Flux

When you raid the group number you are in becomes important. Many of the buffs that you get from other players only work within your group number. If you are the raid leader or assistant picking and choosing which players are in which groups, it often makes the difference between success and failure.

As a player it’s helpful to know which buffs are best for you and as a raid leader it’s helpful to understand all the classes so you can decide how to organize the grouping. Let’s take a look at the player group only buffs. These are buffs that only work on your own group. This doesn’t include buffs you can cast across groups and ones that work individually. For example, a priest can cast Prayer of Fortitude which will buff the target and the target’s party. So they can cast it on the entire raid. But Vampiric Touch only gives mana to members in their own own group.

Let’s take a look at the player group only enhancements.

Note that the descriptions are listed with max benefit from talents. Some buffs don’t require the full spec listed if you don’t want max benefit. Obviously optimizing the best groupings is dependent on which classes are in your raid. But here are some guidelines.

• A Tree Druid goes with the tanks, or whoever is taking the most damage.
• Moonkin Druids are best with casters.
• Feral Druids go well with melee dps or groups with pets.
• Beastmaster Hunters help dps groups.
• Retribution Paladins generally need an Enhancement Shaman in their group to do the best dps.
• Retribution Paladins with Sanctity Aura help Paladin tanks with threat enormously
• Shadow Priests restore mana for whoever is running out. Usually the healers need it most.
• Enhancement Shamans can help melee dps or help regenerate mana, depending on what is more important.
• Demonology Warlocks help tanks or whoever is dying from low health or help hunter pets stay alive.
• Fury Warriors help melee dps.

There is no easy answer to the best group make up. It strongly depends not only on the strength of your players but also on the encounter and who needs more mana, health, or damage to win the fight. Also keep in mind that you can move players between groups at any time. So you can always have someone in one group for the first part of an fight and then swap them later. Often the different phases of a boss fight have different requirements. This makes it even more complicated to get the best groupings. However if you stick to these basic rules, you will do well.

Keep grouping for the best!

Tags: raid, skill, tip
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.