07-17-2006, 11:11 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2006, 11:12 AM by MongoJerry.)
vor_lord Wrote:Total them up and see... I'm not so sure, but maybe I haven't thought about it long enough. TA < BoS always, SoE + GoA + WF > BoK + BoM for melee DPS but not by a huge amount... or is it? Mana spring + mana tide < BoW + JoW.
And don't forget that BoK is also giving extra health to every player in the Alliance raid. Also, BoK increases casters' (and hunters!) mana pools and gives them all a boost to their spirit for even more mana regen.
Quote:With raid-wide totems, however, five shaman dropping mana springs would provide an incredible 125 mana every 5 seconds to every caster in the raid. This doesn't just balance Blessing of Wisdom, it crushes it, delivering over three times the regeneration. Every mana tide shaman increases the rate by an additional 18 1/3 mp5. Should all five shaman be Tide specced, the rate would rise to 216 2/3 mp5, well over five times the regen Blessing of Wisdom could offer. At some point, rates could rise to the point where Horde players could not conceivably run out of mana in a raid environment, and that would be far more of a balance issue than the current state happens to be.
There's no point removing one imbalance only to introduce another one that's enormously worse. Nerfing totems so they stack to a reasonable amount won't help either, since then it'll be useless in any situations outside of raids, as well as being too weak with too few shaman and too strong with too many. I don't think that there's going to be an easy solution to fix totems.
Straw man arguement. When people suggest raid-wide totems, they don't mean that a given player would get the same effect from multiple totems. That is, a player wouldn't get the effect of five mana springs at once any more than a given player can have five or more Blessings of Wisdom on him or her. People are simply suggesting that if a shaman drops a buff totem, say, a mana spring totem, then anyone in the raid within a 20 yard radius would get an extra 10 mana/5. Extra mana spring totems in the area would not have an additional effect on the player. That's it.
Mana Tide should probably not be raid wide. I would agree that that would be overpowered. But buff totems like Mana Spring, the new nerfed Windfury, Grace of Air, and Strength of Earth should be. Mana Spring should probably be buffed a little, too, while we're at it.
Quote:The question is, would it be unbalancing to allow 3 players to supply the totems to the whole raid, allowing two more useful classes to be subed in? And it is pretty rare to have more then one shaman in a group, having all your melee with WF and GoA would be a substantial boost to the horde.
In real world raid encounters, players can't stand in a nice 20-yard radius ball and get all the totem servicing they need. At the minimum, you'd need some shaman to go forward and provide totems for the melee and some shaman to stay back and provide totems for ranged classes. That's just for dumb "tank, heal the tank, kill the boss" encounters. Almost all new encounters are not like that. They usually involve some sort of spreading out or working in small sub-group teams or moving constantly from place to place. You'd definitely need more than three shaman to fulfill all the buffing roles.
The one hitch I see to raid-wide totems is how can you make the Tranquil Air affect melee dps players but not the tanks in the area? Somehow, a tank needs to be able to select that he or she does not want the Tranquil Air effect.