After a couple of months of play even seasoned noobs like myself know the general guidelines of what to bring to a raid.
You know that the standard composition for a 5-man is 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 DPS.
You also know that this scales fairly well into 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 DPS for 10 man raids and this scaling continues into the 25 mans with 4ish tanks 6ish healers and 15ish dps.
By now we also know that it is preferable to have min-maxed or so called pure specs for whatever the highest level of content is that you're running. This is based on the fact that min-maxing optimizes use of talents, gear and skill for specific tasks meaning that a 'pure' tank will be better equipped to tank than an off-spec tank (and I use this term with care).
This is beyond argument by now. We've seen the math. We know that someone who will dump all his talents into the protection tree will be significantly better at tanking than someone who doesn't, we know that a full holy build will outheal a shadow priest by a margin. This is not to say you can't get the job done with an off-spec; It's to say that a 'pure' class will simply outperform an off-spec in the same role.
But where does the hybrid fit in with all this then? When does the versatility of having '2' specs bring more to the table than being 100% invested in a single spec?
The answer is simply: Group Size
No group is perfect, things do go wrong so lets take a look what happens when groups start falling apart:
25 - mans
The main tank dies, the boss makes a b-line for the nearest healer and smushes him/her before the off-tank can pick things up. The group is down a healer and a tank but the remaining tanks/healers should be able to hold things together without too much trouble. The raid risks going out of mana sooner and DPS may have to pause for a while becoming useless for that period but things are very much saveable.
Having a hybrid tank or hybrid healer in this situation isn't going to add much. A little extra healing from a DPS / healer hybrid will help preserve some mana but this would cut into the damage output and prolong the battle making the net result 0.
If another tank and healer die you're most likely looking at a wipe unless you have multiple hybrid DPS / healers standing around capable of switching roles.
Be that as it may a hybrid in this scenario would add very little to the overall raid.
10 - mans
Once again a tank slips up or the healer accidentally draws aggro, both main healer and main tank go down leaving the raid with 1 active tank and 1 or 2 active healers. In this case there's a lot of pressure on the off-tank who now has to deal with both the boss and adds or just the boss and let the adds roam free.
Healers will feel the increase in strain from 1 healer going down as well as having to deal with the extra healing needed on the off-tank or worse having to heal DPS who are essentially sitting ducks to any free-roaming adds.
A hybrid DPS / tank could have a significant benefit at this point by picking up stray adds. A hybrid DPS / healer could ease the strain on the remaining healers by picking up a raid healing role.
5 - mans
A potential worst case scenario in a 5-man run is always the tank and the healer biting the dust leaving 3 dps exposed, fighting for their lives and resulting in a wipe 90% of the time.
By swapping out 2 of the 3 dps for hybrids like a DPS / Healer and and DPS / tank means that even though the group is now severely weakened it lacks none of the components of a succesful group. The hybrid tank is tasked to pick up the mobs, the hybrid healer can switch to healing from DPS and the DPS can continue to DPS turning a potential full wipe into a potentially stable situation.
1 - man
Lets not kid ourselves. We are alone most of the time when questing / doing dailies or soloing various azeroth content for a friend (i.e. boosting). If you cannot tank the mobs of kill them faster than they kill you, you lose time. Precious time you spend corpse running. If you're a pure tanking or healing class you are simply trying to outlast things and if you're a pure DPS class you better hope that enemy dies before it comes too close (a generalization but you get what I mean).
A hybrid doesn't have these problems. Both the hybrid DPS / Tank and the DPS / healer have excellent survivability solo coupled with the ability to do at least a decent amount of damage.
In General
When looking at hybrid's it's important to realize that a hybrid is not something that plays 2 specs at the same time but something that can smoothly switch from one spec into the other.
If you are a DPS / Healer your primary role for any group will be DPS, picking up healing in case of emergency. You are not there to do both. You should not feel obligated to throw heals as a DPS / healer hybrid if you're there to dps and things are going fine. You are there to pick up the slack with your 'secondary' tree if it is needed.
Your role is to keep going when others can't. If your DPS has to stop because of aggro issues your hybrid can continue to perform by throwing a few heals around or off-tanking a stray add.
Group size should be the determining factor for any raid leader or group leader that is putting together a group. In general terms the larger the group the smaller the need for a hybrid and the less utility a hybrid will bring to the table. However the smaller the group gets the more utility a hybrid will bring to the table in case of emergency... and lets face it: shit happens.
A hybrid should not strive to top the damage or healing charts. It should strive to do what is needed to keep the group up and running no matter who gets the credit for best healing performance or best damage.
Showing posts with label hybrid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hybrid. Show all posts
Monday, August 18, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
41/13/7 Holy Hell in concept
Inspired by the lacking damage of my protection paladin, some chats in-game and a few interesting reader comments I have decided to re-evaluate the position of my current protection paladin.
Again, and I can't state this enough, protection is great stuff. Superb tanking ability coupled with an easy time of AoE farming physical mobs makes a protection spec extremely fun to play and suprisingly fast to level (once you have holy shield + reckoning at least).
What it doesn't do is damage. Living off of reactive damage works wonders against brain-dead NPCs (and incidentally against not so clever rogues too) but anyone with the capacity to evaluate an opponent will simply take 2 steps back and ignore you alltogether leaving you with little to do other than /taunt /rude /spit to get them back to hitting your shield.
Since prot is very demanding with talent points without adding damage we are stuck looking at a holy build that makes an attempt at actually doing a little bit of damage consistently and a nice chunk of burst damage to help kill something at low health without tossing all our survivability overboard.
The general idea with this build is to cater to players that don't have infinite playtime and as a result have to be able to do halfway decently in groups, solo as well as PVP without worrying too much about living the life in sunwell or having to respec on a continual basis.
Since there will be 41 points in holy this is essentially a healer build which means your primary role should be healing but you should not have to be afraid to go in swinging with this one.
Conceptually what I have so far is the following:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVEh0xzkeotVGzbZVb
The talent distribution looks a bit messy so lets see what the corner stones are for damage and survivability starting with damage:
Improved seal of righteousness is where most of our damage will come from. Whacking things with SoR up and judging it regularly will be our default damage output and to bring some utility to this bread and butter attack we take benediction and improved judgement from retribution. This not only lowers the mana cost of our constant judging and re-sealing but also to increase the amount of times we can actually judge SoR on a target. Precision from prot is taken to make sure we actually hit when we swing.
Ideally we'd want sanctity aura from retribution as well picking up crusade on the way but this would take a lot of talent points to achieve and would come at the cost of either some holy power or at the loss of blessing of kings one of the most requested and useful buffs currently available to pallies.
I opted to go with some protection talents instead but heading for sanctity aura + crusade in ret could be an equally interesting approach.
Back on the damage topic we see that the holy tree offers up holy shock (15 sec cooldown) with an interesting combo in divine favor that would make the next holy shock spell crit. Setting those two up in a single macro would allow for an almost guaranteed holy schock crit every 2 minutes.
Cleverly judging your improved SoR right after your holy shock crit combo should help in providing a decent amount of burst damage.
With illumination being a pre-requisite for both divine favor and holy shock and the potential to get some mana back from our costly spells when they crit means that crit becomes a very interesting thing to add to our talents which brings into play 5/5 holy power.
To maximize our damage further we go with holy guidance and pray that we can stack enough int for it to have some decent impact on our damage output which incidentally explains the choice of 5/5 divine intellect over divine strength (which does little to nothing for us).
From the survivability side of things we're highly dependand on being able to keep casting our heals when we're being slapped around bringing us to 5/5 spiritual focus. I would've preferred improved concentration from protection but this would take too many points out of holy draining points from holy guidance a very solid damage talent.
Healing light, light's grace and divine illumination will ensure that our heals hit hard, hit fast enough and are cheap enough to keep us up and running even when under pressure of going OOM or being otherwise attacked.
Blessing of kings is what we're heading for in protection to increase both our damage and survivability. 10% extra in all stats means more stamina to survive with, more int to hurt things with and the rest of the stat increases albeit unnecessary are gravy.
In order to up our survivability a bit more we take guardians favor to increase the rate we can bubble up against physical damage. The extension to blessing of freedom by 4 seconds is highly situational but very practical when it comes to helping out flag-runners in the battlegrounds or to avoid being snared in encounters where this is common.
Redoubt is favored over improved devotion aura. The extra block can be extremely convenient when stuck tanking for a group without a tank and improved devotion aura doesn't add significant amounts of mitigation even when compared to the somewhat lackluster proccing of redoubt.
To finish up our tanking capacity we drop 2 points in improved righteous fury. The damage reduction is convenient but primarily the skill allows you to succesfully tank / off-tank lower level instances whilst preventing DPS from taking aggro from you all the time. The usage of righteous fury is obviously to the discretion of the user and it should probably be turned off when you're just healing.
As you may have noticed by now there's two points in the Holy tree that are just kind of floating around with no specific purpose. I arbitrarily put one point in Sanctified light. The extra crit you'd get would be significantly more interesting if it applied to all holy spells or at the very least both Holy light and flash of light rather than just holy light. It does make you a better healer so you could argue to have both loose points in holy in there.
Instead I opted for the curious choice of purifying power. Cleansing and constant consecration costs quite a bit of mana. In groups where a lot of cleansing is needed cleansing alone can put you on the unhappy side of the mana bar.
The truth behind purifying power however is that it provides an amazing 10% extra crit chance for exorcism and holy wrath which is huge for a single point.
This gives you a significant edge when fighting of the undead and demons and moreover makes for an excellent tool to put a warlock pet out of it's misery.
So there we have it. A build that has all the key traits of a healer build making it a very suitable main/off healer but also grabs enough from protection and retribution to provide a modicum of tanking ability as well as helping out with the damage generation.
Healing stats are obviously favored but a healthy dose of resilience and stamina will help compensate for the underdeveloped tanking abilities. Conveniently all of these stats are easily obtained through battle ground gear.
Not as much of a hybrid build as I had expected to end up with (very much a holy build in fact) but in my opinion still a good attempt to bring back the mental image of a paladin that a lot of people had when they started playing wow:
Charge in, hammer in hand, shield in front and put the fear of holy hell into the hearts of the enemy.
Again, and I can't state this enough, protection is great stuff. Superb tanking ability coupled with an easy time of AoE farming physical mobs makes a protection spec extremely fun to play and suprisingly fast to level (once you have holy shield + reckoning at least).
What it doesn't do is damage. Living off of reactive damage works wonders against brain-dead NPCs (and incidentally against not so clever rogues too) but anyone with the capacity to evaluate an opponent will simply take 2 steps back and ignore you alltogether leaving you with little to do other than /taunt /rude /spit to get them back to hitting your shield.
Since prot is very demanding with talent points without adding damage we are stuck looking at a holy build that makes an attempt at actually doing a little bit of damage consistently and a nice chunk of burst damage to help kill something at low health without tossing all our survivability overboard.
The general idea with this build is to cater to players that don't have infinite playtime and as a result have to be able to do halfway decently in groups, solo as well as PVP without worrying too much about living the life in sunwell or having to respec on a continual basis.
Since there will be 41 points in holy this is essentially a healer build which means your primary role should be healing but you should not have to be afraid to go in swinging with this one.
Conceptually what I have so far is the following:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVEh0xzkeotVGzbZVb
The talent distribution looks a bit messy so lets see what the corner stones are for damage and survivability starting with damage:
Improved seal of righteousness is where most of our damage will come from. Whacking things with SoR up and judging it regularly will be our default damage output and to bring some utility to this bread and butter attack we take benediction and improved judgement from retribution. This not only lowers the mana cost of our constant judging and re-sealing but also to increase the amount of times we can actually judge SoR on a target. Precision from prot is taken to make sure we actually hit when we swing.
Ideally we'd want sanctity aura from retribution as well picking up crusade on the way but this would take a lot of talent points to achieve and would come at the cost of either some holy power or at the loss of blessing of kings one of the most requested and useful buffs currently available to pallies.
I opted to go with some protection talents instead but heading for sanctity aura + crusade in ret could be an equally interesting approach.
Back on the damage topic we see that the holy tree offers up holy shock (15 sec cooldown) with an interesting combo in divine favor that would make the next holy shock spell crit. Setting those two up in a single macro would allow for an almost guaranteed holy schock crit every 2 minutes.
Cleverly judging your improved SoR right after your holy shock crit combo should help in providing a decent amount of burst damage.
With illumination being a pre-requisite for both divine favor and holy shock and the potential to get some mana back from our costly spells when they crit means that crit becomes a very interesting thing to add to our talents which brings into play 5/5 holy power.
To maximize our damage further we go with holy guidance and pray that we can stack enough int for it to have some decent impact on our damage output which incidentally explains the choice of 5/5 divine intellect over divine strength (which does little to nothing for us).
From the survivability side of things we're highly dependand on being able to keep casting our heals when we're being slapped around bringing us to 5/5 spiritual focus. I would've preferred improved concentration from protection but this would take too many points out of holy draining points from holy guidance a very solid damage talent.
Healing light, light's grace and divine illumination will ensure that our heals hit hard, hit fast enough and are cheap enough to keep us up and running even when under pressure of going OOM or being otherwise attacked.
Blessing of kings is what we're heading for in protection to increase both our damage and survivability. 10% extra in all stats means more stamina to survive with, more int to hurt things with and the rest of the stat increases albeit unnecessary are gravy.
In order to up our survivability a bit more we take guardians favor to increase the rate we can bubble up against physical damage. The extension to blessing of freedom by 4 seconds is highly situational but very practical when it comes to helping out flag-runners in the battlegrounds or to avoid being snared in encounters where this is common.
Redoubt is favored over improved devotion aura. The extra block can be extremely convenient when stuck tanking for a group without a tank and improved devotion aura doesn't add significant amounts of mitigation even when compared to the somewhat lackluster proccing of redoubt.
To finish up our tanking capacity we drop 2 points in improved righteous fury. The damage reduction is convenient but primarily the skill allows you to succesfully tank / off-tank lower level instances whilst preventing DPS from taking aggro from you all the time. The usage of righteous fury is obviously to the discretion of the user and it should probably be turned off when you're just healing.
As you may have noticed by now there's two points in the Holy tree that are just kind of floating around with no specific purpose. I arbitrarily put one point in Sanctified light. The extra crit you'd get would be significantly more interesting if it applied to all holy spells or at the very least both Holy light and flash of light rather than just holy light. It does make you a better healer so you could argue to have both loose points in holy in there.
Instead I opted for the curious choice of purifying power. Cleansing and constant consecration costs quite a bit of mana. In groups where a lot of cleansing is needed cleansing alone can put you on the unhappy side of the mana bar.
The truth behind purifying power however is that it provides an amazing 10% extra crit chance for exorcism and holy wrath which is huge for a single point.
This gives you a significant edge when fighting of the undead and demons and moreover makes for an excellent tool to put a warlock pet out of it's misery.
So there we have it. A build that has all the key traits of a healer build making it a very suitable main/off healer but also grabs enough from protection and retribution to provide a modicum of tanking ability as well as helping out with the damage generation.
Healing stats are obviously favored but a healthy dose of resilience and stamina will help compensate for the underdeveloped tanking abilities. Conveniently all of these stats are easily obtained through battle ground gear.
Not as much of a hybrid build as I had expected to end up with (very much a holy build in fact) but in my opinion still a good attempt to bring back the mental image of a paladin that a lot of people had when they started playing wow:
Charge in, hammer in hand, shield in front and put the fear of holy hell into the hearts of the enemy.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Not a spec?
I've been doing a lot of reading on the damage potential of a paladin holy build as of late. I love protection to pieces but all the protection talents, the stacking of defense rating and all that goodness leaves me well armored but completely unable to do any damage.
I am not asking for 1k weapon hits, I am not even asking for any kind of sustained DPS but I would at least like to be able to finish off someone when they're at 1% health without being 100% dependant on engineering bombs to do damage.
I went through multiple stacks of bombs in AV the other day and whilst this isn't the worst tactic for a protection paladin it certainly isn't cheap either if you're using decent quality explosives (for as far as that applies to goblin bombs).
This leaves me a bit stranded. I want the survivability a paladin has to offer and this is exactly what I'd lose by speccing deep into retribution for damage talents. I am not saying Retribution paladins are 'soft' targets but tossing your shield aside in favor of a 2 hander will most certainly impact your survivability.
Protection on the other hand is a very demanding talent tree. The really useful skills like holy shield are in the latter part of the tree meaning if you spec into prot it is likely to eat most of your talent points just to be effective. With no damage enhancing talents (well almost none) prot is simply not able to do any damage worth noting.
Which leaves me looking at the holy tree. Due to the heavy investment in healing the holy tree has survival capacity simply through the ability of being able to heal oneself. But the holy tree has something that protection doesn't have... Holy Shock.
A very mana intensive ability on a 15 second cooldown that next to providing some healing can also output at least a halfway decent amount of damage.
Granted, the damage output is somewhat limited. But since it is in fact holy damage it will at the very least not be resisted. Meaning that any effective increase through talenting or +spell damage or even an increase in crit means a flat increase in damage from holy shock.
Grabbing all the useful stuff from either protection or retribution in addition to holy shock leaves me looking at either a 40/0/21 or a 41/20/0 build or something similar which seems to put me squarely in the hybrid build category.
Good survivability, Good to very good healing and capacity to at least do some burst damage every 15seconds or so.
And this is where the researchable material stops and you're on your own to figure it all out and do the math. Information becomes limited... and why? Because 40/0/21 or 41/20/0 is not a spec... at least not to the min-maxing population of WoW.
The general consensus over at elitistjerks is that a shockadin as it is called is a sub-par healer, not able to tank and not able to DPS to the same potential as a full holy, full protection or full retribution build.
It is also the consensus that because this particular hybrid doesn't excel in any one thing but is decent at multiple things it is not 'raid viable'.
Never mind the fact that you can hold your own in Battlegrounds with it, do your dailies with it or the fact that with decent gear you can heal, dps and do some mild off-tanking in 5-mans.
No matter how good a spec may be for certain circumstances it seems that hybrid's often get labeled as sub-par and shoved aside as unimportant whilst in fact they are generally more appreciated by the people that play them then any typical cookie-cutter build.
This is by no means an attempt to put down the quality work done over at elitistjerks... but the information found there is for min-maxers and for people who are heading to SWP, something someone with 2 hours a day of playtime will never be able to do.
If you need to min-max all your abilities to be 'raid viable' or even be considered worthy of logging in (according to the general populace) then why give people the option of picking talents?
Let them pick from pre-designed cookie cutter builds every time they respec...
Until then and as far as I am concerned every specialization no matter how inanely crazy or inefficient is still a specialization and deserves to be regarded for what it is.
If you can call soul siphon and soul link the fabled warlock SL/SL spec (which is little more than hybrid forced on warlocks just to stay alive in PVP) then how is the shockadin not a spec?
Theorycraft is a dangerous tool. A tool that will tell you that in theory spec X is best for maximizing your healing/tanking/dps capability but also a tool that doesn't take into account that there is a huge gap between what is possible in theory and what is possible in practice.
The question should not be what is the best way to maximize healing/tanking/dps capability but what is the best way to improve your game. Theorycraft can be a guide but not a leader. In the end the decision to spec a certain way, pick certain echants and gems should be a reflection of how you play the game and not how the game plays you.
Are we too quick to judge? Afters years of WoW have we become too jaded to see the potential of hybrids? Are restokins, SL/SL warlocks, shockadins, elemental magi the result of bad talent design or merely a reflection of the fact that there is more under the sun than the black temple and sunwell.
Do you have a 'not a spec' spec?
I am not asking for 1k weapon hits, I am not even asking for any kind of sustained DPS but I would at least like to be able to finish off someone when they're at 1% health without being 100% dependant on engineering bombs to do damage.
I went through multiple stacks of bombs in AV the other day and whilst this isn't the worst tactic for a protection paladin it certainly isn't cheap either if you're using decent quality explosives (for as far as that applies to goblin bombs).
This leaves me a bit stranded. I want the survivability a paladin has to offer and this is exactly what I'd lose by speccing deep into retribution for damage talents. I am not saying Retribution paladins are 'soft' targets but tossing your shield aside in favor of a 2 hander will most certainly impact your survivability.
Protection on the other hand is a very demanding talent tree. The really useful skills like holy shield are in the latter part of the tree meaning if you spec into prot it is likely to eat most of your talent points just to be effective. With no damage enhancing talents (well almost none) prot is simply not able to do any damage worth noting.
Which leaves me looking at the holy tree. Due to the heavy investment in healing the holy tree has survival capacity simply through the ability of being able to heal oneself. But the holy tree has something that protection doesn't have... Holy Shock.
A very mana intensive ability on a 15 second cooldown that next to providing some healing can also output at least a halfway decent amount of damage.
Granted, the damage output is somewhat limited. But since it is in fact holy damage it will at the very least not be resisted. Meaning that any effective increase through talenting or +spell damage or even an increase in crit means a flat increase in damage from holy shock.
Grabbing all the useful stuff from either protection or retribution in addition to holy shock leaves me looking at either a 40/0/21 or a 41/20/0 build or something similar which seems to put me squarely in the hybrid build category.
Good survivability, Good to very good healing and capacity to at least do some burst damage every 15seconds or so.
And this is where the researchable material stops and you're on your own to figure it all out and do the math. Information becomes limited... and why? Because 40/0/21 or 41/20/0 is not a spec... at least not to the min-maxing population of WoW.
The general consensus over at elitistjerks is that a shockadin as it is called is a sub-par healer, not able to tank and not able to DPS to the same potential as a full holy, full protection or full retribution build.
It is also the consensus that because this particular hybrid doesn't excel in any one thing but is decent at multiple things it is not 'raid viable'.
Never mind the fact that you can hold your own in Battlegrounds with it, do your dailies with it or the fact that with decent gear you can heal, dps and do some mild off-tanking in 5-mans.
No matter how good a spec may be for certain circumstances it seems that hybrid's often get labeled as sub-par and shoved aside as unimportant whilst in fact they are generally more appreciated by the people that play them then any typical cookie-cutter build.
This is by no means an attempt to put down the quality work done over at elitistjerks... but the information found there is for min-maxers and for people who are heading to SWP, something someone with 2 hours a day of playtime will never be able to do.
If you need to min-max all your abilities to be 'raid viable' or even be considered worthy of logging in (according to the general populace) then why give people the option of picking talents?
Let them pick from pre-designed cookie cutter builds every time they respec...
Until then and as far as I am concerned every specialization no matter how inanely crazy or inefficient is still a specialization and deserves to be regarded for what it is.
If you can call soul siphon and soul link the fabled warlock SL/SL spec (which is little more than hybrid forced on warlocks just to stay alive in PVP) then how is the shockadin not a spec?
Theorycraft is a dangerous tool. A tool that will tell you that in theory spec X is best for maximizing your healing/tanking/dps capability but also a tool that doesn't take into account that there is a huge gap between what is possible in theory and what is possible in practice.
The question should not be what is the best way to maximize healing/tanking/dps capability but what is the best way to improve your game. Theorycraft can be a guide but not a leader. In the end the decision to spec a certain way, pick certain echants and gems should be a reflection of how you play the game and not how the game plays you.
Are we too quick to judge? Afters years of WoW have we become too jaded to see the potential of hybrids? Are restokins, SL/SL warlocks, shockadins, elemental magi the result of bad talent design or merely a reflection of the fact that there is more under the sun than the black temple and sunwell.
Do you have a 'not a spec' spec?
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