Rather than clog up the 25-man cap "is it good or is it bad" discussion with a sidebar, I'm interested in discussing a different part of the 1up article (http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3152830). Namely: will there be a real role for hybrids in the expansion?

Edit: feel free to delete this thread, merged with the main thread where lots of people are talking about hybrid roles.

With smaller raids it just makes it very, very encounter-specific. Until we see what the instance design is we have no clue.

On the plus side it opens up even more min/max theorycraft for those of us bored at work. For posterity, I forsee that Itemrack will become integrated into the core UI whenever you roll a druid. Gogo socketed items.

It really depends on encounter design, and individual guilds. If a guild has members who are willing to log outside the instance and be on standby then they can min/max their raid per encounter and this will go a long way towards making hybrids less useful. However, I can't see too many guilds having this kind of capability. Only on the bleeding edge of content will this kind of thing happen.

Even in this situation, hybrids have their uses. Say an encounter has two phases. The first is healing intensive, and the second is dps intensive. The hybrids heal out the first phase, and hop in for dps on the second phase. This kind of encounter would go a long way to prevent hybrids from being eliminated.

I'm not so much intrested in the 25 man raid instance ( I really like the idea) but more so with the amount of guilds who will blow up internally to achieve a transfer from a 40 man raid guildto a 25 man raid guild.

It's all depending on how much effort they put into making encounters unique. The more unique encounters there are, the more value a hybrid has. Think if they had 8 bosses like ZG, you could wait at each boss while you switch in 3 nessesary classes or you can try it like Blizzard intends and do it with the classes you started with.

I guess what it comes down to is, are you in the game for challenge or just for the ability to keep saying "SERVER FIRST!" In EQ it mattered cause they weren't all instanced bosses, but in WoW everyone gets the same opportunities every week.

Perhaps as the way the game is now but in the expansion its hard to tell how powerful some classes will become, for example will priests healing capabilities hugely excede what a druid/paladin/shaman is capable of to the point where its actually possible for hybrids to fill a hybrid role in a smaller raid group without being detrimental to the raid? We have 10 extra levels to get through, and new abilities to learn. We cant really judge how important each class is for expansion encounters without knowing what encounters we may face, or how some classes may evolve. Thats how i see it anyway.

My biggest problem with giving hybrids a bigger role is quite simply the non-hybrids. The more important they make it to bring hybrid classes that can fulfill multiple roles the more screwed over the pure-classes get. I play a rogue as my main character in a well-off raiding guild. We've done MC, BWL, AQ20, ZG, Up to HH in AQ40 and killed raz in naxx. As a rogue I see other classes, mainly warriors, coming closer and closer in DPS and damage but still being able to tank, take less damage from the AoEs and have more HPs then me. With druids (example) becoming better at DPS, Tanking and Healing where will I stand as a pure DPS class? If a fight requires classes that can switch between healing, tanking and DPS in one encounter,l then I am completely fucked as a raider as all I can do is DPS.

//Zuckas

Kidney shot rotation? isn't that sartura? :)
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Yeah, I read up on the thief class for FFXI a while back and I like the aggro transfer thing they get. I also agree that discussing future roles is kind of pointless with no info on what is coming. But what else is there to discuss?

The exact description of the paladin's new taunt intrigues me - you cast it on a target, and it taunts any mob that is currently targetting that player.

It reminds me of something from this post: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...p=1#post929373

The proposed Paladin taunt is designed for this tactic - it's an improved tool for the task, but you'd use it the same way.

It's also ideal for aoe pulls - the ones with lots of little mobs that are normally impossible to tank because you can't hold aggro on that many targets at once, so the aoe has to burn them down while the healers desperately try to keep them alive, or (in raids) there's a challenging shout rotation. Tanking those kinds of pulls in a 5 man is already the single best situation for a paladin tank.

Sartura is a decent example of how you can design mobs that are stunnable, while not making it too easy by stacking rogues(whirlwind timer making it immune to anymore stuns and raping rogues who were too late getting out). There's also giant eyes on chtun that use very basic mechanics in the game, that are over exploited in pvp. Chain silencing healers or stun locking people isn't something new. It's been used by every decent team in a guild vs guild match in PvP. It's just weird that it took them so long to figure they could actually have stunnable mobs in PvE, and not make it trivial, by adding for example, heavy melee AE. Risk vs Reward concept, will you go and risk getting shred to pieces by a whirlwinding flying bitch to build combo points, or will you play it safe and bow it, for terrible dps and waste of a raid slot. I found sartura on my rogue pretty fun(but well I had pretty smart priests, it helps).

It's not like rogues ONLY bring dps to raids. It's just that mobs are immune to everything else(well besides a few crappy mobs in naxx that you can get thru without using anything but dps anyway). Mobs need to start being affected by gouge/kidney/cheapshot/blind, on a large scale, but with counters(a mob has very powerful melee attacks and isn't tankable, you blind it, for 8secs it actually stops moving and start spamming spells, but do no melee attack anymore...). The fact that very little encounters are designed to use some of the rogue abilities doesn't mean rogue bring nothing but dps to raids. It's just that you see the need to have additional tanks(dps warrior utility to offtank like, faerlina adds) or AE(basic utility of mages, can be considered dps but it's a very different form of dps, totally ineficient most of the case, which is why I consider it utility) more often than you see the need for stuns(yay anub mobs, too bad you can taunt them making the need for stuns close to zero... noth casters, are a bit better for that, but even then you can usually take them down before they get out of intercept stuns)

And yea I didn't bother explaining myself about FFXI, but to sum it up, the Thief class in FFXI has 2 special attacks with very high multipliers, pretty much like backstab and ambush, that you can use with specific positionning. You position yourself behind a tank, who's meleeing a mob, and all the threat you generate on these hits(it's actually really huge instant dmg, imagine full crit executes, not ambush) is transferred on the warrior you were behind. You then go around the mob and do it again with another warrior, or stay behind the warrior facing the mob to do another move that does less dmg, but secure threat on only one tank. The goal is to do maximum damage while generating threat on the tank. Really clever system imo, and would be very interesting to use in a wow concept.

On the same order of ideas, I'd like to see a way for warriors to block incoming attacks on other people by positionning themselves between the agressor and the target, and it would be great if it worked in pvp, and worked on ranged attacks. Would make being protection fun, cause you'd actually PROTECT stuff, not just stand there and try to be a terrible CC with the dmg output of a hunter pet. But I disgress ^^

Yea there is, but stacking rogues would still allow you to get full combo points kidney 3times in a row, for a total of... erm 5+2.5+1.75secs isn't it? Add to this normal stun for the same amount, you're looking at 17.5secs of stun, if timed perfectly, so probably closer to 12secs. That's still an insane amount of time, especially if you can repeat it in a cycle between every WW. Currently, there's no real point in stacking so many rogues because they lose quite a lot of dps stunning, and you can't maintain decent cycles because of the power of WWing which forces you to be cautious or else you die.