This is purely a thought experiment, stuff floating around in my head. There's a lot of arguments/whining going around about hybrids and utility and dps these weeks.

When Blizz was creating WoW, they stated one of their goals was to move away from the Holy Trinity of DPS/Healing/Tanking. The problem is, in RL and everywhere else, all things being equal, it is always more efficient to have extreme specializations, and hybrids would be completely undesirable. So, Blizzard had to kink it, give Hybrids more "points" to allocate in DPS/Healing/Tanking than pure classes. More than even if there were an exponential cost factor in this supposed class creation system. Which is where we end up now.

Naturally, thoughts go toward how to make it fair, how to "fix" the system. But...that's just really too messy. Let's pretend there is no system. Start from scratch. What would a more balanced system of classes, with hybrids, look like?

In short, I thought of two systems:
-All Hybrids. All classes have two roles they can perform well, which also overlap each other in the trinity scheme. E.g.- mitigation tank vs (practical) avoidance tank vs blend of the two. No pure classes at all.

-Some Pure classes, but with absolutely 0 utility. Hybrids cannot perform as well, but bring all the support stuff along in a way that 1 hybrid cannot do all the buffing of the entire raid. E.g.- Instead of Mark of the Wild over an entire raid, a single supposed not-druid hybrid could Mark 1 group, and only 1 group, so you'd have to organize your groups more carefully, and choose how many to bring.


I'm gonna cheap out here and not expand on it, because as I said, it was just some thoughts in my head, and being ADHD, I have a ton of them I forget every minute.

Expand on this, discuss! What would a balanced system with Hybrid classes look like to you? Extra issues - PvP balance, that's always a bitch. Making tanking viable hybrid role in PvP? Damage, how to make damage not the absolutely most fun aspect of any class, hybrid or not.

Ok, everyone turns into druids.

Sounds like rogues currently. Good at one thing with nothing else to bring to the raid.

You've just described trueshot aura, paladin auras, and shaman totems.

So basically you want a total revamp of the system, but keep druids, rogues, paladins, shamans, and hunters.

I'm not sure I get what you're going for...

That's usually a red flag that tells you not to hit that "post' button. Also, http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7883.