Bring the player, not the QQ

I’m siding with Blizzard on this one 100%. There are still issues with healers being pushed into certain niches and there’s more competition right now for tanks and DPS to fit into a raid since there are more of us, this is proof alone that Blizzard’s design philosophy with raiding is working. Some (if not most) of the players right now in WoW are too new to remember how raiding and dungeon runs used to be put together. I’ll highlight the best part of the quote below because it lets me know Blizzard is aware of the REAL problem. Everybody has their own little agenda, no matter how well they hide it, everybody at some point is out for themsevles.

The design intent is very simple, though it gets lawyered a lot by players asking for buffs.

We want to promote diversity and flexibility in the raid group.

Here are examples of what we DON’T want:

• You have to have a shaman in every 5-player group within a raid.
• You have to have 1 Holy paladin, 1 Disc priest, 2 Holy priests, 2 Resto shamans, 2 Resto druids.
• You have 2 have 2 Holy paladins to heal the tanks.
• You have to have an Unholy DK for Ebon Plague.
• You have to have a warrior MT and a druid OT.
• Etc.

We push niches for healers, to a small extent, so that players don’t just say “Well, druids are the best healers. Let’s take 6 of them.” We want you to get a couple of druid healers and then think that you are probably better off getting a few different kinds of healers to balance out your raid. We want you to be able to raid if your best Holy priest is sick that night by getting a paladin, shaman or druid instead.

Some players like to claim the sky is falling after every set of patch notes, and to be fair, it’s a pretty understandable reaction. But the fact is that the Ulduar raid groups have been more diverse than at any point in the history of WoW. Even the most competitive, cutting-edge guilds in the world don’t all raid with the same mix of classes. From that perspective, the “bring the player” philosophy has been pretty succesful. This doesn’t mean there are no balance problems (or even quality of life or fun issues) left to address. Let’s just keep it in perspective. Not many guilds are running with 8 [fill in the blank of the preceived overpowered healer of the month, probably Resto druids currently], and nobody is going to start doing that in 3.2.

I’m still having a hard time seeing why you can’t substitute DPS classes into this statement and have it be any different… except you don’t push niches for DPS, you do the opposite. Because you realized that “niches” were holding people back.
First, there are more dps slots in the typical raid so even if you bring say 5 mages, you have plenty of room for everyone else. Second, if you stack too many of one particular class then you risk not having enough of the buffs and debuffs you need. Third, there are niches for dps classes too, but they are also not overly rigid niches. If you bring too much melee, you suffer on some fights. If you lack strong crowd control, your pulls may be a little messy.

All I am saying is that the design is, more and less, working. Players are still concerned about being curbed, sometimes only when they are trying to look into the future or having bad memories of the past. But for most guilds out there, it isn’t a problem. In most cases, bringing a more skilled player of any class will have a bigger net effect on your raiding success than bringing someone for their buff or narrow healing or damage niche, provided you have your bases covered.

On the other hand, man did that soundbite stick. I don’t think anything I could say at Blizzcon this year could have that kind of staying power.