I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Brian Wood's post Skill vs. gear. You should take the time to read through it if you haven't. However, in review, the basic premise of Brian's argument is that the largest DPS increases available to your raids are not directly based on gear. Instead, things like good rotations, talents, and ye-old "knowing your class" tend to have more to do with your damage than your gear.

Brian takes it to another level, however, and points out the overwhelming effect your raid buffs will have on your damage. The same can be applied to healers and tanks. (The difference between an unbuffed tank and a tank who's sporting Commanding Shout, Fortitude, Gift of the Wild, and Kings is absolutely amazing.) With all that being said, hopefully everyone's got faith in the premise that "your raid buffs really, really matter."

One of the fundamental design principles espoused by Ghostcrawler is that you should bring a player for their skill, not for their unique snowflake buffs (shaman have gotten a pass so far for Heroism, with a few different explanations). Most key buffs, debuffs, and such have duplication among multiple classes. Let's jump behind the cut and start looking at which vital buff and debuff.

This week, we're focused on the core buffs that almost every raid will have. Even PUGs don't tend to do so much as Vault of Archavon with out these buffs.

Replenishment

Okay, Replenishment isn't a buff as most people think about it. However, the Replenishment effect is considered absolutely essential to raids. It's not quite enough make Replenishment classes into "Hybrids," but most of the specs who provide Replenishment suffer some small DPS loss compared to their raiding counterparts. A notable exception to that is retribution paladins and shadow priests, of course, since their replenishment comes from their only available DPS spec.

Each class has only one talent that empowers Replenishment, forcing the player to actively choose to provide it to their raid. The five classes that can supply the effect are hunters, mages, paladins, priests, and warlocks. Hunters provide Replenishment via Hunting Party, a talent deep in the Survival tree. Hunting Party requires the hunter to crit in order to kick off. That sounds like it might not be universal, but Hunters are rocking so much critical strike chance nowadays that you can rely on a constant stream of mana. Mages pick up Replenishment from Enduring Winter, which forces them to spam Frostbolt. Warlocks provide Replenishment with Improved Soul Leech, and Vampiric Touch mirrors the effect for warlocks. Retribution paladins merely spam their judgement ability to provide Replenishment with Judgements of the Wise.

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