I just dont want to see WoW dumbed down to cater for a guild that recently collapsed and cant field an average amount of people from x-class.

Let them balance bosses around having a perfect melee group, hunter group, and/or caster group. Let them assume we can afford to use 2 sheeps/novas/fears/kidneyshots/shackles/traps/MDs/etc, and let them make fights that require the use of those abilities where other alternate classes are busy doing another important aspects of the fight.

That's fine (and exactly what happens) in a true end-game raid, ala Sunwell, or perhaps the current end-game (Hyjal, when Sunwell didn't exist). And possible in a 25-man. In anything else, you can't be 100% sure you'll have one of a given class. Especially in 10-mans. Yes, they could make 10-man Arthas require exactly one of each class. That would be fine, as he's intended to be the final boss. In fact, you could extrapolate it to his entire instance. But 10-man Naxx? Requiring exactly one of each class would pretty much kill any chance a casual guild has of walking in.

I would argue that removing specific class requirements isn't dumbing down the game. Requiring an ability that only one class can do for any major encounter doesn't test the raid's ability to play the game. It tests the raid leadership's ability to get 25 people of the right class. Properly balanced encounters should test the raid's ability to play the game rather than the raid's makeup. They should NEVER force a raid to take a lesser-skilled player just because they're playing X class over a better player playing Y.

Illidari Council has been brought up several times in the last page, and I think it's the worst encounter to use as an example for why class abilities are important. Removing the magetank component of the encounter doesn't make it harder. Lowering the damage that the mage does so a warlock or hunter can tank it doesn't make it any easier, either.

Then again, all 4 of them should just keel over after 5 minutes of combat anyway, because if the entire raid is alive at 1 minute, you've probably won...

I agree and this would be why many GMs end up as MT or the main healer in guild too.
Given the freedom many would love to pew pew but won't and the game while still fun becomes a bit more of a chore.

Putting raids together for certain fights due to gimmicks present or mechanics that require specific skills can get annoying even if it isn't to beat new encounters. Shuffling, benching and swapping raiders is a chore and never the funnest part of the raid. Having understanding players and a good cohesive team make these tasks easier, but I still do hate making people wait to get these chores done. It's not a deal breaker but it is a mundane task and detracts from the game. I really think raid leaders get burned out doing these types of chores over time.

It's easy to say recruit extra #'s; make some of the active players use their alt's that can do task X or whatever but we shouldn't have to have someone on the bench for a gimmick or to stack for some purpose. There needs to be more flexibility by design IMO.

I don't care what the numbers actually shake out to, I just wish a) Bosses 2,3,4 and 5 required/are doable with the same composition as boss 1; and b) there's some sort of raid penalty for padding/min-max'ing for a particular boss/trash pack. Note, this is different from filling in for "gone to bed warrior", this is 5 healers for boss A but 8 for boss B, replace melee with ranged for boss C, and back again for boss D, etc etc.

The 25 you roll with *should* be the 25 you roll with, period.

On a side note, I'd be interested in seeing a boss that changed abilities based on who you had excess of. Excess melee at the expense of your ranged numbers? Cleaves/WWs, blinds,HoJ's, Purges go up. The other direction? Rains of fire, sheeps, sudduces, fears, chain lightnings. Extra healers? Hots, bubbles, shields, big heals, etc. But unlike Nefarion or that ZA troll, he wouldn't use abilities of your low/average counts. Still be some work to make the abilities granted by a 2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/9 group comp (in any form) harder to handle than a 2/2/3/3/3/3/3/3/3 composition (maybe add ability cooldown timers into the mix or something).

It's worth pointing out that raid-wide buffs give Blizzard some flexibility with tanking-oriented abilities that scale with damage and attack power. They're basically guaranteeing that a warrior tank will have Battle Shout, Strength of Earth, Windfury, and Unleashed Rage. That's an additional 550 attack power with level 70 buffs (and likely 800+ with WotLK buffs), that a tank might not otherwise have.

It seems like this is a little more significant for druids than it is for warriors or paladins (although we don't know anything about paladins, but it seems probable to me that they're going to implement an attack power to spell damage conversion). In any event, assuming all the other factors remain roughly equal, this probably suggests that sustained threat might be a bit less of an issue in Wrath, possibly giving them more opportunities to play around with threat drops or other mechanics of that nature, rather than "stay just under the tank's threat for 10 minutes".

It also gives a ton of benefit to non-Prot warrior off-tanks, given the new bonuses to skills like Sunder Armor and Rend, and of course the Tactical Mastery change for BT/MS. Rage will still be a major problem for them, but Windfury is some help for that, so these changes are still very positive.

But going off on a tangent for no particular reason, I really think they'd be better off increasing base rage generation from damage caused, and removing rage generated from Windfury hits. I think most warriors are a little fed up with how warrior skill use is tailored around the existence of one particular totem, regardless of whether that totem is more available in Wrath.

A "raidberance" debuff - can't log into the raid instance for 4 hours after someone else zones in to your spot perhaps? It would allow you to replace a player who has to leave, but not allow you to rotate players in and out.

Only problem I see is with top guilds just getting a bigger roster and rotating in multiple players to fill a role rather than one player in and out.

I think the better option is for blizzard to balance with the assumption that people run the same 25 man raid through an entire zone and if the hardcore guilds want to cheese it and run a different comp for every pull, let them.

Well, on this mythical boss, what I mean is that if you somehow broke the 25 cap and did full 3's across the board, the boss would be a tank'n'spank, but since you can't, and your raid had 3 warriors, warlocks, shamans, rogues, Pali's, then the boss would do WWs, rain of fires, chain lightnings/heal totems, blinds, and Hoj's/bubbles. Had you done 3 mages instead of warlocks, he'd do sheeps instead of rains. *that* sort of thing. But without something to penalize a 2/2/.../9 setup so that you could cheese him into ONLY doing 1 ability, it potentially falls apart.

But yeh, it'd be crazy to program, and someone would figure out which are the easiest abilities (I'm thinking something along the line of "stack shadow priests and let MS style debuffs, purges, and kicks handle the "priest" abilities the boss would do" the most likeliest.)

As for the other paragraph, this comes back to the pure fail that always plagues hybrids as *TRUE* hybrids. If your hybrids can match/beat the pures, you may as well do the 8/8/9 pali/sham/druid raid for pure redundancy and Oshit buttons. If however they can't beat the pures, then you simply don't want them. Wow's gotten around this by making them NOT hybrids, through spec, gear, and unique abilities; they turn into their own pure class a significant portion of the time.

That is exactly the issue that can be fixed by good encounter design and the upcoming changes. If hybrids would do 90% of the healing and 90% of the dps (counting raid(de)buffs and everything) you wouldn't take them to an encounter like Brutallus of course. But if you have encounters where you need to dps race in one phase and massively heal in the next, those hybrids would be the best choices.
To give an extreme example, if reliquary of souls would have a serious enrage timer in phase 1 and in phase 3 he just kills himself, but you have to outlive it to 5k tics or something, you couldnt do it with 2+15+8 but instead would have to bring those hybrids.

I don't know how this would play out in the long run, maybe it would lead to having to switch hybrids in and out for those specific fights because you can't design every encounter around it, but right now we have this in SWP for exactly 2 people and thats for the traditional specialist/offtank (feral druid on all encounters but kalecgos, holy pala on muru).
Role switching mid fight is fun and takes alot of skill a hybrid should bring, to be more of a jack of all trades instead of a "95% of pure job class, but brings raid synergies and thats why you bring exactly one".
As a moonkin id like to do more than innervate a healer and combat res someone if shit hits the fan. If a healer died and i can take over most of his job, rearranging stuff mid fight and still win, thats a so much better raid experience and what made me keep up farming during a one year content draught more than anything.
Gear that suits more than one role and raidwide instead of partywide buffs already helps on this, druids have alot of hybrid talents and fundamental mechanic changes on a button click (shifting) which makes this easier aswell, but i don't see why other hybrids shouldnt have this.

More "out of the box" options for this would be affliction warlocks drainlife/healthfunneling to players or spriests choosing who to heal with VE. Damage for those classes wouldnt have to be buffed and fixed all the time, because they bring other options than pure dps.

Just to stick my nose into this discussion as it is a subject of very high interest to me, to breath my thoughts a little.
Should anyone feel this is the wrong place, there's always PMs.
On the subject of this topic:
Any Min/Maxer would instantly swap a Boomkin for a Mage if he can only perform ~80% after everything counted out on an encounter basis. Ele shamans and Enhancement shamans aswell should you ever be in that seat, as the original quote claims, hybrids doesn't work, that's why we have speccs for them, to create their own "pure" class so to speak, at costs I'm not going into now.

Having hybrids for fights like your RoS would be very gimmicky, even more so than mage spellsteal tanking and I doubt any raid would have/make room for more than one [hybrid], and even he'd be doing another job "full time". You can either see this as the "hybrid" being a "properly" specced Boomkin, or a XX/YY/ZZ shaman, both being full resto 90% of the other time. The "offspeccs" would die out.

Somewhat off topic:
To be somewhat fair druids aren't really hybrid, they're shape shifters. I'd think an elemental shaman with the assumed resto/ele spell power/critt/haste/mp5 gear could very well assume a "hybrid" role better than anything else due to not having to shift or anything, however if you are there for a role, be it dps or healing, if you're only doing it ~80% of anyone else, he's probably going to take your spot.

I used to smack at things with my axes back in MC when healing wasn't needed as much, I didn't see that again until the weakened phase of C'thun. I've also tanked every instance up to UBRS as a shaman, "hybrids" however died somewhere after level 40.

I don't think there is a room for "hybrids" as we define them, one could also argue that utility and class/specc differences doesn't always come in forms of DPS or how it was mentioned so nicely in another thread, there's also CC and survivability, in wotlk perhaps even more.

It is as of this date the first and foremost reason I hear when I ask people why I as a shaman cannot outdo or match a "pure"; "you can heal". Well I ask you; with trees containing over 60 points designated to healing with me spending the majority of mine focused on DPS, is that claim really valid? (This might be more of a pvp issue, but valid nonetheless) With all the skills there is to nullify/weaken the healing (or in a raid situation, really put pressure on those doing it(Twins fight for example)) done by those who specialize in healing, that completely shut down my absurdly small healing capabilities, should they count as factors of such magnitude to justify me losing dps or other valuable assets? It's a mentality issue somewhere, many might not agree with me, but I'd much rather see this is a gimmick** when it comes down to Brutallus'ish fights where everyone must be doing 110%. I can't outheal a Burn anyways, why should the fact that I have a spell with the word "Light" or "Healing" in it's name burden me?

WOTLK brings a unified +heal and +dmg stat that without a doubt will benefit Elemental Shamans and Balance Druids in what can be seen as a "hybrid" way, I just hope this won't be a step in the wrong direction. Remeber; we'll still have 51 point talents in trees designed for completely different playstyles/roles.

**The gimmick being having somewhat usable healing spells when not specced for it. See it as either how some warlocks can outheal the most things, without a single healing spell. Or how Spellsteal as fun as it can be, is cool to have once in a blue moon when solo playing or such, whilst not being very game breaking. Mind Control also comes to mind, we haven't used that since Naxx now have we? I know this sounds wrong as shamans/druids/paladins are classes with three different type of core abilities, what is the problem there is that when you specialize at something for 70 levels, you basicly "specc away" the two other.

In PvP the ability to heal, even in a weak fashion, is powerful.

In PvE the ability to heal in weak fashion is more or less meaningless (it's not useless by any stretch, but I don't think anyone claims that, in a PvE context, shaman DPS is toned down because they can heal). Shaman DPS is less than pure-specs because shamans provide the most powerful stacking utility in the entire game.

I agree that the hybrid issue is a thorny one. A gear overhaul is a first step, but you still have to address the question of why anyone would ever roll a mage if they can do the same DPS, tank, and heal, all at the same level, whenever they please if they rolled a druid instead.

Yeah, I pretty much feel the same way. There really is only 2 hybrid classes, Feral druids and DPS Warriors. They can DPS and Tank without having to respec. An Enhancement/Elemental shaman isn't a hybrid. They DPS. Their gear doesn't support healing at all, and they aren't brought to raids as healers. If an Elemental Shaman, or a Boomkin, or a Prot Pally needs to throw out a heal it's because something has gone terribly wrong.

I do not mind doing less dps then a Mage or a Warlock, because of the benefits I bring to a raid. With Raid wide Totems, having an Elemental Shaman will be a decent benefit for every caster in the raid. The gap does seem too large to me though, especially when you compare Rogues and Enhancement Shaman, and the much larger benefit to melee groups Enhancement brings to the table.

TBC specialized specs into pure roles due to deeper talent trees.

An MS or fury warrior can't tank anything meaningful they simply don't do enough threat and lose a ton of survivability.

For feral druids they lose some key dps talents by spec'ing for main tanking and lose some useful tanking talents spec'ing pure dps.

I remember when I used to be able to heal with 20 holy (and 41 ret) in Naxx as well as 41 holy paladins. Such a thing is impossible in TBC.

The current TBC system is working fine for me. If we are short a healer I spec holy no problem.. otherwise I spec ret and I'm can put out ~2k dps on Brutallus. I much prefer this over the pre tbc a watered down hybrid which is half arse at both healing and dps.

Not true, when progressing (reasonably early on) I used fury warriors for maulgar, hydross (offtanking), lurker, fathom-lord, al'ar, all of hyjal, (cept archi ofc), RoS, could use them on council. Also on weekends when doing SSC fun runs, I often bring my warr in to tank hydross frost phase as arms or fury (without tactical mastery), while we may now outgear it, and it would be by no means optimal, "hybrid" warriors are completely able to tank or dps provided they have the gear.

More to the point though, given how cheap respeccing is, especially for a raiding guild, why would you bother? Why throttle all your DPS and stress your healers when all it takes is a rune of portals, a soul shard, and 100 gold to get yourself a prot tank? (Something like Caribdiss or Malande obviously tank as DPS spec, it doesn't matter, but I can't imagine any good reason to tank all of pre-Archimonde Hyjal without respeccing.)

There are a lot of things that can be done, but aren't worth the bother to actually do.

Another way of dealing with hybrids would be like AoC (and other games): to have hybrids both heal and dps using the same abilities.

SP already does that of course, and their healing is most of the times worthless, except on certain encounters with heavy raid-wide damage (Felmyst comes to mind), but the group healing debuff is not the only way to handle this :

They may introduce a second target (or use the existing focus system) you'd heal while dpsing the main target (or an intervene-like system : target's target if target is a foe), or putting damage debuffs on next attack to nuke spells.

The problem is that it would require a whole rework of concerned classes, we may see that happen on hero classes.

Tanking/dps and tanking/healing hybrids would be much more tricky to work on due to...well tanking as it is.
Maybe tank/heal would be workable based on drains and the such.

(first post here, feel free to correct any obvious flaws)

Given there are 7 non-healer specs of hybrids, and the only one that's currently considered a "good" PvP spec is elemental in 5s, if Blizzard is balancing with the idea that off-spec heals are powerful in PvP, they've clearly got it wrong.

Those non-healer hybrid specs are weak(ish) in PvP because they lack CC, reliable snares, MS, are too easily kited, or have no way to escape the assist train. Off-healing is in most cases insufficient to make up for those disadvantages, and in addition only the caster hybrids (ele shams, moonkin, and shadow priests) can actually wear gear that gives them a mana pool to speak of.

The point remains however that any damage done to an all DPS that team lacks any hybrids is permanent. Any damage done to an all DPS team that has a hybrid can be healed (for example, once the DPS team blows up an opponent or two, they are no longer threatened by the odd DoT being tossed at them, etc.).

Anyways, minor point. Specs are balanced around the synergies and buffs they bring, not around their ability to do gimped healing in a pinch. Those synergies are usually less powerful in smaller group content (such as arena) and hybrids often suffer in that environment as a result.

Please don't forget the Spellpower change coming in WotLK. When considering a hybrid's ability to heal you have to keep in mind what they are currently able to do while wearing full "healing" gear.

Now, I agree that still might be worthless in a 25 man raid situation, where everyone's role is so specialized, and this topic is very much focused on that, but WoW is a much larger game. In a 10 man raid, in a 5 man instance, an arena, a battleground, an off healer can be very valuable.

I think too many people are arguing the grey area of "optimal vs viable". For hardcore guilds, they will always find some way of being OPTIMAL in any given encounter. The vast bulk of the subscribership would be happy with simply being VIABLE.

I'll leave PvP out of it, but from a PvE perspective the only way to make true hybrid's viable is to create vastly dynamic encounters that require different things at different times without the ability to swap characters (this was mentioned previously). Again the dillema this creates is that suddenly hybrids will be "required" in one sense or another. All you have done is swap one problem with another.
Now it seems that the changes to gear,stats, and buffs MIGHT help allieviate this to a degree but only time can tell. The bigger problem I forsee from these changes is that content is either going to become far easier or much harder for your "average" guild. As it stands, many guilds can't field enough people who can survive "get out of the fire" mechanics.... can you imagine suddenly people having to change roles mid fight?? There is a reason that Kael and Vashj broke so many guilds.

I would love to see Blizzard create a deeper and more challenging raid environment, but more and more I feel the core of the game is being eroded. I just don't have faith that the changes are at all for the right reasons. Its that old saying that you can't be everything to everybody all of the time.

Paladins in LK will have high spellpower in all specs.
Prot: 30% Stamina -> Spellpower
Ret: 30% AP -> Spellpower. This talent is also low enough to be grabbed by Prot or Holy if they choose to skip their 51pt talents.
Considering that a raidbuffed 70 Retadin has ~3000 AP in tier4/5 equiv gear, thats around 900 SP or 1800 heals; equivalent to what holy paladins at that level will have. Meaning that a Ret or Prot paladin will have not incosiderable healing power whilst in ret/tank gear.
Ret DPS has been increased considerably, as has Ret's ability to refund mana to the group (JoWisdom now ~600 mana per proc? + 60% of judgement damage to 3 group members as mana (thats around 2k mana to each of 3 people every 8 seconds)


I think one of the main things here is how you classify the different classes. The way I see it, there are no 'pure' classes. There are 4 different things one can do whilst playing: Heal, DPS, Tank, CC.
Warlock/Hunter/Mage/Rogue = DPS/CC hybrids.
Warrior/Deathknight= DPS/Tank. Paladin/Druid= DPS/Tank/Heal. Shaman/Priest= DPS/Heal.

On one hand you have the view that if a 'hybrid' does the same DPS as a 'dps' class, then there would be no point in playing a DPS class. On the other hand, if a 'hybrid' can't do the same DPS as a 'DPS', then there is no point in having a 'hybrid'.
Of course, all that ^^ is stupid, as each class brings different, required buffs. And people will still play mages, as said before, BECAUSE of the fact that they can't be called on to heal/tank.

Overall, i think many of the changes from group->raidwide buffs is good, just to remove group stacking. As the OP said, if a melee DPS can't be in the windfury group, there's no point in him being there. Now a raid doesn't need 4 Shamans. yay.
Required Paladin numbers have been reduced to 2-3 (rather than the 'optimal' 4/5 to get all blessings). Blessings of Salvation and Light have been removed, meaning that blessings of Kings, Might and Wisdom will be enough for the raid. Protection aura, now raidwide, increases healing on affected targets by 3% when talented. Improved Ret aura now does +2% damage for the raid. So overall i think we'll see at most 3 paladins of a raid: 1 Prot/Ret tank. 1 Holy/Ret (sheath of light) Healadin, and 1 Ret/Prot DPS.

I'd like to come back to Boombeef's point. It seems to me entirely possible that what will happen as opposed to what should happen is that healer numbers will remain high. This will be a particular issue if the Death Knight is very popular, all those extra tanks and dpsers with no one to heal them.

The reason I think this is because of the new Spellpower system. Currently if you have a healer with +2100 heal and he puts on a Shadow Word: Pain it will get +700 spell damage, so it's pretty small potatoes. +heal incorporates one third of its power as spell damage. In the new system the equivalent to +2100 heal will be 1400 spellpower. Healer dots etc will be significantly more powerful. Moreover they will benefit from some of the Shaman totems that are currently restricted to the caster group if those are raid-wide in Live.

As a healer in the situation of trying to add supplementary dps you get to cherry pick your dps spells. Searing totem or Shadow Word: Pain is only one global cooldown and puts out a lot of damage for the time you spent to cast it.

So if at some stage of a fight you find yourself needing 6 healers and you've got 9 some of them can dps a bit and do it with more bonus damage and synergistic buffs than they could do currently. Then when the raid takes heavy damage they can all focus on healing for a bit.

The spellpower change is clearly aimed at opening up the possibility of hybridicity in raids. In addition the changes to auras and totems encourages this still further by offering dps synergies to healers.

All this means if you're not sure whether to take 7 or 8 healers you can take 8 and just have some of them dps if it's too many

The converse is also true, dpsing hybrids that use Spellpower (Elemental Shammies, Boomkins and Shadowpriests) will be decent healers if needed. And that opens up the possibility that if you're deciding between 7 or 8 healers you can go with 7 and ask the boomkin to heal if it's not enough.

It's very much like the old level 60 days when the healers all dotted Onyxia and the dps shamans started healing if too many healers died.

On a different tack certain non-healers contribute considerably to the overall healing. As well as Vampiric Embrace and Improved Leader of the Pack the Death Knight ability Blood Aura can output a fair amount of healing. One option to reduce the numbers of conventional healers might be to make those abilities raid-wide and zero threat. You could drop a COH-spammin Priest if they did that.