Raid Builds - A leaders perspective

Atan@Unrest wrote:

this is exactly the reason why so many good Illusionists quit the game or change classes.
1) it doesnt make a huge difference if you are good or suck at your class for your raids success
2) as you cant get a feeling of acheivement through 1) the fun is gone and its an extreme button mashing for nothing
it is not primarily about dps, but dps is was the only thing where you could see a difference between a good and a bad Ilu. Running around with your buffs on or recasting them after death could be done by a 5-year old. A tank can "shine" with keeping aggro, a healer with keeping his group / raid alive in a hard fight. Dps classes can see their parses. Illusionist only have a small gap where they parse either above or below the healers (which keep their group alive as a "side-effect")

Ebarel wrote:

Illy's can shine by not being complete tools and actually using time warp effectively, rather than setting up a fail "time warp rotation". Seriously? You can't have anything worthwhile come out of giving someone 5s of spell double attack at some random interval.
That's why we call them failly's.

Seriously time warp can just £"$£" off. As can anyone preaching at me about its use. If you really need that 5s of spell double attack to stroke your ****** then you aren't all that anyway.

^^ which is the difference between a good illy(or any utility for that matter) and a bad one. Some know how important temp buffs are, others are just simple minded buff bots

Yeah, you're really making a great argument about the fun-value of the illusionist class when you're saying their role in life is to double Elemental Blast.

Oh a bunch of us posted predictions back during beta that you were going to see a marked drop in the population of enchanters, heavily on the illy side, as SF progressed due to the classes being tremendously less fun than they used to be. That's not a good excuse to be completely fail with Time Warp though. And I play a Coercer, I don't get Time Warped ever.

A utility class expected to use their utility abilities wisely, whodathunkit. Chanters have plenty of use, it just don't always show up on their personal parse for them to stroke their ego's. If using temp buffs and making those around you better is not fun for you, and if you're just looking for your own personal parse, roll an assassin or wiz because you chose the wrong class.

Illus still seem weak compared to Coercers, though.
Plus, it's a shame that the utility has to be bard-ish utility and not real crowd control things.

rangers are weak to assassins, warlocks to wizards, pallies to SK's, it's pretty common. You do have a point about the crowd control but how do they implement it? The more crowd control they add the less ae classes get to do, so someones getting the shaft one way or the other.

Korrupt@Najena wrote:

It has nothing to do with hating being utility, it's about the implementation. Victorious Concerto is fun, because it actually requires some sort of active play from the bard and coordination from the group. Other buffs, like Time Warp, are designed to be cast on someone by request, disrupt your normal play, and annoy the hell out of you. I'm yet to ever meet a player who -enjoys- using abilities like Jester's Cap or Timewarp. It can be important, but it's basically a nuisance to coordinate things for relatively minor gain (even a few hundred thousand damage for idealized time warps should work out to be under a percent of your raid's damage - whoop-dee-doo). Thematically in terms of playing a utility class both serve the same function in terms of boosting raid dps rather than dealing it yourself, but the implementations are totally different, and one rewards you for being something other than what you could trivially script a bot to do. It has the same fun value of statue clicking and so on, except with the added bonus of slowly growing to hate other players or the game rather than a badly designed encounter.

Illusionists also need their buffs reevaluated in my opinion. I know they're designed primarily for mage-buffing, but as a monk I get next to nothing from having an illy in group: my haste and double attack are already well capped. I can't tell you how many times our illy has been reduced to putting IA on the shaman's dog because no one else could use it.

Unless you have raided with a illy you have NO IDEA what you are talking about. I played a illy for a long time, raided at the top level of the game and it is hands down by far the most annoying, frustrating, totally NON FUN class in the game.

slippery wrote:

Please do. If you want to write 10 pages of this stuff that's fine with me. Some people were complaining they already knew it. Good for them. They don't have to read it. There's many who do not or haven't seen it from the overall picture you're looking at. A discussion of how raid builds from someone NOT trying to push buffs to their class are desperately needed.
Call it Raid Builds for N00bs if that would help. Other experienced raid leaders could put in their own CONSTRUCTIVE ideas. But constructive dialog would be very welcome.

TwistedFaith wrote:

Did you play a healer last expansion? Do you play a high end healer this one where encounters ride 80-90% on you?

im tired of
healer stacking
utility stacking
Curses , and last but not least any mechanic that takes you out of a fight for ages

START TO DESGIN SOME MORE CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS , ASK TIMETRAVEL HOW TO CREATE CHALLENGING BUT NON FRUSTRATING ENCOUNTERS but it seems like THAT the remaining designers are simply not good enough for it

and get it in your head that abilites like Time Warp and Jesters Cap are absolutley horrible designed

Gilasil wrote:

He is not posting this for people that do not know.
I thought that was abundantly clear.

EasternKing wrote:

No one cares why you think he made the OP. I thought that was abundently clear.
Even if his intentions were purely selfish it has since been repurposed. The previous posters of this thread you dumped on didn't seem to have a problem figuring that out. Try and catch up please.
Albatroz wrote:

Jesters Cap on the raid at one time would be awful - most people need jcap for specific abilities at very specific times and this sort of change would really hamper that. It can be cast raid-wide now and the recast isn't that long.

Time Warp on the other hand would be fine if changed to be raid-wide temp buff.

Neiloch@Kithicor wrote:

See, the thing is, Roger thinks he can just keep putting more curses on an encounter and we will just bring 6 healers. With those 6 healers we will then just not cure anything and wait till we get lucky. It isn't realistic.

As a guild leader of a fairly sucessful raiding guild, I went into the SF expansion with the express desire to reduce my healer count from eight to six. I wanted to do it, badly! I tweaked my personnel around to be sure we were set up for it.
And then we saw the expansion. We fought against going to eight healers for a long time, but it just wasn't realistic. We were pulling Pera'Celsis before the nerf. We tried for weeks with six healers, never getting anything resembling a successful pull, let alone a kill. The first night we brought eight healers, the mob died. First on server to kill it. But it required 8 healers.
The current design that "requires" 8 healers and 8 utility / buffing classes is stupid. And annoying. Oh, and not fun.