Your ideal 25-man raid group

[Kevin]

I would argue that the shadow priest would be better served in the magic DPS group. You mention here wanting to be able to avoid FD and drinking, but at least you have that option. Mages/Locks that would make up the magic DPS group would not have this capability. The shadow priest may also enjoy leveraging either a shaman or moonkin to help increase their DPS.

It's interesting to see our natural tendency to favor our main classes. I certainly did it with druids, and I think it's just a function of being much more intimately knowledgable with what that class brings to the table. GG certainly has much more experience with a broader range of classes in endgame content so perhaps I should defer to him in this discussion:)

D

Mages have never seemed to have issue with running dry in longer fights in my experience. 3 different mana gems, mage armor, and the relatively short turn around on evocation, judgement of wisdom, blessing of wisdom, plus the need to slow DPS at times to avoid ripping aggro. And of course I had forgotten about the new mana based vampiric ability and was only thinking about the old health based one at first.

Warlocks do get a huge benefit from VE though with much shorter downtime on tapping cycles, but they suffer even more from having to slow DPS to not rip aggro than mages do. Perhaps mages were having more downtime in combat issues than I noticed. Or maybe I was around too many ice and not enough fire mages.

But the bigger reason I said hunters is that you can bigger benefit from both VE and VT. Even warlocks shouldn't really need to tap with VT going on so the VE part is wasted, depending on the encounter. In a group with hunters, rogues, warriors, pets, etc. There is a good chance that the VE will benefit the up close people and the VT will benefit the hunters + the shadow priest. Encounter design matters a lot for this. But agin the mostly useless comment was simply before I remembered VT.

And I even acknowledged that VT could be pointless for hunters as soon as we get judgement of light and blessing of wisdom. The extension on the mana pool of those two skills is pretty huge. I know most alliance hunters don't seem to go and hunt up demonic runes nearly as much as horde hunters and many of them didn't even bother with making sure to have mana pots until some of the BWL encounters. That's the impact of paladins on mana pools. Both sides wanted to avoid FD/drink since a 30 second block out of combat is a large chunk of damage and as one of the few classes that had no aggro limits (assuming FD wasn't resisted) that is valuable.

But I envision even with more mana return from paladins, that with the death of aimed as part of the cycle hunters will never see spirt regen again and will have to burn more mana to hit the same DPS levels (multi costs more mana now, arcane is less mana/damage efficient than aimed even with the changes, and steady shot could prove a big mana hog).

But my big limitation right now is the viewing of shadow priest as DPS that provides only healing and never recalling the are DPS that provides mana as well.

I also don't see a big problem with 4+ druids either. The buffs to that class and the versatility if you have the gear and can know ahead of time what to wear is very nice. I know from experience that it's easier for a druid to tank multiple mobs than it is for a warrior and I envision that being more valuable in a 25 man environment. I might even want one of the classes that gets 3 along to be the paladin depending on how well they could actually off tank as 3 buffs from pallies adds a fair bit too. Everyone can have kings + salv + one other. That means you up survival, damage out, and lower the aggro requirements of the tank. It's not as easy to do that with just two. With 3 you can also get away with blessing of light on the tanks instead of salv making paladin healing on the tanks more efficient by a fair bit.

It's very possible that encounter design and potential druid and paladin tanking could mean that you don't really care to have more than 1 or 2 warriors because they don't do the DPS of rogues, they don't tank that much better than the other classes than can, and you don't the extra mitigation they can provide. Then again they could also be the best DPS you can bring too.

And mages have often felt marginalized in raid encounters, posts to that effect have already been made in this thread.


My first concern though with groups is maximizing mitigation of the tanks, then maximizing aggro generation of the tanks. Though of course some encounter design makes that less important. After that I worry about maximizing the damage potential of the DPS. Rogues and warriors get the most increase in damage out of raid and groups buffs currently. So I try to maximize their damage output next. I don't call for shamans more for hunters in our current raids because I know that rogues and warriors benefit more, even though a 202 AP and 1.92% crit and potentially avoiding having to FD and drink is a pretty massive buff for a survival hunter (Its only 176 AP and 1.69% crit for a marks or beast hunter). But that will drop in the patch/expansion with the changes to hunter mechanics. So as mentioned hunters my be better as buff providers than buff recievers.


Edit: I also envison combat trapping being of more value as well even in raids. Right not there aren't a lot of places that benefit from good trapping (the supression room and Nef being two of the bigger exceptions). But without having to FD to put the trap down there could be more places where traps will be helpful and even man efficient, but it's another mana drain on hunters. But yeah still who knows.