Siha turned the tables on a guildie mage in an argument about reagent costs, but the discussion points to a broader issue with raiding in WoW right now (an issue that I've addressed before). The 3.0 patch brought with it raid-wide buffs - instead of a priest needing to cast Prayer of Fortitude on 5 groups in a 25-man raid, one cast now hits every raid member in range. This change was applied to all the major buffs - Arcane Brilliance, Gift of the Wild, Prayer of Fortitude, etc.
But not blessings.
The duration of blessings has increased from Molten Core days from 5 minutes to 15 minutes to 30 minutes, but to get an entire raid ready to go, it still takes at least 7-10 casts. The most basic example is the paladin assigned to Blessing of Kings. There are 10 classes in WoW, and chances are all 10 will be represented in a balanced 25-man raid. 10 classes? 10 buffs - which means 10 casts of Greater Blessing of Kings every 30 minutes. Over a four hour raid, that's 80 casts of Greater Blessing of Kings, not to mention 80 Symbols of Kings used and a great deal of mana consumed.
That is, of course, if no one dies. Add one cast per class death after encounters. And for a total wipe, the number of blessing casts needed scales up exponentially against the number of "raid-wide" buffs.
And it gets even more cumbersome if you're *not* the Kings pally - if you get assigned to Might/Wisdom, hybrid classes become a total bear to deal with (pun intended). The feral druid wants might, and the boomkin wants wisdom. You can't give them both a greater blessing... so for a balanced raid with all classes represented, if you've got both feral and resto/boomkin druids, ret and holy paladins, enhancement and ele/resto shaman (shamans? shamen?), add at least 3 extra blessing casts - so we're up to 13 casts per buff period (plus 3 10-minute ones that you need to keep an eye on between greater blessing rebuffs, so 19 casts per 30 minutes).
Ghostcrawler et. al. have been saying that they want to infuse more fun into the game and eliminate the more tedious parts? Blessing maintenance is tedious, here's your sign.
That said, if I ever hear about a mage complaining about using reagents to throw down a table, or a druid belly-aching about having to re-buff Gift of the Wild, I am going to take my finely crafted mace and, very gracefully, pummel his or her face with it. We paladins have got it worse, so I don't want to hear it.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Woe Are Us - Paladin Blessings
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4 comments:
Simple, combine BoW and BoM into the same blessing. Much like how sanctuary provides runicpower/rage/mana, the new combined blessing could offer AP and mp5. I mean, ultimately why would it matter if it's seen as "OP"? You have both of those blessings anyway in just about any raid you do, and alot of the times in heroics (especially if there's 3 paladins running them, which happens suprisingly often). I don't see this an issue for balancing encounters. I suppose a few classes will benefit slightly more from it than others...pallys/rogues/hunters, but like I said, you're going to probably have both of the current blessings in a raid anyway, so this just simplifies the application of them.
Table-like mechanic? Perhaps summon an Altar of [Might,Wis,Kings,..] Bless?
I think just making the blessings raid wide would solve a lot of issues as a temporary measure. Its really not a permanent solution, but in the interim until something better is developed, I think it would help quite a bit.
Raid wide buff for the greater blessings would make it simpler. If someone doesn't want the buff they can delete it themselves. Having to bless each class seperately is a complete pain. Also if you wanted the odd different blessing on one or 2 classes you could give them a normal blessing to override it. Don't like it because you didn't get the Greater blessing you wanted?... get more pallies in the group.
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