Melee in 25man Raids

[Lavache]

i am wondering how having a lot of melee will help or hinder us as we try to progress through 25man content. we generally have between 8 and 12 melee in our raids including tanks (our last few gruul kills have had 10+). most of them are pretty competent players but competency doesnt fix the fact that a lot of fights are not melee friendly. we have been one-shotting gruul and have killed magtheridon and are currently working void reaver. i know most strategies harp about having more ranged and less melee in almost every fight but so far we have done pretty well. the big issue ive seen so far is when it comes to a fight like void reaver - if our melee dies we loose a big chunk of our dps.

i know melee has the advantage of not running out of mana and having sustained dps, but a lot of fights have area effects that force them to run in and out or move around a lot limiting the total effectiveness some.

thanks in advance

[psychostomp]

last night on our 1% wipe on VR i would have killed for at least 1 more melee. But then again i would have killed to have gotten rid of 2 of our dps'ers that were under 350 dps and replaced them with someone who could produce real numbers. If you have a couple of resto shaman chain healing through pounds on that fight its all gravy to keep them up we use 1 Resto sham and 1 pally to keep our melee grp up.

[Worldie]

Melee DPS is very high and quite impossible to substitute. However, most encounters have some kind of melee-unfriendly thing, which forces you to reduce their number. Without considering tanks, more than 5 melee DPS usually is bad.

Well we tried TK with 2 melee DPS parties last time, was quite funny, VR died in like < 5 minutes, Kael'thas was down in like 2 pyros, but they nearly all died when we got a couple of consecutive Flamestrikes near the boss, forcing them to move and stop DPS.

[Kintaran]

My usual three-tank raid runs with six melee DPS. Two Rogues, two Fury warriors, an Enhancement Shaman, and a Retribution paladin. We usually get better production out of the Angry Mob than we do much of the ranged. Yes, AOEs hurt. However, for all but the worst of AOEs, your best plan is to just heal through it. On VR, the Warriors get insane amounts of rage from staying in pounding, and the Paladin stays manaed from the healing. Fights may be melee unfriendly, but it's nowhere near enough of a downside to trade off the sustained damage they can put out. As a fight drags on, your ranged classes run dry. Your rogues keep doing the same steady DPS. Warriors actually start doing more in Execute range.

Ideally, since melee buffs stack to a much more insane degree than spell buffs do, you want to bring one melee group, no more. Fury Warrior and Enhancement Shaman are the big ones to have, Feral Druid is excellent too. The sixth melee will have to be out in the cold all alone with no group buffs.