Blue post - BoW & Mana SpringFollow

thanks for posting that here. i hadn't seen that yet. very interesting... i think i kinda like it.... it'll help a lot with making some buffing desicions easier at times.... should be a good change.

the comment about unique buffs is BEFORE they make BoW & mana spring non-stacking.

So, right now, you need 3 pallies if you want BoSanc, BoK and BoW... that's assuming you're having a warrior do BoM. if not you'd need a 4th to bring BoM... and then of course the Hand spells. And unique Aura's (1200/1800 Armor, 112-160 reflective damage, 35% spell pushback reduction). no class has any buff that our base aura's are non-stacking with. the damage and haste %'s for ret aura and healing bonus for imp devo are non-stacking, but the base (and even some parts of the improved ones) are unique. and of course we can put up resist aura's with much less loss than shammies... except the shadow one where priests have better....

all in all, pallies are in a good place for raid buffs and even with BoW being non-stacking there will still be plenty of reason to bring pallies... but now if you are lower on pallies 2 pallies can bring all the unique blessings (still need 3 for all unique aura's) a party could need if you have a fury warrior and shaman. imo it's more the fact that shammies have so many unique buffs that they're doing this.... shammies seem to have even more than us. either way, pallies and shamans have the most unique buffs EVEN after this change. and keep in mind if you have to use a shammy to do this buff you are missing out on some possibly important totems. if you have a pally available for it, the shammy can do better totems, so it doesn't mean you won't WANT a pally... just won't NEED the 3rd prolly...

My guess is that BoW is being dropped down to Mana Spring's level (or both are going lower), since they're all about gimping mana regen this patch...

Might and wisdom will always be superior to battle shout and mana spring totem, because you can just fire-and-forget for the next 30 minutes. On dynamic encounters with lots of moving around you wont have to worry about going out of range of wherever the shaman has placed their totems. Battle shout lasts 2 minutes (without the glyphs/talents).

I'm betting shaman are worrying about this change a lot more than pallys. Don't forget a group will ALWAYS want at least one retribution paladin (because of the heart of the crusader debuff, replenishment, the damage and haste boost from ret aura) and many encounters are considerably eaasier with a holy paladin. I respecced prot yesterday and can't move for group invites.

We wont even have to worry about wasting points on kings after the patch.

This change to BoW and Mana Spring totem does not bother me. Now the Shaman can use a different totem instead, which is probably a good thing.

The change that does bother me is BoSanc. Right now BoSanc provides 3% damage reduction plus adds Rage, Runic Power or Mana every time you dodge/parry/block. Therefore, it benefited all tanks in a raid. The Druid/Warrior tanks would generate Rage from dodges/parries/blocks (no blocks for the druid of course), and DK tanks would generated Runic Power for dodges/parries (again no block).

From what I have heard, BoSanc in 3.1 is only going to regenerate mana from dodges/parries/blocks, so the 3% damage reduction for Warrior, Druid, and DK tanks is still nice, but other than that it does NOTHING for them. Still nice for a Mage if you have the mage kiting adds on Gluth I suppose....

I'm not so much against the change to Wisdom/Mana Spring as I am worried that they might take this buff thing too far and extend it to all buffs. The Might thing: we don't have a Ret Paly in the guild, nor have we had enough people to run 25 mans until recently (and that's with PuGing out 5-10 raid slots. We've got plenty of Warriors though, so without Imp. Might, handing out Might is a waste of reagents, cause they just overwrite it anyway.

I don't know. It's a good thing that you don't have to "stack raids" anymore to get just the perfect balance of classes (which I never liked anyway, and one reason I never really went for a 'hardcore' guild), but at the same time it does actually complicate matters when deciding who will do what, and brings classes closer to each other, which nobody likes. Class homogenization has always been something people wanted to stay away from, and these changes, in my opinion, are going too far in that direction.