Swords are bad, get a wand

In WOW there is always a struggle to balance melee and ranged damage dealers.  Baseline ranged have a huge advantage that they can attack from all kinds of places while melee are pinned near the enemies.  In theory this is balanced by melee having a better toolkit of survival and disruption abilities, and this works pretty well in 5 person dungeons and pvp.  It doesn't work that well in big raids.

This is being a serious problem right now in the Castle Nathria raid.  My guild, like many other guilds, has realized that we have way too many melee.  There are a lot of fights where you have to run away from the boss for awhile and stand around and this is awful for melee and perfectly fine for ranged.  We aren't melee heavy in theory - our damage is split roughly even melee/ranged - but that split is terrible for the raid we are doing.

It doesn't hurt that most of the top damage dealers in terms of raw numbers are ranged, so a melee has to be exceptional to get a spot even on fights where they aren't unduly punished.

I am playing a melee character.

I am not super worried about being booted from the raid team because I am the top damage dealer for the raid about half the time and always finish top 4.  They are going to keep me around because at our level you still see large variance in performance within a spec, and I consistently deliver.

But the other melee players are probably feeling worried, and their worry is justified.  

I don't have any good answers for them either.  Swapping classes to a ranged class is possible, but catching back up isn't fast and most people don't want to swap.  If we can't win with the composition we have then management is faced with the terrible prospect of recruiting ranged players and booting melee players, including people who have been around awhile.

No easy answers.

This is also going to compound the problem I talked about last time.  This xpac has no infinite grind to increase player power.  That feels good in a way, because we don't feel obligated to grind.  However, it has the issue that guilds like mine are in bad shape.  We have good players, but we will probably need some kind of slow power gain to actually beat the entire raid.  It is made worse by the fact that we have what should be a normal mix of melee and ranged, but is bad right now.  Top guilds just force people to reroll or recruit whoever they need.  We don't do that.

I was looking into some options for how I could fix this by respeccing out of a melee role.  I don't want to play a holy paladin healer, as I haven't done that in most of a decade.  That would have helped us a little.  I investigated playing a prot paladin healer and I think it might actually be pretty good.  Nobody in top guilds is running a tank spec player doing full heals, but I always look for these weird spots to shine and I am a believer that this could be a good strategy.

Protection paladins have good throughput.  My main heal is one I build up by attacking, and then BOOM it drops a huge heal.  I can hit it about every 5 seconds for 21500 healing (if I am targetting someone at half health), which also puts a 4000 point shield on me.  4000 healing/sec is not enough to be a proper healer, especially because I don't bring big raidwide healing cooldowns.  However, being essentially invincible, healing for 4000/sec, and also delivering 2000 damage/sec is a good set of things to do.  I also have the advantage that if a tank ever dies I just step in and start tanking no problem.  I am slightly squishier in my weird healing spec but only slightly, so me stepping in to tank for strategy (or to recover from calamity) is a fine thing.

Mostly people don't want me to try weird stuff like this.  They go with what normal raid groups do.  However, I think in this case it would actually be quite strong in many fights.  Sometimes you need exactly 4 healers to get through a fight, in which case this build of mine is bad, but sometimes you need 4.5 healers and I can be an excellent .5 of a healer.

So far nobody has decided that we need to get rid of melee badly enough to get me to heal as a tank.  I can't decide if I should wish that it would get that bad so I can try my crazy thing, or if I should wish that things just work.

The consequence of no grind

My guild just finished up the current WOW raid on heroic mode.  We are now ready to start working on mythic.  This is slower than the group is used to, but that is explained by the raid being harder than expected.  I like that, and I am perfectly content with slightly slower progression.  In the previous expansion I landed in the middle of a patch and didn't get to experience most progression.  Now I get to see the whole thing start to finish, which is great.

However, we have some problems.  Castle Nathria is a tough raid.  One of the hardest start of xpac raids ever.  The absolute top guilds cleared it in 8 days or so, which isn't unusual, but I am concerned for middling guilds like mine.  In previous expansions there were mechanics to let weaker guilds gradually beat extremely hard content.  Initially Blizzard just put in % bonuses, but those didn't feel good.  Lately they have been adding in slow grinds that let players gradually get more powerful so the weaker players can slowly overpower difficult content without feeling like it was handed to them.  In the previous raid tier we had Corruption, which increased my damage by about 40%.  This allowed me to put out sufficient numbers to do content that the best guilds beat without that bonus.

This expansion we don't have those systems that slowly power us up.  There are a few small things like sockets from Venari, additional conduits, and gradual gear increases, but if the best players in the world beat the content at 220 item level, and my guild gradually gears up until we are fighting the bosses at 226 item level, we are only getting an 8% increase over them.  Even with sockets and conduits we are still only going to be 15% better than them in raw numbers.

That won't be enough.  We have good players, and some middling players, but the absolute best in the world are more than 15% better than us, especially when you consider that they can stack classes to have any composition they want while we simply have to run with the group that we have.  Given their class stacking options we might well only have a 10% advantage by the time we arrive at the final boss.

It seems entirely possible that we will simply be flat out unable to defeat the mythic raid this tier.  It won't be just us, either - any guild that is more than 10% worse than the best in the world isn't going to be able to win.

I get why Blizzard did this.  They wanted to get away from infinite grinds where players felt obligated to play forever for marginal increases to power.  They wanted to just make the game about getting your gear and then being able to log off for the week if you want to.  I get that, and I don't disagree.

But the consequence is that if the raid is extremely hard for the best, then the pretty good cannot win, ever.

If we can't beat the final boss before the next raid tier arrives, that isn't a disaster.  I will just keep on practicing to beat whatever it is we can beat.  Still, I bet there will be a massive outcry about this once other people realize what is happening.  They haven't seen it yet because they are used to beating bosses a couple months after the cutting edge people do.  When they finally realize they cannot do so, then a reckoning will come.

It turns out that even though people complained about the infinite grinds those infinite grinds had a purpose.  Getting rid of them has consequences that we will have to grapple with, whether or not this is a net positive change in general.