Hunter tears bring up good point... unintentionally.

Very little good seems to be coming from this thread, but there's one interesting post in the lot, which is mostly interesting because it applies to more than just hunters. Disappeared in an increasingly surreal back and forth between hunters and Ghostcrawler... which peaks around the time GC actually downloads simcraft and a DPS spreadsheet and starts kicking ass with actual numbers.

Anyway, argument at hand is about DPS neglecting survival talents. The claim is that we blame the game or healers for death and ignore the fight in favor of DPS.

The reality is a long shot off, and it also explains exactly why DPS specs almost universally ignore survival talents. It's not a mater of burdening healers, it's actually the exact opposite. I'll actually let GC explain it himself: "Now days someone is at 100%, will hit 100% in the next couple of GCDs, or will be dead."

Rant continues in the break, with cataclysm speculation and such.

Raid damage these days comes in two flavors: Avoidable and Unavoidable.

Unavoidable damage, like the damage auras all over the place in ICC and not uncommon throughout all of WotLK, is just that. The raid has to eat it, you can't avoid it, so it has to be healed (and by extension is healable).


Avoidable damage comes most notably in forms like empowered flame orbs, defile, and shadow crash with a couple dozen stacks off the Animus up, which will take out significant portions of the raid if not properly avoided, but also in forms like malady of the mind or malleable goo that will still indirectly cause wipes by secondary effects if not by damage alone.

In all cases avoidable damage simply must be avoided, not survived. No amount of survival talents lets you eat a full pungent blight, or let's you do more than about 200 dps after taking a malleable goo to the face. Most forms of avoidable damage can't be healed, or are at least sufficiently difficult to heal that not avoiding them simply isn't an attractive option. This also completely removes the value of survival talents - why reduce the damage by 5% when you shouldn't be taking it to begin with?

On the other hand, unavoidable damage is, by principle, healable. There are considerable discrepancies in survival talents available to various specs - even within warlock specs, affliction has no viable access to soul link. Destruction can trade less than 40 dps for it, demo has it out of the box, affliction loses 10 talent points for it, and many of those points have to come from powerful must-have or over-budgeted talents. Most classes don't have an easy 20% damage reduction like warlocks do, either, and for the entire raid to be healable through damage auras and unavoidable explosions, it's balanced around the lowest common denominator... which is roughly zero.


Now... Cataclysm. One of the stated goals of the mastery system is to move the bulk of damage boosters down into those green numbers at the bottom of the spec, so the entire talent consists of talents that actually alter the way spells work. The way it's been explained several times, talents like Bane would be the bottom end of complexity - simple damage boost by altering the spell, not by adding +5% to it. So a survival talent is still a DPS talent because it adds a few points down in the mastery numbers.

Ideally, every talent pick would be function vs. funciton, not damage vs. function, and specs would simply have room for stuff like range talents, threat reduction, damage reduction, and so forth.


This all sounds fine until you start looking at raids... For every Firefighter or Blood Prince fight out there slowly driving every healer in your raid to alcoholism there's a Brutallus or Blood Queen demanding the best out of your DPS. You also still have to consider discrepancies between classes.


While I'm tentatively interested by the goal of making tanking and healing closer to DPS in that you can "catch up" again after a mistake (rather than the current reality where a third of the raid is dead before the mistake is even apparent) I don't think it'll pan out that Blizzard will make survival talents attractive to DPS specs.


There is one case, though, where I can see them pulling it off. Let's say a 51 point tree has 45 DPS talent points available. There's 6 points for survival - nether protection and molten skin, for example. This is a touchy line to follow, people have been spoiled by tightly tuned DPS trees this expansion, but vanilla and BC speccing wasn't far off, there was very often at least 3-5 points of slack in a spec. That's not a bad thing, unless it goes far enough that talent trees feel like sparse mechanics just for maxing out your mastery bonus.


A lot of people are worried about a lot of things regarding Cataclysm, but I think I'm in a pretty small group to say this is my biggest worry: That they won't be able to "fix" healing and tanking the way they want to without either screwing DPS (or tuning encounters around sub-optimal DPS, which also isn't an attractive idea).

It'll be quite a while before people can decide if this happened or not, just like the other things I've mentioned worrying about for Cataclysm. It most likely won't be apparent until at least tier 12 heroics. Blizzard openly admits to badly undertuning Naxx and possibly over-nerfing Ulduar easy modes, but tier 11 will still be a first tier raid, regardless, Karazhan wasn't exactly a telling preview of tiers 5 and 6 itself, and it was better tuned than Naxx, though it was pretty overtuned at first.

Overtuned is generally a bit better than under - you'll never screw someone by nerfing a boss they've killed, even if you do annoy a few. Consider the relatively modest complaining about the nerf train that ran over Ulduar and dragged it for seven miles before the train exploded, but consider on the other hand the complaining that surely would have ensued if around December '08 Naxx was buffed to the point that two thirds of the guilds running around in Naxx gear could no longer clear the place. The ill advised Hodir hard mode buff generated almost as much QQ as the complete collection of Ulduar nerfs, and that buff truly impacted a small handful of guilds. Even the single guild that got it before the buff still had Firefighter between them and Algalon when the buff was reverted, so they weren't even in the world first running.