Innervate for all Druids!

[ima_nerd]

on the other hand there is an unexplainable tolerance for offensive warriors

That's a weak analogy. How many dedicated tanks do you need for say, MC? You need three, at absolute most. When you have enough healers that the raid can function, I totally support Shadow Priests and Feral Druids. When the raid is crippled by Shadow Priests trying to be main healers, you have a problem. When your MT is 39/12 Fury/Arms, you'll have a problem.

My worry is that they'll start caving to other skills in the same way. What happens if the rogue player base decides Cold Blood is a "must have"? Tactical Mastery has been called for by Warriors for months and Blizzard has yet to give any word on their plans for that talent, if any. Are all shamans going to get the mana totem now?

I consider TM for Warriors on par with IAE for Mages. Being level 60 without it gimps you completely in both PvE and PvP. Being without Cold Blood isn't an issue - my Rogue is cuurently specced combat and doesn't miss CB. Try playing a Warrior without TM or a Mage without IAE ... that's a world of hurt.

It's those kind of questions that have me wondering why they're doing this with Evocation/Innervate. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, as it makes the Druid class more of the switch-hitting hybrid it was meant to be

I agree. I dislike the idea of Druids being pigeon-holed into any particular slot (coughRestocough) but Innervate is so damned nice and a lot of guilds came to rely on it to beat encounters. Having a Druid that can both DPS and be a mana-battery ... I'm looking forward to it. My guild's DPS is somewhat lacking ever since our very well geared Feral Druid decided to spec Resto for raiding. I thought he was going to explode when he saw this :)

Edit: Spelling, clarification, etc

[lfd]

That's a weak analogy. How many dedicated tanks do you need for say, MC? You need three, at absolute most.[right][snapback]108751[/snapback][/right]

If you're going for a raid argument on this, you'll have to pick a better example than MC. Fights in BWL and ToAQ can require _at least_ three, and often up to five or six.

Looking at the guild I'm in, it also seems that as the warriors get better geared, it's less and less necessary to have points in Protection.

Are all shamans going to get the mana totem now?

Obviously we don't want to go down this road, so I won't mention Blessing of Wisdom :shuriken:

[Mavfin]

If you're going for a raid argument on this, you'll have to pick a better example than MC.  Fights in BWL and ToAQ can require _at least_ three, and often up to five or six.

Looking at the guild I'm in, it also seems that as the warriors get better geared, it's less and less necessary to have points in Protection.

Are all shamans going to get the mana totem now?

Obviously we don't want to go down this road, so I won't mention Blessing of Wisdom :shuriken:
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We use 3 prot wars to clear BWL. And don't *have* to have that.

[Artega]

Yeah, and say it on any public forum besides the lounge and the first ten posts will contain at least one form of verbal abuse.

Here, someone's thinking it, though they may not say it.
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Wanna-be.

[oldmandennis]

If you're going for a raid argument on this, you'll have to pick a better example than MC.  Fights in BWL and ToAQ can require _at least_ three, and often up to five or six.
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Lots of MC fights require 5. Aside from that, you rarely need more then 3 TANKS, who will be soaking up lots of punishment over a long period of time that makes advisable all of the investment in prot talents.

[Artega]

Guess it depends on if you choose to limit yourself in this way.  I raid in a group with Feral druids, Balance druids, DPS warriors, shadow priests, Fire Mages, Arcane Power mages, Dark Pact warlocks.  We've taken Nef down each of the last 3 weeks, and will continue. 

So, if you choose to blame it on 'social realities', confine that reality to your server, not mine.
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Perhaps you both need a reality check.

You're on Stormrage, Mavfin - last I checked (which was several months ago, I'll admit), it was an extremely high-pop server. While your raid alliance may play a normal style, I'm willing to wager quite a bit that most of the other guilds on your server - both sides - play more towards the min-max style. Whether they do better or worse than you is somewhat irrelevant here, however; the reality that Hedon is referring to is present on EVERY server with raiders on it, including Stormrage (and Terenas, if you raid there.)

Likewise, not everyone plays to the Minimum-Maximum™ tune, Hedon; I'm a diehard Protection Warrior specifically engineered for PvP. While I may be more effective as Arms (if I can manage to stay awake; MS spec is the very essence of tedium) or Fury, I thoroughly enjoy being able to take an unholy amount of damage and keep on staggering downfield with the flag, or to completely lay out anyone stupid enough to try and fight me in melee combat. It's not min-max, but it's where I find the increasingly limited amount of fun in the game :)

[Artega]

Are all shamans going to get the mana totem now?
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Yes, in the same patch where Tactical Mastery, Cold Blood, Consecration, Shadowburn, Aimed Shot, and Evocation all become innate class skills, in the You All Can Go $*@! Yourselves™ patch.

Seriously, though, Blizzard's more or less committed to that course of action, since they stabbed the Warrior community in the back with a dull, rusty knife by giving Priests the old Improved Power Word: Shield for free (as though the damned skill wasn't overpowered enough.) They'll eventually cave to the constant petitioning, bitching, and moaning from the Warriors (especially if they backstab us again with the Mage and/or Shaman reviews), which will cause all the other classes that haven't had their turn at the Me-too Machine™ to start speaking up.

[Artega]

Lots of MC fights require 5.  Aside from that, you rarely need more then 3 TANKS, who will be soaking up lots of punishment over a long period of time that makes advisable all of the investment in prot talents.
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Not really.

Past the 15-point talents, such as Defiance, Protection offers only a tidbit for raiding tanks.

Improved Sunder Armor is somewhat redundant; you're going to be taking enough damage from bosses (and even trash, until you're geared up and wading around with six layers of eight inch thick supermagical plate mail) that you'll basically never be seen wanting for Rage to burn.

Concussion Blow has extremely few uses in most raids (I believe AQ20/ZG trash is stunnable, however), given that pretty much everything is immune to stuns to prevent Rogues from owning the world.

Likewise Improved Shield Bash; most bosses are immune to silence, and most are immune to interrupts as well.

Improved Shield Wall would certainly qualify as being a great talent (for raiding only, where 30 minutes isn't too terribly long, given set-up times and all that fun micromanagement) if it was a 15-pointer; might actually be useful for non-raid tanks if it was that low in the tree.

One-Handed Weapon Specialization increases your damage (aggro) output and Rage generation a decent amount (and also increases Shield Slam and Shield Bash damage), but Rage generation is very rarely an issue for raid tanks, and Defiance basically does the same thing for a lot fewer points into Protection.

Shield Slam is a questionable skill. It's great for an aggro-generating ragedump, but Sunder continues to produce aggro at its usual rate regardless of how many are already on the target, and all other excess Rage is generally going to be spammed off with Revenge combos, Shield Bash, and Heroic Strike spam in conjunction with a speedy weapon. It's useful and somewhat fun to play with, but as far as tanking goes, it's hardly worth 31 points.

After you get Toughness, Last Stand, and Defiance, you have pretty much the best raid-tanking talents you can get; Anticipation and Shield Specialization (plus 1/3 Improved Shield Block) are interchangeable, depending on your gear state (Ant is great when you're decked out in so-so gear, but after you start getting more of your tier2 set, the +10 Defense isn't so hot compared to the additional blocking action.)

In fact, you might end up being better served with a 31/5/15 tank, especially if he's Swords; he'll have a damage boost from Sword Specialization AND Mortal Strike, which is going to be more useful more often than Shield Slam, since the MS debuff is insanely powerful.

I'm full (31) Protection purely by choice; the silence and stuns are golden in PvP, and I've always preferred my Warriors to have the image of an unstoppable behemoth rather than a damage-dealing juggernaut (though I'll admit the idea of being an Orc berserker has crossed my mind.)

[Lissa]

Perhaps you both need a reality check.

You're on Stormrage, Mavfin - last I checked (which was several months ago, I'll admit), it was an extremely high-pop server.  While your raid alliance may play a normal style, I'm willing to wager quite a bit that most of the other guilds on your server - both sides - play more towards the min-max style.  Whether they do better or worse than you is somewhat irrelevant here, however; the reality that Hedon is referring to is present on EVERY server with raiders on it, including Stormrage (and Terenas, if you raid there.)

Likewise, not everyone plays to the Minimum-Maximum™ tune, Hedon; I'm a diehard Protection Warrior specifically engineered for PvP.  While I may be more effective as Arms (if I can manage to stay awake; MS spec is the very essence of tedium) or Fury, I thoroughly enjoy being able to take an unholy amount of damage and keep on staggering downfield with the flag, or to completely lay out anyone stupid enough to try and fight me in melee combat.  It's not min-max, but it's where I find the increasingly limited amount of fun in the game :)
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Just an FYI, one of the top raiding guilds on the server is setup much like we are, let you play your spec the way you want and they're right up there with the min-max raids for taking down content (I'm speaking of Complexity). They allow people to play whatever spec they want and they are up there in success as the other big guilds are (I think they're at #4 or #5 for both sides with Critical Mass - Alliance being #1, Blood of the Horde - Horde being #2).

[Xanthix]

The trouble is that if you have a talent that is so over the top amazingly good, you effectively force the majority of players to get that talent and thereby effectively limit the variation within the class that talents are supposed to encourage.
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The counterargument to this is that if you take all the "amazingly good" abilities out of the talent trees and make them class abilities, so you aren't "forcing people to spec a certian way," then all you are left with for the talent trees are talents that increase spell XYZ by 10% or give you a somewhat useful ability.

For example if IAE and Evocation and Presence of Mind were made core mage abilities since they're so good, the whole arcane tree is a bunch of passives that marginally increase the effectiveness of arcane spells. Where is the fun in that, and where are the meaningful, character-defining choices?

In the end there must be a line drawn somewhere. Tactical Mastery is pretty crucial, but is Evocation really "essential"? I don't know. Also, I think with mages you have the added complication that the fire and frost trees are kind of mutually exclusive, so many mages go arcane, making some abilities seem more crucial than they may actually be.

[Xanthix]

I think the idea is to have evocation, mana tide, and innervate all be learned trainer abilities.

The day they do this is the day the priest forum explodes from people complaining that every healing and caster class has a core activated ability to regain mana, except of course for the "masters of healing." I may or may not be one of the posters in that forum. :whistling:

[Skandranon]

Blizzard stopped looking at this from a game-balance perspective, and actually started listening to all the stupid complaints.  Honestly, if raids have problems with Balance/Feral, that's their issue.  Game balance shouldn't be affected because people are too narrowminded.
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I disagree. I think this was precisely because Blizzard started thinking about it from a game-balance perspective. Innervate was simply far too powerful not to give it to everybody.

Think about it. If I'm designing an encounter, what do I assume? Do I assume no innervates? Then most times, if the druids are specced innervate, they'll utterly trivialize the encounter. Do I assume they all have innervate, then? Well, then anything but 31 Resto is useless.

Blizzard clearly disapproves of spec-requirement. They don't want success to be linked to spec, and for the most part they've avoided it well. But Innervate is so raid-changing, so absolutely dynamically powerful, that you have to factor it in. When designing an encounter you have to know how much healing a raid can realistically put out, and Innervate is like having another healer's worth of endurance along; it's a huge swing.

The Blizzard designers are okay with mandating class requirements for certain bosses. They are, from observation, not okay with game design forcing spec. That is what this change avoids. Innervate is certainly not required for any encounter currently in the game. But Gurgthock from Elitist Jerks offered an opinion which I agree with, that Naxxramas probably features an extremely heavy mana-intensive fight (none of the current fights qualify as mana intensive, by the by) that demanded that a decision be made about Innervate now. This was it.

[oldmandennis]

Not really.

<snipity>
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Dunno warriors in and out. I know a lot of raid MT types go deep prot. Anyhow, I didn't say you needed 3 people to go deep prot, I just said you probably needed 3 people who felt like TANKS (so they would at least consider deep prot) and a couple of rogues in plate to pick up the extra corehounds, or be the extra person in an AOE bug taunt rotation.

[oldmandennis]

The day they do this is the day the priest forum explodes from people complaining that every healing and caster class has a core activated ability to regain mana, except of course for the "masters of healing."
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Of course, the mana tides and innervates are primarly there for the priests benefit. Then there is Devine Spirit + Meditation.

[oldmandennis]

The counterargument to this is that if you take all the "amazingly good" abilities out of the talent trees and make them class abilities, so you aren't "forcing people to spec a certian way," then all you are left with for the talent trees are talents that increase spell XYZ by 10% or give you a somewhat useful ability.
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The solution is to make atleast 3 amazingly good talents per class. They have to be pretty much as amazingly good through a variety of play styles, to force a real, hard choice between specs no matter if you like raid, 5man, or PvP.

At the moment, mana tide, as much as I hate its crappy prereqs, blows the doors off of parry and elemental fury for raiding. Nature's swiftness totally owns Stormstrike and Elemental mastary for everything. Giving all shaman tide doesn't really effect the balance of a raid, it just allows them to put a not quite as good talent at the top of the resto tree. Hopefully they will add decent raiding talents to the top of Elemental and Enhancement, and force a real choice.

On mages, if they could do a good job of creating synergy between fire and frost, 16 points in arcane is a millstone around the neck of any "elementalist" build. AP and POM are pretty good talents to continue to get people to spec arcane, and maybe move clearcasting a bit deeper.

On druids, maybe the best way to look at it is not a relative nerf to resto druids, but a relative buff to druid healing as a whole, which is considered by some to be lacking compared to priests after the patch. If druids get another "Oh crap" button, then they can work better with priests to recover from damage spikes.

[Rinnhart]

Wanna-be.
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31 HOLY FO-LIFE

[Olon97]

I consider TM for Warriors on par with IAE for Mages. Being level 60 without it gimps you completely in both PvE and PvP. Being without Cold Blood isn't an issue - my Rogue is cuurently specced combat and doesn't miss CB. Try playing a Warrior without TM or a Mage without IAE ... that's a world of hurt.

I disagree on the TM part for PvE. Leveled from 1-60 without it. Have tanked and offtanked in MC/ZG/AQ20/AQ40 without it. Flurry + defiance is not a world of hurt - it's fun and effective at PvE encounters. Gimped in PvP I fully concede.

I've spent months in more conventional specs (31/5/15 & 17/3/31 primarily) and have found that people vastly overstate the significance of the PvE downsides of no TM (straw man arguments such as impossible to thunderclap, etc), while ignoring the offsetting benefits of a well constructed non-TM build.

Of course, we haven't reached the end of AQ40, and supposedly there are some TM "mandatory" fights towards the end there. People were saying the same thing about BWL back when our guild was still doing MC, and that has proven to be a bunch of bunk - so I take most all "mandatory" talk with a huge grain of salt.

In general, I think a group without min/maxed talents on every toon of every class may take another wipe or two per boss to develop a strategy that works for them, as many "essential" abilities such as shield wall and innervate are really band-aids for poor execution elsewhere that turn close wipes into kills. The spec-permissive guilds who progress as fast as or faster than the spec-restricting guilds pretty much debunk the commonly held attitude that it's raid spec or never be able to wear anything but blues.

[lfd]

We use 3 prot wars to clear BWL.&nbsp; And don't *have* to have that.
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My first thought was "that must be pretty close on Vaelastrasz". My second thought was that when you hear the word 'tank', you mean 'protection-specced warrior'. What I mean when I use the word tank is simply 'warrior'. We clear BWL without, to my knowledge, _any_ protection specced warriors, but we certainly have more than 3 warriors in a raid (5-6 ideally). My point was that the protection tree isn't needed to tank effectively, and becomes less so as your gear improves. Thus you may as well spec dps ;-)

Those mortal strikes come in handy.

[Tal]

My first thought was "that must be pretty close on Vaelastrasz".&nbsp; My second thought was that when you hear the word 'tank', you mean 'protection-specced warrior'.&nbsp; What I mean when I use the word tank is simply 'warrior'.&nbsp; We clear BWL without, to my knowledge, _any_ protection specced warriors, but we certainly have more than 3 warriors in a raid (5-6 ideally).&nbsp; My point was that the protection tree isn't needed to tank effectively, and becomes less so as your gear improves.&nbsp; Thus you may as well spec dps ;-)

Those mortal strikes come in handy.
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We typically have 6 warriors in our BWL runs and I find MS to be a huge boon on Ebonroc. :D

When I set up the tank rotation for Vael I typically will start off with our fury warriors who naturally will out aggro most other warriors will move to the big protection specc'd tanks in the middle to allow for a nice smooth transition to execute range to the end. Though I have been guilty of pulling aggro WITH Salvation pumping back to back executes. :D

[lemekim]

My worry is that they'll start caving to other skills in the same way.&nbsp; What happens if the rogue player base decides Cold Blood is a "must have"?&nbsp; Tactical Mastery has been called for by Warriors for months and Blizzard has yet to give any word on their plans for that talent, if any.&nbsp; Are all shamans going to get the mana totem now?

It's those kind of questions that have me wondering why they're doing this with Evocation/Innervate.&nbsp; I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, as it makes the Druid class more of the switch-hitting hybrid it was meant to be (and paves the way for more variation among non-31-point builds), but I'll be curious to see where they draw the line with this sort of tweak.
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Mana tide totem most likely will become a trainable - or at least a 10 point talent in the Resto tree (I hardly believe any Shaman will miss Combat Endurance). The similarity to the situation with Druids and Innervate is uncanny - a lot of guilds require Shamans to spec Mana Tide, it's a 31 point talent (actually most Shamans have to spend 37 points so that they can get Purification and NS), and it similarly pigeon-holes them into a specific spec, probably even moreso then druids. Expect to see this among the big changes for Shamans at E3.