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Other How important is it really to have a perfectly optimized group when raiding

frederik

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Nov 27, 2014
If you want to raid as a hybrid what is expected of you in almost any case is to heal. DPS skilled hybrids are often not allowed by guilds to participate as damage dealer in a raid, because their damage is often behind the damage of pure DPS classes. But is it really necessary to always have a perfectly optimized group when raiding? Is that a matter of winning or losing a fight or does it just take a little bit more time?
 
It absolutely wasn't necessary to optimize in vanilla and with people having 10 years or experience on top of that it abso-goddamn-lutely shouldn't be now either. You didn't even need all raid spots filled to clear content. If anything, it could make WoW feel some way new again to let (read: make) people use crazy specs more often... It's not effective to be other than cookie cutter but that's about it. I don't know the maths on dps check bosses if lots of your raid would be sub-optimal specs but I really doubt you would ever fail because of that.

It's more about people than the game. Try convincing someone Wailing Caverns can be 4 manned or you don't need a tank. If he's new to the game, he don't even know what tank means or what instance is and is ok with that and you'll clear WC. Early WoW raiding was kinda like that. I raided as PROT WARRIOR DPS. Not because I thought it was DPS spec, but because raiding was so new to us all and our organization really sucked. Consumables were next to unheard of, we had weird specs and weird gear (technically our OOC ressers wouldn't even need specs and some times even gear!). Pretty much the only rules were dedicated warlock cursers/banishers, dedicated tank HoTs, don't use DoTs, and leave Barman Shanker home. It was fun and we cleared MC over the months. It's a shame this can't really be emulated on a private server. Or perhaps on any MMOG ever again.

Try to convince top guild seasoned 96433 expansion veteran and he'll probably be cool like the newbie or is blind by all the guides and addons he's ever read in his comfort zone and call you noob and ignore you, resulting in no cleared WC and no fun to be had.
 
I agree, Fact.

I can't fathom it would ever make or break a raid in vanilla if you had a couple of sub-optimal speccs in it.

Whats the big deal with bringing a feral or something else. Back in the days the absolute majority, im talkin 99% didn't know how to play at fucking all. We wore extremely retarded gear, a lot worse than sub-optimal, had non existent rotations or optimizations.

Heck, half of the raid barely participated while the other half carried those. Yet they all fell. At least in MC and BWL this should be a cakewalk with some off speccs running around.

Would be great if some people would get their heads out of their asses and be just a tad more open minded.

In case you end up looking for certain classes to complete your raid roster, and you wonder why its not that easy to find willing players that sacrifice their own game experience in order to get brought into a raid, hoping, one day they will be able to grab some loot for their offspec in order to finally start having fun...well, there you have it, lol.

Thats probably the only really sad thing about Vanilla. As a hybrid you already know, if you are going to get loot for the specc you'd actually like to play, it will take many, many months until gear beneficial to you might open up to secondary speccs.

In all honesty, if I would be in charge of a raid, i'd totally pack a feral, owl, shadow (not so unusual due to shadow weaving), enh shaman and what not. I totally dont see the issue of bringing a handful of non optimal speccs to the first two raid tiers. Not at all. All it would probably do is boost overall fun.

If you should wipe, it will certainly not be because of one feral druid or what not in the raid. There would certainly be other reasons for that.

Vanilla content aint cookie cutter hard enough not being able to bring speccs like those. At least not the first two tiers for sure. There is, FORTUNATELY, tons of space and breathing room to have fun. No need to be that uptight.

My opinion, at least.

Edit: One more thing. In a scenario where I would be in charge of a raid, I would absolutely implement some sort of system to actually reward players to bring optimal speccs, while not disregarding the couple of players that go with sub-optimal ones. Obviously there would be some sort of loot - spec preferences going on. But I would make sure to occasionally throw a druid a piece of feral gear, or a shaman some piece of elemental gear, even if they raid as Resto. The non-set items that drop, that would benefit those offspeccs... I mean, come on, eventually pure dps classes will leave those to gather dust, simply because they have their sets, sooner or later. Boosting overall morale, making sure players that sacrifice themselves for the good of the raid get rewarded if the role they chose for the raid is not what they enjoy the most.

No idea why I should throw a rogue some non-set leather item that he will probably exchange in the very near future for a set piece if I could make a resto druid in the raid really happy, if he prefers feral outside of raids. Or if he comes along as a feral in the first place.

Sorry guys, I just don't get the cookie cutting in Vanilla. Those raids will be cleared. That is certain. I'd sacrifice these neglectable differences any day if it means a more enjoyable raid and guild enviroment.
 
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For a small bit of devil's advocate here; This is fine and all but not only is it really up to other folk deciding they want to take longer in raids (due to less efficient classes) but this simply won't fly in a progression guild aiming for the e-peen of server firsts. Any detriment to speed of progression can and will be dumped by these guilds.

I'm sure that in time, casual guilds on Kronos will open up. If one doesn't exist, perhaps you should take the initiative and make it. The guild isn't going to make itself, after all! Who knows, people might even find the atmosphere better even if progress isn't nearly as fast - I know back when my mostly-friends guild was struggling to progress in Karazhan during early TBC that we still had loads of fun simply because we took our time to do it the way we wanted to.

However, you may need to wait until stuff like 20-man raids open up before it becomes viable.
 
Hey Phaze.

Thanks for the input. I however, do not exactly agree.

I'm not talking about taking a full raid of offspecs into the Molten Core. I mentioned taking a few, as I do not see how it could possibly harm progression with any seriously noticable impact. I'd say it would increase the difficulty and / or time needed by a absolut minimal margin.

Being more open minded about the roster does not cancel out the ambition or desire of progression. That is and would not be my intention.

If given the chance, I'm certain I could create a successful middleground for all. And yeah, about that server first stuff... To me, at least, this lost its prestige and appeal, many, many years ago :) For starters I would be happy if we would get more Info on the server status first and possible ETA. And after that a healthy playerbase...

If given this healthy playerbase and enough available slav..(jk) eh, potential guild members that agree with my point of view, I might give it a shot. But those are some big if's. With enough potential interesst it aint out of the question.

But that was always a big problem in vanilla. Getting those 40 dedicated players and making them work together.

Depends on the players what will come out of this. :)
 
Yes its possible to raid with one or several hybrids.
It's also possible to raid entirely without consumables, with only 30 people, without using druids, etc. etc.

If you're playing a suboptimal specc in a casual guild they might take you. If you're in a guild that cares about performance they wont, for the same reason they wont take people slacking on consumables, it makes just objectively worse.
 
Hey Hagson.

Agreed on what you say. But I would still like to point out that those are extremes that you bring up. Simply being not uptight and bringing a little bit more variety into the raid does not exclude everyone giving their best in that scenario. It also does not necessarily imply "casual". This is a decade old content, after all... Where im trying to get at, is that it wont harm progression in a big manner.

Like I mentioned in my other post, a middleground is where its at, in my opinion. The fact that you bring a handful of non cookie cutter speccs does not imply or mean that you dont fill up the roster to the max, or that you dont use every other tools available to you, as consumables etc.

Dont get me wrong tho, I'm not trying to imply that you dont know this already. I just want to clarify in general.

The only reason you would ever not want to bring a specc or a raid roster that is not 110% optimized, is when you are going for server firsts. And that might be fine, to each their own. To me at least, this is not exactly understandable, but that is just me and my personal opinion on that matter. Can't stress this enough. I PERSONALLY cannot really grasp the fascination of clearing a decade old content on a private realm as the first guild. To me, PERSONALLY, there is no prestige to be found there.

Funny thing actually, as I filled out an application for <Synced> which aims to achieve exactly this goal. My reason for this is simply in hope of being part of a friendly, decent community that provides a fun experience while still possessing a certain amount of ambition. They might lean more towards the ambitious part, but that doesn't necessarily has to be a bad thing. I also wrote this in my application.

But in the end time will tell. Or rather the available playerbase that comes with it.
 
The thing is that everything is doable as offspecc, but raids and especially trash are unbearably long in vanilla and will take longer with a lot of non optimal raid speccs. So basically it's your fault if your raid need 4 instead of 2 1/2 hours for a MC run, and you have to ask yourself whether you want your raid to suffer so much for you to play a specc. (feral dps is one of the few vanilla dps classes that is actually fun to play and more than smashing one button though so I totally understand why people want to play it)
 
@krutopatkin

Yeah, the doable part and extreme amounts of trash is very true. But like I stated, the hypothetical raid I was talking about, was not made up of only off speccs. I thought about having something like 5~ slots for these. Maybe less, but something around that. I can't really imagine that having 3-5 dps speccs, that perform not as good as pure dps, out of a total of 40 players, would increase the raid duration by 100%. Those are extremes, again.

Btw. I do not intend to play a "offspec" inside raid enviroments. I do however believe that there is room for those without sacrificing progress in general or anything major at all.

And in the end, if for whatever reason this would not be the case, I would still make sure that those people that sacrifice some of their personal experience for the success of the raid, get rewarded accordingly. That is the least a raid should do for those players, in my opinion.
 
Is it important to have an optimized group when raiding?

No.

Even if your goals are server first, speedruns, etc, an optimized group won't perform that much faster than a group bringing 4-6 "offspecs"

But that's not why guilds hate offspecs.

It's because of loot competition.

Let's say you're a warlock. Mantle of the blackwing cabal drops, and a boomkin wants it. For some reason, the loot council decides that between the two of you the boomkin should get it because he hasn't gotten loot in a while or something.

The warlock is likely playing a PvE spec that utilizes his damage to the best of its ability. DS/Ruin, or SM/Ruin. Don't you think the warlock is going to feel slighted being that he is forced to play his "best" spec instead of a "fun" spec? If the druid wanted to play a caster dps class...why didn't they just roll a warlock/mage?

You can apply that first part to whatever offspec you like, ret-paladin, arms warrior, survival hunter, hemo rogue, whatever. Almost all of the "offspecs" also take up valuable debuff slots that could be used for a much better net raid dps.

The reason why shadowpriests are generally accepted is because of the incredible buffs they give to warlocks and (if they're farmbots) their own personal dps is more than reasonable. They also don't share a lot of loot with other classes.

I don't care if you pick something up for your offspec if no one else/trials need it and you're a raider. But don't take upgrades over raiders that outperform you by a wide margin.
 
@ ironervousides

Well said! This is the true dilema of the whole deal.

And here a lot of opinions might differ. There are certain arguments for both sides, really.

As you pointed out, that Warlock might bring the cookie cutter specc to the raid in order to work at maximum capacity. However, what you should not neglect here, is the fact that the Warlock is still entitled to do what he deemed the most fun to him - dealing damage. That in itself is already a reward compared to the fate of, going by your example, a druid has to face in the endgame.

There probably are some druids that actually enjoy what they do in raids, but lets face it, most probably dont. So they sacrifice their own playing experience by a bigger margin than that hypothetical Warlock.

So, if a guild decides to open up a certain amount of spots for "offspecs", I dont see why that Warlock should be entitled to the Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal. There may be certain non-set items that might be BiS for dps classes, but at the end of the day the dps increase is irrelevant and they have their class sets.

So, if you decide to be more open minded with your raid, and obviously are not 110% cookie cutting, then why would you draw the line here? Might as well not take any offspecs in the first place then, i guess?

Making sure that everybody in that hypothetical guild or raid understands how loot and its distribution is going to be handled, is key here, obviously.

The extremely limited available gear to certain offspecs is already hard enough to get as it is, I for one, would not want to see it thrown at a pure dps just because his T2 Shoulders didn't drop yet. And might actually do in the same run a little bit later.

Like I said, if you do allow a certain amount of offspecs, then either make sure they get their gear to at least perform at some sort of level, or dont bring them in the first place. Hands down, I'd give those few offspecs prio to the non-set gear. Because they wont replace it for a VERY long time.

I think it is important to look at this in a broader view than just "what benefits us this exact second more". Because with that mentality you might as well not bring any of those in the first place.

Also, even if you do look at it this way...gearing those "offspecs" is certainly not an easy task. They only have those few items available to them and are more limited than other classes/speccs. So, in the end, your raid would still profit more from the chicken having the mantle, upgrading from probably a LOT worse than what the lock is wearing at that time.

Just as I stated somewhere above, if there would be a scenario where you dont bring offspecs to the raid, and those that would like to sacrifice their individual fun for the good of the raid, those should be rewarded at least so that they can enjoy their desired specc outside of the raid. So unless that Warlock runs around in green shoulders (...ya, I know, but I can bring up extreme examples as well) I would throw that thing to a dedicated innervation bot that would prefer to play chicken in the first place.

It's obviously a different story for dedicated players that actually enjoy the role they are forced to play within the raid. Good for them. It's beyond me how you can actually enjoy some of the specs hybrids get forced into, but thats just me in that case.

There are multiple methods to make sure a certain amount of balance is kept with a concept like this in mind. I could name multitudes that come to mind.

How about a different approach? Make hybrid tiersets have no minimum dkp requirements, dedicated healers / innervate bots, whatever you wanna call them, can spend their DKP on them if they actually do enjoy the role, otherwise make it cost nothing, let them roll on it or simply look which one benefits the most from it, gearwise.

Otherwise let them save their DKP for items they actually care about, for the spec they actually care about. With some sort of reasonable limitations, ofc.

I wouldn't want to see the first Ashkandi on the back of a retribution paladin that drops, just to be a bit extreme. Unless you have otherwise only alrdy reasonable equipped fury warriors in the raid. But those are a lot of if's.

The middleground is the desireable solution to this issue, in my opinion. I would not want to deny hybrids their extremely limited equipment for many months just because it is a temporal, most of the time not exactly big, upgrade to other classes. All they can do then is hope that after many months, all the remaining non-hybrids having absolute everything there is from that gear pool available to them. And then they need to actually see those, very few in numbers, items dropping. Again. The chance for them to acquire their desired equipment in a humane, reasonable amount of time is very slim, to say the least.

So if the stars allign and it should actually drop, let alone twice without extreme time-spans inbetween, I believe they should have a right to those items, as they either sacrifice their desired spec for the raid, or simply raid with it, to upgrade them for the roster.

They arguably play a bigger role in the raid than some of the dd's and on top are much fewer in number available.

Something else that might be an issue. How do you handle the absurd amount of dd's? What about the (most likely) remaining, waiting dds to get a raidspot, that sit on the bench or whatever. By the conservative nature of most guilds, those hybrids would be an eternity away from getting the gear for the spec they truly desire to play.

So ya, there are multiple ways to approach this problem, multiple ways of making reasonable compromises, from my point of view.
 
So, if you decide to be more open minded with your raid, and obviously are not 110% cookie cutting, then why would you draw the line here? Might as well not take any offspecs in the first place then, i guess?
Yes and that is exactly what some of the current guilds planning to be on Kronos are doing :wink:

Again, if this is such a problem it might honestly be worth setting up your own offspec-friendly guild. I'm sure some folk would be right chuffed to have that option.
 
Hey Phaze!

I'd like to see how the development of Kronos progresses first, before actually considering this.

But yeah, you are right, someone will have to, in the end. And I believe this would be for the good of the server, too. Diversity is attractive, after all.
 
"It's obviously a different story for dedicated players that actually enjoy the role they are forced to play within the raid. Good for them. It's beyond me how you can actually enjoy some of the specs hybrids get forced into, but thats just me in that case."

If you don't enjoy the pve role your class is traditionally defined as: don't play that class.
If you get your rocks off from having huge monsters dick you in the face constantly, play a warrior.
If you blow your load thinking about shooting 3k damage rockets from your hands, play a mage/warlock.
If you love keeping people alive, you play a druid/priest/paladin/shaman

The game is 10+ years old at this point. You don't magically get to 60 without realizing what your class is pigeonholed into.
 
Thing is, you probably knew this one was coming - those classes and their nonhealing speccs might actually appeal to some. The risk of being forced into those healing specs however should be common knowledge to everyone. Doesnt change the fact that it doesnt HAVE to be that way. :) That is a mentality issue, foremost.

If you dont enjoy the pve role your class is traditionally forced into: play only if you can live with the possible consequences due to the conservative nature of vanilla.

That would be my advise. :)
 
I actually kind of agree with this. I've played on 3 vanilla private servers all with hybrids, and every one of them was the optimal healing spec. I pick the role I want to play, then the class based on their main specs. I really didn't had that luxury of knowledge and experience on retail launch.
And in the end there aren't nearly as many off specs on private realms than it was on retail. People learned their lesson.

The thing is I just don't care what spec or role someone wants to play. He can't get to the top 10 in dps chart? Big deal... What I remember the seemingly most efficient group was always 2-3 mortal strike warriors, 0-1 combat sword rogue, 1 feral, and 1 imp totems shaman. The feral and shaman weren't frequent in top DPS, but the warriors loved their buffs and it made them ridiculously imba. Enough imba to warrant those "useless" specs. Or something. We didn't theorycraft or visited elitist jerks until later. TBH this killed the magic in WoW. Yeah I'm so old school I think WoW died in vanilla...

It was very optimal and some times demanded for alliance to have dwarf priests and threat reduction blessings. As horde we did fine without those. You can optimize every small detail in this game to ridiculous extremes if you want.

Same for loot, just give it to player who played the role the item is designed for, other than that I just can't seem to care...

If someone complains it takes longer to clear trash, he can go fuck himself. Before making the "decision" of rolling the correct class/spec you want to play, make the biggest decision of them all: Do you have time and patience when it comes to vanilla raiding? And the basic human decency to not belittle others and get jealous of some stupid loot which ends 85% on a character which will be abandoned in two years, no matter his spec.
 
Bring the player , not the class. This might work for hybrids in vanilla.
You will like a feral druid that knows to play well. Innervating, taunting if needed, healing and decursing in difficult situations.
If you bring that feral or shaman just for the 3% crit or WF totem might not be the best solution. What if they die during boss fights and you can't resurrect them?
And don't forget the versatility of these specs. Mostly in PvP but still. If in these days it is cool to have a midget in your group, why not a boomkin? :D
 
Optimized groups and specs will help your guild progress faster.
Ask yourself the question: "Do I want to slow everyone arround me down?"
 
The game is 10+ years old at this point. You don't magically get to 60 without realizing what your class is pigeonholed into.

Actually, this is not true. Vanilla WoW does an amazing job at fooling classes of their role on the way to 60. Part of the reason leveling your class does not prepare you for your role in raids is the developers, in my opinion, had a vastly different vision of endgame when they first created the leveling experience.
 
Hey Lharts.

You don't have to ask yourself this question. In the scenario I talked about in so many, quite long posts, I mentioned multiple times that everybody in this hypothetical raid KNOWS and its AGREED upon, bringing a certain number of offspecs. It's not like someone decided "man, fuck this shit, ima go all dps in dis raid, fuck everyone and fuck everything." :)

And please, let's be reasonable. Bringing those few offspecs will NOT increase your raiding duration by ANY noticable amount WHATSOEVER. Just No. Just simply no. You won't take 4 hours instead of 2 because you bring a feral, a owl and maybe a elemental shaman. Neither will you take 3 instead ouf 2 hours. Get real.

Sorry but everyone is pretending this to be a huge setback, which it simply is not. This is not fucking retail where you bring less than half the amount of what you bring in vanilla. The breathing room is just THAT much bigger.
 
Very pseudo-altruistic of him it brings a tear to my eye. He never progression raided in vanilla if he thinks offspecs are what slows things down lol. We had a lvl 58 priest top healing meter in Vael for fucks sake.
 
Sorry but everyone is pretending this to be a huge setback, which it simply is not. This is not fucking retail where you bring less than half the amount of what you bring in vanilla. The breathing room is just THAT much bigger.

I was a RL in a casual guild on ED. We brought a feral to tank, and he tanked everything in MC (with little to no issue). The biggest problem was a loot problem. Everyone else was getting loot (especially the other tanks) or dreaming of loot to drop in MC, except him. Pretty much outside of Warden Staff, his next epic dropped in AQ40. This pretty much killed his vibe to raid. And this feeling was shared by a lot of those who played weird specs (trust me, if it was a weird spec, i had seen it in my raid). Receiving loot is part of the fun in raiding =)

I truly believe Blizzard had endgame potential for all their talent trees at first. Strict implementation of the holy trinity system of tank, dps, and heals, put an end to that vision.
 
Hey Qiyn.

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience with offspecs in the raidroster.

This is a very true, existing problem for offspecs. For some it is indeed very extreme.

In case there are any people wondering, considering playing a class and a specc - even in PvE environments that dont fit in the conservative mindset of many vanilla players: What Qiyn is saying, is a real, big issue.
Even if you wind up in a more tolerant, open minded raid that realizes the things mentioned in this thread, chances are you will still seriously struggle for your gear.

But to some this might be a motivating factor instead of the opposite, as it was in your case, Qiyn. Being already fortunate enough to be able to raid with your desired specc, the one your hybrid class might actually lure potential players to play into, but it simply not being the reality of the endgame.

As Qiyn mentioned earlier, Blizzard did an astonishing job at hiding your endgame fate as a hybrid. That is a great point he made a couple of posts above.

No idea why some people want to put the blame on the people that simply prefer the feral druid playstyle, over lets say a rogue, and it simply is their desired class.

Just saying that people should get their fingers off certain classes just because the spec(s) fun to play are not viable enough for a DECADE old content, that was tuned towards a playerbase that was simply shit at the game, no way to say it any nicer, is ridiculous. (Again, before any misunderstandings come up - talking the first two tiers.)

It just seems that some people want to stick to their black and white mentality so bad, that they cant even realize or dont want to acknowledge that this is 10 year old raids and their setups we are discussing.
 
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Just dont expect getting into a hardcore guild if you're playing a shitty spec
 
I don't think anyone is saying that it's literally impossible to raid as/with a hybrid, it's just harder.
Just like raiding without consumables is harder, and raiding with only one hand is harder.

And yes, it will slow you down, not by 50%, but by a bit. If you're in a situation where people try their best and want to be in a "serious" guild then why would you drag them down with your offspecc. Lharts is right in this, there is no way to get around it. You are dragging others down.

There may be certain non-set items that might be BiS for dps classes, but at the end of the day the dps increase is irrelevant and they have their class sets.

The dps increase is not irrelevant. It will help a lot against "gear check" bosses such as vael.

And the example you gave about the Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal is kinda strange. The warlock will need that piece more than the moonkin, and he will benefit more from it, and the guild will benefit more from it.
t2 isn't the end all be all gear, very few classes will actually want all of it.


We had a lvl 58 priest top healing meter in Vael for fucks sake.

If this is true then your guilds healers sucked. Badly.



Obviously none of this applies to a casual guild.
 
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