"Bring the player not the class" should be

#0 - March 5, 2009, 8:53 p.m.

Blizz has been tossing around the slogan "Bring the player not the class" slogan all over the place since wrath, and while I agree with the goal I strongly disagree with the means. Course my means is more difficult I just think its funner and more interesting. First what blizz has been doing

1) They have worked at homogenizing group buffs and raid utility so multiple classes bring the same buffs that don't stack.
2) They have also retuned existing group buffs so they don't stack with most similar buffs and allow few people to get every buff.
3) They also have made most group buffs raid wide so people don't stack a classes so each group can have that single buff.

The only mantra I agree with is the third one there but I believe that homogenizing class buffs and stacking them makes raid design far more boring, instead what I felt should have been done is the following,

1) Class buffs are unique but not quite as good.
2) Similar class buffs can stack but with diminished returns.
3) Make every class feel like they bring a useful utility to the raid.
4) And make group buffs raid wide :D

I strongly feel a balance could have been struck with these points that would still support bringing the player over the class but also make each class feel needed for something more than their dmg, tanking, or heals.

This would also allow for compounding, I can make a 10man group centered around caster buffs where I would receive almost no DPS gain vs a 25man. And a well balanced 25man at 20 people pretty much ever buff needed and most of the time those last players add next to nothing if not nothing to the existing 25 people in the raid, and I find that just boring, personally I feel that a rogue or a warlock should always be better in a larger group instead of plateauing off when you have your basic buffs from 3 other people.

I think that my way would have been superiorly interesting and still support bringing any class but fairly discourage bringing to many of one class.

Ghostcrawler

#20 - July 17, 2009, 9:53 p.m.

The opposite is "Bring the class, not the player" where you leave behind a good player because you already have a hunter or whatever and some other mouthbreather brings a really essential buff. Not crazy about playing that game myself.

You should get to raid because you are good at WoW, not because your presence magically makes everyone else better.

Ghostcrawler

#108 - July 18, 2009, 7:36 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Then the only way you will truely be able to accomplish that is mass homogenization.

We don't think that's true. Some of you guys seem to always head for a purity of game design where things would look very neat in a table or plotted on a graph. But we're not trying for a design where every possible raid comp is equally viable. We don't need to support a design where the raid of 8 mages and 2 dps warriors is as effective as the raid with 10 Holy paladins.

All we need to accomplish is to give groups enough flexibility to be able to bring the players they want while still getting all of the big buffs and enough of the smaller buffs. And we've done that. In the Sunwell days, the rosters of most progression-oriented raiding guilds (basically the ones trying today's equivalent of hard modes) were very similar. Now they are quite diverse. We don't have 30 specs represented yet, but we have 4 tanks, 5 healers and at least one dps spec of every class. That's more class diversity in raiding than WoW has ever had before. If you look at the guilds doing hard modes, they have pretty different rosters these days and that's even more true of the normal modes.

If you're new to raiding in WoW, that's awesome because a lot of people are and we made a big effort in LK to make that happen. But talk to the groups that did Sunwell and the frustration they had in trying to build their raids. The first thing these guys said to us when they heard about a new class was "There's no room in my raid to take any."

If you're looking for that one thing that's going to get you a raid spot, I'd shoot for a reputation that you know what the blank you're doing and some good friends.