Gurtogg Bloodboil and the Illidari Council; I don't have to, but I find myself playing the role of hybrid dps during these fights.

When Gurtogg starts his fel rage phase, I throw 2-3 heals on the target trying to get a fast ancestral healing proc to smooth things out until the main healers have the raid stable and are on target. If someone really squishy gets fel rage, I'll often just bomb heals (and chug mana pots).

On the Illidari Council my role is dedicated Malande-wrangling and she is a poor dps target 50% of the time. Rather than switching targets when she's shielded up, I instead touch heal the raid and try to keep ancestral healing on the Gathios tank.

Those are two good hybrid fights. But during any battle that is not a pure dps race, I will usually be looking for opportunities to snap off quick heals. Most battles with no enrage timers and/or plenty of phase changes are viable opportunities to trade some DPS time for stability and control. While I don't think the game is exactly friendly towards a hybrid playstyle, I do think there is some room for a split focus right now. If Blizzard makes the right design decisions in the future, shaman could get multi-role duties on more encounters.

The old Gruul was this way too (not so much anymore since they softened him up quite a bit). At the beginning of the fight, your healers are standing around twiddling their thumbs because he hasn't grown yet. So they can throw up some damage (at least some of them) while healing isn't intensive. Conversely, at the end of the fight with multiple growths, the ferals and enhancements can help out healing due to the damage output.

Why does everyone seem to think a non-prot tank can't tank heroics? They make it slightly harder but it's still entirely doable if the healers any decent(yes even in pugs)..... and even if the cases that you get a Tank and a warrior for DPS the warrior is still valuable with their debuffs and ability to off-tank if you need it (In an instance like SH for example we had the DPS warrior tank the first mob we killed while DPSing it while the tank grabbed the rest, A DPS warrior is still (imo) more useful to the grp then say a ret pally, or even a mookin(especially if the grp is melee hvy)

I think you are misinterpreting me to make a very old and well-established point. People are min/maxing thus hybrids aren't using all their roles equally (not even close). This is obviously true and I didn't want to doubt that in the least.

But Blizzard is starting to make talents that work for min/maxing AND for being hybridish. Something like "Mental Quickness will also add 10/20/30% of your AP to your +damage/healing". Or "Tactical Mastery now greatly increases threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst while in Defensive Stance". Those talents (and things like +healing -> +spelldmg) are what will make being hybrid more fun than ever.

And it can work because people are min/maxing so talents giving bonus points to other trees while at the same time helping to min/max does not necessarily unbalance the game but is just an icing on the cake when it comes to raiding. That resto shamans can do a bit more DPS or DPS warriors are able to generate a little more thread won't change *that* much for the raiding but for everything else. That was my point. But even in raiding it might alleviate the stacking needs a little in the long run.

While these individual changes don't mean too much I think we can see a pattern and it's quite promising to hybrids from my view. I still remember how I hated being gimped outside of raids playing a protection warrior.

The problem generally I've seen is twofold:

(1) The DPS warrior sucks at threat generation period. Is this a class limitation? I'm guessing no. But it's a serious player / mindset limitation. And since we are asking "what's the matter with dps warriors tanking heroics?" in the actual game not some theoretical game where skilled dps warriors fill the LFG tool, this problem is real.

(2) The DPS warrior doesn't even remotely understand building multi-target threat. I find that in non-heroic 5-mans, you can get away with ridiculous things. I "tank" a caster on my rogue. The paladin "heal tanks" whatever is not CC-ed. While the caster bit can be possible in heroics, no healing class can OT a mob and still be healing.

While protection warriors are not automatically good at (1) or (2) they at least think about them as a rule and generally try to build solid threat and solid multi-target threat. Since you are generally racing to down some kind of non-CC-ed mob in a heroic, it's especially critical. If I sit there on my rogue auto-attacking or ony my priest flaying only (with pain up) because anything else (mashing SS, adding VE and MB, whatever) is aggro for me, well someone is typically going to be OOM, dead, whatever.

A warrior certainly can tank heroics without points in protection, but it can really slow your group down depending on group makeup. If I am not protection and grouped with well-geared DPS, it's often nerve wreaking trying to hold aggro on trash. Non-prot warriors have very little front loaded aggro (aka Shield slam) which can really slow things down. A paladin in the group with BoS helps a lot here.

To me the difference is purely the fun factor. As arms/fury, it's possible to tank a heroic but it's a lot more work can be a bit flaky with aggro and multi-mob control. As protection, tanking is a blast since you have additional skills and the ability to seriously control fights. I respec to protection for heroics because it's simply more fun.

Does anyone else suspect that the changes to disarm immunity have more to do with making bear tanks important in WotLK than anything else?

I could see an encounter where the boss has a frequent or extended-duration disarm ability that would be extremely difficult for a warrior to tank post-2.3. Druids, and to a lesser extent paladins, would be ideal for such an encounter.

I say "to a lesser extent paladins" not because of threat generation, which would not be hampered significantly by being disarmed, but due to the inability to parry while disarmed. This would still make the paladin preferable to a warrior in such a fight, but the druid would clearly be favored.

I would be very surprised if WotLK didn't bring us at least one boss with a significant disarm ability.

No. It's almost certainly a PVP change. There were a large number of very irritating NPCs that disarmed in old content (I'm looking at you, BRD and Strath) and 'needing' a bear tank is a stupid way to bring that back in to play.

I would say it's simply for the sake of homogenity. They recently changed this mechanic for silence (immunity changed to duration reduction), now they're doing it for disarm. I think they're realizing immunity isn't necessarily a good thing when it comes to balancing certain aspects of PVE/PVP.

It'll certainly be an interesting change to arena matches though, considering a large portion of the teams run with arms warriors who can soon be disarmed for at least 5 seconds.

Aggro really shouldn't be to much of a problem anymore...... atleast on the servers i've played on all the pugs have KTM except the new lvl 70 ones(that I wouldn't be doing heroics with anyways), while it might still be slower you still tank alot better then say a Resto/moonkin or ret/holy paladin can. As for the shortage of tanks w/ all the hybrid builds and stuff I'm pretty sure that is why the first "Hero" class is a class that can tank.

I often find myself healing on Bloodboil as well, at least when teh squishies get it. And there are other places that I feel encourage some degree of hybridization (Naj'entus is one, Archimonde another) but no place that I feel rewards it to the extent that encounters reward/demand bringing particular pure classes.

I should be clear here... I do think Blizzard is getting much better at encouraging hybrids in raids, but I think they still have room to improve.

No, the arena threshhold is 15 minutes.

It does bring up whether wearing the 5-piece Genesis set bonus will allow it to be used in Arena, however (5-piece Genesis reduces the cooldown on Rebirth by 5 minutes).

Man, if it does, that's going to change a lot of the class dynamics in pretty much every tier of competition.

I was going to say something on the Priest talents, but words fail me at the moment over the combined awesomeness, and much of it has already been said. I'm actually really happy for the Nelfs; Elune's Grace was so much crap for so long.

Elune's Grace + Pain Supression = Priest Facetanking. I'm totally rerolling Elf so I can do what I'm best at. D:

Seriously, though, the lowering of Fort/Spirit's mana cost, and the Meditation buff is going to be huge. I might have to start switching to those Purified Shadow Pearls from my Royal Nightseyes. :x

Though I realize DPS Warriors are completely capable of holding solid aggro on a number of targets, as a healer I would under no circumstances trust a non-Prot tank for a Heroic unless I knew the guy. Even if DPS has KTM, their threat is largely negotiable...but if I get aggro from my first heal, I get mad very quckly and will likely ditch the group if the problem continues. That's the problem on my end...most DPS Warriors can't get solid enough aggro on all un-CC'd targets to protect their healer.

Would be interesting if the 4 part Druid set bonus allowed CR to work inside arenas (as several sets are getting different boni), a very strong incentive for bringing them into your team...

I think he means "I'm hoping the S3 Gladiator 4pc reduces the cooldown on brez by 5 minutes so you can use it in arena."

At least that's how I read it. <_<;;

I ran alot of heroics with my 5's warrior to get him nethers and while he is the best warrior I know, you could definately feel the difference between him being prot and non prot. It got to the stage where he would only do heroics as arms if he had a paladin for salv.

Also the pre nerf felguards in Blood Furnace would just kill him every pull if he was arms as prot he was able to just survive. In the end we just had to switch to me holding agro while he kept them hamstrung.

This is pretty much the only bonus to be more awesome than the current 4 piece for druids.

Major changes to Alterac Valley.

The focus is less on zerging the general and more on defending and keeping players on your team alive. Winning is now based around a point based system similar to EoTS/AB except that it works backwards.

Ummm... allowing combat resurrection to be used in arenas only if you have a four piece arena set is just about the worst thing they could do. The four piece bonuses shouldn't make or break a class in arenas. Or you'd have to struggle to get enough arena points (or at least insane amounts of honour) to get the set before you could get on even an average team.

So? Having a warrior in Merciless Gladiator brought back to life after being dead more than makes up for a hit to the druid's stats. Its not like they were arena powerhouses anyway, and gimped gear doesn't make it any harder to cast Cyclone

Theres already a minor precedent in that warlocks with 1.3s 50% unstoppable fears are a lot more desirable just because they have a four piece arena set. /shrug

Do you honestly think the number one priority, every time, for every team wouldn't be the Druid if they could combat res in Arena?