isolated one of the parts, he has shitty/missing enchants on most of his gear.

Run your entire guild through http://be.imba.hu/ if you want a brief overview. Ignore what it says about 'not optimal' shit, and use it for to-hit and a sanity check on enchants and gems. Be aware it doesn't take into account misery or other raid-hit buffs or food (snapper x-treme) that some people may be using to be over the hit cap.

I already do that when i have questions. Agreed on the "not optimal" and "proper enchants" stuff. Some of the enchants are like a +9 AP buff, but they would cost 1000g more than the lower version. I can't understand the point of that, and I certainly won't pay that much for that little bang for the buck.

:uhrr:

Ha.  You're just messing with me.  You had me going there.

Well played, Sir.  Well played.

This is bad math. If all 25 players in a raid are 99.5% efficient, that does not make the raid 87.5% efficient, it makes it... 99.5% efficient. Whatever that measurement even means. You only get to add those numbers together if you're talking about, say, raw dps or some other number like that, not when talking about percentages.

Raw DPS matters.

Raid design is unfair to some.

With the current healing situation in the game (mana being almost no issue, esp. with replenishment), the amount of overhealing a healer does means almost nothing.  This is even more true for Holy paladins who, even with the 3.0.9 nerf to divine plea, can still afford to bomb Holy lights and use divine plea every cd.

The problem with holy paladins (as far as racking up big numbers on a healing meter, which is a really crappy tool for judging healers, but that's another discussion in itself) is their only raid heal is the holy light glyph and they are also the most vulnerable to getting their heals sniped by other healers.

Only tips I can think for you to offer your pally is to:

1. Use and abuse Beacon of Light, paladins have great single target throughput and using this spell in optimal situations essentially doubles it.  Using this spell to it's full potential is probably the only way a holy pally will come close to the other healers on the meters in the current unlimited mana healing environment.

2. Use Holy Shock religiously, every cd if possible and where applicable.  This is a holy paladin's best tool to fight against their healing being sniped by other healers and with holy talents will benefit them in other ways too.  Since you say he stopped playing for quite some time this could be part of his problem.  Holy shock used to be a very lackluster spell, especially for PvE raid healing.  In Wrath it has become a core healing spell even in a raid environment, but he may still be viewing it with a stigma from when he last played.

ha ha ha ha ha

I should explain. We have a paladin in our guild that runs out of power like clockwork, and I really can't figure out what she is doing to make this so. It's made it so I'm tempted to level MY paladin to heal with, just so I can see how paladin healing is shaking out this time around (my prediction: I will still hate it for being more annoying than it needs to be). I don't even want to give her advice, I just want to know for my own peace of mind.

Lack of Int is my guess.

I read that as "lack of hit" at first. It made me laugh. The end!

EDIT: Ooh, I think she doesn't have nearly enough crit is the problem. Hm!

Most likely, Int is the new mana regen stat thanks to how replenishment works, plus holy pallies get a % of Int converted to spell power and up until 3.0.8 I think, divine plea was based on your total mana not base mana, so it regenerated more mana per use with more Int.

Just like mages with mana gems, using divine plea early and often is the key for not running out of mana.  They can pop wings which essentially turns it into only a 20% healing reduction and in a real emergency can set up a macro to remove divine plea to get full healing potential back.

That isn't really necessary most of the time though because turning 15k+ holy light bombs into 7.5+ just reduces the amount of overhealing being done.  :why_so_serious:

How many healers are you running with?

Our best Druid healer decided to AFK through a 25-Naxx clear because he could.  No one noticed until he said something about it a week after the raid.  At 5 healers we were bringing too many; which caused them to cut out each other's healing performance and makes the WWS look very strange / not reflect capabilities.  It is difficult for many to maintain focus when it is obvious (to them) that their performance/excellence is irrelevant.  Pretty damning when 30% of your raid healing goes missing for a few fights and no one notices. 

Not suggesting that's the root cause here, but a Holy Paladin can single heal Patchwerk and should be dropping Glyphed Holy Light as often as possible, keeping holy shock, plea, and sacred shield in cooldown as appropriate.  Stacking Crit then Haste, cause the Int will come naturally and you don't really need 30k mana anyway (it takes two pieces of food to fill the tank even at 23k mana - already annoying).  And Bacon, esp on a fight like Patch.  Shaman can put out about 5k hps while Paladins will put out 15k per second.  If there is a role in the raid for them that other bored healers aren't filling, even bad Paladins can look amazing.  Paladin have a cast time on their effective heals, so if you've got 6 healers the Paladin will have no chance to get in for full effect - especially if they aren't top shelf.

There is also the possibility he's playing with baby-in-lap, that tends to negatively impact reaction time.

Nu-uh.
I shall bend interpretations until the day you rue feeding me.

Lantyssa: took your sweet time, eh?

Ingmar: raw dps + raw healing, although healing would only partially be affected.

I forgot you're a lawyer and thus love mind and word games. ;D

I'm prepared now.  You shan't fool me again!  For at least a few days...

 :oh_i_see:

To the healing discussion:

Overhealing certainly does have a place in context of healer skill. While there is relatively little need to have all that great of healers right now, I can only assume it will be getting more difficult in Ulduar, and healing already becomes hard in Sarth+x when you have healers with significant overheals. I don't mean "OMG! You have 2% more overheals than the other healer, you suck!" I'm talking about the paladins and priests we get doing 50% over heals in our raids. As long as over healing is <30% they should be fine, but anything above that means they're wasting quite a bit of mana, and more importantly are probably not healing someone else who could use it. If anyone is overhealing >30% and people die during the fight (with exceptions, like people dying because they stand in the wrong place and instantly die). If there is raid damage going on, there's always someone else that could use a heal.

And as far as the speccing issue:

There is quite a bit of give and take in the "Optimal" specs. Most of them have some options built in which don't change the dps by much, and give you more control over it. Fairly often this comes in the form of 3-4 talent points that can be spent as you want, with only a 1-2% chance in dps. That, generally isn't a problem. What is a problem are the people with specs that deal significantly less damage, that aren't even in the same area as optimal. If 25 people in a raid are all doing 4% less dps than they could, its the same as bringing one less person to the raid (Well, not exactly, since you usually only bring 16 dps, its more like if everyone does 6% less dps than they could, but you get the point).

I have very rarely heard of people saying you need to spec a certain way because it will improve your DPS by 1%. That much isn't very noticable (~20dps for most players). On the other hand, there are talents that can increase your DPS by 10%+ for a few points. Not taking them is very noticable, and saying you need to take those talents if you want to raid with a group is not being elitist in the slightest. Its saying "Carry your weight." If at any time a tank is out-DPSing you, you have some definite improvement needed (caveat: I tend to do quite a bit of DPS as a tank. However, anyone at a similar gear level (all iLevel 200+) tends to do at least 30-40% more damage, as long as they're a decent player. Those that are and entire tier behind should be doing around the same numbers the tank does).

I tend to enjoy stacking spirit on my priest. It means he can solo with very little downtime. Being told to put on gear that favors DPS stats more if I go to a raid is not any different than being told I can't come in a smite-spec.

Paladins are made to overheal. Priests that are 50%+ overhealing more than their counterparts need to stop using greater heal as much.

Fixed.

The only fights in current content where GHeal makes sense are Patchwerk and Sarth+. For everything else Flash is a better stock heal.

Generally true. I still use it on clearcast, sometimes.

Also, make sure those healers are at ~10% haste.

This makes very little sense to me, at least from watching paladins (I have never healed on one). It seems the ones doing the most overheals are the ones who are least effective as a healer. They tend to be the ones who throw their Beacon on the tank, then go about throwing their heals at everyone else. The problem is, if they're overhealing on the raid, they're not healing the tank for as much. It seems to me that if the tank could use 100% of a heal, but the most a raid member could use is 50%, it would make more sense to throw the heal at the tank, wait for the raid person to drop a little more, and then throw the heal at the raid person when they can get more of the effect.

It depends on healing assignments. Generally, paladins should NOT be on general raid heals. That's for priests, druids (somewhat, best on melee w/ aoe damage), and especially shamans.

Most people put paladins on your tanks for consistent HPS and only have them raid heal emergency stuff like kel's ice block and other big single-target damage spikes. Add the fact that a decently geared pally is almost completely mana stable as long as someone has replenishment, and everything is just fine - most of those overheals are going to be on the main tank and as such aren't a barometer for bad healing technique.

Using meters on healing is ridiculous.  There's one measure of a healer's performance - do the targets the healer is assigned to heal live... or not.  If the answer is "not", then you need to figure out why the healer's charges are dying, and correct that if possible.

I'm missing something then. How does this equate to paladins doing more overheals? Unless they're consistently doing 20k+ I don't see any reason half of it should be going to waste every time.

Always Be Casting. On the main tank. Whether he's taken damage or not. A lot of it ends up as overhealing. All I'm saying is that paladins are generally at the top of the overhealing meters when compared directly to other classes, so you simply cannot use overheal % on recount to declare them poor healers.

And soulflame is flat out wrong. Healing meters ARE useful for performance indications as long as you know how to read them. If one person is wildly different from another - same class, same talents, same gear - there's something going on. The meters can tell you that SOMETHING is awry and can give you indications to dig deeper. All your targets living could mean that one of your healers is picking up the slack for another. Get the one who's lagging a bit on the same level as the rest and you can progress to the next level - one less healer and one more dps. Shoot for 4 healers on naxx 25 and 2 on naxx 10.

It still seems to me that 50% seems ridiculously high. If they're doing that much overhealing, they could be casting half the time and doing.... Something else.

Maybe. Or, that could mean that your tank takes some damage and gets topped off during every heal but some of that healing goes to waste, or that every third heal hits the tank just after they get topped off by someone else, or the tank takes damage right after the heal lands and it all goes to overhealing instead. 50% overheal isn't ridiculously high. Normal healers can use a stopcasting mod or cancel their heal, tank healers generally do not, they'll just let the heal fly on the bet that the tank will simply take more damage before their GCD+heal will land.

Most likely, it's from a combination of the above plus the big one, crit overhealing. Even if the paladin IS doing some raid healing in addition to MT heals, your overheal can still get up in that area. It's really not uncommon. Ad-hoc healing assignments can exacerbate the problem since healers tend to heal on top of each other given the chance. Every healer including your MT-healing pally is going to hit that mage who took aggro for a split second and spiked down to 20% life in one hit. Because the mage has low health and only need 8k healing, more than half those flash of lights / flash heals are going to be wasted and go into overheal.

In addition, raid healers simply heal on top of each other and every single priest in your raid is going to heal on top of the tank healer because a tank is always the target of the first prayer of mending bounce. If prayer of mending crits (and sometimes if it doesn't) the next tank heal is going straight into overheal.

Edit: Holy light glyph I forgot about too, thanks. I don't actually play a paladin :)

50% is not ridiculous for a paladin at all - keep in mind that the paladin is probably using glyph of holy light, which heals everyone within 8 yards of the holy light target for 10% of the value of holy light, something like that - that means on every cast that is hitting probably at least all the melee dps around the tank, and a lot of them are going to be unwounded in a lot of situations. A LOT of that extra splash healing will be overheal.

I understand some amount of over heals. Our better priests/shaman/druid will usually do in the 10-20% range over the course of any given wing of Naxx. Most of that is from the 1-2 heals they throw a minute that are completely wasted. On the other hand, I've never seen a paladin under around 40%, with most of them in the mid 50's. A 50% overhealing rate means that for every heal that is completely applied, one is completely wasted.

I guess next time we have 2 tanks on I'll just have to go respec and give a try healing. It just really sounds too high to be anything but poor playing.

Or it means that a glyphed holy light spell hit someone wounded and then 5 people around the wounded guy who weren't hurt for 10% each. Or the paladin has beacon of light up on someone, heals a hurt guy while the beacon target is unwounded. I think those two abilities by themselves generate a very large amount of overheal.

If you haven't healed before, the first thing you're going to learn is that in raids you can't reactively heal tanks. If you wait for the tank to get hurt before you start casting, you will cause some wipes. That's where a lot of the rest of the overheal comes from on paladins; they don't have any 'buffer' abilities except sacred shield, and so instead of being able to have a lifebloom stack or renew or earth shield/riptide going to fill in the gaps, they just have to chain their heals on the tank. That automatically is going to generate overheal, there's just no way around it.

Also note that your overhealing meters are probably not counting missed ticks of, say, the druid's HoTs that happen when the target is at full HP. The "real" overheal of a druid healer is usually far far higher than what the meters show.

EDIT: I decided to look up our paladin healer on patchwerk last night, which was a great, clean kill. She overhealed 67% or so. The breakdown on the WWS:

31% overheal on Holy Light, the part of that which is from crits is outside her control
87.4% overheal on Beacon of Light (outside her control)
75.4% overheal on Glyph of Holy Light (outside her control)
37.3% overheal on Flash of Light (see Holy Light)

So as you can see paladins have some mechanics that automatically cause a LOT of overheal that is out of their control.

Even if you know exactly how to read them they can still be very misleading.  Unless you have a mod that will do a Grim Reaper style combat breakdown for an entire fight instead of just the last 10 seconds before death, and you have the patience to go through it, you will never get the full story from a healing meter.

The only 2 significant pieces of information a meter can provide in relation to healing is showing spell usage patterns and cleanse/dispell counts.  Plus with everyone using meters now and managing mana being a thing of the past, most healers now are competing heavily with each other.  This has basically lead healing to (d)evolve to a place where spam healing with your quickest most mana innefficent heals or spaming any sort of group heal along with throwing hots and instants out at every opportunity is the norm.  Overhealing be damned, if your not gonna run youself out of mana why wouldn't you just spam like crazy and boost your meter e-peen.

Gone are the days when healers actually had to use their long cast high efficiency heals, set up healer rotations, cancel casts, pay attention to the 5 sec rule, and watch their threat.  That was when %overhealing actually mattered because a healer with significant overhealing was likely to be the one with significant mana problems and because in those days threat from overhealing was significant enough pull aggro off a tank if you were careless.  All %overhealing tells you now is which healer was slightly slow or had their timiing slightly off and had most of their spam healing sniped by another healer who was slightly faster or had better timing with their spam heals.


Under the current circumstances any healer who doesn't have 20% or more overhealing probably isn't healing to their full potential and is finishing fights at half mana or more, which is just as wasteful as a healer with 60% overhealing imo.

Once people are in full epics heroic Naxx can be done with 3-4 healers, if you have more in your raid they will just canabalize each other's healing to the point where some of the healers will just get the short end of the stick and end up with either very low effective healing or very high overhealing.

I heard a story the other day about how a resto druid in a decently progressed 25 man guild basically went afk for an entire Naxx 25 clear and nobody noticed unti he said something later that week. 

When mana is essentially unlimited, as a guild gears up less healing is needed and each healer can do more healing to the point where a lot of healers can quickly realzie their contribution isn't needed as much, but most guilds don't usually park some core healers who helped them progress on the bench and bring more dps they just keep the same lineup.

3.1 is slated to have a whole host of nerfs changes to the mana regeneration model to make healers diversify their casting a bit more. How effective they'll be is yet to be seen.

And with some of the current changes on the PTR to some of holy's shit, that overheal is going to get EVEN MORE OVERHEALIER.

I don't understand and kind of hate the sacred shield nerf (only on one target at a time.) What, were paladins not bad enough in the Malygos vortex?

The other nerf, the one where instead of lowering holy light's cast time it makes holy light CRIT MOAR is the one that really gets up my snoot for some reason. But yeah, both those changes are aggravating. I'm getting a little tired of them panicking that paladins are TOO GOOD OH GOD TOO GOOD in the situations where they're good, but keeping them sucking super hard in situations where they are not good. Nerf my awesomeness, fine, but at least let me have something to do other than holy shock, bubble ONE person, and weep during shit like the vortex.

Only one Sacred Shield and instead of faster HLs the talent will now iincreases crit?  :ye_gods:

I am a very sad paladin.

I expect PW:S to get similar treatment!  Stat!  (So that others can feel my pain.  Also, assuming it works that way.)

PW:S works differently, it just absorbs damage (I don't know how it compares, I haven't healed with either class in ages), it has a short cooldown, but puts a debuff on the person you cast it on so no one else can cast it on that person if the shield gets eaten through before it wears off or whatever. It has had various nerfs through the years itself.

Still, priests were never ever told THAT was their version of group healing.  :why_so_serious:

Most of these recent Paladin changes are aimed at nerfing them in PvP (especially holy) from what I can see and what I've heard, although the consequences for PvE are  :awesome_for_real:

That's a new one to me.  I hadn't heard Holy Paly's are da bomb in PvP.  Really?

One sacred shield isn't a very big deal to me.  I don't use it on anyone but the tank except during those few boss fights where healing is restricted due to some aura or special event, etc.  I certainly can see it being useful in PvP, but even then it will only block 500 hps once every 6 seconds.  If you are a target of multiple pvp'ers, they'll eat through that in no time.

Making HL longer, but crit more?  Yeah, that made it even more useless.  I got my power, crit, and haste jacked up really high now and just use Flash all the time.  Whenever I use HL, it is usually too late and crits for way way too much (read 15-17k.)  Critting like that sure looks good from the outside, but it is pretty hard to be a consistent healer with these kinds of tools.  Now we'll have just even more of the same.

Holy paladins are more dominant in arena than resto druids were.  The reasons vary from metagame changes to holy shock being buffed to ret and prot buffs landing in their lap.  Paladins are almost 1/4 of all 2k+ players in all three brackets and the majority of those are holy.  People bitched about them on beta, but no-one listened.  An overpowered PVP healer makes life miserable in organized pvp situations.  An overpowered PVP DPSer makes life miserable for everyone everywhere.  No healadin ever corpse camped someone in the middle of their dailies or 100-0 stunlocked a fine young gentleman in AB.

I think it's gonna be interesting to see how they try and balance Ret paladins now though.  Their burst is still quite high on live and they will add Exorcism to their pvp repertoire in 3.1, then you hear reports from the PTR that their dps isn't quite keeping pace in Ulduar and so they might get even more dps buffs.

Somehow Blizzard always ends up chasing its own tail when it comes to balancing classes and specs.  Pvp nerfs aimed at Holy that look to unbalance them in PvE right alongside PvE buffs for Ret that have a solid possibility of unbalancing them in PvP.  At least if it goes live like that all the Holy paladins can make their new 2nd spec Ret  :grin:

As a holy paladin, I have totally corpse camped people.  Generally jackasses who were trying to kill me while I was doing my dailies.   :awesome_for_real:

If things get too bad, I'll go ret/tank when dual spec comes in.  I'm already collecting all the epics for both those suits now since our main tanks and plate dps pass on the lewtz these days.  I remember I could heal pretty damn well as ret when levelling so that is still an option anyway (mix and match spell power pieces with ret pieces.)

When my brother is holy he likes to bomb Horde with Judgement of Justice -> Divine Favor -> Holy Shock as they ride past.

Pallies are the biggest dicks in Wrath.  Worse than rogues were in TBC.

In fact, I think rogues rerolled and became pallies.

Hammer of Justice is the new omg wtf stunlock haxxor.  :why_so_serious:

I don't play on a PvP server anymore but I can just imagine how much of a pain it would be in Wrath with a bunch of DK's and Retadins running around everywhere trying to stir up trouble or be complete jerks.

Pallies will always shine in the early seasons of Arena because of their survivability. Especially when the game is melee-craft as it is now. Once you get season 3 or 4 relative resilience levels again, a priest or a druid will pull ahead again because they can survive.

Plate armor + shield on a healing class is such a balance.

It's not even the plate armor and shield to be perfectly honest, most casters can lock down a pally and kill them in a few seconds just like any other class in the game and mele don't struggle a ton with them with the proper use of interupts.  It's the bubble that makes them amazing in the current state of PvP.  With the current level of burst damage versus health pools most healers under any kind of focus fire can expect to survive for 5-6 seconds at best if they can get some emergency heals off on themselves.  The bubble gives holy paladins 12 seconds of focus fire/crowd control  immunity and uninterupted healing. 

When your the only healer that can consistently survive long enough to be useful against double and triple dps teams your the go to option for any team that wants a healer.

Holy Pally + X is doing so well right now that Disc. priests are starting to gain some momentum since they are the only realistic counter to the bubble with mass dispel.  Should be interesting to see what happens in 3.1 with warriors getting the new Shattering throw.

Man, did I miss the overheal conversation completely?

Overheal used to be bad, and partly out of control. Ever wonder why healers that weren't pallies didn't like crit? Because we heal people based on the average amount we'd heal for, crits are good for Inspiration type effects, but generally a high crit rate = high overheal % unless you're waiting for the tank to hit 30%. This was even worse after downranking got mauled and we HAD to use heals that would result in 2-4k overheal on a crit.

As for people with lower overheal, it either means they're not healing much, using smaller heals (LHW spam doesn't generate much overheal) or using smart heals (Chain Heal doesn't count if it doesn't jump!)

Anywho, if your total heal is low, and your overheal is high, you're probably healing strange. But if you're not permanently OOM and the raid ain't dying, it's really, REALLY hard to judge healing by a meter.

I kept my /recount going last night while main healing our Naxx 25 run.  I was consistently in the top 1 or 2 spots for total healing and the top 3 positions were very close overall.  However, for overhealing, I was at a whopping 45% of something like that and everyone else was well under 10%.  I always knew Holy Paladins had an overheal issue, but that just shoved it right into my face.

If you are honestly curious, browse random people (http://www.wowmeteronline.com/) and see what their overheal and healing breakdowns are. That gives you a good idea if you're in "the norm" or not.

I'm not terribly concerned with overhealing.  I chainheal the tank, sometimes the tank doesn't take damage in between hits, resulting in 100% overheal.  Sometimes I touch up the raid, and I'll heal someone who's down 1k health, just because, which can result in 80% or more overheal.  Sometimes my heals get sniped, although if I'm really concerned about that, I'll use HS.  Plus, once again, my concern is that everyone's health bar is full, with emphasis on the MT.

Unless blizzard gives me the tools to heal the amount I actually need to heal, I won't care about overhealing, and mine sometimes hits 50%.

Regardless, as a holy paladin, my healing makes the raid holy priest I run with weep.  I solo healed the last patch 10, at least according to him.  Of course, as he observed, we're at the point where we only need 1.5 healers for much of Naxx 10.

Neither am I.  Same with hitting some magical DPS number.  Main\off tank didn't die, boss died before any enrage timers or in a decent amount of time?  Call it good.

The magical dps numbers matter mostly for just a couple fights, and are mostly raid-wide magic numbers; you do 12,000 raid dps to Patchwerk-10, or the raid dies. When there are more tightly tuned enrage timers in Ulduar or whatever, you don't really want to be the guy that everyone rolls their eyes about and complains about picking up slack for, or you might find yourself sitting most weeks.

Overheal is in another category of 'who cares' right now, but the magic dps numbers really do matter to a certain extent.

Remember; while damagemeters on bosses make DPS's e-peen grow, once you've got a dungeon on farm status what REALLY matters for the evening is trash.

Look for people who afk or don't bother trying with trash. Smack them into shape. Trying on trash gets you faster full clears. And we're not talking minutes faster, we're talking 30m to an hour faster. Chain pull. Don't take it slow, especially with a 'powerhouse' group where everyone is overgeared and done it a million times. Get in, get out.

Yes, don't get me wrong.  I do not change my practices based off the overheal numbers either.  Our 25man run did very well.  We went back to Patchwerk after ignoring him for 2 weeks and one shot him easily.  We are getting to a point of basically being able to do everything in there once we get past the learning curves. 

I only brought it up because it seems like a ton of wasted healing points.  I mean each time I see somebody down 1k and I blast them with a 6k flash crit.....  I don't know, just seems like something is wrong.  I find most of my clean up healing gets done with Judgement of Light.  I keep that up as much as possible on the MT's target and there is always a nice blanket of HP's all around.  Yet, again a huge source of overhealing, but it sure makes things go smoothly.

I do have to say that my efficiency was at its very highest on Patchwerk.  I was assigned the MT and got to use my HL to its fullest glory.  14-16k crits sure come in handy on that one. 

If available, a Ret Paladin should be doing the Judge of Light. Due to the way Judgement effects scale (Can't find the exact numbers, but I believe its some place in the 2AP:3SP range), the usual priority on judgements is Ret>Prot>Holy, meaning you'll usually end up with a Ret Paladin judging Light, the Prot Paladin judging Wisdom, and the Holy Judging that other one if they're bored.

Since the judgements overwrite each other, try to keep the paladins with highest combined ap+sp doing light and wisdom, with the others doing the third one no one talks about (and I can't remember the name of right now).

Holy paladins should probably be judging *something* since they have that it-gives-you-haste talent.

We used to be able to downrank, but apparently that wasn't cool.

Once they decided to go all out with +dmg or +heal  (now spell power) on caster gear after release, healers down ranking spells became a way for them to gain infinite mana without losing much in the way of healing effectiveness.  As we know all to well now, infinite healer mana allows content to be trivialized and makes it harder to balance bosses.  Thus the developers have been at war with downranking, nerfing the spell power coefficients of lower ranked spells in TBC, and outright making it impossible to downrank in Wrath. 

However, thanks to replenishment and the rediculous amount of stats gear has at 80 they are pretty much back to square one with infinite healer mana, thus the overhaul to mana regen mechanics in 3.1.

I would have happily traded in infinite mana for the ability to downrank, it made healing more engaging for me. You're right as to why they did it; however I (and many others) didn't see that this was the only or best solution to the problem though.

Likewise, the new changes to regen miss the point that replenishment is the loose cog in the mana regen machinery, not oo5sr regen...

From what I understand, OO5sr was a problem for certain fights, basically any fight with some sort of scripted movement/transition, I think Saphiron was an example given.  When Saph goes into the air and healers run to an Ice block or just moving out of a blizzard, they can get a few seconds of OO5sr with ease.

With current stat levels and regen equations healers that value spirit can have well over 500 mp5 ooc even in entry level gear, I'd imagine that in best in slot gear with raid buffs this value can come close to 1k mp5.  This trivializes fights like Saph in the sense that the AoE dmg should give healers mana trouble at lower gear levels and push people to use resist gear.  With the current OO5sr regen though they can spam heal through it then use the air phase or moving out of a blizzard to regen a ton of mana and continue healing through without issue.

I agree that replenishment is a major issue but they have their head in the sand in regards to it, mostly because they're using it as a band-aid on underrepresented dps specs instead of just giving them more competitive dps. 

They seem to be ignorant however of the fact that whichever class/spec brings the best dps while providing replenishment will be the go to replenishment slot for bleeding edge min/max types and the other specs will continue to be underrepresented.

If every replenishment spec was identical save for damage done, yes, that would be true.  Since they aren't, it's false.  Each one brings a different set of raid buffs/debuffs and some of them are pretty hard to bring to the party.  Even if Survival hunters did the most DPS of all the replenishers, they wouldn't necessarily be the choice above retadins because retadins bring a lot more raid buffs to the party than the hunter, some of which are pretty difficult to get and involve a heavier opportunity cost for the alternative spec.

Yes, but the specs getting replenishment in 3.1 are frost mages and destro locks. Neither of these specs brings anything to the raid that a higher-DPS spec can't as far as I know.

Curse of Elements and healthstones!   :oh_i_see:

Moonkin or unholy DKs take care of the first.  Cookies are nice.

But it's so hard to find an unholy DK!

Wha, they don't stack?

Nothing stacks anymore.. welcome to.. uh.. 6 months ago with the "Raid Normalization" patch.   It's why you have to keep yelling at idiot dps who are crying "zomg buff might please" when you have 3 warriors running shouts in your group.

Man, you make warriors run shouts when you could just 30 min buff it? Cruel.  :-P

Make?  No, but if they want to shout and overwrite might they're getting bitched at every single time that shout goes down.

These can be provided by an affliction lock, who almost certainly does much better DPS.

I don't play either a mage or a lock, so I haven't really been following the changes. There may be some additional utility and/or DPS thrown in, although I'm inclined to agree with Vash that this is just a bandaid fix.

They fixed it so it won't overwrite anymore, unless you're dealing with someone with improved battle shout vs. vanilla blessing of might, in which case, yo go for the shout anyway.

Ideally you don't want the lock providing it at all, you get it from a moonkin or DK who can provide it passively, as opposed to the lock who has to pass on curse of agony to put it up.

Affliction was beaten with the nerf bat.  The warlock trees are within the margin of skill/gear/fight differences of each other in 3.1.  There's also almost no overlap in synergies amongst the replenishment specs.  Given the strength of buffs/debuffs especially in 25's, you can pick who specs for replenishment based on what synergies are already present - or on who is the better player.

DPS-wise how are destro locks and frost mages comparing to rets and survival hunters though?

I recently took my warlock to Destro.  He's all 200 blues with a few 200 purps and one 213.  So, not near pimped yet, but not bad.  I still can't get into the top 10 on damage or dps charts for our 25 man instances (last night that was 2300 dps at number 10.)  Time will tell though.  I know our best geared lock in the guild is consistently in the top 5.  I need to talk to him about his spec.

In our 25man runs, our GL is a demonology 'lock (I think; he has a felguard), and he is usually top one or two. I blame AoE foolishness, but he does slap down the pain.

Our lone survival hunter does good DPS, but isn't anything like dominant. As an enhance shaman, I usually thoroughly trounce him on the damage meters. Our gear is comparable.

What I find interesting is despite all the rogue (whom as a group I regard as being barely above mages in lowlife quotient) pissing and moaning, our top rogue usually is in the top 4 in damage output. He's some sort of dagger rogue and I suspect it's the mutilate build. His gear is very good and he does put up some serious numbers. I can beat him on occasion, but usually he has a good 10% on me (although, some of that is MY damage, but...hey, it's a shaman thing).