Quote:
Originally Posted by Wordplay
That doesn't sound too wise to me. Mages and warlocks have so much more utility in addition to high DPS. For example: kiting, decursing, and pets. They can AoE and single-target whereas rogues can only hit one target at a time, which are usually immune to majority of their poisons and CC abilities. Which makes them exist solely for DPS that is better performed by the ranged classes.
You know, we have only about that many priests, in total, here, myself included. Six of which are in the "bad" guild. 
If the main-tank dies, there is nothing to adapt to. The boss will wipe everyone and that's it. It's the same thing if one or two of the healers accidentally die: it's game over despite 90% of the others still being alive. |
1) So far in Hyjal / Black Temple, there are plenty of dps races to kill a boss before it kills you. Mages are found to be lacking in the dps departments and various top guilds in the world did / are stacking their raids with rogues. Can a mage / hunter fit in? Definitely. In terms of min-maxing though, they're not the cream of the crop for those outright dps races. Examples being Kaz'rogal (burning mana ftl, basically Kazzak 2.0), Reliquary of the Lost (kill them before they kill you) and pre-nerfed Mother Shahraz (not really a dps race at that time, but more of range dps being gimped to hell due to mechanics). AoE is a non-issue and is mostly limited to trash. When my rogues are doing 1300+ dps and my mages are doing 1K+, I certainly would favour my rogues in a pick on the roster. Staying alive is not a problem thus far on the fights I've been on.
For CC, 2 mages is often enough to keep a couple of adds sheeped while the MT + 2-3 OTs (other warriors or/and feral druids) pick the loose ones up. Hunters are rarely brought for kiting (though we do use a hunter to kite some ghouls in Hyjal) but even then, it's mostly on trash mobs. BM hunters are pretty hot dps atm but still nothing compared to a warlock or rogue. Mages got the short end of the stick from Blizz (though they're getting buffed in 2.3, so hooray for them ^_^).
2) It's true that a main-tank dying is often a guaranteed wipe. That hinges on the healers (assuming the MT doesn't do any stupid stuff like standing in that BLAZING HOT RING OF FIRE, just to give an example
) to be able to do their job. However, not always a MT dying is a guaranteed wipe. We've had our MT die on Vashj (our shaman didn't drop a grounding totem T_T) at 20+% and still managed to recover. We also had our MT die on Supremus (yes, embarrassing >_<) but we got through it by just spam healing one tank to the end (the OT taking the hurtful strikes). There are guilds who have killed Illidan but had their warlock tank die to the demon phase. Solution to that? Get a hunter to Feign Death and swap in Shadow Resist gear. That's something that you will never see in any strategy guide and requires quick thinking. There are various examples that quick adapting to a bad situation can prove to be a clutch in beating the encounter. Not an excuse to perform badly obviously but when things go wrong (tank DC-ing, healers DC-ing, people being dumb, etc), the raid is expected to think of a solution to quickly adapt. Of course, not every situation is salvagable but then again, not every bad thing is a hopeless cause. ^_^
3) You have 8 priests? Damn! We only have 4 (2 holy, 2 shadow) xD