You can have my Bloodlust when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

<3

But on a serious note, does all this apply strictly to world first progression? If none of that mattered to everyone, then the current system wouldn't be that bad.

"For a 10-man guild, they would need to roster two shaman to be able to guarantee a heroism. And 20 if they want to be able to “stack” two of a class for a given encounter."

This. Vortex went a very long time with zero shaman, in fact, and it hurt: it took everything we had, and much pressure on our dps, to be able to do as much as we did without the shaman. We now have 2, for exactly the reason of having those bloodlusts available as well as the totems needed to buff our magical dps. As it is, we regularly raid without the +hit buffs granted by moonkin/shadow priests, so our casters have an extra 3% hit to slot out that would otherwise go to buffing crit, or haste, or spellpower.

The introduction of the drums and scrolls that can do class-specific buffs is a step in the right direction, however; we even made use of the fortitude ones this week, when our priest was having internet problems. I'm hoping that they plan to release a version that replicates bloodlust, even if it is a "weaker" version.

I totally understand your concerns, but I'm afraid this is the price we need to pay so we can have challening encounters (uuntill they are nerfed) or class diversity.

No, I don'tbelieve this concern has nothing to do with rank or skill: only top guilds CARE about this, since lower ranked guilds usually do nerfed versions of these balanced-for-x-amount of- class-Y fight, and the version they do can be "doable" /first kill, learning, whatever) without min-maxing raid setup.

I'm afraid I'll keep thinking top guilds tend to whin..complain about this when they don't do that great on new encounters. Blame it on "but they had better setup than us!" yo.

Newsflash: "Managing your roster is part of being better than other guilds" I'm sure you knew this before Anub, Yogg and Mimi too.

Here's someone not from a top guild to tell you that yes, we totally get what Kyth is saying and we agree. It does matter to us. We usually carry 30-32 people on the roster, just enough to fill raids allowing for absences and a little flexibility. We got Yogg down quite late, and only did 2 Ulduar hardmodes before ToC came out.

We have been working on, but have not yet downed, hardmode Beasts. To some degree, this is a gear issue for us, and we have no choice but to farm 10 man and 25 regular for a few weeks to make up for the Ulduar HM gear we never got. That's fine. But for us, stacking paladins (for HoP), healing priests (for GS and PS), and running a bit melee-heavy is what we need to do to get through Gormok without tank deaths and before the worms come out. You can say we're just bad, and that may be true, but this is what works for us at our current gear and skill level. So we have had nights when we just had to skip working on it because the right people didn't log on. That's extremely frustrating. We raided all the way through BC and WotLK up to now stubbornly refusing to raid-stack. It took us longer to get a lot of kills, but we got them with whatever group we had. We don't feel like we can do that anymore.

Personally, I have not and have never thought that, as a hunter, I should be maximally useful on every raid boss. Limiting the kind of raid fights blizzard can design be restricting the mechanics to fights where certain abilities can never be stacked beneficially is a BIG limit; I don't mind at all that fights can be min/maxed by bringing different classes as long as, you know, each class gets a chance to shine.

Your claim that progression at World 5000th is the same as World 1st is fallacious because, for the most part, guilds like that do NOT min/max all that much. When I first got into raiding, the major requirement for someone to be brought to an entry level raid was that they had their gear enchanted. When working on progression, we tended to bring an extra healer, and that was the extent of our min/maxing. Like you said, guilds like that are World 5000th for a reason.

Absolutely 100% no matter how you design the game, the fact of the matter is that, as long as an encounter is "doable" at all, the benefit from min/maxing will only mark the difference between World 1st and World 5000th, not the difference between World 1st and not doing it at all. If an encounter is "doable," it will always mean that people will have to choose whether or not they care more about getting a kill quickly or bringing the players they want to bring. And don't say that Freya is proof otherwise, because it isn't: your guild had the skill to work up a strategy that would work without a ton of melee and execute it before many guilds did, but most guilds still need to choose between bringing more melee or having to train their ranged in a harder job (and thus taking more time).

If there's anything to complain about, it's the DEGREE of benefit a raid can get from stacking, but that's just too subjective a complaint for my tastes. Yes, bringing 18 warlocks to a raid because it's the best strategy is a sign of poor design. Yes, eliminating an entire class from the roster for a raid because they bringing nothing useful is a sign of poor design. But beyond that, there's no good reason in the world why Blizzard can't design a fight that happens to want a few more paladins than normal, as long as the only result of not bringing them is that you'll have to work out a more difficult strategy. That's just life, and I for one am happy when a fight highlights class abilities you don't necessarily get to use often otherwise; it makes for more varied and interesting fights.

So yeah, basically your complaint really does boil down to "the degree benefit a guild gets from raid stacking on Anub is inconveniently high for my guild, and it makes me unhappy that we have to depend on additional practice and more difficult strategies to get a kill that another guild can get by raid stacking more than us." Which is pretty banal when you get down to it.

I hope every single officer and raid leader in the world reads this, best write-up ever. Should use all possible CD's on the frist pull of a progression boss because even tho you know you'll need them to a specific phase of that boss, first you have to reach it, and increased haste on healers and huge increase of the raid DPS WILL get you further on the first attempt ever, and you should keep BL'ing on the part of the fight you're sttrugling the most so you can increase the chances of seeing the next part of it.

We have been beating our head against the 10 man part of heroic phase 3 Anub for 3 resets now. Sometimes we have bloodlust, sometimes we don't, and our dps has generally risen to the occasion to get us to phase 3 regardless. But is *definitely* easier when we have the option to bloodlust our DPS/Healers at some point in the encounter.

Another thing that is frustrating, ecspecially in 10 mans, with anub in particular, is that it becomes *significantly* more difficult if you don't bring the healer that can do the job "best". We are regularly falling apart in our phase 3 attempts because we (myself included) are failing at the healing, which I don't admit lightly. We have seen ~13% regularly, and I just can't keep our raid up. It's infuriating. We are trying to do it with a Disc Priest and a Druid. And while I have read it is possible for these two healers to do accomplish it, we are failing (compounded by the fact we often don't have a bloodlust to push through to the end). Every time we get to phase 3 and I have to make a decision between a raid member and a tank, I get frustrated. I can't help but think that if we were using a Holy Paladin, we would be trivializing half the healing issues we are having right now.

I honestly think we are going to have to either 1) bring a bloodlust, 3 heal it, and ask the DPS to push through phase 1/2; 2) don't bring a bloodlust, 3 heal it, and take 2 kite phases; or 3) bring a holy paladin instead of myself or the priest that have spent hours learning the fight.

I can't help but agree with you, Kyth. While it is "doable" without certain things (bloodlust, beacon of light, BoP) it becomes more difficult if you don't have them. It irritates me that a strategy that is successful if you have x,y,z becomes unsuccessful, or at least less succesful, if you find yourself missing those things.

I'm sure we will get our raid figured out. I'm sure we will sit a DPS for a shaman, so that we have a bloodlust. I'm sure that we will use a hybrid that can DPS for the first two phases and heal the third. But the fact that it feels almost like we have to make these changes and can't just walk in with any 10 people capable of doing the job just as well as anyone else, but for their lack of (bloodlust, beacon, BoP) is, in fact, frustrating.

It seems like all classes have 1 or 2 unique abilities. To avoid an "Anub" situation, it seems like you either have to a) ensure that all those unique abilities are duplicated or replicated by at least 1 other class or b) design very generic encounters. Given the choice, do you you homogenize the classes or homogenize the encounters? On Anub, it might be Death Grip, TotT+FoK and HoP that make the encounter easier; on other fights it might be Improved Blizzard or Power Word : Shield or Hammer of Justice or Wind Shock or Acclimation or Mind Control or Spell Steal or who knows what. Where do you draw the line?

I'd just like to add that I thank you for the work you do here and also to take a stand on these issues. As someone who really only takes his ten man that he runs with friends seriously, I greatly appreciate someone from a top guild having the same concerns. We have 10 people we run with every week and really have no option to 'sit' someone. We recently had to tell our ele shaman to sit for a druid so we could get bres, gotw and a real third healer and it was heartbreaking. I understand we were trying to 2 heal content that was designed for 3, but these were my friends and who I wished to play with. It has been much easier to do though in Wotlk, but there still is a bit of a way to go for real btpntc.

Raid stacking has always been a part of the game, this is nothing new. The fact that you are now on a crusade to end it when your guild was on the negative side of it (where was the raid stacking blogs when you could afford to take 3+ Hunters and 3+ Warlocks to Yogg0? There weren't any) is what causes people to deter from your argument. You raise good points and in the pure sense of raid stacking, they are valid and should be addressed. However, don't try and push it off as if this isn't just you getting on your soapbox because you couldn't field more than 2 Paladins or 1 DK for Heroic: Anub when it is painfully evident that your experiences with this boss have fueled your fire to push this issue.

This is Beruthiel no.1 (the clown!) changed the name cause some guy decided to use same name too :S

"Raid stacking has always been a part of the game, this is nothing new. The fact that you are now on a crusade to end it when your guild was on the negative side of it (where was the raid stacking blogs when you could afford to take 3+ Hunters and 3+ Warlocks to Yogg0? There weren’t any) is what causes people to deter from your argument."

Yes this and "You have never offered a reason why you think otherwise, you just assume it’s a given because it’s inconvenient for you personally. That’s why I don’t like this post."

this were the reason I said "Newsflash: Managing your roster is a part of being a better guild than others".

You are suggesting that encounters should be designed around guilds with 32-35 raiding roster (magic number comes from Fusion roster?), guilds that has no flexibility to use alts, or guilds that have raiders who do not like to sit on bosses cause encounter requires a trialist or an alt is more helpful. Yes there are guilds like that, but there are also guilds that can manage all of these to fasten their progression: it's part of the package.

If you have a setup that you don't want to change on different encounters, or assume if you want to have a roster of only 25 people that you don't want to change no matter what, is that a valid complain when you say an encounter requires a different setup than your 25 people? "But we had done Freya with that 25 people in our guild!!!"

In the end you will get people like:"...stacking healing priests (for GS and PS), and running a bit melee-heavy is what we need to do to get through Gormok without tank deaths and before the worms come out. You can say we’re just bad, and that may be true, but this is what works for us at our current gear and skill level"

Yes, not to be a jerk but thinking you need class stacking to get through Gormok just indicates you are bad. If game/ encounters were designed around your current gear and skill level they would be a joke or all classes would be same, if they were designed around what Fusion could afford, there wouldn't be this post.

I think 3.2.2 fixed some issues in terms of raidstacking DPS on Anub, I know atleast our ele shaman and warlock both managed to pull 8k DPS each, which imo is "enough" now. Actually though we did have quite a stacked raid it's interesting to see that the DPS was so close from class to class, to the extent that there's no real class I'd feel obliged to leave out if the player knows how to make use of it. Then again, for a first kill, some classes still remain clearly sub-par.

The more noteable issue from my point of view is healing. Holy Paladins are simply insane atm on any fight which requires multiple tanks. Playing both Holy/Disc Priest and Resto Shaman(and looking to change my druid to resto also...go figure), I know fully well that even a lesser geared Paladin will kick my ass in terms of the healing he can put out if there's 2 tanks. The other classes aren't "bad", it simply takes atleast 1½ healers to replace a paladin, often more.

In terms of 10man raiding, often times if an encounter requires 3 healers, it's doable with 2 if one is a Paladin and the other can be either Druid or Priest, for melee heavy setups a Shaman will do also. Having that Paladin buys you +20% dps, that's a "buff" no other class can ever compete with.

Same when all your tanks or healers don't show up for a night: you can't do it. Again: managing your roster is part of being a succesfull guild. Do you expect blizzard to design fights you can do without any healers in case your healers may not show up that night? Those fights would be ridicliously easy wouldnt they?

That's how it looks to guilds that can manage to do their rosters properly, if you think a game shouldn't take that much effort, it means your version is the non heroic versions of ToC: do not tell me you need class stacking for non-heroics.

It's interesting that you have singled out Bloodlust, I would have thought that for Anub, the current fight that is everyones focus, mathematically Ebon Plague is a much more significant buff than Bloodlust by having that 12% extra magic damage on all the adds straight away.

I just wanted to echo that the raid stacking issue does very much translate to lower-end guild settings, perhaps even more so because on the lower end you don't have the option of recruiting to suit stacking.

If a high end guild puts up a post saying "We need a handful of DKs" you may not get apps that meet your standards, but you at least have the option of taking people who don't meet your standards if the encounter is off-kilter enough.

Months behind guilds like ours...well...we just have to hope that the nerfs come before our progression does.

If we weren't having vacation/sick relative/whatever issues and were raiding more than one night a week we'd likely be staring at Anub and scratching our heads going "how are we going to do this..." We've had a recruting rogues shingle hung at our door for two months now and we still only have our original one.

When it comes to "hardcore" raiding guilds working on heroic toc25 and heroc toc10, I think it's reasonable to expect that it will be hard, that stacking classes or thinking outside the box may be required at first. That's the fun and challenging thing about hardmodes, right? I think of it as bonus content that's there as an extra challenge, not subject to the level of play-balancing that the "normal" mode content is. Maybe hardcore guilds don't have the luxury of seeing it that way - hardmodes are something they need to be farming ASAP or they lose "hardcore raider cred" or whatever.

I definitely don't see any problems with normal toc10, I see plenty of people clearing it who haven't been able to clear uld10. I've cleared toc10 a couple times with pugs where half the people were learning the fights as we went, we didn't have +3% spell hit, people had mostly H ToC gear. I mean, it certainly took a while, but it was definitely challenging, fun, and "doable". :P

I wanted to take a moment and throw in my support that Kyth's point very much does apply to lower ranked guilds. Our guild is on a smaller server. The server itself ranked around 220 in the US list the last time I looked. My guild has never downed Yogg-Saron; only two guilds on the Alliance side have in fact. Only one Alliance side guild has a heroic CC-25 kill.

While we are nowhere near the level of performance of top ranked guilds, Kyth's points very directly apply to us. Right now, my guild is ranked second in Tier-9 raid content on Alliance - and we still cannot get a Warlock that plays regularly. The recruitment notices have been out there for months. So, when an encounter dramatically benefits from stacking Warlocks we are in for a rough ride. That has nothing to do with World firsts or even server firsts.

If Blizzard wants 'bring the player, not the class' to have any merit, while simultaneously keeping class diverse, then content developers need to design content with multiple 'solutions'. As an example for Heroic Anub Phase 2 - on top of the 'Paladins for HoP' solution, add a mechanic where some non-Paladin class can stun or slow Anub while underground with sufficient diminshing returns that it effectively buys the raid around 12-15 seconds.

To Kyth's point, the designers have to know when enough is enough. I am not suggesting that every class have some mechanism that solves each problem. But content designers could develop content such that each unique boss mechanic could be 'solved' by, say, three different classes.

With more ‘multiple-solution’ content, guilds could realistically attempt that content with the raiders that show up for the night - instead of calling it and mass logging over to Aion because only 1 or 2 characters of some class were available.

I have to say I strongly disagree with your evaluation of Freya+3. Back when the fight was on the edge of beatable, we worked on it for a couple weeks. (This was after something like 5-10 guilds had killed it.) Upon reviewing logs and other guilds' reports we found the major difference was the degree to which the raids were stacked. We had been running 2 rogues and 1-2 DPS death knights, and most other guilds were stacking the hell out of them. We proceeded to do the same (going to 3 rogues and 3 DPS death knights) and lo and behold, we killed the fight the following week. Freya isn't tuned quite that hard anymore, but originally the fight HEAVILY favored raid stacking in much the same way that a fresh Anub'arak 25H kill does, or most new endboss kills do. Anub'arak isn't any more unreasonable in that respect than Freya was.

Meanwhile the issue of block tanks and Hand of Protection is different and more along the lines of "truly unique abilities" similar to Mana Tide, Innervate, Rebirth, and Bloodlust. But some context is important here. At a maximum (this depends on your strat) you want four paladins in an Anub'arak 25H raid for Hand of Protection. Is it really unreasonable to expect a raid to have 2 holy paladins, a ret paladin, and a prot paladin on their roster? It doesn't seem that way. The context of available specs which have HoP makes it a far less egregious issue than, say, requiring four hunters/warlocks/rogues for a given encounter.

Okay, so we're bad. Then I would love to hear the answer. We have several paladins, but if they all don't turn up for a night, how do we do this? Without Beacon, Kings, and HoP, how? Yes, I'm still talking about Gormok, and the lack of paladins is what led us to stack other classes to get through it.

I don't think this strictly applies to world first progression at all. I think this applies to guild first progression. As was mentioned each subsequent kill gets easier and easier due to gear off of that boss, and due to understanding the fight mechanics better each and every time. I personally don't think this changes whether you're going for world 1st or server 10th as the learning curve is dependent on each individual guild.

Right, it does speed up the learning curve as Kyth stated, and I agree with that. But what does the speed at which you clear content have to do with anything other than being higher ranked among guilds? Blizzard is not releasing content so fast that most raiding guilds barely have time to put it all on farm. Even now, with guilds that are 4/9 in Ulduar, it's still possible to finish Glory of the Heroic Raider before Icecrown hits if they want to with the boost of 245 gear.

Don't get me wrong, I think progression races are a very important part of WoW culture. It sets the bar for all players. Most of the time the best guilds are basically beta testing a lot of the content, and the more casual guilds get a less-ridiculous version of it to enjoy at the hard core guilds expense. So I think these issues only have a harsh negative effect on the top 1% of the guilds that play.

I'm just a Bloodlust bot. :(

"Newsflash: “Managing your roster is part of being better than other guilds” I’m sure you knew this before Anub, Yogg and Mimi too."

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. "Newsflash": encounters are designed for 50-person guilds? "Newsflash": 10-man guilds should expect to run with 20 people? Did you read the entire post?

I'm saying I think Blizzard is designing carelessly and while Bloodlust is the best example, there are others, as we have experienced (due to our choices) with some of the 25-man raid-stacking fights.

I sometimes think this blog would be better if no one knew who was writing it, because everyone seems to be unable to see the larger points behind the posts and just assumes it's usual complaints that we're not willing to do X. I'm saying it's not appropriate for Blizzard to *design* for X.

Because no one enjoys wiping.

If they are designing 25-person raids, I think they should be taking into account what guildsize that makes and understanding what it means when they make a fight that strongly favors stacking a subset of the raid. Same deal with 10-mans. That's why my last section said I think it's reasonable to design so two of a class makes an encounter "far" easier, but beyond that and I don't think what they're designing is in the best interests of the game.

Saying "it only affects ranking" dodges the point that they control everything about this game. They choose to design the classes and encounters as they do, and they create ripple effects throughout the game. There's no law of physics that says "you cannot create a hard encounter unless it encourages class stacking." Just look at Freya: difficult encounter, very touchy, doesn't require stacking in the least. *Can* you swing the odds a bit in your favor with melee? Yes, but it's very minor.

They're applying this principle to raid debuffs, saying they don't want one to be "too burdensome" to apply although they have no intents to make them equal.

Saying that "well it's nerfed by the time other people get to it" again dodges the question: everything is hard when a guild does it for the first time, regardless of how nerfed it was or wasn't. They're ranked World 5,000 for a reason. Bloodlust *still* makes that encounter harder. It's wrong to say that once a fight is nerfed, or once you get below some magical point, "things that make the fight far easier" stop coming into play or mattering.

Races are just as intense at world #1 as they are at world #5,000, it's just that the context changes: rather than competing across the world, maybe you're competing on your server. But people still deeply care. And significant advantages still matter.

<3 Rul! You know we love you.

Kyth, I agree with you on this. I like to believe that I am capable of viewing things from different perspectives fairly well, but I just can not see a point of view in which continually wiping because the boss encounter favors stacking a certain class more than others is acceptable. I guess it is possible that my own feelings on the issue cloud my ability to see that for some people being stuck on (or simply having a harder time with) an encounter due to not having a certain class/ability is acceptable. I also think that people underestimate just how much having a Bloodlust and Rebirth(s) can help (not just because of the dps increase, but the healing one as well), perhaps because they've never been without them.

I think it's more of a burden for the content designers to take all of these abilities into consideration when designing fights like Anub hard mode, rather than to strip classes of their uniqueness by burdening the class designers.

I'm not opposed to Drums of Bloodlust. In fact, I'd rather they give it out in the form of an item usable by anyone than to give it away to another class for a few reasons.

First, I think that Kings provides an overall higher DPS increase to a raid (I could be wrong, just speculating), and this was given away in the form of an item at 8%. So a 30% Bloodlust makes sense to me.

It would help 10 man guilds/raids tremendously. I would like to think that even if you give these class buffs to click-able items in a weaker form, guilds like Fusion wouldn't be caught dead using them anyway. Fusion, Premonition, Ensidia, and the rest of the top guilds would still want that extra 2% Kings, or extra 10% on Bloodlust because it's a game of min/maxing at this level. A 25 man raid should be able to field 2 Shaman/Paladins of any spec. It's not just the Shaman that brings Bloodlust or Paladin that brings Kings, but rather six different specs that can.

Which brings me to my point about hybrids. They are brought because of their buffs for the most part. If you bring an Elemental Shaman to a raid that does a static 5k DPS and there is a Mage in the raid that does 6k DPS, why would you even want to have the Shaman if you're progressing? If that Shaman brings a buff that makes the Mage do 7k DPS, then that 1K DPS belongs to the Shaman, not the Mage. To me this is how they have to balance DPS classes and players should recognize it as such. But now you run into another problem. If the Shaman boosts 6 casters by 1K each, then they are bringing a much more substantial amount of value to the raid over a pure DPS class. The pure DPS classes need more utility to make up for that somehow. This is the burden of the class designer more than it is the content designer.

But I wear rose colored glasses, and if I take them off for a moment, I remember beating Alliance to Lucifron in MC by a margin of hours. Afterlife beat us to Magmadar because of Fear Ward. Horde had no idea Tremor Totem worked on his fear and left it behind in Wailing Caverns. There were quite a bit of faction imbalances back then. Horde had a distinct advantage in BWL on the drakes because of Windfury totem. It allowed tanks to generate enough threat to let the DPS ride the lightning and go balls out.

So they give Horde Paladins and Alliance Shaman. To go even further, we were given more class homogenization during the current expansion. At what point do you just strip the uniqueness of every class away and just have tanks, healers and DPS classes?

To me it just appears easier to design the content around the classes rather than the classes around the content, because the content evolves and changes so much faster. I think Blizzards content designers don't have a clue how raid synergy works compared to a raid leader like Kyth. In a way, someone like Kyth could probably design a raid encounter that was much more balanced because she understands all of the classes inside and out.

Oh, and to Beruthiel 1 -

You are wrong. I am not part of a top guild, and I *do* care. It is just as equally as frustrating for me.

I agree completely Zeven, that it should be more of a burden on the raid designers.

That said, the class designers need to consider whether an ability is too overpowered in niche situations.

Example on how to fix Tricks+FoK uniqueness: Hunters could've been able to use Misdirection with volley. It has zero pvp gain (no dps boost) but gives you another "AE threat helping" class, and adds onto hunter utility.

I agree no class needs to be "maximally useful." And I'm in fact 100% certain I never said that.

If you'll re-read what I said, I was talking specifically about the gap between the classes. If the penalty is too high to bringing a class (e.g. warlocks on anub hardmode) you start down the path of raidstacking. Then I compared it to Freya where, while melee are better, they're not so much better that you actually want to sit ranged.

5,000th does matter. It seems you can't follow any details of my post other than what you've decided is a top guild whining. Maybe you should read some of the other comments here? Because what I'm posting about has nothing to do with min/max and will come up the entire lifetime through a boss, regardless of the nerfs. I'd suggest re-reading the section on Bloodlust. There's a reason it's first, because it's the easy part to understand: every raid group has equal access to bloodlust and its value is the same regardless of fight nerfs because it scales as time passes: the 5,000th guild to kill a boss is struggling just as much as the first guild, and needs all the advantages they can get. Pretending they don't matter, or that since it's easy for you it must be easy for them is a common high-end raider fallacy.

I did, in fact, complain about the DEGREE (your emphasis) of raid stacking. I'm sorry you think it's too subjective: Blizzard doesn't. GC posted recently, for example, about how while they want to reduce "onerous burdens" of applying debuffs, they weren't going to make them all the same in mechanism and cost.

Design is not about black and whites, it's about degrees and about deciding when it's "too much" and when it's reasonable.

That's why I compared Freya and Anub, since Freya has a clear, but minor, stacking advantage and is a good example of a well-designed fight. Freya has nothing to do with "strategy" for making it melee versus ranged friendly. The difference is simply one of degrees: ranged do less DPS on Freya but not so much less that a skilled ranged is worth sitting for an unskilled melee. But the difference between having a second BoP and not having a second BoP is so strong on Anub that, without question, any guild would sit an experienced player of another class to bring in a trial or even an alt paladin.

And I didn't mean to give the impression that I'm against homogenization. I support having abilities that cross over between a couple of classes. But I think you have to leave at least one ability to each class.

Exactly. Imagine how easy the EQ raid designers had it? The classes were so generic that you had very little to design against. In WoW, the talent trees and larger amount of abilities per class makes the burden of content design so much more difficult. Especially since WoW works with scripted events and gimmicks more than EQ ever did.

You miss my point, which is that, on any fight, any particular class is more useful than any other, then raid stacking will always be the easiest way to gain an advantage on the fight. This is as true on Freya as it is is on Anub. There's no "starting down the path to raid stacking." If you're progressing on content, raid stacking (and other forms of min/maxing) to one degree or another is a given.

You're right that design is not about black and whites. But your decision about what's "too much" and what's reasonable is very, very obviously based on the fact that you think 32 people is the ideal guild size, and that alts and trials should never need to be used on progression, both of which are incredibly questionable opinions.

(While I have certainly decided that you're whining, the fact that Fusion is a top guild is not relevant. However, you seem to be under the misapprehension that top guilds don't raid differently than lower-ranked guilds, which is silly. Yes, every guild with a regular shaman raider uses bloodlust. But there ARE guilds out there that don't have a shaman to raid with, and they do the best they can, and they manage. The same is true for every other raid-relevant advantage in the game. And the fewer advantages a guild makes use of, the lower ranked they are in general. Anub just happens to make having a couple extra rogues and DKs one of those advantages, and there is no problem with that.)

As an addendum, a month or so back I was in a 10 man run that was having a horrible time with hard mode Hodir because we didn't have any priests around to mass dispel the melee when they all got frozen. Is the answer to change the freeze mechanic, or give mass dispel to someone else?

I didn't miss your point. I'm trying to clarify for you the entire intent of this post which is that there's a point where it becomes so adventageous to stack classes that it overwhelms other reasons to bring someone, such as skill or seniority.

All I'm saying is, when fights cross this line (and while it's hard to say where the line is, it's not hard to list fights on either side of it), I think it's a design weakness.

It's an additional twist on "bring the player not the class", as I made pretty clear in the post, from the perspective of unique utility rather than pure DPS, which is usually what it's based on.

And it's ok if you have "certainly" decided I'm whining, since I've "certainly" decided you have an axe to grind that you're more interested in than in actually understanding what I'm saying. If all I was doing was "whining", I'd have posted purely about Anub. Instead I used it as one of many examples of a general WoW design fallacy that I see. Your inability to see past one section to the general point isn't my problem.

I think it's valid to ask whether it's reasonable to have the freeze mechanic on 10-man (if indeed mass dispell is required.) They could make it so 'freeze' hits a maximum of two players on 10-man, so dispells in time are reasonable (more than one class with a defensive dispell, and the dps specs can do it also.)

Clearly it makes sense on 25-man, but they have pretty frequently removed mechanics from 10's because they can only be dealt with by specific classes or specs.

If I were changing Anub, btw, I'd add one more orb so that you can do a two-tank strategy with only two paladins. They don't need to remove any more mechanics, just make it so stacking paladins doesn't confer as big an advantage.

It's a Sunny Saturday, but to avoid additional arguments like this one where the author is hell bent on focusing on one single section of the entire article to the point of ignoring the other pieces, I rewrote the section on Anub.

And even gave an example of how Vezax could have been designed to force inappropriately heavy raid stacking but wasn't, which should help with understanding the concept of "degrees".

Alright, I don't want to drag this out; you've certainly made your position clearer than it was and I appreciate that. But I still think the overall thrust of your post is based on the prejudices of someone who is incovenienced by a fight (which has nothing to do with Fusion's ranking or anyone else's).

I base this conclusion on statements like "A fight should not so favor a particular class/mechanic that you would sit full-time members over apps just due to the class when you already have 2-3 of that class in the raid." I mean, why not? Once you acknowledge that raid stacking is always present on progression (ANY progression, not just progression related to world ranking), then what makes 2-3 the ideal number to max out at? You don't justify this opinion at all, you just say this because Fusion happens to have 2-3 of all classes handy.

There is no real reason to avoid designing fights that allow raid stacking to be the major part of the dominant strategy during progression (again, progression for any guild, at any stage of the game). 50-person guilds are more common than 35-person guilds in any case, for the obvious reason that it's more social. People with alts are more common than people without them for the obvious reason that most of WoW is directed at people below max level. You're advocating design that encourages people to only play one class and to join small, focused guilds (both of which are fine) at the expense of larger guilds and people who like to raid with multiple classes (which isn't, particularly since the latter are more common among non-highly-ranked guilds). So yes, in that sense I do have an axe to grind.

I contend that the option to raid stack effectively is good for the game. You have never offered a reason why you think otherwise, you just assume it's a given because it's inconvenient for you personally. That's why I don't like this post.

"You’re advocating design that encourages people to only play one class and to join small, focused guilds (both of which are fine) at the expense of larger guilds"

If I may be so bold as to ask, but how exactly is designing content which does not favor stacking particular class(es) in bulk (I'm defining bulk here to mean more than 3) cause harm to larger guilds? Right now, based on your point of view, smaller guilds are being penalized when progressing because larger guilds are able to stack classes, even though the smaller guild may have a well balanced roster (which I think is at least part of Kyth's reasoning against class stacking). Don't get me wrong, larger guilds are fine, but why do raids need to favor stacking in order for large guilds to not be penalized? A large guild should be able to function just as well as a smaller guild if there isn't the option to stack a class in bulk.

Another problem that I have with your argument is : "50-person guilds are more common than 35-person guilds in any case, for the obvious reason that it’s more social." Where did you get this wonderful information at? If the first part of the statement is true, I would still doubt the second portion.

Everything has to have a catalyst. At this point, the reason why Kyth decided to bring up the topic of raid stacking, is moot, so why not discuss the actual topic at hand. Hopefully, if in the future we can bring enough public attention to encounters to promote raid stacking we can get Blizzard to start looking at more ways of limiting it (without removing fight gimmicks).

I agree. I applaud the efforts to get it out there and get it fixed; it needs to be fixed. I was just pointing out why people have an 'axe to grind' so to speak. Alone in the Darkness pre-nerf required more raid stacking than Anub'arak does. It wasn't mentioned then, probably because they didn't have to try and do the fight with only one hunter or alt Warlocks.

On the topic of raid stacking, healing wise, Paladins really can be insane. Not only because of beacon but also for their hand spells and let's not forget about aura mastery (situational, sure. But there is no other class you can bring to get it). But enough with the QQ :-)

As far as large guilds vs. small guilds go, the ability to benefit from raid stacking means you have more reason to include more players on at least a fairly regular basis.

Think about it like this. If a large number of raid fights involve a benefit from raid stacking, then a large guild can bring a lot of different players/alts to take advantage, and not worry about having so many many raiders who come to every fight. If very few fights offer that benefit, then there's no real reason to switch players in and out and large guilds fall apart because the alternates don't get to play much.

Effective raid stacking allows progression for more casual guilds. Removing the option to raid stack makes the division between hard-core raiders and casual raiders bigger and harder to cross. That is bad for the game.

You last paragraph confuses me somewhat, so I'll skip over that for now. As for the rest of it, why does the game need to support stacking to such a degree in order to larger guilds to rotate their raiders in? It would seem to me that duty should fall to the raid leader, and not the mechanics of the fight.

Just for the record: mass dispell is by no means required for 10 man Hodir hard. In a caster raid, I wouldn't even call it useful - never used it there, in fact. Maybe in a very melee heavy raid it's a real advantage to have it. On the other hand, melee stacking on Hodir hard is a nice dps advantage, so that balances it.

Unless the raid has only a single class capable of dispelling magic on friendlies, I wouldn't consider Hodir a problem. Let's not forget that mass dispell requires standing still and ugly targeting (so that you really hit all melee). Single dispell can be done on the move.

Bloodlust is used as the example as it's been the standard example for ages, and it's GC's favourite go-to argument. Technically you could prolly run Anub with a roster full of rogues and warriors, at which point Ebon Plague is pretty useless for the 2 dk's you're forced to bring.

"Same when all your tanks or healers don’t show up for a night: you can’t do it. Again: managing your roster is part of being a succesfull guild. Do you expect blizzard to design fights you can do without any healers in case your healers may not show up that night? Those fights would be ridicliously easy wouldnt they?"

Yes they would, but then you are now talking about roles and not classes. A balanced raid needs a certain number of tanks, healers, and DPS to function. The exact numbers for each role may change depending on the specifics of the fight. But which specific classes/specs that fill those roles should not have a huge impact on the outcome of the fight, assuming that all buffs/debuffs are provided. For example, a raid that brings 6 (arbitrary number) Paladins should not have a significant advantage on any given fight over a raid that only brings 2 (minimum to provide both BoK and either BoW or BoM).

If there is a large advantage in bringing more of a particular class, enough to the point that you are willing to bring in alts/applicants/random members of that class off the street over the main of an established guild member, then something about the encounter/zone is poorly designed. It means that the developers did not take the time to reasonably think about what the effects of having large numbers of certain classes or specs would have on the encounter.

"That’s how it looks to guilds that can manage to do their rosters properly, if you think a game shouldn’t take that much effort, it means your version is the non heroic versions of ToC: do not tell me you need class stacking for non-heroics."

Managing a roster should mean nothing more than knowing what you need to fill the required roles, and bringing a varied enough mix of classes to cover all the buff/debuffs. After that, the skill of the players behind the classes should have far more impact than the classes themselves. Knowing that having a large number of (insert random class here) makes the fight vastly easier does not make you better. It means you simply found a flaw in the design and exploited it.