LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

Bring the player, not the class.  Blizzard has been pushing this mantra since the days of vanilla-WoW.  Burning crusade brought the expansion of many class’s roles.  You didn’t have to have a warrior tanking, druids could do it too, you didn’t have to have a priest for healing, shaman, paladins, and druids could step in as well.  Blizzard has come a long way with the idea that a raid should be comprised of the best players, not necessarily just the best class composition, but there is still some work to do.

Shaman supply 100% of your raid's daily recommended value of bloodlust.

Take for example the guild that I currently raid with.  We are a small 10 man guild, so we handle raid attendance with a Google spreadsheet (cha-ching), so members can easily post whether or not they are going to be able to make the raid.  Below the members we have a list of things that we must have for each raid, raid requirements if you will, in no particular order they are: two tanks, two (at least) healers, some dps, replenishment, and bloodlust.  Not bad.  Warriors and paladins can both tank (sorry druids no love for you here), shaman, druids, paladins, and priests can all heal and we just fill in the rest with DPS.  Pretty easy right?  Well, we learned pretty quickly that our healers need mana, (basically we hit E on Lady Deathwhisper) so we added replenishment to the list of requirements for the raid.  As it turns out hunters, warlocks, and priests can all satisfy the replenishment requirement so no problem there.  But wait, there was one more item on that list – Bloodlust.  This is the one ability in the game that breaks Blizzard’s “bring the player not the class” mantra; bloodlust is a must-have and you can only get it from a shaman.  It’s so important to a raid, in fact,  that there are times that I would rather have 9 raiders and a trained monkey-controlled shaman with only bloodlust on his action bar (henceforth known as a TMCSWOBOHAB, ok maybe I will ditch the acronym) than 10 raiders without a shaman.

Just put a banana on the bloodlust key.

Don’t believe me?  Here are the fights in ICC that I would rather have a trained monkey shaman than a 10th non-shaman raider: Saurfang, Rotface, Putricide, Blood queen, and Sindragosa, (and maybe even Valithria).  That is five of the twelve bosses in ICC.  For those of you math inclined folks out there, that is almost half the boss encounters I would take a shaman controlled by a trained monkey over a tenth non-shaman raider.  If the monkey could keep the shaman alive for the fight and cast bloodlust when we called for it, I would be happy.  No damage, no healing, just cast bloodlust when we need it.  Why?  Because bloodlust gives the raid 30% additional haste, you can argue the numbers but that correlates to somewhere around 30% more damage and 30% more healing – for 40 seconds.  So why is it better to have 9 raiders and trained monkey pressing bloodlust than 10 raiders without bloodlust?  Because so many of the boss encounters have a phase of the encounter (generally the last) where the proverbial poop hits the fan; Saurfang has his mark, Rotface starts throwing out infections faster, Sindragosa decides to encapsulate people in ice, etc.  These are the difficult phases of the encounter, the rest is trivial, and these are the phases that speed is of the essence.  The faster the boss dies, the less chance of something random and very, very bad happening.  It’s so important to finish those phases quickly (look at phase 3 of Putricide) that I would rather have one less raider and more DPS for one phase (thanks to bloodlust) than one more raider for the entire encounter.  Think about it, 9 players putting out 30% increased damage is much more than 10 raiders with no damage buff.

Raiding without bloodlust? Ok, a little hyperbole.

And that is why Bloodlust (or Heroism, with you are Alliance inclined) is the single most game-breaking (Blizzard mantra breaking) ability in WoW.  I like relying on bloodlust about as much as a deflated life raft in a shark tank.  So how can we fix it?  Well I have a few ideas.  The easiest (and quickest) fix would be to give the buff (or some version of it) to other classes.  How about a “Divine inspiration” buff for pallies?  Or maybe mages could hand out “Magical quickness” as well as water.  Personally I prefer mages.  They do not have many raid wide buffs currently (Arcane Intellect being the exception) and are also ranged DPS which nicely complements the shaman (melee DPS or healer).  Of course that is the quick fix, there is also the long way out – change bloodlust.  Right now, it’s pretty insane 30%ish extra damage and healing, why not use it?  What if Bloodlust made you 30% faster but also take 30% more damage?  Now you would have to use it with care.  It can make the boss disappear but can also blow up in your face.  The only problem with “nerfing” bloodlust is that it would effectively buff all the existing boss encounters that depend on it.  Can you imagine doing Putricide in phase 3 with 30% more damage – Yeouch!  One way or the other, I would like to see the dependence on Bloodlust disappear that way we could chop the end off of “Bring the player, not the class – unless you are a shaman.”