"Bring the Player, Not the Class" fail

#0 - Dec. 14, 2009, 3:42 p.m.

Lady Deathwhisper:

Cult Adherent - nearly impervious to magical damage
Cult Fanatic - nearly impervious to physical damage.
and curses that will likely cause a wipe if not dispelled on a healer.

Given this, I have to change the makeup of my otherwise relatively successful 10 man team, resulting in hurt feelings and people who've been decent players not getting a spot so I can bring the right group makeup.

I'm especially curious: if the rest of ICC is going to have similar things, I forsee it possible that you would be hard pressed to create a single team that could do all of it:

Magic, Poison, Curses, Disease == 3 differenet magic using classes required to dispell all.

Then add in a requirement for physical melee (which cannot dispel). That's 5 slots specific to a subset of different classes. Two tanks (one physical, one magical).

Add an event where melee are at an extreme disadvantage due to serious AOE or a ranged-only phase like Ony so you can't take too many of them or else you'll hit enrage, and another where ranged at a serious disadvantage, and yet another where lots of CC or kiting is required, and we're SOL - only a couple of comps can do it.

Now - for a 25 man, this isn't an issue. In a 10 man, however, you're effectively screwing a large number of people who might be able to go (but couldn't bring what's needed to keep from wiping) out of runs. Changing the 99% to 40% in 10s would alleviate (although not obviate) this issue, given the very bad side-effect of not killing the right guy in time.

Ghostcrawler

#5 - Dec. 14, 2009, 7:20 p.m.

Needing to have a mix of melee and casters isn't a violation of "Bring the player." Many of our encounters are designed to discourage you to stack the raid too far in one direction or the other.

I realize for some players "Bring the player" means that their raid of 20 rogues and 5 DKs should be completely viable. That isn't our intent though.

That mantra got launched because we didn't want raid leaders to have to sit good players in order to build an inflexible list of raid buffs and debuffs necessary to succeed. If you looked at a roster for Sunwell, nearly every raid looked pretty similar, maybe with 1 or 2 class differences. In Icecrown, the raid comps are enormously different. That doesn't mean class is irrelevant.

Ghostcrawler

#101 - Dec. 16, 2009, 4:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If this game had ever been about "bring the player not the class" you wouldn't see 3 classes sitting at 5 times the representation of every other class in pvp..........every season.

"Bring the player" applies to PvE only. It was specifically part of the buff / debuff overhaul. There are few reasonable ways to have every buff in groups as small as Arena teams. A big part of Arena strategy is building comps for synergy. We specifically don't want Arena teams to be about grabbing three random people.