Quote:In that case, why bother having Druids, Paladins, and Shamans in the game at all? Just eliminate them, and go back to the "core" classes: Tank, DPS, Heal. Problem solved.
It may be bitterness but that's how I feel now
I think hybridicity in a raid environment is something of a myth
Let me use a cat druid as example. On the face of it it's a "Rogue" who can go healer if needed - wonderful! The cost is he only does about 80% of Rogue damage given comparably geared and skilled players
However to do damage the druid with be in Strength, Crit and AP gear. When he shifts he can get off about 4 heals then is out of mana without the Spirit to ever get mana back any time soon. He is worth maybe a tenth of a real healer if that
Alternatively he can use some of the gear that is aimed at hybrid role. This has approximately 2/3 of the dps stats of real dps gear and about 2/3 of the healing stats of real healing gear
Because he's now not in dps gear he now does about 60% of the dps of a real dpser with the option to be about 25% of a healer
Just take one dps and one healer instead of 2 hybrids. You get 100% dps + 100% healer instead of 120% dps or 50% healer. In situations where you have an excess of healing you can simply move faster as a raid
The other often touted value of a hybrid is being able to turn into a tank in a crisis. Between high armour, parry block dodge and crit and crushing blow negation a good raid tank is probably at about 85% physical mitigation. If one of your healers, in healing gear, turns into a bear he will have about 40% mitigation. So you go from a tank which only takes 15% damage to a tank which takes 60% damage, 4 times as much. This isn't going to save the raid more than one in a million times. In fact there will be just as many times when the player might save the raid by staying healer and throwing out some heals as by changing into a pretty awful tank
As for combat ress and innervate, well. Soulstone is functionally the same as combat ress if you can anticipate who is likely to die (main tank usually) and innervate is just a mana potion
I'm very disillusioned with my druid. Regardless of whether it's fair for us to do something and not be crap at it, it's been the case for the last 3 months that we could tank as well as warriors. It now seems pointless to play a hybrid. How long will cats continue to do decent damage before they decide it's unfair on Rogues and nerf us? Are trees going to get hit with the nerfbat to cheer Priests up?
I really think that this kind of class-adversarial whine-driven game development is a poor way to manage a project like WoW. Who cares if someone can grind mobs solo better than the next guy? Is it really worth killing off raid tanks and healers just to placate the Warriors who want raid spots without putting any work in on their gear?
You see not only does this kill off the desire of a lot of druids to tank. Paladins will be looking at this and thinking we're next. So will dps hybrids
And if you take away everything except healbotting from the four heal-capable classes you don't force them all to become healers you force them all to re-roll dps
Anyway my Druid is now retired, I'll gquit her later on today and never trouble any Warriors by taking a raid tanking spot again. I'm going to play my Rogue instead for two reasons. 1) 20% of players play Rogues so we have tons of forum whiners fighting our corner 2) it's unlikely they will remove dps from rogues as a class feature