Well, for a Ret paladin Improved Sanctity Aura does just that, and a Prot paladin can get improved resistance auras that would be handy against elemental damage.

Greyn pointed out where shadow priests bring raid utility.

I will always maintain that the problem of "pigeon holing" hybrids has nothing to do with itemization or class mechanics, it has to do with encounter design. Up untill now, Blizzard has designed most encounters following a paradigm of there being specific tasks/jobs/roles that have to be fullfilled in order to defeat the encounters, and the difficulty of the encounter is based around these jobs. As long as there are encounters that are designed around this paradigm, hybrids will be pigeon holed into one job or another. If there's a big bad boss that hits really hard and needs to be tanked, a warrior will always be the best choice to tank it. Simply buffing paladins, shaman, or druids so they can tank it as well or better than a warrior would be imbalancing. I think the problem most people who play WoW have is that they find it difficult to envision an encounter that is "hard" without following this formula.

So how do you make an encounter difficult/challenging without following the "best class for the job" formula? I think Blizzard has already introduced some ideas that follow a rule of more general difficulty.

An example might be encounters that require special movement and positioning from all classes. Like Dark Glare on C'Thun, Thaddius polarity shifts, or the Heigan Dance. Basically, if you don't move at the right time you die regardless of what class you are. Or the spores on Loatheb, your group has to get a spore at the right time or you won't kill him. These are all mechanics that are not class dependant and are still somewhat challenging (well, I personally don't find them that difficult but apparently they are for some people :P )

What I'm getting at is encounters need to be designed not around classes, but around a more general difficulty. Sure, things should still need to be healed, tanked, and DPSed - but these jobs shouldn't be what makes an encounter challenging, all these jobs should be able to be accomplished by hybrids or pure classes or whatever without having an effect on the overall difficulty of the encounter.

I have no idea what the encounters will be like in BC, but I'm hoping they move this direction.

Please, let's not try to justify pigeon-holing people into roles based on Cheshire Cat arguments. I don't think there is a Druid out there who cares how you define what the word hybrid means because it has no impact on what I am and am not capable of. And Blizzard's definition of what druids are and are not has changed multiple times on their website as well so its no more valid a source of information.

Is a druid more a healer than a dps class? Certainly today we are. That's not the point of this thread though, is it?

Short answer is that I don't know its possible to even begin to speculate on the impact this will have. It is so dependent upon the instances, upon how the talents work out, and what bench a particular guild will have. I don't envision a future where nobody wants to heal (although the "not it!" analogy above is a pretty funny one) because there are some people who really like that today. How strongly top-tier guilds stick to their min/maxing practices (8 warriors in a raid!) and swap people on and off the bench according to need we don't know at this point because we don't know if hybrids bring anything to the new raids that they don't bring today.

Some of that is true right now, loatheb is a fight where a shadowpriest can heal for more then any healer, but thats because of a fight limiting mechanic. I can tell you that just about every person in our guild likes having me in the party because VE, while not gamebreaking, helps smooth out the aoe in most fights. VT actually takes away from the flexibility of a shadow priest slightly as it becomes much more valuable to be in a group with all mana users, while rogues/warriors/ferals do eat alot of AoE VE can heal.

The biggest concern I have with how hybrid design is this
The value of a second shadowpriest to the raid is significantly less, the first can apply shadow weaving and misery, while restoring health/mana, while the second can only act as a battery. Similarly the first retnoob can refresh judgements, but the second is just a strange healer/dpser that isn’t that great at either.

Blizzard has designed hybrids in a pretty similar way, as most of them provide a couple things.
1) Raid Wide Bonus (Shadow Weaving/Misery/Crusader Strike/Blood Frenzy/Imp Faerie Fire/Bear Tank)
2) Specific Party Bonus (VT/VE/Aura's/Totems/Shouts)
3) Some DPS level

It remains to be seen, but from what we know right now nothing from 1) stacks. If you are a raid leader and want to bring a hybrid you have to decide that the sum of these three is more valuable then a pure replacement. If your current guild has two priests that want to spec shadow, I wouldn’t want to be the one who is newer/lesser geared.

Hybrids will be valuable, because they provide some indirect bonus to dps/healing that no pure class can replicate, but I doubt most guilds will have more then 2 of any hybrid, due to the reduced raid numbers, and under most ideal situations only 1 would be on any given raid.

The 'off-spec'--because anything but healing for a multi-faceted class is an off-spec apparently--builds reaching raid-viability is seen as threatening by pure classes because they don't want to lose their raid slots.

Examples:

-Why would you bring a rogue if a fury warrior can do the same damage AND tank in a different set of gear?

-Hell, why would you bring a fury warrior if a feral druid can tank as well, dps as well, and cast the all-important heal spells better than a fury warrior? (disclaimer: not saying this is true as of right now or as of v2.01, just making the most extreme example possible)

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In all honesty, for a hybrid, or multi-faceted, class, an off-spec should be anything that concentrates heavily in one talent tree at the expense of the others. In a perfect world, a 'correctly' specced druid would have points in every tree, helping them do everything somewhat effectively and wearing gear very similar to genesis; however, in a min/max environment, that just isn't viable.

I think the quality of the player is vastly more important than the "quality of the talents spent". My main is a 60 Mage. I decided to try out a Druid (after a Priest) because I wanted something to melee with and because it's much more interesting than a Rogue. I (currently) am 0/30/21.

So I'm not an optimal healer. However, when called upon (which is 80% or more in the 5-mans that my Druid is currently running), I heal just fine. Because I'm skilled.

I absolutely trust my raiding Druids to heal well in whatever spec they choose because the are incredibly skilled. At some point, due to encounter design, I expect this to change and for deep Resto to be at least preferred, but for levelling up and the 5- to 10-man instances, spec what you want! I know I'm going to be partying with very good players, and they will get the job done. If, in fact, they can't - they are intelligent enough to respec and fix it.

And I think that's how hybrids should work.

This is analogous to a tank saying that he holds aggro fine after he gets critted for massive damage because he's at 430 Defense with 0/5 Anticipation. He is skilled at what he does, but his skill has no effect on preventing the crit. A skilled healer without healing talents is just as good as a shitty healer with healer talents: they are both average at healing. The "good enough" mentality is maddening to anyone who wants to really progress through content. Just because it is much more difficult to pin blame on a single healer in a raid because of the sheer volume of numbers involved doesn't excuse a healer from being effective when they need to be.

I wanted to re-state this because it's completely true. However it also points to the biggest flaw in the way hybrids are handled: they are completely dependent on other non-hybrids. A group that has a Ret Paladin, Enhancement Shaman, Shadow Priest, Feral Druid and an Arms Warrior all have awesome synergy abilities, but none can really take full advantage of anyone else's. The Paladin's Crusader Strike ability is reduced to DPS since he has no other Judgements to keep up, the Shaman's Unbridled Rage is wasted on the priest and his totems point toward mutually exclusive goals, the Druid's ILoTP butts heads with Vampiric Embrace, the Vampiric Touch is lost on the Warrior and probably not even necessary in such a group, and the Warrior has 3 half-assed melee classes taking advantage of his deep wounds debuff. Hybrids do not feed well off other hybrids.

If you take these five and split them up amongst a 25-man raid in the proper groups, their abilities are extremely powerful. The Paladin can keep another Paladin's Judgements up and his crit bonus is extended to the whole raid, Unbridled Rage and totems go to 4 melee classes, Vampiric Touch can give mana to 4 casters, there are far more people to take advantage of the deep wounds debuff. However it is the context of the raid that makes them powerful. They require "core" classes or sheer numbers for their abilities to become worthwhile, and very few of them stack well.

To the fact they need other people to take advantage of their abilities? Yes. It's great, and I like it. That they stack poorly as a result of the way these talents work? Not so much. You never need more than 1 Ret paladin because he keeps up all Judgements and JotCrusader is his raid-wide buff. Why not give the tree another bonus to a different Judgement that works in the same way so multiple Ret Paladins can overlap responsibilities without obsoleting the other? Judgements are already a mutually exclusive ability, the same Paladin could never keep both up at once and would be essentially wasting talents to have both if there was another paladin that could do something similar.

I just wanted to add this to the discussion seeing some similar posts about hybrids only being able to do the job if it's an easy one to begin with (because it was tuned to be with a bigger error margin) etc.

I can only speak from the Feral Druid tanking PoV since that is basically all I do. Some stuff you notice while tanking is that, although the content is not tuned to be very forgiving, very few fights actually require a Warrior to tank. Apart from the asinine "Hey, I am enraging soon, hit Shield Wall please" bosses, a Bear can do it as well. He might not be the best at times, but it is still viable while not being detrimental to the raid. I can't say much about Naxx because I have only seen Noth, Anub, Faerlina and Raz there, but in all the fights a Bear could MT as well (in progression nights that is). The second reason I won't talk about Naxx is because the itemization of off spec basically stopped there, so the comparison is not fair for the off specs to begin with. Thus, I'll like to shift your attention to AQ40: I have "mistakingly" tanked the first kill of Huhu post 30% enrage because we messed up the aggro swap (we don't use threatmeters) although it was planned to give it over to the Warrior because of Shield Wall and LGG etc. Did it work? Yes. Would a Warrior have been slightly better? Yes of course. Was a Bear still viable? Obviously. Nowadays we can perform the aggro swap easily pre-enrage, and that is what we do.
Likewise with Twin Emps; I had the pleasure of MTing our first kill there as well, sporting a few blues on our first kills. And when we wiped in our progression nights, it was never because I died to Nilash but because of the random things that can go wrong such as aggroing the neutral bugs, healers not running out of AoE etc.

Would any of you consider Huhu (pre-NR resist patch) and TE (pre-AoE fix) a "joke" or "trivial" while learning? I know I wouldn't; they are both very nice fights, hard and intense.

To sum it up: Blizzard has shown they can design fights where hybrids can do an off spec role without being detrimental to the raid WHILE the fights are still achallenge for the raid. All they have to do is creating bosses that can be tanked by Warriors, Paladins and Druids alike, with Warriors having a slight edge, but not as much that it is impossible for Druids and Paladins to compete with them.

That's why I am expecting alot more of those fights in TBC, and less of the Naxx/Shieldwall Enrage fights.

Thoughts?

Top-end raiding has always been about min-maxing. Blizzard is a creative company, but I fail to see how they could possibly design the raiding universe to discourage min-maxing.

However, it is my belief that Blizzard is just going to make the whole game easier. Everything they've said indicates this. Smaller instance sizes make it easier for casual guilds to raid. Raid spots for hybrids imply the content will be easier. Difficulty sliders for instances. It all points to easier content. Only in this context can hybrids actually play as hybrids in the raid game.

Nite-moogle pretty much summed it up. So long as there are "Best at DPS!" classes and hybrids are unable to do multiple roles with neither negatively impacting the other (IE: Global Cooldowns afffecting both offensive and defensive abilities, mana used for everything, switching to a 'dps' stance preventing you from healing, etc...etc....) we won't see off-spec's every really becomming mainstream.

Let's be honest, the ideal raid in WoW for 90% of encounters is 3 warriors, 5 priests, 1 paladin, 1 druid and 30 rogues or mages. It was much the same in EQ. 1 warrior, 1 bard, 10 clerics, 60 wizards.