Hey all,

It is well known that the cost of increasing any stat on a piece of gear by X grows as X^1.5. It is also well known that hybrid classes, like druids, paladins and shamans, benefit from more stats than pure classes like rogues or mages.

So -- let's try to work out how the X^1.5 scaling of stat costs would help a hybrid class that wants to wear hybrid gear.

I will use a feral/resto druid as an example. Let's imagine a hypothetical 'ideal' piece of hybrid gear -- where half of the item budget goes to healing stats like spirit, +healing and mp/5, and half goes to feral stats, like crit, agility, strength -- and compare it to a hypothetical 'pure' piece of gear.

A piece of pure gear that gets X effectiveness would need to spend X^1.5 points. A piece of hybrid gear of the same cost would divide the item budget of X^1.5 evenly between two areas -- each area getting (X^1.5)/2. This means each area gets improved by 1.5th-root of (X^1.5)/2 or about 63%.

Next, note that about 10-15% of total effectiveness comes from slots which can be switched out (weapon/offhand/ranged). Now we can consider how well our druid would do if he were to use hybrid gear in all 'static' slots that are fixed for the duration of the fight, while using appropriate pure pieces of gear in the slots which he can switch out at will.

In each role we get 0.9 * 0.63 + 0.1 = 66.7% as a 'lower bound' and 0.85 * 0.63 + 0.15 = 68.55% as an 'upper bound.'

To me, this seems pretty poor for raid use. Druids who wish to itemize in this way got a little help in BC with the introduction of nurturing instinct which would push their hybrid-geared healing to about 100% effectiveness of a pure-geared druid (of course their mana regen and feral stats will stay relatively nerfed). Shamans and paladins sadly lack talents that promote hybrid gear use -- except perhaps elemental devastation.

In conclusion, I have a few questions:

(a) Among the beta testers -- have you see a lot of gear that resembles ideal hybrid gear I am talking about? Feral t4 doesn't count, as the split there isn't even.

(b) Can anybody think of viable reasons to hybridize gear in a raid setting?

edit: One additional consideration I thought of since I wrote this post was that for things like healing your effectiveness is equal to [base] + [+healing], where base value can account for something like 33% of total effectiveness. Since base values stay the same for a hybrid-geared and pure-geared class, this would push hybrid gear effectiveness from 66% to something like 75%.

It doesn't really bother me. You can be decent at multiple roles, or improve yourself at one by sacrificing capability in the other. Much is made of how druids can substitute for warriors as raid tanks; in order to do so they gear for feral stats at the price of healing ability, which isn't really a loss if they're in a pure tanking role for that fight, and in any event it seems only fair.

Yes: Too much healing accomplishes exactly nothing.

I wear hybrid gear all the time unless I'm in a fight where I know I'm going to be performing in a single role the entire way through (generally healing when that's the case.) I figure out how much healing I need to be able to do for the fight, add on some extra for emergencies, gear for exactly that much healing, and then devote the rest of my gearing freedom to doing something useful.

In fights with aggro-wiping mobs, healers will pick up aggro when an offtanked mob does an aggro wipe. Pre-C'thun trash is a good example of this. If I'm healing without Salvation (which I should be) and healing efficiently (which I also should be), the mobs will come after me rather than a Priest or Druid. That's a good thing so far. But it doesn't last very long if I fold up like a piece of paper when they hit me. Divine Shield can save my ass, but then the mob just goes to munch on another healer. Given all this, I'm helping the raid far more if I trade out some of my healing gear for tanking pieces to beef up my durability. So they come after me, I toss up Holy Shield, and by the time my health gets low, somebody's figured out what's happening and tosses me a few heals, and shortly thereafter the "real" tank arrives to taunt the mob away. I probably wouldn't survive the aggro if I was wearing pure healing gear, and I definitely wouldn't survive it if I was wearing cloth like I do sometimes in pure-healing situations. And considering I only need around 5k mana buffed to heal all the way through one of those packs, there's no reason not to trade out some healing gear for tanking stuff.

In fights with more secure aggro, the tanking isn't necessary, so I gear for damage. Yes, I know, pallydamagelawlzorz. But you know what's more useless than a paladin doing miniscule dps? A paladin doing unnecessary healing. There are no prizes for overhealing the tank, and no prizes for finishing the fight with 95% mana instead of 60%. But even a small addition to raid dps gets the mobs dead faster, makes the next pull happen faster, gets the bosses dead faster, and gets everyone in bed sooner. (People talk about overhealing all the time, but nobody ever uses the word "overdamage".)

I don't follow your initial statement that hybrid classes benefit more from stats than pure classes. Any concept of that is only starting to emerge recently with talent trees. All classes benefit from increases in stats, as they do in increases in +crit/hit/healing/damage. The challenge is that hybrid classes benefit more from every single stat, whereas mages will definitely take Intellect instead of Strength, so on and so forth.

I think the basic arguement you are pitching is the long-running one on druid forums (I don't troll paladin or shaman forums) about Stat X turning into Stat Y upon shapeshift. There are just too many problem/challenges with this as a design though. Database design and code changes, along with the addition of processing is justification enough to not have this effect or ability. Personally I would love to have single pieces or be able to change gear while in combat, but we just don't have it , nor will we likely get it. It breaks some of the functional game design.

Hybrids still have the issue of situational use. And I don't imply that as an issue of a bad decision or challenge, it's merely part of the role of the hybrid class to determine their best role in a given situation and adapt as necessary. The problem is that the hybrid classes are all healing classes and healing becomes a priority role at almost all times. Additionally, there is a lack of changing on the fly to adapt to a different role. We end up maximizing (zomg Tree) for one situation which leaves us relatively not as viable for another, until we go out of combat.

Hybrid gear in raid settings: Genesis set is nice for a lot of raid settings; however, when it comes to a new encounter, we will tend to end up in our maximization healer sets.

That was not my statement -- my statement was that hybrids benefit from more stats, not that they benefit more from stats.

I still don't follow. Don't hybrids benefit from +heal/dmg/crit/hit just as well?

It again breaks down to role/responsibility - in a healing situation, I am going to gain more benefit from +heal and int/spirit. In a tanking role, my +heal is worth nil; however, +hit, defense, etc are great.

A druid can tank, dps, and heal. If a druid has enough gear he can tank, dps, and heal in the same encounter. Because hybrids have more roles than pure classes (rogues and mages cannot tank or heal) they make use of more stats than pure classes do -- if they decide to play like hybrids. Of course if a druid decides to only heal he only needs healing gear. However, the fact that for so many druids this is optimal behavior is in some sense a design failure on Blizzard's part, and I think Blizzard is trying to change this.

Apologies in advance to the keepers of this board.

You are being retarded. Mages don't gain any benefit from strength. Rogues don't benefit from spelldamage.

You are being retarded. Again. There are many situations in the game where playing like a hybrid is a great idea -- PvP is one situation, but I can think of some raid encounters also. I was talking specifically about hybrid play in a single encounter. You either didn't read that in my post or ignored it for some reason.

The reason hybrid classes heal is because they don't have anything to offer in the tank or dps department that specialist classes cannot provide. However, they have healing functionality that priests, the specialist healer, lack. Shamans have chain heal, druids have swiftmend and hots, paladins are ultra-efficient.

If you give hybrids unique tank or dps functionality, people will take hybrids to raids in those roles. However, that point has nothing to do with my post. My post was arguing that a class that is capable of filling multiple roles should, ideally, have to exercise that capability during raids. If classes do not exercise it, their flexibility goes to waste in some sense -- and that's a design failure.

This is probably going to be my last post in this thread, as I am finding this conversation kind of painful.

Why don't you just call him gay while you're at it?

I mean, really... I understand that misunderstandings of language can be frustrating, but do you have to go and make yourself look that bad?

* Priests are also hybrids. All healers atm have the potential to hybridize and I see far more shadow priests dpsing on raids than ret paladins. =P (which is not to say "OMG get in your cage and hael me you sucky paladin!" but it is to point out that there is no pure healer in wow.) All the healing classes bring something unique to the board in healing situations, which healers are better for waht depends a lot on how that utility is used- but we all have secondary roles. =)

Yes, only mages, rogues and hunters are really 'pure' classes. Hybridizing between spell damage and healing is an odd case, because spelldamage gear helps both of those roles -- so I did not treat it in my post.

It's pretty obvious, however, that priests are the specialist healer class in WoW, despite the existence, and viability of the shadow tree. Properly specced priests have an unmatched set of healing tools for every situation, really, and exceptional mana regeneration to match.

Priests in general are actually a good example of the alternative way of treating hybrids -- you give them two strong choices, with each choice providing something powerful and unique. Priests can either be the most capable healer in the game, or an insane AoE healer/mana battery/dps. Apparently, a useful middle ground does not exist.

It would be a shame, I think, if all hybrids in WoW were treated in the same way.

Not accepted. Shut the hell up if you can't keep it civil and smart in your own freaking thread.

Really, my opinion is that this topic has been done to death. Since the closed beta, people have been yammering on about how stupid Blizzard is for not giving hybrids some awesome super set of max-stat gear so they can be awesome super hybrids who kick awesome super ass in every single role that exists in the game. It's old and dumb and people need to learn how to use itemrack.

If you look at my post history, there are very few times I use this sort of language. I think at this point, having the word 'retard' appear in the thread was better than a 3 page discussion with an ESL poster about what the exact meaning of the word 'more' is.

You are making a strawman. I don't play a druid, I play a mage. I don't have any personal stake in how hybrid gameplay turns out in WoW. Perhaps some people are asking for hybrid classes to get gear that lets them function at 100% effectiveness of their parent classes, but I am not one of them. What I am curious about is whether there is interesting hybrid gear in beta, and whether hybridized gear (at 70/70% or 80/80% split, or whatever) would actually be useful in raids. I think this is an interesting question, especially because the answer is yes in some other MMOs, like DAOC and FFXI.

It's too bad that this thread has gone to shit.

The trouble with hybrids http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9404
TBC Raiding - hybrid roles http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9356
Hybrid roles in TBC http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8213
Hybrid DPS http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8745
Hybrids in a 25 man raid environment http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7883

The OP is making a mathematical argument, that a lot of people are missing. Let's take the words "druid", "shaman", and "paladin out of the conversation for a second. Let's just imagine an abstract situation. You have a stat budget, let's call that quantity B. You can assign points to attributes A1, A2, ..., An. Each attribute has a cost modifier C1, C2, ..., Cn such that the budget for an item can be written as the following bound:

Sum{i = 1 .. n} ((Ci * Ai) ^ (3/2)) <= B

Now imagine you actually have 2 sets of items itemized with this basic constraint. Which is a better stat assignment strategy? Purchase many stats in smaller quantities or a few stats in large quantities?

Ultimately, the answer is many stats in small quantities. In less abstract terms it's better for a lowbie to go out and acquire a bunch of "Of the Monkey" gear than it is to acquire a bunch of "Of Stamina" and "Of Agility" gear - he'll have more total stam and agi via the "Of the Monkey" gear than he could ever have focusing on single stat gear.

However, this result is just as true for 3-stat and 4-stat pieces (i.e. pieces with 3 and 4 stats on them) as it is for 1-stat and 2-stat pieces. Given the choice (and assuming that you can get the stats you need) it'd be better for every single piece of your gear to spend a little of its budget on every stat worthwhile for your role than to spend all of its budget on just a couple. Hypothetical items that spread stats across 8 or 9 stats (assuming a sufficiently large budget) would be inherently superior because of this.

What the OP is asking is, is this effect actually significant in the current game? Can, say, a druid acquire enough decent gear with stats spread across all of the various useful stats to be able to do a satisfactory job at most roles while being some reasonable %age of the effectiveness of someone who is more specialized? (All without giving up effectiveness at your other abilities.) Theoretically, a druid who geared this way would be able to heal pretty well, tank pretty well, and DPS pretty well in one set of gear. (But he wouldn't get the same level of efficiency in any of those roles versus a gear min/max'er with present item budgets.)

In the current game, I don't think the gear exists for this to happpen. It's unclear whether this potential scenario even crops up, given the itemization we see and the various other complicating factors. But, mathematically speaking, there are distinct item budget advantages to spread stats around heavily, and there may be a a way to optimize your gearing to take advantage of this.

To be clear, someone itemizing this way would never likely approach the effectiveness of someone gearing for a specific role. Even in a given role, there are many stats to spread across, and the exponential cost hasn't kicked in to the point where it's cheaper to put (say) 15 int on a breastplate than it is to add an extra point of strength. But if (when) you reach that point, this is a perfectly reasonable question to propose.

(If I had more time I'd actually dissect the question mathematically and figure out what the actually general answer is. But I don't have the time to work the equations.)

EDIT: cleaned some stuff up and expanded on my rambling a bit.

I can't understand how people can be asking for one set that does everything for a hybrid.

It will always be more effective to specialize. For each pull you will have a role. Like Kaubel said, press your itemrack hotkey to switch to the gear appropriate for that role. For one set to work better than switching gear when switching roles it would have to have an insanely high item level. Is that really what you are proposing?

Do you think it would be right to have all the stats from scaled sandreaver leggings, leggings of elemental fury and Earthshatter legs all on one piece?

Hybrids need multiple sets of gear they swap for each role, any set that attempts to do everything will be weaker in all areas than a focused set unless they make insanely high ilvl uber combos like above which just wont happen.

I personally enjoy the fact that its much harder to gear out a hybrid "offspec". It means after I have it my character is unique unlike all those rogues and mages who get loot priority.

The OP's post, actually can be viewed in a non-hybrid context, even. Consider warrior gear. Warriors can get DPS plate and Tanking plate. One could ask the question, though, is there some middle ground (non-existent, but possible under item budget rules) gear that would allow warriors to tank and DPS at some relatively large %age of effectiveness of someone in specialized gear. Imagine plate with basically all of the following stats on it, but in smaller than normal amounts:

Armor
Strength
Agility
Stamina
Attack Power
Hit
Crit
Weapon Skill
Dodge
Block
Defense
Parry

Since you'd be investing in so many stats, the point totals would be low. But you'd get more than if you mixed and matched DPS pieces and Tanking pieces.
The interesting question is if there's a breakeven (or better) point for gear of this sort. (I don't know the answer though)

You see this question coming up in the context of hybrids more often because the range of potential stats they can benefit from is larger still. A druid can be concerned with all those stats and then:

Int
Spi
+dmg (and its variants)
+heal
+spell crit
+spell hit
+mp5
-resist

(and possibly others.)

There's actually an intereting optimization problem underlying all this for gearing. (And I'm somewhat hoping someone with more free time will ponder it...)

Yes you do. There can't be a point at which an item with less stats allocated to stamina, defense, and armor is a better tanking item than one with more. If you want to come up with some metric or heuristic that gives you a number for how much Hybridy Goodness an item has, by all means do it (though maybe not here) - but you haven't solved an interesting problem, you've just come up with a way to produce numbers that aren't relevant to any in-game scenario.

Well, ultimately, the answer to this question depends on what Blizzard's goals are in class and encounter design. My understanding is that, broadly speaking, Blizzard wants 'diversity.'

To me, this means that Blizzard wants some specialist tanks, healers and dps, and some classes that switch roles between fights (which is handled by itemrack + hybrid spec), and sometimes within a single fight (which can only be handled by hybridizing gear AND spec).

The mathematical exercise is only relevant for raiders if Blizzard designs encounters where the last case is rewarded. Right now the only times I can of in game where hybrid-geared and specced characters come in handy is PvP (for obvious reasons), or insurance against specialist deaths in non-bleeding edge raid content (where a druid can take over a priest or an offtank that dies).

Think it over time. Come back, one week.