No, I have no intentions to prove him wrong. More of proving that its not only option, since many keen to take their word as absolute truth. As there are no correct answer on how to build raid. Its just that calculations indicate that hybrid contribution seems to be rather high, hence making them viable option.

While its still obvious that many guilds ignore those raid benefits. Why are those benefits ignored? Why is Feral druid always placed on Melee group over Retribution Paladin, while the number seems to show that raid would benefit a bit more from Paladin. Why are moonkins not used while they seem to give the best dps increase on the given examples (I dont see reason to prove Shamans or Shadowpriests belonging there as their contribution is phenomenal).

Without being able to see your spreadsheet (404 Not Found), I thought I'd add in some corrections based on the errors I found with the retribution_calculator I found on your site.

I think you (significantly?) overestimate the dps contribution of Sanctified Crusader, it certainly isn't the 1.03 modifier that it might appear to be at first look.

Firstly, Shadowpriest/Affliction Warlocks have roughly 20% of their damage able to crit Secondly, high crit classes like Rogues and Fire Mages don't get so much out of +3% crit. A rogue moving from 25% crit chance to 28% is only realizing a 2.4% dps increase, which is a full 20% less than the assumed 3% bonus to damage.


Another thing that bothers me with utility of the +hit spell hit totem and +hit fairie fire is that most people seem to fill out their hit rating to cap via gemming, which makes it harder to gearswap around having/not having the buff in your raid/group. Not a huge problem to work around, but it can be a minor headache with nonstatic raid groups.

Edit: The information I posted about Improved Mark is incorrect - the entire point of Improved Mark is to make it provide up to 110 AP for melee. I shouldn't post while I'm still asleep.

Also, yeah Strength of Earth would benefit a feral grouped with a Shaman.

Most of the hybrid builds have been embraced by this point.

Moonkin is an uphill battle. On paper their dps and party buffs compare similarly to elemental shaman but they lack the utility of bloodlust and quick heals. They are in a bad situation and should likely be improved.

As far as hybrid pallies go, I think an indirect problem facing them is that they have to be compared to Holy spec. Holy paladins heal a main tank so damn well that it is almost absurd. Eventually there is just a boundary to how many of a class you want around in a 25 man raid. If you always have 2-3 holy spec it is hard to make room for more.

It is hard to argue against practical results though. Nihilum have done pretty damn well for themselves progress wise with their own raiding style, so it is obvious that people will imitate them.
Because feral druids themselves are incredible flexible and can give you an offtank as well as DPS slot. Nobody brings feral druids as a pure dps class, they are brought along to offtank, and have the extremly nice added benefit of providing very decent DPS together with great support when not tanking.

Because you tipically raid with 3 mages, so the options can be to either cut down to elemental shaman/mage/mage/shadowpriest/moonkin, and moonkins are not clearly better than the last mage. Expecially given that stacking mages gives you excellent advantages of spreading the aggro in AoE, etc...

I based that into this quote:

What gives estimate of 3.21% overall dps gain from Sanctified Crusader. So the +3% as direct number shouldnt be too much off. Edit: I do acknowledge the problem with Improved FF, as I assume that people get full benefit from it (Even if they were hit capped).

"Because feral druids themselves are incredible flexible and can give you an offtank as well as DPS slot. Nobody brings feral druids as a pure dps class, they are brought along to offtank, and have the extremly nice added benefit of providing very decent DPS together with great support when not tanking."

Ok, this is very good argument when considering the boss encounters and need of offtank.

Emphasis added.
I think this is really the key statement here - Nihilium is doing things their own way, and that way is to take pure classes only. Hey it works for them, and yet hybrids work well for many many other guilds. The issue is that Awake is abrasive and his dismissal of hybrids comes across as "hybrids are not efficient and nobody should take them because they're a waste of a slot." [Note: not his actual words!]

Grabbing tier gier, you'll only need cloth for bracers/belt/boots, so I wouldn't exactly say itemization is a problem. Or are the tier sets terrible for moonkins for some reason? :o

If I'm not mistaken, 2nd tier Marksmanship 5/5 talent is: Causes 100% of your Hunter's Mark Ability's Base Attack power to to apply to melee attack power as well.
I only note it because it is a talent in the marksman tree, and survivalist/BM hunters probably won't have points in it. I understand that the stacking Mark is a completely different mechanic and for hunters only.

In any case, Our survivalist hunter hangs out with the feral druid and the crit aura keeps him from going OOM, while buffing the entire melee raid significantly. Our BM hunter is happy in one of the shadow priest group with his 3% buff on the assorted DPS there(the range on Ferocious Inspiration is ridiculous, if not limitless), and is also pushing really impressive DPS. And our MM hunter is.... low on meters and lacking in raid buffs.

Having to rely on tier gear is part of the problem, particularly when you're trying an "experimental" build or something about which many guilds might be skeptical in the first instance. In most guilds, you're not realistically going to be getting multiple types of tier gear once you get past t4, so by taking the moonkin piece or the ret piece you're committing to that. And at the same time, if you need the gear to prove the viability of the spec, you're basically at an experimental stage. Are you going to take an experimental piece of gear over a primary-use item for a tank or some such? It's hard.

His point is 'they are a waste of a slot if you are interested in the fastest progression'. Given that they are the fastest progressing guild, then it is hard to argue with their results.

If you want to argue that people should be given freedom to play a game in a way that caters to their own enjoyment, I don't think you'd find many people arguing against you, but they have backed up their own argument about the rate of progression with pure classes pretty damn well empirically.

Any raid build for a Hunter can get Imp Mark, and imo there should always be at least one Hunter at a raid with the talent.

While that may be true, I'd never consider Hunters to be a hybrid class (staying on topic).

Ret Paladins / Moonkin Druids, as stated earlier, are really the only ones who have a historic discriminatory bias against them (which my personal experience has shown to be <usually> well-warranted).

Once their review hits, which I'm sure it will, we'll be revisiting this issue, but from the other side of the fence.

Well Prot paladins a getting a lot of bad press here. It's really not as dismal as people make it out to be, and I can guarantee that most of you who are railing against prot pallies, quite obviously don't have any in your raids.

In situations where I'm offtanking, such as void reaver, I really have no issues matching warrior threat. My downfall of course is if I'm not holding aggro I end up having to drink mana potions as frequently as if I was healing, but threat is not the issue at all.

There are few situations where I'm forced to tank in full prot gear and feel useless by the end of the fight. The time between murloc phases on morogrim is so short that anyone has marginal utility when "not tanking". On Karathress I can tank the hunter and his pet with no problem simultaneously building threat on both. Once they die (we kill them second) I can swap on my healing mace/shield, quaff a mana potion and still do patchup healing for totems and bolts. On Leotheras I can tank an add in full heal gear.

On void reaver I can pull aggro if I start too quickly, meaning the warriors are rage starved. I prefer NOT to pull aggro because I can put out more threat as a mana starved paladin than a rage starved warrior.

I think a lot of the bad press comes from prot paladin gear tiers. There's a point somewhere after dungeon gear where the "paladin designed" gear is too weak to tank anything significant, while the warrior designed gear is great, but gives you no spell damage. At that point your threat is marginal at best, your health is less than a warrior's and you're struggling to pass the crushing cap.

Once you can start to get past that, your health still falls behind the warriors, but all of a sudden you realize that you can actually put out a lot of threat, and worrying about being crushed is no longer a concern.

That of course combined with the baseline abilities (round of blessings, aura, wipe recovery) and the fact that my tiered set doesn't share a token with warriors' like the druid's does, and my ability to maintain a very respectable amount of healing in heal gear, makes me a good choice for an OT in my opinion.

A lot of people have just not even tried, or if they have tried, not tried wholeheartedly, to use some of these offspecs. There's just the assumption that they will suck. The assumption that because your trial alt pally tank in blues had a hard time keeping secondary aggro on moroes, that there's no way a pally tank would manage on void reaver.

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...po&s=4455-4983 Here is our void reaver last night. I took 21% of the damage. More importantly I took more hits than our warrior tanks. Meaning that I generated OT threat rather well if you ask me.

Generalizations like "Prot pallies can't generate OT threat" are just that. Yeah, I generate more threat when I'm getting hit than when I'm not. But so do warriors, and so do druids.

Most guilds who say "You can't do this" really dont know if you can or not. All they really know is that they don't need to, and have never tried it.

Speaking as the person that usually does the inviting for our raids, I'd agree completely with this. I hate to rule out certain specs as "non-viable", but I've had a hard time finding the evidence that a ret pally or moonkin isn't a wasted raid slot. I personally can't wait for the review of these specs. One of the things I enjoy most about putting together raids is working with different synergies in creative ways. Having a couple more options will only make it more fun.

The 2.4% increase would only be true if there were no other factors involved. However, as an example with rogues, a rogue with lethality would have their Sinister Strike, Backstab etc. criticals increased by 30%. The damage output from these abilities when increased from 25% to 28% crit would be 3.43%.

You mean other than having any effect at all? Untalented Hunter's Mark doesn't affect melee.

The range is either infinite, or zero, depending on how you look at it. It's an "all party member" buff, not "all party members in xx yards", which means that it's applied by the party member themselves as a self-buff, whenever they receive the server event. Standard caveats apply, but if you're in the same instance in the same fight, you're going to get the buff.

You may very well be right, but these numbers don't prove anything. It's practically impossible to infer threat from WWS info - there are any number of reasons that you could have taken more hits than anyone else that don't have any correlation to you having as much OT tps than other classes. Also, given the lack of another OT class in the data, there's no comparison to be made at all.

I'm not saying that you're not telling the truth, but scientifically, your data doesn't establish facts to back up your conclusions.

Sorry, posting before awake ftl - corrected my previous post.

At least one Hunter in the raid should have 5/5 Improved Mark for melee benefit (I do). Most raiding BM Hunters (well, most raiding Hunters period) spec 20 points into MM for Mortal Shots, so it's a toss-up between Improved Mark and Efficiency.

Yeah we had 2 BM, a shadow Priest and a feral Druid in a group for Gruul and it was pretty scary. I couldn't burn the mana though even with Hawk on, so if I have to choose I'd rather take the feral :P

MM is pretty screwed as far as complexity of DPS method as well as synergy of group buffs. We have an MM Hunter still though, and he does very well - but not quite as good as the BM's usually.

I think one of the hardest parts of selling a Hybrid class (I'll use the Retribution Paladin as my example) is just who is going to fill that role. I'm sure most guilds only have a small pool of very reliable raiders, and when you're looking to fill the off spec role you want to try and use someone who you know is good at their class.

Here's where the trouble starts:
I've recently created a list of gear from Crafted/SSC/TK that is for the most part uncontested, save Prot warriors. With it, I'd have about 1850AP 8% hit 30% crit 120 damage unbuffed, without using any Tier5 tokens. This is a pretty solid gear set, and I think I could be pretty viable in a raid slot, however, I know it'll never happen. Why? The issue, which I'm sure may plague a lot of other guilds, is you'd be losing one of your top, most reliable healers in the process. I've geared up with a lot of healing drops, and I just can't see how it'd be fair to toss that aside and assume a different role.

I guess what I'm getting at is there's two parts to the argument for Hybrids:
1) Will this spec be worth bringing to the raid and will it outdo the pure class you'd bring instead
2) Can you afford to lose whoever is taking up that role?
It seems clear that the person who shows up to raids and does well as a healer is going to be generally accepted as the better player, is going to have a better chance at getting the off spec loot, and would be one of the first people that turn toward the off spec. The question, however, is can you replace them?

How many people had one of their top Healing priests go Shadow when the Burning Crusade came out? It's because they were the most trusted to do well in this unfamiliar territory. At BC it wasn't hard to replace them, since different people were gearing up and there were fewer raid slots. Now, discounting the recent position of healing priests, say if that same priest was counted on to show up to every raid in BT/Hyjal, and his healing was highly influential to the success of your raids, would it be feasible for him to stop healing and go Shadow? I'd assume you could always have them spec back and forth depending on what you need for the encounter, but dropping massive respec fees to be a sometimes-hybrid doesn't seem worth it.

That's my only real gripe with the situation.

Exactly, showing one example when we have no idea how well the rest of your tanks performed, on a fight with a randomly avoidable knockback tells us pretty much nothing.

Last night I ended up tanking VR on a friends warrior account for our first kill as it happened. We had a new warrior that had far worse threat then either me or our other warrior (I play warrior about once every 3 months when our MT is out for a few days). The reason is simply that he didn't understand that as an OT you nearly never use heroic strike and must make sure you have the rage to shield slam on every cooldown (devastate in between) and was unwilling to learn. In the end we had to swap him for our feral druid who had much better threat then either of us warriors but ended up tanking the boss for not much longer then us - because the amount of time you end up tanking VR is mostly related to how many knockbacks you take which is ultimately down to luck in such a small sample size as one fight.

Now if you showed me the info on a gruul fight where you outhreat a warrior who is using shield slam on every cooldown and not wasting rage on heroic strike when he's rage starved that may be an actual comparison.