goblite

Just like i loved nostalrius, i'm loving Elysium. I'll play to 60, i'll make a twink, i'm going to enjoy it just as it is. However... just like i felt left out in 2005 when my elemental shaman was turned down by every raiding group i will feel the pain of vanilla's problems again here. This post is just my thoughts on what i know to be a problem with vanilla wow and some ideas i often dwell upon that might improve upon those problems. I do not anticipate implementation of these thoughts or even that the attention of elysium's team will be drawn to this post. Many of these problems would not need to be eliminated so much as made manageable to improve the game. Lastly, i'm not aware of all the problems and will only be sharing my thoughts on what i'm familiar with so please add what you think is a problem and how you might address it too. The biggest problem of all is raid representation and the arbitrary but necessary restrictions implemented by the community on who can participate. There are 3 reasons why some specs are restricted and i believe they could be addresses in a satisfactory way as follows. 1. Longevity. Lets look at the most represented classes first and see how long they can sustain their role in a raid. All Warrior: Rage can be exhausted but can always be replenished by continuing to perform your role All Rogue: Energy can be completely spent but comes back within seconds. All Hunter: i don't really know how their mana regenerates in vanilla but they do fine so i assume it's ok. All Mage: Mana can be exhausted but they can evocate and supplement with consumables to perform their role. All Warlock: Mana can be exhausted but they can lifetap as long as there are heals for effectively infinite resources. All Healers: Mana can be exhausted and they may (or may not) have some tools to restore mana and supplement with consumables. This is pivotal element of raiding and i don't think it needs to be changed. Shadow Priest: I don't know, mine was always oom but apparently 1 per raid managed it somehow. Feral: Same as warrior/rogue Prot Pal, Ret, Ele, Enhance, Balance: Mana can be exhausted and must supplement with consumables to continue performing as they have no reliable means of recovering mana. While supplementing mana with consumables such as dark runes can be done... it makes gameplay prohibitively expensive and grindy for some classes while others have longevity built into their class. Fixing this issue alone would be a great stride for the oft neglected hybrid classes. For elemental shaman, in particular, this problem was solved in BC with water shield and talents that allowed some mana regen to continue while casting. I think the simplest fix for vanilla is the addition of an ability that restores some mana on a cooldown while also being cool or fun. For example: Thunder: 20sec cooldown, self only, Lightning crashes down upon the caster energizing them and restoring 15% of their maximum mana but stunning them for 1 second. OR just buff the tier 1 talent that reduces damage spell mana costs from 2/4/6/8/10 to 5/10/15/20/25 and add a recover mana component to elemental mastery. There are lots of potential ways for this particular spec. If classes that lack sustainability can be given tools with which to continue performing their roles for longer without relying completely upon prohibitively expensive or grindy consumables then i think the game would be much more fun and inclusive 2. Gear and stat dependency Those same hybrid classes that suffer from mana problems generally suffer from a lack of gear as well. There is either very little gear that helps them to perform their role or at least that what gear there is does not sufficiently enable them to perform their role well. Enhancement shaman, for example, can wear the mail armor that hunters like but they really need STR and INT to do their job well which none of that hunter mail provides. Elemental shaman and Balance druids can find a few pieces of spell damage gear but some of their equipment slots can go through an entire raid tier without an upgrade or they may choose to compete with cloth wearers for gear which makes them yet more unwanted. Protection paladins have the absolute worst issue because they rely upon spell damage, STR, INT, and defenses to succeed but there are virtually no pieces of plate that provide all of those and they require armor most of all so mixing/matching with mail/leather/cloth is out of the question. Having more longevity as described above can help mitigate this problem as having more INT/Mp5 becomes less of an issue for many of these classes but overall, i think that two major changes would really solve this issue. First, ALL tier gear for hybrids should have a healthy dose of ALL the stats that class can make use of including STR, spell damage, healing, INT, AGI, Mp5, etc... even if the set bonuses don't really help the spec- it at least makes the problem more manageable. Second, While i like the distinction between healer gear and caster dps gear i feel that it simply makes another barrier for non-cloth casters, of which there are few anyway, so ALL plate, mail, and leather caster gear should have +spelldamage/healing instead of +healing. That might break things for healers so maybe healing spell coefficients could be increase to compensate? i dunno..that gets complicated, but even if just the first thing were to happen it would help a lot. 3. Limited Debuffs on bosses This issue actually limits a LOT of classes. Imagine if shadowpriests got to use shadow word: pain, hex of weakness, and devouring plauge. Imagine if ferals got to put bleeds on the target or if assasination rogues got to apply poison Dot's to the boss. WHile it would help many well represented classes just as much... it would certainly help bring the utility out of a lot of the less represented classes too and earn them a place in the raid. 8 debuffs is simply a poor number, 16 helped but still didn't account for the potential usefulness of 40 players. Debuffs should have been limited to something like 64 so that there is still some barrier to abuse of random items but all players got to use their class abilities. Epilogue: Anyway, those are just my thoughts. I may very be wrong about whether some things would help or not but its just a thought experiment that i wanted to share. I will now get back to levelling my OP mage that i rolled, trololol.

But the biggest issue of all was that they weren't given the proper tools to support the raid. If you oom, you really aren't even supporting anymore. Even when the community does allow the occasional enhancement shaman or spriest in a raid they hardly use their abilities other than to keep up the 1 debuff they are there for, else they oom and have to spam dark runes, both of which are crummy situations to play in. Just having the longevity use your abilities would make gameplay more fun and make it sensible for the community to give these specs a chance. That and being allowed to add more debuffs- can't support if your supportive ability gets knocked off the boss or you aren't allowed to use it in favor of another debuff.