Full Melee team viable in expansion?

[crowdx]

Hi all,
so I have just hit lvl 70 on my 4th team and started to wonder about melee viability in Cataclysm. My current team is really going to be used to fill out some spots in my other teams and I have a 5th I am going to level which at that point would give me the option of a full melee team.
So my question now is, with my recollection of the Burning Crusade, a lot of dungeons needed specific classes and group make ups to clear the heroics. I know in Cataclysm they want every class viable in a group but I am wondering will a full melee team really be viable, especially from a healing aspect (I remember some group combinations were quite hard to heal as a main healer due to the high spikes of damage taken from certain classes).
Anyone got thoughts on this? Or even thoughts on what the best team combination will be?

[Shodokan]

Right from the get-go? Absolutely not. The only real classes capable of any sort of healing are ret paladin and enhance shaman. Enhance does not heal as well as ret and it sacrifices a ton of damage to do it (as does ret, but they have more buttons in general). Feral druids need to shift out to heal and i don't think their heals have the potency required to sustain damage in heroics like you are seeing required.

Eventually? Eventually i think that a team of 5 paladins could do it, as it stands now prot paladins can solo most of black temple, mag, etc etc... with the nerf to death strike i'm not so sure about dks but they are technically a possibility as well.

The only real problem is CC at that point, which when you outgear content by two tiers of raiding gear that should not really be a problem. To start? It will be.

I mean, it will be a challenge to do heroics as a boxer IMO, so if you enjoy melee classes then you are going to need to find workarounds for the shortcomings. It's not like shaman who can build heals into their DPS macros and if their crit is high enough be able to sustain it due to clearcasting etc.

Either way. Good luck.

[kate]

I have been thinking about this a bit too. Initially, with my Paladin + 4x shaman team, I was thinking about having it so that the shaman could all dual-spec elemental/enhancement (except for one that would be elemental/resto) just in case there were any fights where melee were better than ranged. (Un?)fortunately, I haven't run into any situations where melee would make short work of something but ranged would have difficulty, so I never tried it.

I will be making an all Worgen, all Druid team - though I'm not sure if my DPS will be feral or if they'll be balance - or maybe dual spec to try both.

[crowdx]

So then for starting the expansion, will a tank, be it pally, warrior or DK plus 4 shammies, be a good team or will they be missing something another class could provide? My current thoughts are 3 of the same class for dps, I am working towards 3 locks, mages, shammy or hunters (hunters are my least favorite).
Not entirely sure on heals, I have always liked my druid but with the tree form having a cooldown now, I am not sure how this will work when he comes under pressure due to no content currently stresses a teams healing. I do have all the other healing classes too but not sure if any will have an edge.

[Ualaa]

I would think, a healer + tank + 3x melee DPS would be doable for pretty much everything.
You'd have the entire team in melee (aside from the healer), which means most of the puddles of acid will be in a smaller area, making them harder to avoid... and all four toons will likely eat point blank boss AoEs or the odd cleave.

I don't see 5x DPS, no healer spec among the group as being that viable initially with any class combination... you might be able to brute force through some things as Rets, but they would have a harder time then Tank + Healer + 3x Melee or 3x Range.

[Feider]

I hope it is. My melee team will be my first to 85. Warrior tank, Resto shaman with rogue, cat, enhance dps. They've been fun at 80

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Define viable.

[BrothelMeister]

My melee team of 4 rets + Blood DK is at 78 and horribly geared for their level, and the dungeons aren't too bad.

As with ANY boxing comp, if you want to do it enough, and apply enough effort, you can make anything work. I fully intend to run the 5 melee characters together to level in Cata.

[Ualaa]

I'll level up as 5x Cats.

Will PvP as 5x Cats as well.
Same toons, but a bear and a resto, for PvE dungeons/heroics.

[Shodokan]

My melee team of 4 rets + Blood DK is at 78 and horribly geared for their level, and the dungeons aren't too bad.

As with ANY boxing comp, if you want to do it enough, and apply enough effort, you can make anything work. I fully intend to run the 5 melee characters together to level in Cata.

Current dungeons require no CC or any real coordination though, so making a comparison to viability in dungeons now and in the future doesn't hold water very well.

[Ualaa]

What kind of CC options to DK's and Rets have?

My druids bring Entrapping Roots (which is useless against ranged mobs) or Cyclone (which is fairly a very short CC) to the table.

Can we heal through extra DPS, or is it just not viable?

If Cataclysm heroics are anything like the early Burning Crusade heroics, I doubt we'll heal through it until 6 months or so into the expansion (whenever the 2nd tier of raids comes out), when we can purchase the first tier of raid level gear, for badges.

[Shodokan]

What kind of CC options to DK's and Rets have?

My druids bring Entrapping Roots (which is useless against ranged mobs) or Cyclone (which is fairly a very short CC) to the table.

Can we heal through extra DPS, or is it just not viable?

If Cataclysm heroics are anything like the early Burning Crusade heroics, I doubt we'll heal through it until 6 months or so into the expansion (whenever the 2nd tier of raids comes out), when we can purchase the first tier of raid level gear, for badges.

It might not even be doable with first tier of stuff with a lot of setups normally ran, who knows if a lot of the encounters are even doable without like huge perseverance.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I remember when people said "No way a 5-boxer can clear heroics, there's just too much movement and skill required." Then we did that. Then they said "Well yeah, but not with no tank." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not without a real healer." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not with melee DPS." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not with all melee." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not in current end-game content." Then we did that.

I'm seeing a pattern here...

[Shodokan]

I remember when people said "No way a 5-boxer can clear heroics, there's just too much movement and skill required." Then we did that. Then they said "Well yeah, but not with no tank." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not without a real healer." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not with melee DPS." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not with all melee." Then we did that. Then they said, "Yeah, but not in current end-game content." Then we did that.

I'm seeing a pattern here...

I'm not saying it isn't doable, i'm saying that the skillcap between doing them at current gear level and outgearing it is severely different.

[Ualaa]

Well.. heroics throughout Lich King... we could basically reach 80th level.. and run most of the heroics somewhat successfully.
As in, in utterly crappy I-Just-Reached-Max-Level-Questing gear, down six or seven bosses and be able to kill trash in almost every heroic up to a boss... giving us a lot of attempts at the boss before trash respawned.
I remember a lot of guild members getting both the normal and heroic achievements, for a lot of dungeons, at the same point.

Looking back to Burning Crusade.. sure Slave Pens was one of the easier heroics.. but just about anything else was basically impossible in the gear you'd have as a fresh 70th.



I'm hoping Cataclysm is closer to BC then WotLK, in terms of difficulty. As in, not doable with fresh to 85th level gear, but doable and challenging with level 85 initial crafted/normal mode 85th dungeon loot.

I'd like to see crowd control as something which makes a fight a lot easier, but not something that is absolutely essential...
I remember quite a few heroics in the BC era; they would need a mage or hunter, with a rogue/warlock as a lesser choice because of humanoid mobs. If you were a Shaman DPS, they would not take you.
I'd like to see pretty much all group compositions be viable - which I define as sufficient to clear the content, even if it takes a lot longer.

Pretty sure they'll all be doable, initially even, given the right classes. Hopefully, they'll all be doable initially, given the wrong classes (assuming a Tanking class and some kind of Healing).
Down the road... that might not even be a requirement.

[Boylston]

From a solo perspective, I think that heroics should have hard-modes to them with better/different loot mechanics if you acheive a harder kill. Would be nice to be able to use quest gear and start to tackle heroics to gear up for raids, then to do the same heroics in a harder fashion for raid-level gear as well.

[Mokoi]

you can probably outgear any heroic with any team.. 5 resto druids, probably if you have patience.

heroics at gear-level? probably not.

[crowdx]

I actually would like to see requirements for heroics, similar to BC with the need to buy a key from the appropriate faction with a level of rep. This meant people had to work their way to getting into the heroic and faction rep was worthwhile.
Being able to fully gear a toon in a couple of days running random dungeons really spoiled the game.

[Mooni]

Shodokan-
I have good speculation and bad speculation. The good is if you're running DK 4 Ret, you could just set up movement keys for one of your rets to prance a few yards away, taunt, and cast repentence. That'll teach 'em.

The bad speculation is I used to farm BWL for ore, and if anyone wanted to come along for the achievement for killing Nefarian they were welcome to jump in. I was just doing it to cover repairs. Last week a holy paladin joined us.
Well I only tried it once since 4.0.1, which was last week. It was horrible. It took 4 tries to get Chromaggius down, and at the end of the Nefarian fight only 2 stood (a pet-less hunter and the holy pally). It was horrible, horrible.
The chromaggius fight, he kept switching his vulnerability to something useless that I didn't have. I brought an elemental shaman, arcane mage, shadowpriest and hunter. So naturally he would just switch between frost and fire vulnerability. The poor mage was doing 900dps, which is mathematically untenable for a mage spamming arcane blast.
Nefarian? Somehow he hit the tank for 47k. This is a kingslayer tank. He proceeded to one-shot people every so often throughout the fight, but since I only brought one tank I was so busy mage-tanking and shaman-tanking and pet-tanking that I couldn't scroll back and see what had happened. They gave him an iWin button.
If this is how raiding is going to be in cata (and I'm just talking a slightly buffed level 63 raid boss here) the dungeon bosses are going to be pretty rough too. I guess we're seeing that with Kai'ju Gahz'rilla etc already.

[naPS]

I've run most of the new instances in the beta on heroic, and they're not that bad. I think there's a lot of talk about everything being rough and tough and requiring CC, but I just haven't seen it in practice.

However, there are some very annoying new mechanics that are going to be a challenge to overcome. A few of the bosses in HOO require some large group movement and several different mobs to be targeted by different people at the same time, and the mobs all have the same name, so it could really get interesting.

[d0z3rr]

I don't like these FUD threads. Why speculate? Can't people just wait until the content is out and see what happens then?

[Ualaa]

Theorycrafting can be fun.
And we want to be able to run all the content... so getting an idea of what is coming is worthwhile.

Ultimately, we won't know if something works or does not work, or how it needs to be modified to work... until the expansion is live and we can actually test our compositions and tactics.

[BrothelMeister]

DK+4R has a lot of CC, especially, but not limited to when you have some of them as blood elves. My team is going to hit 80 tonight, and my gear is horrible, but any dungeon is doable with enough planning.

What CC do you really wish you had for PvE that DK+4R doesnt have lol?

1 direct silence (+4-5 aoe silences if your Belf)
5,10 sec cooldown interrupts (means infinite interrupts)
4 Direct Stuns
4 Sleep effects
4 Holy Wrath, which glyphed will stun nearly everything in Aoe style, on a 15 sec CD
at 81-83, you can get desecration on the DK tank to have aoe snare around you

Did I forget anything worthwhile lol? This team has more CC than you really need, but if you need to remove a few mobs from the fight, you definitely can with constant rolling stuns, aoe stuns, silences and repentances.

[Shodokan]

Divine storm is back to 80% damage, and is on the same cooldown as crusader strike... which is pretty sexy.