Archive for November, 2008
Away for a Week or So; Part One of Series Unfinished
0Considering my role as a guild and raid leader, it is very important that I hit 80 as soon as possible. With schoolwork and actual work stacked on top of the obligation I have to my raiders, this means I must divert attention away from blogging for about a week. Unfortunately, this also means I will not finish part one of my series on developing a successful hardcore raiding guild before the release of Wrath. I was hoping to, but I was unhappy with the first draft and now I do not have the time to finish it before I get in my extra sleep before Wrath’s release.
If this was a paying gig, I would sacrifice some of my leveling time to finish it. Alas, it is not. And I have my own interests to look out for as much as my readers’. That said, I want to acknowledge the fact that a lot of you are thinking of or committed to leading your own hardcore raiding guild in Wrath. So I will summarize a few important points.
Make Sure You’re Ready to Lead a Hardcore 25-Man Raiding Guild
You need to understand there is a level of micromanagement required to play the game on a hardcore level. A guild would never have defeated M’uru if their approach was merely to fill gaps with moderately adequate players and then brute force it. You needed a certain amount of cumulative DPS to have any chance at all in defeating M’uru. And often times this was higher than people realized. 2K for all but shadow priests, ret paladins, and slightly undergeared balance druid was unacceptable (and, even then, you tended to sit your ret pallies because they coudn’t contribute as much as, say, a fifth heroism or another warlock). And while you may never see an encounter as difficult as M’uru or Kil’jaeden ever again, a hardcore guild will err on the side of caution and find players who can micromanage and do everything they need to improve.
The same is said for the formation of strategies. It’s one thing to follow someone’s strategy point-for-point, and it’s another to find people who can refine them or to refine them yourself. If you want to be efficient in your success, then you need to march to your own beat at times. There’s a reason a lot of raiders call Bosskillers “Bossguessers.” Sometimes the written strategies are not the best in general, nor the best for your guild specifically.
I don’t think you need previous leadership experience explicitly to run a hardcore raiding guild, but it does help. Personally, I was the leader of a top clan in a game called Nox for six months straight, then a player in a small clan that had no real leadership structure (because it was just four of the best players in Nox banding together to dominate the competition outright). While only a total of maybe 2000 people competed in the clan ladder every month, it was still a lesson in what was necessary to lead a successful group of gamers. And while competition for world firsts is not always the focus of some hardcore raiding guilds, competitive experience can give people the tools they need to lead and help improve a guild on a personal level.
That said, I think you need to have witnessed leadership styles that exist in MMO’s. This can be done either as a leader yourself or as an underling watching the leadership. If you’ve never played an MMO before, however, you will be unfamiliar with concepts such as DKP and probably lose members when you can’t answer the question, “Why do(n’t) we use DKP?”
Develop Your Ideas, Philosophies and Guild Structure Before You Create It
While it is certainly possible to create a successful hardcore raiding guild on a whim, I don’t advise it. It’s best to develop ideas and philosophies for your guild and set them in stone through the guild’s written rules and structure. Even if that means your written structure is to “have a loose structure that gives way for flexibility that might be necessary for [your] success.” Some top guilds have no written structure other than this agreement. But they are very, very rare and are almost always well-established with highly mature players (and anyone who can’t work in the system gets the boot).
That said, at least decide what sort of loot system you want. Decide the amount of time you want to raid and when. State the type of conduct you expect from your members. And declare your goals and intentions. If you are going to go for world firsts, say so. If you are aiming to merely create an efficient raid that places respectably, say so. If you’re merely hoping to create an efficient raid that can beat content, improve and have fun, say so.
People join and leave guilds based on their philosophies, schedules, loot systems, leaders and rules. If you do not clearly state how your guild operates or plans to operate, you can lose people or fail to attract recruits. Especially if your guild is new and has no progression ranking.
Establish Yourself, and Become a Visible Figure on Your Server
While not absolutely necessary, it does help your cause if you can either prove to be a promising leader or create some sort of publicity for yourself before you create your guild. The more people know you somehow, the more people will think about applying to your guild.
I did this by playing pretty much every part of the game. PvP. PvE. And by joining PUG raids and even leading my own PUG MC that managed to kill Ragnaros every week except two (out of ten). I also did this by racing to become the first 70 on Proudmoore during TBC (in which I was successful). This generated some publicity and showed how committed I was to the ideal of efficiency.
While such exploits do not always cause people to apply, they can help your cause.
When You Recruit, State Your Intentions
When you first recruit for your guild, make sure you clearly state what you intend your guild to be. If people want to join the top guild on the server, and you hope to overcome the competition to do so, say so. That’s what I did. And I don’t think we would have managed it if I hadn’t.
The same can be said if you don’t. Especially if you reside on a server that has one or more of the world’s top guilds. You can bet that if Premonition ever transferred to Proudmoore, I’d openly admit we don’t intend to compete with them. There’s just no way we could on a twenty-hour schedule.
Don’t Be a Prick!
I’ve seen a lot of hardcore progression guilds fall apart or drop out of the stresses of hardcore progression because their leaders are pricks. Very rarely do they reform and recoop from the ousting of a cantankerous dictator. There’s a good reason why Nihilum and SK Gaming rose to become number one in their respective times (and now they are merging, but that’s a different story).
Don’t make the same mistake! Your players will perform better if you’re not constantly yelling at them, or if you fail to approach your guild’s problems reasonably.
Have Fun! Or Find Satisfaction!
If you can’t have fun or find some satisfaction in leading a hardcore raiding guild, don’t do it. Plain and simple.
Wow. That turned into something that is almost what I wanted to say in my first two parts. I guess stress really is a part of writer’s block. Anyway, that’s it for now. See you after Wrath!
–Lume
Developing a Successful Raiding Guild: A Prologue
4November 9, 2008
About a month ago, someone on my server approached me and asked for my advice on leading a successful raiding guild. This person wasn’t interested in building a guild that could score world firsts or dominate the server competition. Such advice is something I cannot give, as I do not have any experience leading guilds of such caliber. Rather, they simply wanted to know what made Lunacy successful, and how they could go about improving their own guild.
First, however, I must lay out the history of Lunacy and define the style of guild it is. This is, afterall, the context in which I give advice, make decisions, and formulate opinions.
What Lunacy Is, and What It’s Not
Lunacy is a top 100 guild in the U.S. Our kill of M’uru placed 40th in the U.S., while our defeat of Kil’jaeden slipped us down to 64th. With this in mind, we can be considered hardcore. However, we are not a top 20 guild. We are not currently on the same level as any of the guilds on the front page of WoWProgress. Nor did we strive to achieve such a feat during The Burning Crusade.
I’m not about to pretend we’re something we’re not. However, to have killed Entropius (M’uru) well before his first nerf, and to have defeated Kil’jaeden two months before 3.0.2 is no small feat. This puts us in a relatively small class, at the 99.6th percentile of ranked guilds on WoWProgress.
Furthermore, having survived both M’uru and Kil’jaeden as a guild, whom people so fondly refer to as “the guild killers” is also an accomplishment I think is a testament to our guild and our ideals. We value the skill in our members and are constantly evaluating the level at which we play. If we cannot succeed or efficiently progress with the members we have, either we must improve or change our members. In this regard, we can be considered hardcore.
At the same time, however, I am not about to set a raid schedule of five, six or seven days a week. I value the lives of our members, as well as my own. It is simply impossible in this day and age for a person to raid on such a rigorous schedule and still manage to hold some semblance of a normal life. For this reason, we can perhaps be considered casual.
Hence, I always like to refer to Lunacy as a guild with a casual schedule that can accommodate raiders who approach their play in a hardcore manner. We are a “hardcore-casual” guild.
A Brief History of Lunacy
Lunacy did not exist during 1.x. Well, it did, but it was an entirely different guild than it was during The Burning Crusade.
During 1.x, I raided with various guilds. These included Exigence, Black Wolf Mercenaries and Project Mayhem on Proudmoore, as well as Zero Tolerance on Azgalor. My times with Exigence, Project Mayhem and Zero Tolerance were very short. And while my time with Black Wolf was extensive, I could no longer raid with them regularly once they had transitioned to a schedule that was exclusively Australian. After my stint with Project Mayhem, I evaluated my guild options and decided Proudmoore had nothing to offer me. One guild didn’t use voice communication, which I thought was imperative to success during certain encounters. One guild had a prominent officer that ninja’d loot from the raid of a close friend of mine and gloated about it on IRC. Another only raided weekends. And the last option I had was another Australian guild. With all of these guilds ruled out, I decided I would create my own guild at the start of TBC, and spent my time raiding casually with Black Wolf, PUGing BWL, running a PUG MC, and playing the TBC beta.
At first, I was going to transfer servers and start the guild elsewhere. I thought the Australian-American split between Proudmoore’s population was too problematic. However, I realized it would be difficult to establish a guild as a fresh face, and my co-GM convinced me to stay by offering to help lead the guild. This was when the modern version of Lunacy was born. I originally did not want to adopt the same name as my first guild, but Silver was a part of the original incarnation and insisted on the name. So I buckled and agreed, even though they are completely different guilds.
From there, we began recruiting. At the launch of TBC, we had merely five people who intended on raiding with us full-time. After a couple weeks, we had only eight capped members and raided Karazhan with a couple friends filling the last slots. From there, we slowly built our guild from the ground up, running heroics nearly every day to trial potential members and invite those we felt were adequate in meeting the guild’s standards.
Initially, our goal for the guild was set relatively low. The general idea was to create a guild that had the potential to break down raiding walls efficiently and clear all of the bosses in any given content cycle. This is something Proudmoore failed to do in Naxxramas, never defeating Gothik in Naxx-60 before the release of TBC. It was my intention to fill this hole and challenge other guilds by creating a guild that would compete on a level higher than Proudmoore was seeing in the waning days of 1.x.
From Hydross on, Lunacy achieved this goal. The only two bosses we did not achieve sever firsts on in tier five content and above were Lurker and Illidan. Illidan was a major blow to the guild, no doubt. However, it did not dent our morale and instilled in us a desire to rise again to number one in the Sunwell Plateau. Also, it was easy for us to take heart in losing the server first on Illidan, because we only lost by 30 minutes and actually managed to do something no one else in the world had done at the time. We were the first guild in the world to achieve a progression kill (that is, a “guild first”) with a paladin tanking Illidan.
Losing Black Temple to Renaissance did bring us back down to reality, however. Following the loss, we heightened our recruitment standards and vowed to approach Sunwell with an aggression that would elevate us to an entirely different level. If someone’s DPS still needed work, we simply erred on the side of caution and denied them entry into the guild. If they couldn’t deal with various situational abilities, they didn’t make the cut. However, I will admit mistake in being loathe to replace, cut or demote some of the existing members whose performance wasn’t up to our new standard. In this regard, we were slowly evolving, but there were some problems that persisted because we were still a developing guild.
As time passed, we became more concerned with our residual problems. After stalling for some time on Felmyst, Silver and I decided that we would sit anyone we felt wasn’t up to the task at hand for specific encounters. If someone was likely to conflag the raid on the Twins, they would only come in if we absolutely needed them. If someone’s DPS was too poor, we’d put in someone else on M’uru. This new caution and standard led us to place extremely well on M’uru (40th in the U.S.).
However, we weren’t done making refinements and our problems caught up with us. With the midsummer months bringing forth a great amount of attrition, anyone who hadn’t defeated Kil’jaeden faced waning membership and a limited recruitment pool. For this reason, it took us two months to defeat Kil’jaeden. Admittedly, this was perhaps also because we faced some internal problems outside the scope of membership. This experience provided me with perhaps the most perspective on just what I needed to do with the guild to make it successful in the future. For one, recruitment needed to be more aggressive. For another, I needed to act on not only performance problems, but also attitude problems. You can’t build a good raid or succeed if one or two people are souring the mood. And you can’t build a good raid if people don’t adhere to your guild’s philosophies. It is not enough to have people who show up everyday. You need to have people who exemplify what you expect from your raiders. You need to fill holes in your raid. And you need to hammer home your guild’s philosophies.
With that said, we now have a raid that I believe is even stronger than it was during our first kill of Entropius. I have a great amount of confidence in the foundation we’ve built for Wrath, which is something we obviously didn’t have during TBC when we were entirely new. That said, there are challenges ahead in transitioning to a new expansion. But I am not ready to discuss my plans for the future, as they are still being evaluated and decisions are still being made.
Needless to say, the evolution of Lunacy has been astounding and I have a great foundation on which to further build and improve the guild during Wrath.
What to Expect from This Guide
This series of posts is being written for people who hope to create or lead their own hardcore raiding guilds, and for those who find themselves thrust into the leadership ranks of such guilds. This compendium will offer advice and provide contextual examples for the creation, management and improvement of guilds that want to raid on a hardcore level, but maintain an atmosphere that breaks the mold from most other hardcore raiding guilds.
The series will cover the creation, building and refinement of a hardcore raiding guild. It will provide contextual examples from my own experiences, as well as references to the guilds who have ideas I sometimes like to emulate. It will begin by detailing the situations that can lead to the creation of a guild, followed by ideas on how to develop interest in the guild, how to evaluate players interested in joining, how to improve the efficiency and skill of the raid after the foundation has been set, and how to make any renovations necessary to heighten the success of the guild.
Now Is Not the Time to Evaluate CoH and WG
15November 6, 2008
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.
Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.
We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest’s healing is through CoH. It’s a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.
A priest said to us the other day “Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!” He’s even thinking of going Disc.
–GC (src)
In my opinion, it would be a mistake for the development team to evaluate this now. 3.0.2 has nerfed the current content so hard that people are using circle of healing and wild growth so frequently because the tanks are taking virtually no damage at any given moment. Further, it is because a lot of the existing raid encounters were designed with raid-wide damage in mind. What’s more, there could be sarcasm, exaggeration or ignorance underlying a statement like “Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!”
From Felmyst on, in Sunwell Plateau, the raid-wide damage is enormous. It’s only natural that you’re going to see a large amount of raid-wide heals going off, especially when the tanks are taking so much less damage than they were pre-3.0.2.
Furthermore, Naxxramas and the Obsidian Sanctum are entry level raid dungeons. You can’t possibly balance spells solely around entry level content. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of Naxxramas’ fundamental encounter design was based around level 60 tools.
So to evaluate CoH and WG now would be a mistake. One of the reasons CoH was changed and WG added was because you only had the group-only CoH and chain healing to deal with high amounts of raid damage. So tack on heroism, and shamans were too highly valued, making the change to CoH and the addition of WG necessary to make sure shamans didn’t dominate the scene also in Wrath. So to go back on this now would be tragic.
While there will definitely be some need to balance the spells against each other in the future, depending on just how well CoH or WG scale in comparison, now is not the time to do it. The current content is not a good benchmark for it. Especially when you additionally consider that the parses are showing high percentages largely because these classes are assigned by their healing leaders to cover raid-wide healing, while others are assigned to focus on the tanks.
When and Why WG Is Used, and When It Is Not: A Look at Specific Encounters
Rage Winterchill
The tank takes virtually no damage in this encounter. Even before 3.0.2, the tank literally had to stand in death and decay to artificially generate rage (or mana, in the case of a paladin tank). Because he hits for virtually nothing and spends a lot of his time casting spells, very little focus is placed on tank healing, which is best combated through single-target heals.
He does, however, cast a frostbolt that entombs someone in a block of ice and deals heavy damage to this target. A druid will not use WG when this happens. I would be casting regrowth, a nature’s swiftnessed healing touch, or rejuvenation followed by a quick swiftmend to keep this person alive.
Death and decay is a raid-wide damage spell. When he uses this spell, I am naturally going to use WG. What’s more, he cannot cast a frostbolt and this spell simultaneously, so I don’t have to worry about looking for the frostbolt the moment it goes up. And because he hits the tank so softly, I have time to cast WG. Often more than once, even.
Kaz’rogal
There is very little raid-wide damage that goes on during this encounter. The only time the raid-wide damage is high is when someone runs out of mana and blows up on people. If there is a high amount of WG or CoH casts during this encounter, it’ is because someone didn’t manage their mana well, or because the raid’s DPS is so poor they didn’t kill him before people started blowing up.
Because my raid kills him so quickly, I spend most of my time keeping single-target HoTs up on the tank. However, even then, because 3.0.2 nerfed the boss’s melee so much, this is usually only when he cleaves the tank. So 3.0.2 has lowered the amount of single-target heals I cast even in this encounter.
Azgalor
Rain of fire is the big damage dealer in this encounter. And because only the cleave does significant damage to the tank, I primarily focus on making sure I have full HoTs up on him only when the silence is incoming. This is because the paladins won’t be healing him at all during the silence, and I don’t want the cleave to gib the tank. Otherwise, outside of the silence, the paladins are focusing on the tank and I’m focusing on dealing with rain of fire damage. WG is the natural choice for this.
Archimonde
I don’t use WG as much on this fight as I do single-target heals. This is because the damage is concentrated on people randomly, given the very nature of doomfire’s random trajectory and the erratic synchronization of various abilities. The only time I do use WG on this fight is when a large group of people standing next to each other get doomfire at the same time. Otherwise, I’m using single-target heals.
He can still hit the tank relatively hard compared to other bosses, even after 3.0.2, so I often throw heals on the tank. Also, as a raid healing leader, I can’t micromanage my assignments given the random nature of the abilities people have to deal with. So everyone is going to be casting single-target heals when the tank looks to be in danger. This is because other people might be busy running from a doomfire, flying through the air, preparing for a fear, or decursing.
With my guild, usually only one or two people in close proximity get doomfire at a time. This is because we’ve been dealing with this encounter for ages and most people are familiar with the fight. So instead of spamming WG, I just throw singular heals. The only time a lot of people get doomfire is when Archimonde throws down a fresh doomfire next to people right before he fears them into it. Otherwise, you have time to get away from an existing doomfire and tremor totem usually pulses before people get anywhere near them.
Supremus
During the “tank and spank” phase, people don’t generally spread out. However, they are also not taking a lot of raid-wide damage. Post-3.0.2, it is primarily the off-tanks that take the damage, as special abilities weren’t nerfed damage-wise. However, the primary tank takes little damage. With the focus mostly on only two people, I’m primarily casting single-target HoTs on them.
During the “loose” phase, when he’s running around at people and spawning volcanoes, people are too spread out sometimes for WG to be profitable. For this reason, I have a mixture of both WG and single-target heals.
If you are seeing parses with a lot of WG during Supremus’ loose phase, it’s because the people have a hard time taking a peak away from their raid frames at the player out on the field. So sometimes people will just spam WG because they’re not cognizant of just how spread out people are from the person they’re casting on. Me? I tend to use player health bars and cast on someone who is actually close to dying near me. I imagine I likely save more people’s lives doing that than someone who is indiscriminately spamming a raid heal (unless it’s CH, because its healing is concentrated on the first target, meaning lack of discrimination is less impactful).
Teron
In 3.0.2, the damage on the tank is a joke. Even before 3.0.2, when he was considered one of the more hard-hitting bosses of BT, you could keep up the tank merely with two people spamming chain heals through him or her. So, post-3.0.2, you can imagine that my raid is mostly assigned to raid healing, of which there is a fairly substantial amount. I think I assigned only one paladin to heal the tank and the rest just threw him heals when it was needed (which was virtually never). So, naturally, people were spamming their group heals in high concentration.
Gurtogg
This fight is designed for raid heals, be they chain heal, wild growth or circle of healing. Even before 3.0.2, I assigned bloodboil by group number, meaning we could use CoH to explicitly deal with the mechanic. With the way the encounter is designed, you are simply going to have people who cast primarily raid-wide heals.
Illidan
This is a fight where the spell use depends on the phase and situation. In phase one, there is pretty much no raid-wide damage. The only damage anyone other than the tank can take is from flame crash (the fiery circle Illidan leaves on the ground), and parasites. Flame crash is avoidable by the melee, so they should take no damage from it if your tank positions well and your melee pays attention. Meanwhile, parasite is cast only on a single target. If the resulting parasite mob spawns are dealt with in the correct manner, no new parasites should spread from it, either. So only single-target healing is used in this phase, typically.
Phase two is a mixture of single-target and raid-wide damage. The two flame tanks are going to be taking heavy single-target damage. However, once you have assigned enough single-target healing to them, the rest of your healing is going to be focusing primarily on the raid-wide damage thrown out. This is due to Illidan’s fireball, which does splash damage. There is not enough space on the grate to spread people evenly out and avoid the splash damage. So the way we deal with it is to clump into groups of four. So roughly five or more people are going to take damage, making WG and CoH ideal in this case.
Then you have the final phases. During the human phase, you have to deal with the same thing as phase one. However, instead of merely parasites and flame crash, you also have agonizing flames. However, if your raid is positioned properly, agonizing flames should not be spread beyond its initial target. So only two or three people should have agonizing at any given point. And because these people should be at range and spread out, WG or CoH is not ideally worth using. For this reason, single-target heals still reign.
During the demon phase, however, it’s a different story. You will have residual agonizing flames from the human phase, and possibly a residual parasite. Following this, the damage will largely be focused on the demon tank (usually a lock). So most of the healing is going to be single-target in nature on the demon tank. But we will use an ability called flame burst, which does damage to everyone in the raid. After a flame burst is when people will definitely be using WG or CoH. Otherwise, single-target heals are still best.
The use of WG and CoH is concentrated during phase two and right after a flame burst. Phase two is less than half the fight, though it is an important part. And flame burst isn’t constantly being cast during his demon phase (which many call “phase four”). So WG and CoH have their place, but they should not dominate the choices people make in an optimal rotation for the fight.
This parse shows masterfully how the design of Illidan makes it so WG does not chew up 70 to 90% of his casts in an ideal mixture of healing spells. Gian did more healing than anyone else on the fight, even the priest whose cast mostly CoH during phase two and then random spots of DPS, renews and shields.
Kil’Jaeden
WG has its place in this fight, no doubt. But mostly when you collapse and spread after collapsing. It also has its place during flame darts and right after the fire blooms go up. But once the fire blooms are up and people react to them, the spread of people is too large for WG to be ideal. At this point, I’m stacking single-target HoTs and casting regrowth to keep them alive.
This is another parse where Gian tops of the meters. The parse shows that WG was ranked third in the number of his casts.
Spell Use Depends on Encounter Design and Assignments
Some of the examples I’ve given weigh heavily towards the over-use of WG and CoH that the developers are worried about. However, I have also given adequate counter-examples as to where the use of those spells depends on encounter design. To change these spells now would likely throw a wrench into the encounters currently being designed, since the raid developers consider what tools people have available to them. This is why DPS in Sunwell was balanced around the pre-3.0.2 use of heroism and why a lot of raid-wide damage was based around chain healing. In order to create a high level of difficulty, the designers had to consider the best tools for the job. And the major problem was that the people who could bring such tools were limited in number. With the change to CoH and WG creates a situation where more people are capable of bringing those tools.
So it astounds me the process through which the ideas have been implemented and reconsidered. As a joke, I used to reply to people asking for advice on how to beat the Twins by saying, “Just throw resto shamans at them.” While amusing, it was absolutely true. That was the best way to approach the encounter. CoH was just too terrible for dealing with flame sear, given that it that flame sear was not limited to groups, as CoH was. This made recruitment frustrating, as the pool of resto shamans was so limited. So the change to CoH and the addition of WG were extremely welcome and have provided a more than solid fix to what was once a huge balancing issue.
But now the development team is concerned with the overuse of such spells, even though the overuse is merely indicative of encounter design and sometimes unideal approaches to healing by individual players. Parses are not suggestive of the optimal approach to healing, merely of what is adequate. And the fact that people are beating content with tons of priests and druids spamming one spell is simply because the content is extremely easy right now. As the encounters become more finely tuned in the later content of Wrath, you will discover people who only spam CoH or WG becoming less and less successful as they continue to use a strategy that is not prime in every situation. When two people in close proximity are taking a steady stream of damage, prayer of mending is better to use for a priest. When one person is taking heavy damage, stacking single-target HoTs is best. Not CoH. Not WG.
I’ve provided ample counter-examples that already exists to show when CoH and WG are not ideal to use to maximize healing throughput. I’ve also provided counter-examples that explain what is best used for keeping people alive, not simply for topping the meters.
CoH and WG for PvP?
I should also perhaps mention PvP, since it’s relevant.
Players are going to adjust their strategies based on the spells people use. If WG and CoH are keeping up a raid in AV against an AoE strategy, players are going to shift to single-target DPS. This is what is called the “assist train” and it is used to combat area of effect healing and force healers to adjust and change the spells they use. I saw this in Dark Age of Camelot, where AoE healing was so strong, and it is a valid strategy to combat it by shifting to an assist train.
Also, WG and CoH will have virtually no place in 2v2 or 3v3. I doubt a lot of priests and druids will even spec for it.
Not Now
Let’s not jump the gun on changing WG and CoH based on statistics. You can’t rely only on statistics to make adjustments to spells. We have yet to even begin to see enough truly complicated encounters to fully understand where they lie over other spells. And, even then, current encounters suggest that WG and CoH isn’t the only thing there is to raid healing. So let’s not consider changing these spells here and now.
