Drums will not be changed. TBC was Blizzard’s nod to bards. I was a makeshift bard in TBC and I WILL relive that fantasy! I WILL play my drum set WITHOUT being exhausted.
If you want to get super sweaty you can mandate leather working or you can down bosses without it. It’s is completely optional and will not make or break your raid. Don’t worry about what pugs do, worry about what your guild can do.
Basically every crafting prof but Engineering has really compelling reasons to pick it up, bordering on mandatory for some (primal mooncloth/bs weapons)
It’s just not feasible in TBC to mandate everyone have LW the way you can with Engi in classic.
You don’t need drums or any other meta strategy to play WoW. If you don’t want to use drums find like minded people to play with, or make your own groups and say you don’t want drums to be mandatory.
But don’t expect to change the minds of people who want drums in their group. That is their choice and if you don’t like it then you should find other people to play with.
This is silly…
It is not “Optional”…
You sound like everyone saying “World buffs in Classic are optional!”
They simply are not… you were wrong about world buffs and you are wrong about this.
You don’t have to be a meta slave. There were several guilds that didn’t bother with world buffs. Would it be a nice change overall? Yeah but do you have any trust in this dev team to not screw it up somehow? The bigger issue is going to be melee not getting groups at all outside of guilds.
5% haste is only going to be mandatory to parse, not to clear any content. Haste only affects hard casts and melee auto-attacks in TBC as well, so the benefit is probably only a 2-3% dps increase at most (maybe slightly more for warriors but they are pretty weak in raids anyway).
In retrospective, world buffs in classic provide upwards of 40% dmg… hardly a comparison.
this. i was originally in favor of no changes for vanilla… but after seeing what my guild and basically anyone running naxx does nowadays, any dps is pretty much required to show up with at least heart and head buff. the amount difference is the equivalent of wearing 3 more pieces of gear. then you have the dudes who will spend hours getting songflower, dmt buffs, possibly even orgrimmar buff. the value in these buffs is astronomical when it comes to pure damage classes like mages, warriors, rogues, ect. for me as a healer, i usually stroll in with just heart and head buff and even then its usually overkill. for dps however these world buffs are literally the number 1 most important thing to get for every raid night. a “good spirit” change making them either harder to get, to the point of discouraging a massive part of the playerbase away from ever regularly getting them, or easier to get, to the point of basically ensuring most of the playerbase world buffs whenever they wanted. personally, i would want them to just make hard timers at like 2 hours on each buff, breaking the priest mind control meta and people dropping hearts ever 15 minutes.
It effects the GCD, so all instant cast spells, as well eventually. In TBC that didn’t hit until SWP but who knows what patch we’ll start on. Its hands-down the best stat to stack pretty much throughout TBC though
As a healer I usually just get Zg (plus zanza) and Ony. But on my warrior they’re game-changing so the incentive to get them is incredibly high. If they exist, the pressure to get them is super high, but I wouldnt mind terribly if they didnt exist either.
Often good game-design means protecting players from themselves.
Even if it does affect the GCD (and I’m still not sure that it did until the haste rework in wrath). It doesn’t effect things like energy regeneration and dot/Hot tick rates.
In addition, a significant portion of classes have huge dead time in their rotations, making the shortened GCD value kinda pointless. Basically Hunters are the ones who benefit the most from it due to their main ability being a casted spell AND having a swing timer.
In the end drums are still only providing a marginal dps increase, one small enough that good crit RNG or just small mistakes throughout the fight could make a more meaningful difference.