World Buffs & Cross-faction Stacking Rules

[Xudo]

World buffs affect low level players during battlegrounds.
It is great that there are 10-19 and 30-39 possible and can be played every day.
But when enemy twinks joins with world buffs, they are very hard to beat.
They put almost no effort to get those buffs and they get very strong advantage.

I voted "Yes" and ask to remove worldbuffs not only in raids, but on battlegrounds too.

[Toaomb]

My friends are all highly competitive raiders in the classic scene and universal opinion seems to be that world buffs in raid make the content too cheesy, but tipping the scales by buffing melee seems a little risky due to stacking classes meta. I think there should be no world buffs but some form of compensation to casters. Maybe instead of taking buffs away, when you enter a raid you instantly get all buffs and the content is scaled to be much harder?

[Redmagejoe]

My friends are all highly competitive raiders in the classic scene and universal opinion seems to be that world buffs in raid make the content too cheesy, but tipping the scales by buffing melee seems a little risky due to stacking classes meta. I think there should be no world buffs but some form of compensation to casters. Maybe instead of taking buffs away, when you enter a raid you instantly get all buffs and the content is scaled to be much harder?

Refining content is much harder than just removing overpowered buffs. People seem to believe that things should just be adjusted with a slider that ups damage and HP, but that's an incredibly shallow adjustment that seldom yields something that is properly more difficult and instead just raises a gear ceiling. Yes, tuning raid content so that it is actually challenging would be wonderful, but would require an entire intense development cycle to achieve and might not be usable until a year or more down the road.

[Ugoboom]

My friends are all highly competitive raiders in the classic scene and universal opinion seems to be that world buffs in raid make the content too cheesy, but tipping the scales by buffing melee seems a little risky due to stacking classes meta. I think there should be no world buffs but some form of compensation to casters. Maybe instead of taking buffs away, when you enter a raid you instantly get all buffs and the content is scaled to be much harder?

buff armor values back to tbc values or even higher
this allows spell meele like rets to catchup with their effective full armorpen and casters to just generaly catch up
and allows arp gear to be useful beyond the 216 armor we get most boses down to

[Gantulga]

It would be infinitely better to simply rebalance the buffs so that they benefit all specs equally, toning down some outliers.
WF and blessing stacking just works in favor of fury zug zug more than anything else, exacerbating this balance issue further.

Why not tone down the amount of trash in some raids or reduce their hit points?

[Ugoboom]

It would be infinitely better to simply rebalance the buffs so that they benefit all specs equally, toning down some outliers.
WF and blessing stacking just works in favor of fury zug zug more than anything else, exacerbating this balance issue further.

Why not tone down the amount of trash in some raids or reduce their hit points?

you can do both. indeed the insanely long time vanilla raids take to clear needs to be remedied. this is far better done by toning down armor and hp of mobs, and the bullshitness of mechanics they do (patchwerk trash 360 cleaving warstomp oneshotting :puke:)

the issue of wbuffs is that, do you tune new raid encounters to require them? if so, you only get 1 attempt to kill them per week. wipe and lose the buffs? welp the raid is done, its over boys lets throw the towel in.

Or if you balance the new raids to not require buffs, then you just make prog far more trivial than it needs to be and you end up repeating the mistake of vanilla all over again.

wbuffs being limited nonreproducable consumes creates this dumb meta

[Isvya]

If you are really going to remove WBs then at least consider removing the debuff slot cap too.

What a great idea

[Jmilesi]

So... We all rerolling warrior or rogue now?

[Venytas]

Just give us both. If neccesary nerf wbuffs a bit. but at the end i think being able to combine the buffs is more important than having wbuff because it impacts more players

[Jmilesi]

I don't see a problema with world buffs, people got the wrong idea after all the world buff meta during Classic Wow and most of these never raid Naxx or AQ20 anyway.
To stack shammy and pally buffs is bad, shamans always raid in melee groups to use WF totem. This change only benefits warriors and rogues and they already are the best DPS.
If you guys wanna stack both buffs you should somehow encourage shamans to play in ranged DPS groups, reworking the elemental shaman or something.
People that voted Yes clearly didnt think this through or play main warrior.

[Shamma]

Raided on classic from MC to Naxx. Did not skip a week. Played a mage. Hated WBs with a passion all the time. We cleared all content w/o WBs too.

Thought it very well through. To hell with WBs.

[Jmilesi]

My problem is not with the WBs, keep it or leave it, I dont care.
My problem is with the buffs stacking only consolidating the Warrior meta, thats what I was reffering to when I said "people that voted Yes didnt think this through".

[Geojak]

As a paladin is thought is trough.

My blessings not removed is all I need.

I care little about warrior meta in raids, I dont care about wold buffs, I care about the absurdity of shamans and paladins the same group. It must be fixed. I have priorities. Warriors needing a nerf is a separate topic from this

[Yirman]

My problem is not with the WBs, keep it or leave it, I dont care.
My problem is with the buffs stacking only consolidating the Warrior meta, thats what I was reffering to when I said "people that voted Yes didnt think this through".

While I agree that totems+blessings stacking mostly affects Melee Physical Damage dealers (and in a positive way), removing world buffs also hit the same group the hardest, since they scale the best with current world buffs. It seems fair to assume that the result of the suggested change, should it go through, will not affect the raiding meta, while a lot of annoyances of buffs overwriting each other is removed. This seems like a win to me.

If WB's are not removed at the time totems+blessings stack, then aforementioned scaling of melee physical damage dealers only keeps outscaling the others, consolidating the warrior meta further. At such, both should go, or both should stay in my opinion.

I voted yes to remove WB's and have blessings and totems stack, not because I think it will change the meta in any way, but because of the annoyances of having a shaman and paladin in the same group or raid.

[Kerenis]

Greetings!

Any news on this? its been more than 3 weeks ago

[Kerenis]

My problem is not with the WBs, keep it or leave it, I dont care.
My problem is with the buffs stacking only consolidating the Warrior meta, thats what I was reffering to when I said "people that voted Yes didnt think this through".

While I agree that totems+blessings stacking mostly affects Melee Physical Damage dealers (and in a positive way), removing world buffs also hit the same group the hardest, since they scale the best with current world buffs. It seems fair to assume that the result of the suggested change, should it go through, will not affect the raiding meta, while a lot of annoyances of buffs overwriting each other is removed. This seems like a win to me.

If WB's are not removed at the time totems+blessings stack, then aforementioned scaling of melee physical damage dealers only keeps outscaling the others, consolidating the warrior meta further. At such, both should go, or both should stay in my opinion.

I voted yes to remove WB's and have blessings and totems stack, not because I think it will change the meta in any way, but because of the annoyances of having a shaman and paladin in the same group or raid.

Stacking shaman/pally buffs would also help casters/healers mana regen so their output will also be increased

[Neoulous]

No more World Buffs ? Does this serv become a casual gamer server ?

Where is the tryhard ?

People should go on retail server to ask for this

They dont have Vanilla spirit which is optimization and tryhard.

You do this, you will loose ppl who play for performance cause WB gives you the opportunity to do things you cant do without it.

Anyone has the choice to get them or no...

So why not get the condition : if ppl have WB, they cant have Pally and Sham buffs and if they dont have WB, they can do it.

There is too much impact on some classes like cat dps who takes so much power from WB, Survival hunter, Seal Fate rogue, regrowth druid etc.. and Warriors...
But warriors keep advantage with WF benefits cause SHam will continue to use it. Other classe will not have this advantage so is it really better ?
I dont think so...

[Rokit]

No more World Buffs ? Does this serv become a casual gamer server ?

Where is the tryhard ?

People should go on retail server to ask for this

They dont have Vanilla spirit which is optimization and tryhard.

You do this, you will loose ppl who play for performance cause WB gives you the opportunity to do things you cant do without it.

Anyone has the choice to get them or no...

So why not get the condition : if ppl have WB, they cant have Pally and Sham buffs and if they dont have WB, they can do it.

There is too much impact on some classes like cat dps who takes so much power from WB, Survival hunter, Seal Fate rogue, regrowth druid etc.. and Warriors...
But warriors keep advantage with WF benefits cause SHam will continue to use it. Other classe will not have this advantage so is it really better ?
I dont think so...

This server is a explicitly casual RP / PVE Server. Maybe this is all -good- things when they make this change.

[Crispin]

I think this is a place where creativity could shine. What was the one evolution of raiding difficulty that wow raiders liked and brought genuine character to raids? Ulduar difficulty mechanics.

If you remove world buffs and faction stacking - negatives, less alive world, lose a big portion of your raider and most dedicated endgame player base, less incentive to repeat lower raids which creates a bigger difficulty wall for new raiders due to lack of playerbase to do content.

A solution could be for new content especially raid content is to have a hard mode of all bosses that can be activated in the fight much like ulduar with the difficulty being scaled to those who would stack world buffs and utilize different buff mechanics.

As the world buff raiders tend to be speed raiders these difficulty mechanics wouldnt have to be very complicated but just mechanics which mean you need to speed up or wipe etc such as fire fighter or something.

Just a thought about using this complication to create new content and be creative instead of reductive which is what turtle wow is all about.

[Balake]

Stacking shaman/pally buffs would also help casters/healers mana regen so their output will also be increased

Not true at all. Besides the obvious fact that shaman mana totem is garbage: You won't have 8 shamans in your raid. Your shamans NEED to go in the melee group as that's where their buffs are at their most powerful. If you have ever raided as warlock or mage or shadow priest, they really don't have mana problems. The fights are short, we have mana potions and tea with sugar (very important custom consumable) so our dps is not gated by mana but by, well.. our actual damage output.

The only scenario to put shamans in caster group is if turtle wow devs add a special caster totem that gives spell power/spell crit and it has to be a very very strong totem (for example 10% spell crit) to compete with windfury but im against the idea cause tbc had totems too strong and it became one shaman required per group which is a crappy meta.

So again to emphasize, mana regen is not a good caster stat. The simulations say this, the stat weights say this, and the practical experience in raiding says this.

[Lunkdunk]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

[Markuis]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

How can the answer to such a class imbalance be buffs that lower the difficulty ceiling so suboptimal is allowed, not desired by itself?

[Lunkdunk]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

How can the answer to such a class imbalance be buffs that lower the difficulty ceiling so suboptimal is allowed, not desired by itself?

Nowhere have I said world buffs are the answer. I'm saying class imbalance will be worse without them, and without the world buff buffer you will instead have the optimal comp buffer. Of course it would be better to have a class being desired by itself, but that is not the suggestion on the table.

[Markuis]

Nowhere have I said world buffs are the answer. I'm saying class imbalance will be worse without them, and without the world buff buffer you will instead have the optimal comp buffer. Of course it would be better to have a class being desired by itself, but that is not the suggestion on the table.

You are right... I don't think WB should be removed without further class balance.

[Turtlenitis]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

People will always try to optimize, so unless warriors and rogues r nerfed to the ground there always going to be a batеalion of melees no matter what. SOM also has double HP on bosses compared to regular 1.12. So unless you get to whitness the enrage timer on Pachwerk u still have time to spare. People became too soft by downing bosses under 3 mins.

[Isvya]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/2006
og classic with wbuffs
as you can see its 100 warriors 0 rogue 0 mage 0 locks
wbuffs = bad. no wbuffs = good
Jeeez, you make no sense at all....
there is not a single guild here that does serious minmaxing btw

[Lunkdunk]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/2006
og classic with wbuffs
as you can see its 100 warriors 0 rogue 0 mage 0 locks
wbuffs = bad. no wbuffs = good
Jeeez, you make no sense at all....
there is not a single guild here that does serious minmaxing btw

I'm not a big proponent of world buffs. I would rather get rid of the time I spend getting them each week. But the suggestion as it is will punish progression raids, thats my point. On the raids you didnt link, rogues and mages are present, albeit at a lower number than SoM. And remember, the suggestion is to skew the high dps-classes more towards melee than SoM has, since windfury/bok/bom is on another power level than other types of stacking.

[Shamma]

No, removing WBs will not in any way affect progression raids. During progression you wipe on every corner. You are mostly running w/o WBs! What it will affect is the weekly mindless repetition of already cleared raids by making them take somewhat longer as well as speed running times!

[Mekunekud]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

and on private servers, out of the top 500 DPS, 500 are warriors as no other DPS can come close with WBs.
Without them, T3 rogues and mages can start to approach warrior DPS but are still a good margin behind due to how overpowered HS queuing is.
Until HS queuing is fixed and warriors are unable to focus entirely on crit and AP after the 6% hit cap (with weapon skill), WBs buff warriors to untouchable levels and no other class benefits nearly as much from every single world buff as they do.
The real loss of world buffs is that they bring the lowest DPS upto the Naxx minimum DPS threshold and removing them will push them out. Which hurts them in the short term but will allow proper buffing to the specs so they can be involved.

[Xudo]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

While this is mainly a gear issue world buffs provide the following to every member of the raid that attains them: +18% Spell Crit, +10% Melee Crit, 340 Attack Power, +10 Mana every 5 seconds, +15 Flat, and 15% increase to All Stats, +300 Health equal to 30 Stamina, +15% Melee Attack Speed and +10% Movement Speed.

I think if devs remove Melee crit, melee attack power, melee attack speed buffs, then we'll see much less warriors in top dps list. I don't think it will somehow affect moonkins, elemental shamans, shadow priests, arcane mages.

[Apimius]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

While this is mainly a gear issue world buffs provide the following to every member of the raid that attains them: +18% Spell Crit, +10% Melee Crit, 340 Attack Power, +10 Mana every 5 seconds, +15 Flat, and 15% increase to All Stats, +300 Health equal to 30 Stamina, +15% Melee Attack Speed and +10% Movement Speed.

I think if devs remove Melee crit, melee attack power, melee attack speed buffs, then we'll see much less warriors in top dps list. I don't think it will somehow affect moonkins, elemental shamans, shadow priests, arcane mages.

this.

it will affect casters too, but meeles (mostly warriors) much more.

[Kairion]

There are two major powerplays that have to be considered when talking about the strength of totems + blessings

Scenario 1 Physical DPS
The first one is the Holy grail of melee dps with Blessing of Might, Kings, Strength Totem as well as Agility totem/WF on swich.

Assuming the following gear for calculations: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/gear-se ... rior-84750

The combination of all of these effects awards the player with
88 Strength from Strength of the Earth
88 Agility from Grace of AIr
222 AP from Improved Blessing of Might
about 45 Strength and 27 Agility from Kings (some scraps give or take couldn't be bother to factor in druid buff)

In total this amounts to 488 AP & 5.75% crit

For Comparison worldbuffs would give him the following (copied from OP):
10% Melee Crit, 340 Attack Power, +15 Flat, and 15% increase to All Stats, +300 Health equal to 30 Stamina, +15% Melee Attack Speed
Just noticed somewhere we miss a 10% dmg from Darkmoon horoscope that isnt listed yet

If we equate windfury roughly being worth the same as 15% attackspeed from rendbuff, its clear to see that the warriors extreme top end will be going down significantly compared to using worldbuffs but no totems.

Scenario 2 Casters
Casters gain a bit more mana
31.25 mp5 from Improved Manaspring totem (12.5 mp2)
39.6 mp5 from Improved Blessing of Wisdom

Ignoring spirit based manaregeneration the casters can get 20 mp5 more from class stacking compared to worldbuffs, they loose 18% Spell Crit in the exchange however.

So in conclusion the only one whos powerlevel arguably marginally increases with the new change would be non paladin healers.

The combination of Blessing of Salvation and Tranquil air totem could lead to casters being able to fire with impunity, but the 18% lower spellcritchance should mean that they can not realistically make full use of most of the free aggro reduction.

So purely mathematically speaking, it creates weaker raids where especially the classes that scale best with the worldbuffs (Warrior & Mage) are being brought closer to the baseline. This lowers the frustration of wiping and loosing worldbuffs, allows new content to be designed without having to consider the possibility of worldbuffs, and allows shamans to use the full extent of their class toolkit in Raids. I take this any day over having to run over half azeroth only to then die at burning adrenaline with full worldbuffs.

[Ugoboom]

No, removing WBs will not in any way affect progression raids. During progression you wipe on every corner. You are mostly running w/o WBs! What it will affect is the weekly mindless repetition of already cleared raids by making them take somewhat longer as well as speed running times!

It absolutely was. When we in old tabc were progging naxx, we only ever got our first kills of loatheb, maexna, patchwerk, when we had world buffs. These prog walls would have lasted much much much longer.

I also witnessed a raid team recently that was stuck on 4H because they simply ran out of time. Wbuffs allowed the re-clear portion of the raid to go faster when kept, but when wbuffs were lost, 4H prog was far more limited on time.

These both rally back to the clear problem that vanilla raids just take too long. It only sorta worked back in the day because blizzard was pumping new content at a good pace, and people ran on that hope to gear up and see the next bit of content faster. That doesn't work here.

The raids take too long, and wbuffs are a way we use to speed them up. When they go, we need replacements and even further improvements to the timeframe of raids to respect people's in-group times.

[Kairion]

The problem with the argument that worldbuffs save time discards the time spent gathering them beforehand. Just getting dragonslayer, zg buff and heading to naxx costs you 20-30 minutes. Including blasted lands and diremaul and you look at 45+ minutes if you dont spam teleport chars everywhere

Throw in songflower and thats a third of a typical raid evening.

So players spent the same amount of time to clear the dungeon, just with the risk of having it done for nothing if they wipe and not having to sit in teamspeak for the worldbuff gathering part.

The aspect of actually progressing a boss with wbs for the first time is more relevant. But you mustnt forget. Killing half the bosses in naxx each week also provides gear improvements that add up and allow a weaker raid to eventually clear when at it.

If at all, they should rather allow you to extend the id over two weeks to allow groups with less time dedicated to play to clear what they have on farm one week and progress on new bosses the next week. Rather than doing wb runs midway trough a raid because the tanks lost theirs and cant keep up in threat

And lastly its a pserver, you dont need to be done with mc in a month. Content release cycles here are way more fogiving

[Velite]

This is Classic Season of Mastery, with world buffs suspended and ofc no windfury/blessings stacking. 2 warlocks, 19 mages, 52 rogues and 427 warriors. When you dont have world buffs as an extra boost to pull out during progression you will instead replace the low dps classes. The suggestion would make it even more skewed to melee meta than this.

How can the answer to such a class imbalance be buffs that lower the difficulty ceiling so suboptimal is allowed, not desired by itself?

Nowhere have I said world buffs are the answer. I'm saying class imbalance will be worse without them, and without the world buff buffer you will instead have the optimal comp buffer. Of course it would be better to have a class being desired by itself, but that is not the suggestion on the table.

Except that is the suggestion, because from the balance budget, you need to subtract world buffs to make those specs desired by themselves. You cannot have improved specs and retain world buffs, or players will become as powerful as sunwell characters in naxx.

Most of the suggestions to improve the bad specs will essentially be to copy world buff effects and apply it to them. Now you will have world buff^2 characters. There is a reason why TBC did that but removed world buffs, so that characters will only at most be world buff powered, or should I say, spec buff powered.