Having a well balanced raid with lots of buffs is a big part of being successful. My kitty DPS goes up 20-40% in a 25 man raid vs. a 5 man thanks to all the amazing buffs that come from being in a strong group. There's so many raid buffs now it's a bit of a mistake to bring too many people with the same spec, particularly in a 10 man. For example a raid really benefits from having a feral druid: Leader of the Pack improves crit and Mangle improves bleed damage. But a second feral druid doesn't add any extra raid buffs. You may be better off saving that spot for an Arms Warrior or Combat Rogue to bring their overall physical vulnerability debuff.
There's some 23 buffs and 15 debuffs for a raid in 3.0.9. Most classes bring two or three and most buffs have two classes that provide them, so there's a lot of room to mix and match. The primary source for info on the various buffs is Zarhym's forum post from August 2008. It's pretty dense, there's a much more readable version with a handy chart on the Dwarf Priest blog.
I've tried calculating all the buffs available by hand but it's too complex. A good web-based tool for doing it is MMO-Champion's RaidComp tool. It's a DHTML wonder where you drag various classes into raid boxes and it dynamically shows you what buffs you currently have in the raid. Very easy to use and experiment with.
The other tool that looks promising is the Utopia addon. It's a compact frame showing all the important raid debuffs on the current mob. It greys out the ones your raid cannot ever apply, so you can tell how your current raid is not optimal. It also shows clearly when an important debuff isn't active. For instance, it'll show you when your DPS warriors aren't bothering with Sunder Armor and costing you 8% DPS. It'll also keep you honest about keeping Faerie Fire and Mangle up, helping you and the rest of the raid. Unfortunately the addon is pretty buggy right now and hasn't been updated, although there's a note from late January the author was working on a new version.
I really like Blizzard's concept of "bring the player not the class". Right now in our guild most of the content is so easy for us we don't need to worry about stacking buffs. Except the hardest achievements, where it's a tradeoff between bringing the strongest players and bringing the ones who round out the raid buffs the best. These tools help you make those decisions deliberately.
I demand more funny spec support!
Posted by: Revaan | 2009.03.04 at 15:52