Kumar

Well, in some ways TBC did focus on the Burning Legion. Kael in the end was allied with them, I actually found the forge camps quests pretty good and then it all ends up with Sunwell and the Burning Legion.

I beleive once we went to Outlands they had to tackle the Illidian, Vashj and Kael storylines, there was no other option and they have finished it up smartly with Kiljadean.

 

Nezralix

Just as an aside, if the Alpha has just started as the news sites are claiming, then we'd have about six months before final release if it works the way that the TBC schedule did (and the way software project management goes, there's a good chance it will work the same way).

The TBC alpha started in August '06, the closed beta started in October, and the expansion was release in January '07.

 

Mr. Crow

<question deleted>

I realize this isn't the right place to ask this question, so I'll contribute something worthwhile to the discussion instead.

 

bv728

Vanilla had two major Arcs, and two one-offs - The Black Dragonflight arc, The Ahn'Quiraj Arc, and the one off Zul'Gurub and Naxxramas bits (Naxx was huge, but it was a one-off dungeon).

There are really two main, intertwined arcs to TBC - the Fate of Outland, and the Burning Legion's Crusade. Defeating Vashj and Kael is the Fate of Outland arc; you prevent them from destroying Outland to feed their hungers. The Legion Arc involves defeating BOTH Legions; Illidan's and Kil'Jaeden's, starting from Karazhan, to Mags, to Black Temple, to Sunwell. There's one-offs in Gruul, and one in Zul'Aman.

I think the Fate of Outland arc is poorly articulated, compared to the Legion Arc, and both are compartively weak compared to the Black Dragonflight arc.

 

oldmandennis

Is anybody else concerned about the decline of hybridization? Don't get me wrong, hybrids like Ret and Feral are fun to play and have never been more viable. At the same time though, the rising ilevels, homogenization of gear between hybrids and "pure" classes, and possibly soon the addition of 2 more talent tiers will make it nearly impossible to play as a hybrid, as opposed to a furry rogue or a glowey arms warrior.

Already, ferals heal for pretty much nothing. The problem is getting worse in Sunwell and since the patch nerfed HOTW to push kitties into rogue gear - top of the line cat gear increasingly is rogue gear with 0 int. Not only will you not be able to heal for much, you woln't be able to heal for anything, because you woln't have any mana. At the same time, trees are zooming past 2500 healing, and raid damage is scaling to match. A ferals pitiful contribution to healing is worth relatively less the farther we get into TBC. Heck, if cats are forced into any more rogue gear, soon they may not even be able to pick up random adds that break free on a tank death.

It goes without saying, but they also need to be very careful with the new bottoms of the talent trees. If the new bottoms synergize with the rest of the direction of the trees, then obviously they will be essentially required to raid. But if ferals are pretty much precluded from taking any more resto talents, at the same time as resto gets 10% more effective (and raid healing needed goes up to match).... well you may as well stay in cat and heal through LotP.

I don't think hybrids should be able to do any job as well as dedicated class at all times in any gear. However I do think that your ideal cat gear should leave you being ~85% of a rogue, 75% of a tank, and maybe ~50% of a healer. The percentages on tank and healer are dropping, and it's troubling.

 

Jebraltar

Expecting to be able to heal and DPS with the same spec is not realistic, given the game's current state. The problem is that they cannot build gear that is as good for healing as it is for DPS, and there's very little reason for them to want to. Feral Druids are the only spec where they've even been able to make gear that is hybrid between two roles (tanking/DPS), and I've run into very few people who feel that they need to be able to heal in the same kit. (Not to mention the problems involved with PvP if Ferals actually did have really-good healing kits.)

The only reason talents like Nurturing Instinct even exist is the fact that Druids, Shamans, Priests, and Paladins used to be forced to heal in a raid environment, so they tried to stick healing talents into the feral tree to make it more attractive, not because of a serious attempt at making it so that you can DPS for most of the fight then drop form and act as a healer or vice versa.

 

Kumar

I completely agree that the arcs in Vanilla WoW were better orchestrated, I was pointing more towards the Outland arcs were actually logical (in terms of what Blizzard would/could tackle in Outland).

I actually find the idea of being able to do that troubling. I see Hybrid classes more as classes that can easily switch between different roles rather than perform all the roles without switching out gear/talents. The idea that a hybrid class should be able to perform all their roles even at 50% effectiveness would be a nightmare to balance. Also, with such roles itemization IMO will be more difficult.

 

Nezralix

Real hybridization has really been on the way out for the past couple of years (really, as soon as specialized tanking gear and healing gear started to exist). And I agree with you that, yes, it's getting comparatively worse as time goes on, as base stats and base skill values become a smaller and smaller part of overall character stats (and this trend will probably get proportionately more severe in WotLK).

I do think that, to combat this trend, Blizzard needs to identify ways to convert stats of one type (melee DPS, caster DPS, healing power) to *reasonable* (but not really competitive) stats of alternative types. They've started working towards this with the healing -> spell damage conversion, but that does little for druids, Ret paladins, etc. You definitely don't want to get to a point where a feral druid can shift out of form and spend an entire mana bar healing 25% of their life bar.

I imagine that gear scaling will be something they address seriously in WotLK. I don't think they have a choice there.

Solid hybrid talent specs are, I think, out of the question. The talent trees are getting too big; there are too many variables to do much except try to make sure the standard max-one-tree-minor-another-tree work well, in a balanced way. I think that the top-end talents, if they're to be worthy of being taken over competitive talents in other trees, will inherently end up being required, and there's no real way around that (it's only failed to be the case in a couple of cases now).

I think the real solution here is making each spec individually powerful at their main role, not too ridiculously underpowered in alternative roles, and letting people move freely between them to minimize the long term opportunity costs of being one vs. another. But I don't think that's a very popular solution.

 

Yenadar

...in addition to only being at all useful in PvP. In PvE, such hybrids would continually get over-looked, as "sorry, we need 3 solid tanks, not 2.5, and we need 9 solid healers, not 8.5, and 13 solid dps, not 12.5."

It is the best interest of Blizzard and the community as a whole that the traditional 'hybrid' classes come into their own and be able to completely fulfill and compete with the jobs of the 'non hybrids', as long as they are geared and speced to match. Blizzard wants you to have to re-gear / re-spec to be able to switch roles.... playing a hybrid allows you to do that without leveling another toon.

That being said... there is no pure tank or pure healer classes any more. Only the DPS role has any classes 100% dedicated to that role. Warriors are not tanks. They can be, but they are Tank/DPS hybrid. Druids are Tank/DPS/Healing hybrid. And 2 different DPS roles available at that. Only Hunters, Locks, Rogues, and Mages are stuck with 1 role 100% of the time.

Blizzard very much wants any 1 class that can fill a role to be able to step in and adequately fill it. For example, the mitigation / avoidance gaps between warriors, paladins, and druids is narrowing very quickly. Why pick 1 over another now? It is all in the gimicks/buttons required or useful for the fight, the way Blizzard intends it to be. Even then, they are moving away from making 1 class required. Brutalus is a great example from everything I have read. Each of the 3 tanks has a unique advantage for being a tank. "Go with what works for you as a guild."

 

Irise

I think implicit in that line of reasoning is cat gear with a cat spec, and assuming that, it would be unreasonable to expect to be ~50% healer. However, it is possible to have a hybrid spec such that you a so-so tank, rogue and healer with the appropriate gear. It is not uncommon to see an elemental shaman throw on resto gear for certain encounter in BT in our guild and I assume its the same for many other guilds.

I think it would unbalance the game to be average at all three aspects of the game with just one set of gear.

 

Obligatory

oldmandennis - I honestly think that the type of hybridization you speak of was never really there, and probably never should come to be. The only thing that has ever approached this was the patch 2.0 retribution paladin, and it was your desired fusion of two roles (a very solid offense and respectable healing) that made them absolute monsters in PvP. Yet they were still a joke in PvE - the lack of windfury was nowhere near made up for by their healing abilities. Fast forward a year, and with only a few minor changes to the 2.0 ret tree, ret paladins are now an integral part of any raid looking to maximize DPS. Despite losing much of their healing capability, all it took was a windfury totem (and reverting a few nerfs) to make the class considerably better than it was before.

Basically, a "jack of all trades, master of none" character is worthless in PvE because such a generalist will lack the abilities to make a noticeable impact on a raid as compared to a specialist. No encounter will be tuned so tightly as to require a such precise amount of healing/tanking/DPS that it becomes necessary to bring some sort of 40% healer 60% DPS character. Which leaves as the only utility of such a character the ability to fill a critical role in a pinch. Such a feat might occasionally turn a wipe into a kill, but it can also turn a kill into a wipe on account of not having enough DPS or having a tank with sub-par mitigation.

And then in PvP, such characters create a balancing nightmare, where they usually end up as either free kills or unstoppable death machines.

Blizzard has been killing off this incarnation of hybrid classes, and I say more power to them for doing it.

However, I do think that you make a solid point with the deepening specialization that will likely result from increasing the size of talent trees. Because while a character that switches roles mid-fight may be worthless, a character that can switch roles between fights has obvious value. I would really like to see more of this sort of hybridization, so that blizzard can keep making a wide variety of encounters and feel free to tune them to different tank/heal/DPS requirements while still allowing players at the appropriate gear levels to clear an entire instance using the same raid.

 

Douglas

In raids, yeah. In non-heroic 5-man and less, IMHO it's alive and well as long as the players permit it to be.

Back in vanilla WoW, I loved the Zandalar Harsupex's set for my druid. It had reasonable int, sta, spi, +heal, and armor. I could make a decent healing set, but still be able to shift and offtank reasnoably well, even in places like Zul'Gurub. I do miss those days.

You can still do some of that in non-heroic 5-man if you set yourself up for it. And of course it's still viable for soloing. My own druid is currently 0/19/42, and is main-healing in Karazhan (I've pretty much got no interest in progressing beyond that right now), but still has enough feral that I can do dailies and solo questing without any pain, without a respec. I'm using the new "arena 0.5" rep set to do this, which means I've actually got enough int and +heal to be semi-useful even in my soloing gear. It's very nice. But I don't expect to be able to carry that very far into raids and heroics -- though I have offtanked in Karazhan like this. An offtank doens't need anywhere near the TPS of a main tank, so it's easier to set up.

(I'd rather be able to switch between offtanking and healing than DPSing and healing. I love being able to offtank a mob in phase 1 of a fight, and then being able to stand up and heal the MT once one of the mobs has been eliminated. My tankadin has been doing similar stuff in Magister's Terrace -- tank when we're in a fight where it's possible to manipulate threat, but heal when we're in a fight where it isn't. I can always DPS on my 'lock or hunter, the other two jobs are more fun for me.)

Know how they might be able to do this to some extent? Remember Anathema/Benediction? That mechanic was awesome. But it was a little pointless since it was a weapon, and you can already swap weapons in combat. Give the same morphing ability to armor, or at least to a trinket, and suddenly role-shifting in a fight is more feasible. You can put a reasonable cooldown on it so you can't swap back and forth over and over, but to be able to switch once for one phase transition would be incredibly awesome.

Another thing I'd like to see them do, hopefully with WotLK, but at least with expansions beyond that, is only raise the talent tree caps by 5 points when they raise the level cap by 10. In vanilla WoW, someone who used the entire hight of a tree could only put 20 points in another tree. In TBC, the same is true. I'd like to see the number of points available outside your main tree go up slowly as expansions come out, rather than remaining static (and therefore actually decreasing from a relative standpoint). Let Resto top out with 46-point talents instead of 51-point talents. Please!

 

Douglas

Honestly, I would like to see this change. I would like to see Hunters, Locks, Rogues, and Mages get additional roles some way or another.

I'd like to see an evasion-tanking spec for rogues that was at least viable up to Heroics.

I'd like to see hunter pets able to main-tank up to Heroics; in such a setup, the hunter would be a little bit of a healer.

For warlocks and mages, I'm less sure about exactly how to do it, but I'd still like to see something happen. One thought I had was, have warlocks get a pet such that having it out nerfed their DPS quite a bit, but the pet itself was some kind of healer. (Letting the Voidwalker actually main-tank up to Heroics would work, but is kinda too obvious, and someone else has to get a healing role.)

 

Starfire

The "pure" DPSers bring CC that the other DPSers don't. Well, except maybe for priest. (And don't nitpick me on the others, yeah yeah there's earthbind/entangle/etc). Not only do they bring atleast 1 cc, most of them have atleast two cc's. And are all reasonable at kiting. 2

The "pure" DPSers also bring unique utility to the raid without a premium. Think of mage water, healthstones, even portals and summons. I'd like to count misdirect here too.

In reality, sans 25 man raids, they aren't really that "pure", they all have an additional role: they are CCers.

 

Kumar

As a Rogue, I just want to be DPS, I understood that before I started playing my class and I understand that right now. Games with classes always thrive around defined roles for a class and thats the way it should stay. In the case of Druids, Pallys, Shamans, the class itself doesn't have a defined role but it is left upto the player to choose their role and go with it. They are hybrids because they can change between those roles by changing their specs and gear. The moment you start giving every class something, its not left good at anything.

Not to mention the complexity of having something that you suggest and the confusion that it would create, even with such a simple talent system people don't know what specs are good/bad/usable.

 

Vain

Perhaps the model for hybrids is not that you are expected to be able to fulfill multiple roles with one spec, even if you change gear, but that different roles are available to the player if they choose to respec. Character class A can spec between (damage, tanking), character class B can spec between (damage, healing), character class C can spec between (healing, tanking), and so forth. The character classes then become nothing more than containers for different permutations of the available roles (which I simplified to three roles, but you could break it down a lot more than that), rather than actual hybrids that are supposed to perform multiple roles at the same time.

 

Fiola

So why give healing specs free +dmg? Why do damage casters get free +healing? They get to be damage/healing specs with pretty much no penalty. If anything, I see most of the changes mid-TBC as restoring "hybrid-ness "to hybrid classes - Healers and Prot warriors, especially - but not for Ret paladins.


I'm bitter about that last point, because hybrid gameplay was the main reason I continued playing my spec/class, but now it has the least supported hybrid playstyle(mechanics/gear-wise) of all the hybrid classes.

 

Axanor

Ferals can absolutely heal fine, they just need to swap gear to do so, like any other class.

Our MT heals on Archimonde since cats don't have a great way to avoid the doomfire.

I'm a Moonkin, and if a healer dies, I can pick up healing where they left off if necessary. But expecting a raid encounter to be built around an "optional" spec is pretty silly.

 

• Vinsent

Really the problem with Hybrids as they stand in WoW is partially spec, but partially time.

Say there is a theoretical class that has a instant cast nuke that deals competitive damage say 80% of a pure dpser.
This class also has a instant cast heal that heals competitively say 80% of a pure healer.

If they spec for either one they go to 90% equal to the side they chose while remaining at 80% for the other side.

This class is what we traditionally consider a hybrid, almost as good as a pure class, but with an option the pure class does not have.

The traditional math argument is well I could bring 1 dpser (100% dps, and one healer 100% healing), or I could bring these two hybrids and get 170% dps, and 170% healing. Why would you ever bring the pure class...blah blah blah.

The problem is that even if the class can do 80% of the healing, they cant do it at the same time. Even if specked for it, this theory class cannot heal at the same time they are nukeing they need to stop doing damage to heal.

The hybrids in the game get around this by doing their second role at the same time as their first. The problem is that the talents and skills that let them do it are not very strong so that they end up being 95% primary role 5% secondary.

Examples to show what I mean:
Shadow priests do dps, and at the same time, without any additional GDC, or effort heal (and regen mana).
Ferals do high dps while tanking, and heal off their crits. (I know this is a weaker example but its there).
Ret paladins maintain JoL and JoW so heal and regen mana as they dps.

And so on

A buff to these mechanics could allow "hybrids" on raids.

If you do 50% dps OR 50% healing no one brings you to a raid, your worthless.
If you do 50% dps AND 50% healing you get brought because two of you = one healer, one dps.

Imagine a world where Leader of the Pack healed 100% of the damage dealt by the druid to his party, and assume a 500dps druid (I realize this would be broken and the numbers are off but its an example).

Now you could, for example run a group with two druids instead of one 1000hps druid and one 1000dps druid.

Which is a better model than if a druid could either heal 90% as well as a healer and dps 90% as well as a dpser. Because in that situation you allways just bring the two pure classes and druids sit in LFG.

I dont think blizzard will go this way unfortunately, I think we will see more specialization and less choice in the trees, and the constant up and down for class balance...but a paladin can dream.

 

oldmandennis

I'm not arguing for overpoweredness, I'm but it's my opinion that healer hybrids should be able to do a nontrivial amount of healing. If you lost a couple of healers to a bad shatter on Gruul, some classes were able to stop dpsing and heal enough to finish the boss. If you lost a warlock tank early on HKM, a cat could pick him up. Changes in itemization are making both of those scenarios **less** likely.

Look, if a cat is 85% rogue, 75% tank, and 50% healer, it's not some superhuman creature worth 215% of a normal raider. You can't tell a healer to stay home because the kitty is going to do his job. The cat is most of a rogue that is counting on some group buffs to justify a slot, with some interesting oh shit buttons that if skillfully used might save a raid or two. You can't do more then one role at any one time. The relative and absolute nerfs to a cat's ability to perform other jobs dumb down the game, and remove part of the point of playing a hybrid.

I mostly use ferals as an example because I have the most experience with them. Other healing hybrids are probably in much the same boat.

Vinsent, your example makes little sense, because that's not the way any class really works. Ferals have to shift (and stop DPS) to heal. Shaman and Paladin both stop autoattacking or casting bolts while they heal. Priests... on 95% of fights VE is mostly wasted, with Brutallis being the obvious exception.

I'd be interested to see a WWS of a feral doing a competitive amount of healing on Archimond. My guess is that he's mostly decursing. Besides you can't switch gear in combat, so in order to achieve this, he's discarding his hard earned gear and most of his talent points. If this was a new fight to you, you would be greatly served by subbing him out.

 

Vhex

Make all classes hybrids, problem solved honestly. If you have no 'pure' classes to compare to, nobody is getting jipped.

 

Liebestod

Personally, I'd like to see them leave the talent-trees capped at 41 points but expand them horizontally, and also add some talents that required investments in multiple trees, like for Priests you'd have a 30-point Shadow / 20-point Disc talent or something like that. One problem by simply expanding the trees down vertically is that this tends to lead to "pure" specs becoming better over hybrids, since the pure spec will be able to increasingly specialize for its given niche, especially in PvE where niching is more prevalent.

I'd seperate the arcs into the "against the Illidari" (which arguably includes TK) and "against the Legion", but it's really not a line that needs to be made very heavily. I definitely wouldn't put Karazhan in either, unfortunately... yea, apparently there was an Eredar there for some reason, but the dungeon overall didn't have much of a story beyond "let's explore some shit, revive some dragons, etc." Which is kind of a shame, really, it had the promise to be a lore-rich place with its ties to Medivh, the Karazhan riders, etc. wtb upside-down Karazhan.

You also forgot to mention the Infinite Dragonflight arc, which arguably would've been important if the devs bothered to do anything with it in Hyjal. Maybe they'll show up in old Strat, but I'm still pretty annoyed by the plot thread being abandoned.

And yea, one-off side arcs like Terokk, Gruul, Zul'Aman.. all nice additions. Also hints at a Deathwing arc, hopefully that's expanded on sometime soon.

 

• frmorrison

Towards the Hybrids, at least in non-heriocs for example any Feral Druid or Ret Pally can main heal with a gear swap.

It is later in heroics and beyond where you may need to spec healing to keep up, but with the new SP dailies (about 150g in a hour once a day), respecs aren't a problem.


Blizzard needs to make Ret Pallies and Feral Druid use Warrior/Rogue gear respectfully, so there aren't more "wasted" drops on loot tables and the game is more causal friendly.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Zifna

The loss of hybridization worries me from another perspective.

Shaman, Druids, and Paladins are essentially each three different classes. A Resto Druid and a Feral Druid have very little overlap in raiding. Rogues and Warriors probably are more interchangeable and alike than A Resto and Feral Druid.

So, these "hybrid" classes are "overrepresented" in raids, as you might have 5 shaman in a raid for example... and it's clear that at least some of the community sees this as a problem.

Blizzard seems to be encouraging "one and only one" of each miniclass, but this leads to issues also for many guilds as if your hybrid classes are not of 100% attendance, you will either have to have your multiples sit out disproportionate amounts of the time or accept a suboptimal composition to bring them in.


Do you think this is a good direction for Blizzard to take? To encourage "the Balance Druid," "the Ret Pally," "the Prot Paladin?" To be honest, I do not.

 

Addled

That would mean that WotLK would be rolled out in September/October, correct?

TBH, I hope that Blizzard delays until the Christmas holiday season/Spring vacation time to launch WotLK. I go to college and work simultaneously; there's no way I can take time off to rush-level my toon to 80 until the holiday season. There's probably a good portion of the WoW population that is similar to me as well.

--------


Also, what do people feel about crafting professions in WotLK? I'm leveling a mining/engineering shaman now, it might become my new raiding main for WotLK. If Blizzard is going to repeat giving jaw-dropping BOP epics to crafting professions (see Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire, Frozen Shadoweave sets), I'm considering going Leatherworking/Engineering instead.

Would it be worth it or not?