Effects of Wow's New Design on Raid Guilds

My perception is that guild structure has more variety than many players suspect.

What I mean is that there are very small guilds who focus on 10-player content, but every player is there for every attempt. There are also huge guilds with hundreds of players that can run 2-3 separate 25-player runs. Many guilds have core raiders and then a lot of other people who are content to level or do heroics and maybe fill in for the raid once in awhile. There are guilds that struggle to ever get Resto druids and guilds that have rogues and paladins coming out their ears. Many guilds have long-term players who have changed their main character and maybe even the role they fill multiple times. Many guilds collapse and new, often smaller and sometimes better guilds rise from their ashes.

We do make changes to try to acknowledge the diversity of guilds. Allowing for a complete 10-player progression path was one of them. Giving groups more ways to get the most powerful buffs was another.

The buff / debuff overhaul was a pretty big undertaking. While we are happy with the core design, we do feel there are specs that could offer a little more and that is the kind of thing we will improve over time. We definitely don't want to get back in the realm though where a spec has such a crazy powerful ability that they are considered mandatory for a raid to succeed.

Q u o t e:
So what he's saying is that since no class is critical for buffs, and everyone's DPS is within ~5% of each other, he's inviting people based on abilites like Innervate and Rebirth that are MUCH more valuable to a raid than anything another Mage or Rogue has to offer (a tiny bit more damage), thus leaving those players out of the guild/raid.

Are Innervate, Rebirth and Bloodlust great abilities? Absolutely. Am I happy when I get one in my raid? Yes. Do I sit out the warlock, rogue or mage in order to stack Rebirth? Not really. A good raid is one in which Rebirth gets used zero times.

Players also have a tendency to gloss over that "all other things being equal" part. Very few guilds can make the assumption that everyone in the raid has equal skill and gear, and honestly those guilds don't have invite drama. They know exactly who is coming and why ahead of time.

Should you take a great shaman with Bloodlust over a cruddy rogue? Probably.

Should you take a cruddy shaman with Bloodlust over a great rogue, assuming Bloodlust will make up the dps differnce? Probably a bad move.

Are your shaman and rogue consistently within 5% dps of each other to where the only tie goes to Bloodlust? If so, I would argue you are in some theoretical space and not in the actual game. If your guild is this good then the real answer is it probably doesn't matter and you are going to resolve the invite with a /random or DKP or who is best friends with the GM or something.