Well, I could see a Paladin with just enough in Prot to improve Righteous Fury being capable of keeping aggro on mobs when needed, similar to a druid with a small Feral investment. As a healer, he'll have a shield on anyway, and a ranged taunt is invaluable for picking up loose/deaggroing mobs.

Way back when, not long after I hit 60, I tried a hybrid priest spec. It was a little better with the old trees, healing wasn't gimped quite so badly with it. But as Bekah points out, Mindflay is very weak without all those multipliers. This came home to me when the newly released damage meters showed a wand spec priest beating me while dragging someone's alts through ZF. Now granted, I sucked back then and he had a nice wand but still, wands?

Not too many months later, secure in my old style Disc/Holy build, I was doing something with another 'Hybrid' priest and was happily out DPSing them with Smite. Now this was the old and slow Smite and I didn't have much, if any damage gear at the time.

Blizzard's talent revisions certainly have made classes more specialized. I get the feeling they didn't want people to do stuff like 31/30 builds and intentionally set out to avoid some of the most powerful ones, either by putting shiny, must have talents 41 points deep or by rearranging talents.

I've done a Tri-spec twice, once going all the way to silence, and the other just to mindflay (oh why can't Mindflay be trainable).
And each time I never thought my mindflay would be great damage (although extended SW:P was nice).

To me it was mostly about having the slowing proc, and additional chances to proc blackout.
Which worked well for me while I was pvp'ing a lot. Great for slowing/stopping a flag carrier.

The problem is that you can't talk about hybrid specs or raid viability without itemization and the actual encounters. So I think I'd wait till the expansion to actually wacking braincells about it.

I ran with a 19/11/21 spec while doing the PvP grind on my druid back around patch 1.10. It's an amazingly useful PvP Hybrid spec, which means it fails horribly with raiding. I was still a decent healer, always top 50%, but that's more of a statement of my gear and skill than the spec. I was best off wearing warlord gear and switching from nuking to catform once oom if I wanted to do DPS, and Tanking was pretty much right out.

Pre 2.0 resto was.. Well, horrible. It had a fair amount of utility, but it added bugger all raw healing power, and the untility in it was mostly aimed at pvp / 5 mans. This let druids get away with metaphorical murder. I pretty consistently came in in near the very top of healing done on any run where I was assigned to heal without spending a single point in any talent that had anything to do with healing other than HoTW. Massive use of the ZG trinket whenever the feces was heading for the fan, and a set of healing gear which was, and is very good for a non-naxx druid was all I needed. 2.0 changed that. I am a more powerful healer now than I was before, thanks to the new low tiers of resto, but druids who go deep resto now actually gain benefits from that which I cannot overcome by having a better interface, and being very awake.

Specialisation is going to be the way of the future, if you bring a feral druid you are not getting a healer on the same order of power as a resto druid anymore, you are getting a beast of melee combat, that tanks and hurts things, with a couple of sidelines they also do well, such as decursing, (a feral druid in int heavy gear can spam abolishes and remove curses for a very long time) and innervating shadowpriests. if you are short of healing one day and have to bring that druid for mainhealing, I would really suggest having the raidbank respec them twice.

There is, as far as I can tell one, and only one hybrid specs for a druid which ought to work in a raid enviorment You can go balance / resto, and the synergies are there in gear, and in talents to make this a strong spec. The bulk of the utility lies in unique buffs and debuffs tough, so really, this is a way to get imp Farie Fire on mobs, brambled thorns on your tank and a strong healer in the bargain.

This is incidentially the exact same issue which is causing warriors so much angst. If your "main" talent tree does not suck, and suck hard, then speccing anything else wil prevent you from doing the traditional job of your class anywhere nearly as well as someone who does spec into it. This is not really an avoidable issue, if talents are to matter, then with trees as deep as we are seeing in the crusade, what we are really getting is the splintering of most classes into "subclasses"
There are no warriors, druids, or priests anymore, there are ferals, trees, arms, furies, moonkins, shadow, holy, and prot.

Pre 1.9 Paladins had the best of all worlds, with my 31/20 ret/holy spec I was capable dps, as good as it got for healing, and could tank in a pinch (aside from my embarrasing incident with a Molten Giant).

From 1.9-2.0, things changed. Deep Holy made your healing noticably better (because they shifted Illumination, Spiritual Focus and everything else deeper, but I digress), Prot had some nice pvp gizmos in it, Ret was solid for dps but didn't bring anything notable. This meant it was holy or bust for most raiding Paladins, if you spent most of your time healing it was just too good to pass up.

For 2.0 and onwards, Holy is about the same (very nice for healing, with Divine whatsit it's also nice for spelldamage builds now), Prot got a few nice buffs, and Ret got some love too. The depth of the talent trees, and the number of talents we have, basically means you pick one tree and go with it, because with the possible exception of prot once you go deep you might as well go deeper.

I am sorry, but I am not quite sure how you can possibly claim that the restoration tree was underpowered with a straight face. Resto was an incredible tree, it offered first innervate, which was so good that it had to be given out as a free talent because it pretty much forced every druid to spec for that, then swiftmend, which was an incredible burst heal on a supershort cooldown. I have lost count of how many raids were saved because a druid saved a tank with an NS or a SM after a huge burst of damage.

Resto gave you: 10% less mana on heals, 10% more healing, 15% mana regen while casting, 2 instant heals, .5 seconds to your bread and butter heal to just name the truly top notch talents. The fact that your guildmates were retarded and you weren't was why you could still match healing with them even with a horrible healing spec. NS and SM alone completely alter your playstyle. When we kill Emperors in AQ, we always ensured that each side always had an SM/NS druid, because the survivability of your tank increases so much when you have a druid who can drop a 3k instant heal after a big crushing blow.

Think of how much better of a healer you could have been had you spec'd sufficiently for the role. I have no doubt you were an adequate healer, but if you were matching your guildmates already in feral spec, you would have absolutely pulverized them had you spec'd for it.

There in lies one of the more difficult problems for any good hybrid player. As I mentioned in the shadow priest thread, (and it applies across the majority of hybrids) doing well to excellent with the crappy tools that we're given in an off spec tends to force the most serious players into a place where their efficiency has been tested against such crappy odds for so long, that you've essentially endurance trained them to preform on a higher level than their class mates. A good shadow priest is also going to be a good healer- because otherwise they're simply not that good of a shadow priest. They've got loads of experience compensating for limited healing talents and have worked pretty hard at figuring out what they need to do to stay competitive and still keep the off spec they love.

This doesn't always pan out. You can't play any random feral druid/shadow priest off the street into a raid and expect them to simply dazzle you when they heal. It does pan out more often in high end raiding and with the serious theorycrafting off specs.

You hear it all the time- stories of a 31 point feral druid kicking their resto classmates to the curb with their superior healing. Shadow priests who can pull off patchwerk as a healer without breaking a sweat. Meditation? Who needs meditation! They're the people who can pull it off every week and keep your traditional specs panting and trying to represent the edge they're supposed to have. It's not the talents. It's the players.

On one hand, they're often the only people you can fully trust as an offspec- the ones who will produce the highest results possible every time.
On the other hand, if you take them off thier off spec and give them even mediocre gear, they'll destroy the other healers and laugh while doing it, saying how damn easy it is.

Puts you in a pickle doesn't it? Best priest healer in the guild is also, hands down, the best shadow priest. You've got 2 other people who can do adequately on healing but very meh on shadow. You've got spots for 2 healer priests and 1 shadow priest. Do you give the shadow spot to the phenomenal shadow player and lose the healing edge... or do you give the shadow spot to someone who will half ass it and keep the best healer on healing?

It's a hard question.

The guilds that forced innervate also pretty much ensured that the innervate would go to a priest under most circumstances, as such it rarely actually improved the druid's personal healing.

As for calling gift of nature a "truly top notch talent" and that it provides "10% more healing".. I truly wonder how well you know druids, until the 2.x patch it was all pre-gear, and hence next to worthless on the spells we cast most.

If that was actually a realistic question, it would be pretty easy: Put the best player on healing. More attempts are failed by sloppy/imperfect healing than a few percentage of raid dps.

Very few actual scenarios will have so few variables to consider, however.

My guilds holy priests keep me on my toes, they're certainly not sheep. That said, people tend to learn what they need to succeed at what they're currently doing, and advance when it's needed. Caveman didn't need to know how to make a ballgown to survive- so chances are they weren't outfitting their wives in high fashion. Throw a caveman in a ballroom though, and I bet you money they'd do their damnedest to learn how to survive, and one or two might even get lucky before the débutantes ate them. The theorycrafting for WoW has been very progressive, and despite the hundreds of dead horses littering the field, people are still occasionally coming up with bright new ideas.

Any class can be boiled down to simple "hit a button -- you've done your job". What makes some frost mages better than others? It's all spamming the frostbolt button really. Anyone can be adequate at a class. I could probably pick up a well geared 60 rogue and do acceptably well on the damage meters after 5min of explanation. Would I be a good rogue? Certainly not. Knowing how to gear- optimum damage cycles- when it's appropriate to sacrifice what for what- being able to make changes on the fly- when to pot- when to push harder- when to back off, that's important and separates out a good player from an excellent player.

Any player can hit flash heal or mindblast. It's certainly not difficult. The reality of it is, however, that some people are just better than others at "spamming frostbolt".

I do agree, however, with allowing choice =) People tend to do much better when they're happy with what they're doing. I count myself very fortunate that my guild managed to luck into some people who really love healing above all other choices in the game. I don't necessarily understand them, but man I could just kiss them for it. =D

I think what you say here is right. Off specs usually have something to prove so they invest more time and thought into pushing the class to the limit. That alone makes them better at their class because they invest more time into the game (WoW, for the most part, rewards you proportionally for the time invested). Maybe that is why off specs do attract that kind of player; it's like playing with a handicap and some people love challenges.
Dedicated players will succeed, the other's will see that it doesn't work out for them and will respec to something more fulfilling/fun.

Now if you let the off spec heal, he has to heal with a handicap. But by the virtue of being an off spec, playing with a handicap is nothing new to them so they will once again invest more time and thought to produce better results than people with optimal spec that are, as you said so nicely, on autopilot.


I still remember people mocking me for enchanting blue gloves with +15 AGI for tanking (back when +15 AGI was really expensive) and putting Animist's Caress on some blue pants just because I wanted 20 HP (and the extra INT) more for tanking compared to the cheaper +100 HP enchant. In the end my persistence paid off, and I don't regret any of those choices.
On the same scale, I would enchant my Healing gear with the same dedication if I was ever asked to heal for a big part, too (in fact, I did, but noone ever trusts me enough to heal them >_>).

Again, caveman are not any more adapted to survive than modern humans are, they just have different selective pressure. I think I understand your analogy, that given the challenges that a caveman faces on a regular basis, something easier should be nothing in comparison; I disagree with your analogy because I don't think that someone who chooses to offspec is necessarily facing a greater challenge than someone with an optimal raiding spec, and thus will have an easier time when called to perform his 'natural' role.

A great player is a great player regardless of the spec / class he plays. Our raid leader is a great warlock, and one day, one of our main tanks had connection problems and couldn't log in to play, so he logged on our main tank and tanked Emperors flawlessly on his first attempt at the fight. He never played a 60 warrior before, but his first time playing one was tanking twin emperors and he pulled it off.

Granted, that's an extreme example, but if you are a min/maxer by heart, who pays really close attention to all details of the game, odds are with a bit of practice you can transition into any class that you want.
I disagree. The difference between frost mages is not who does the most single target DPS on one mob, but you see it in lateral aspects of gaming. The mage who always instantly frost novas the little bugs on Anub, or the mage who is always instanteous on counterspelling the enemy healers in PvP instead of going for the phat critz. Shadow priests don't have as many gimmick abilities other than their sustained healing/mana returns, what differentiates them for the most part is gear choices/willingness to use consumables/optimizing damage cycles, but I'd argue that the difference between a good shadow priest and a great one is really minimal, assuming both are willing to bear the same burden of consumables.
Again, I think that the difference doesn't show up in the 'spamming frostbolt' fights, but in the fights where you are called to perform differently, and outside of a few fights where silence is amazing, shadow priests are rather monodimensional. Healing usually -

Oh totally. What I said somehow upsets me is that people who somehow choose to play non-conventional specs assume that if you are good at being an offspec, automatically you are a better player than the conventional players in your spec. The analogy used in the post before this is that you are used to playing with a handicap - but again, I find that the people who enjoy offspecs are not necessarily those who enjoy playing with a handicap, but just people who somehow got burnt of playing a support role; I very very rarely see people who play offensive classes get burnt and switch to a support role.

Isn't it the same for any DPS class? Every rogue/hunter/etc has a clear cut optimum cycle that they perform. From a boss fight point of view, ofcourse. And yet there are clearly differences in performance between different players, more than what gear accounts for. Even for "frostbolt spamming".

If you want to talk about lateral decisions and PvP, a shadowpriest has his "gimmick ability" too: healing. Knowing when to drop shadowform and heal in addition to knowing when to fear and silence is what separates a good shadow priest from a great one.

Absolutely, which is why I'd rather have the absolutely best players doing healing or tanking, if given the choice. I already conceeded however that I think those considerations take second place to players wishes, it is more important that people are enjoying what they are doing.
I completely agree. I consider myself a quite good PvP healbot, but I am still completely green at PvP shadow and I am learning nonstop. PvP has a much harder learning curve than anything PvE related, and it is defently a great way to tell the very experienced players from the mediocre ones.

I am sorry, I disagree every bit of the way. Maybe in particular guild set ups, where you were constantly short on melee DPS/tanking, but for guilds who had tanking and DPS covered, and you were healing on challenging content, SM/NS/sustained healing from 10% mana off were absolutely amazing.

I absolutely make do with being shadow spec'd now, and I am enjoying my self sufficiency much more, but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that being holy didn't make a huge difference in my healing throughput and efficiency.

I think you were just in a very peculiar situation where your guild was consistently short on tanks, and the rest of your healers were incompetent, because there is no other reason why your other optimally spec'd healers were not leaving you in the dust healing wise.

EDIT:
I don't want to make it sound like I think feral druids are useless. I don't, feral druids are amazing, expecially with 2.0, but the sacrifice you make and you had to make was pretty damn huge. We can argue if the payoffs were or weren't worth it, but trying to brush them aside as 'minor' is absolutely insane for me.

One of the issues isn't that the gear is terrible - but that the spec differentiation for each job is now even more extreme. A shadow priest in BC will have the same exact healing ability they have current. Most specs will be 13/0/47 or some derivative. However, you examine a holy priest - and it's the opposite. They get huge upgrades in healing. Even a heavy disc with a minor holy tree will be far better due to the number of mana reduction talents and overall stat increases.

So - the shadow priest become even more removed from healing well by not having the solid talents in the deep holy tree. That said, we can heal better then mages still :P.

No, Bekah - I will not be your healing bitch xD.

I think the point is that pre-2.0, due to downranking heals, gear was FAR more important than talents. 10% reduction in mana cost or 10% boost to the base healing amount was trivial compared to downranking to HT4 with ~1k +healing. This isn't the case any more since now the talents scale with gear and you can't practically downranking to generate efficiency. In 'race' situations where you absolutely needed the maximum HpS, resto still had an edge, but whenever efficiency was key most druid builds performed surprisingly similarly.

The most useful talent for healing pre-2.0 for druids was the reduced cast time for HT, in my opinion (3.0s HT4 essentially receives a 16% boost to HpS), followed by the cheaper heals. IIRC both were available to feral/resto.

pre-2.0 HT4 comparison:

HT4 is 404 base with 185 mana cost, 3.0s base cast time

Assume both druids have the improved cast time.

Base HpS = 404/2.5 = 161.6 HpS

HpS boost due to Gift of Nature = 161.6 HpS * 0.1 = 16.16 HpS

HpS boost due to +healing = +healing/3.5 * 3.0/2.5 = 0.343 * +healing HpS

So pre-2.0, Gift of Nature was only worth about 50 +healing in terms of HpS under the limited circumstances of using HT4 for conservation purposes (which was pretty often, really). The resto druid is still better for overall mana conservation purposes (since essentially, the mana reduction talent DID scale with gear) but a nonresto druid with ~10% better gear used to be very competitive with the pure resto druid, simply because it was easy to talent for good HT4 and HT4 downranking was so dominant in efficiency.

I think the reality of hybrid builds is that with an experience cap you have to choose what your good at or simply be sort of good at maybe two things. Its a classic issue that has plagued RPG's from paper to digital mediums.

Hybrids in a "cap" environment like WoW work very well for casual players who do under-level dungeons ( ie strath @ 60 ), pvp with friends, and general goofing off. I have played this role many a times as work or what have you limited my ability to raid. Its a lot of fun in my opinion.

As difficulty ramps up so does the pressure to min/max and for hybrids this is often at the expense of their "hybridity". As a consolation their off-specs often have nice perks that benefit a large raid such as Shadow Weaving, LotP, & Santified Crusader. These are nice perks since in a 40 man raid they can benefit a large number of people. The 2.0 changes seem to emphasize this as a consolation to specialization.

However, in TBC with focus on smaller content, these perks I think loose a bit of their luster. With less people to benefit from the "perks" their value is correspondingly dimished. If what I read of Kharazhan is true there is immense pressure to maximize each slot in your group to a degree not seen in a 40 man.

As a side note, I liked healing a priest not due to some weird compulsion to "heal" like some people, but simply because its something I could be the "best" at. I never liked Shadow/Disc/etc since I always ended up second fiddle. As a holy priest I could push not just to be first on the meters but try to hit a 10, 20, even 30% margin of victory through min/maxing of spec, gear, and style. I enjoyed being able to dominate not simply compete. Healing was an act of intense concentration as I used every tool available and not simply Heal 2 spamming.

Resto's edge was really only seen imo if your job was cut and dry healing. Once Innervate was made a base skill a feral druid offered a lot more for a raid. The ability to off tank saved more raids for me than swiftmend, esp as alliance with Lay of Hands.

But, more than that, druids often were decurse bots. Being feral with a massive mana pool was a definate asset esp with Natures Swiftness on tap to help. The flexibilty and use of downranking more than made up for the efficiency of Resto. Feral druids were a great multi-use tool to fill the gaps in a raid with dps, tanking, or healing and they could do all three very well.

Now, that is no longer true really and I have a harder time rationalizing a druid who gives up Treeform or other upper teir talents. They have gained extrodinary ability to specialize but seem to have lost their hybridity. I am not sure as a druid if I would find this great or not. The feral/resto druid of pre-2.0 was probably the last and best hybrid spec, ret/holy paladin close second, and I have yet to see anything close to it in 2.0.