The failure of "Bring the Player..."

#1 - Oct. 19, 2009, 3:22 p.m.

...is the Hunter class.

No other CLASS can be subbed completely out of raids and result in such consistent raid improvement. Last night all three of our hunters got subbed out of Heroic 25-man Anub in favor of Warrior AOE (one hunter's ALT), Spriest AOE, and DK AOE + DG. And this is not an isolated incident to either this expansion, or this dungeon.

Homogenization is a great idea, but you have to either do it all the way, or not at all. Hunters sharing MD with a class that has better single target AND AOE damage capability actually hurts us. The Hunter class losing AOE damage capability while specs like Spriests gain it hurts us. Etc, etc...

Hunters need to bring SOMETHING unique to a raid that benefits the whole group, or we'll keep being told "well, we'll just hope that no hunter loot drops this time." TSA is no longer unique, MD is no longer unique, Replenishment is not unique, Expose Weakness and Hunter's Mark no longer do anything for the raid as a whole, and moderate, consistent, and aggro-free single-target DPS is not necessary. So what do we do?

When push comes to shove on difficult encounters, we will sit on the wait list until Blizzard gives us something desirable to raids.

Posting on an alt to spare the guild I love from the trolls, and spare myself from them.

P.S. When Spriests are more desireable DPSers to a raid than any hunter spec, there's a problem.

Ghostcrawler

#45 - Oct. 19, 2009, 7:57 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Wow, people still don't understand that the "Bring the player" quote refers to certain buffs that specific classes/specs brought and were crucial to raiding which have been more or less thrown around willy nilly at other class.

Yes.

Look at the raid comps various groups use for hard mode kills. While a certain amount of min/maxxing is necessary for those really challenging fights, there is still a lot of diversity in who brings what class. This is something that didn't exist before in Burning Crusade raiding, where raid comps were generally fixed.

If your raid does not bring you, that is rarely a problem with the "bring the player not the class" philosophy.

Ghostcrawler

#193 - Oct. 21, 2009, 6:01 p.m.

Q u o t e:
you won't get any. GC is in the lalalalalaa-hands-over-ears-mode right now. He's right and you're wrong end of story. I already proved a situtation where the player had to change classes to go from 10+ wipes to 1 shot by just changing from warrior/druid to rogue/shaman.

I think in this case we have the benefit of data, which you are comparing to one anecdote. Can you improve your chances by swapping players in and out? Of course. It would be silly to argue otherwise. If you are stacking too many of the same spec, or if you are lacking key buffs or debuffs, or most importantly if you have undergeared or underskilled players, then you might have problems.

But do you have to have a specific raid comp in order to beat a hard mode fight? No. Groups do it with pretty different makeups. This was *not* the case for the challenging content in BC, and something we wanted to fix.

When you look at the guilds that got the early kills, it's not because they had the perfect raid comp. In fact, they had different raid comps. The main difference between them and most guilds is that they are extremely competent players who play well together. That's it. That is the big secret to killing bosses in WoW.