Last week Tobold, a venerable gaming enthusiast who often has a love-hate relationship with World of Warcraft, came out with a doozy of a post in which he asserts that Paladins and Druids are overpowered (or, badly designed) due to their innate ability to fill the role of tank, DPS, and healer depending on how they spec. Here is the meat of the article:
When looking at class balance, classes aren't so much defined by what they do best, but by what they *can't* do, or rather by what they can't do reasonably well. We can argue for hours whether druids are really better tanks than warriors, or whether they are really better healers than priests, or really as good as dps as all the dps classes. But the very fact that you can hold all three of those discussions points to the problem: In the current design philosophy of Blizzard, hybrids have no fundamental weaknesses, and are thus better than specialized classes. Warriors can't heal, priests can't tank, mages can't do either. Why play one of these specialized classes if a hybrid class can do as well in your specialization *plus* can do as well as any other class in their specialization?
10 druids could easily clear Naxxramas, 10 paladins could do it, but it would be a bit harder. 10 players of any single other class can't do it. There are 8 classes in the game that can't do everything, and 2 that can, and that is not what I call class balance. Hybrids *must* have some weakness, otherwise they make all the more specialized classes obsolete. In spite of there being only one race per faction that can roll druids, the class is now one of the most popular, especially among level 80 players. That is simply bad design. Either you make every class be able to do everything, which is obviously silly, or you accept that choosing a class means choosing something you can do well, and something you can do less well.
While I'm sure that his article is well-meaning, it also manages to completely misrepresent the two "total hybrid" classes in the game, and all but recommends throwing them back into the dark ages. To be clear, I use the term "total hybrid" to mean "class that can fill all three raiding roles as opposed to a tank/dps hybrid (e.g. warrior) or dps/healing hybrid (e.g. priest).
We've been there before
It wasn't that long ago that Tobold's stated wish - that hybrids be less effective than pure classes at their jobs in exchange for their flexibility - was a fact of life. Two perfect examples from The Burning Crusade era were the Retribution Paladin and the Balance Druid - neither found much welcome in raids due to the scaled-back damage that they were saddled with, and it took a truly excellent player behind the character to win a spot. (My guild carried one Boomkin, and zero Ret Paladins.) Feral Druid cats weren't all that more common - they did laughable damage, and were only valued for their offtank capability (which is not what many players had in mind when they decided to roll a cat).
Pushing back further, vanilla WoW painted an even bleaker picture for the total hybrid classes. If you rolled a Druid or Paladin in the pre-TBC days you were expected to heal for your raid spot, or else stay at home; there was no room for a feral Bear, nor a tanking Paladin, they simply were not viable specs.
Players of the hybrid classes have experienced the world that Tobold would have you believe is "fair" - we've seen entire specs gimped to the point where they were not raid viable, and the result is that very few players bothered with those specs as a result, and were forced to play their characters in manners that they disliked.
The fallacy of flexibility
Rhetoric like Tobold's appears in many places, although it is most prevalent on the official World of Warcraft forums. The main thrust of these comments is that total hybrid classes have a leg up on all of the competition because they are able to change from a tank to a dps'er to a healer on a whim, and thus bring the best of all worlds to a group. Unfortunately, this is pure nonsense.
While it is true that the capability to fulfil all roles in a raid is present in every hybrid class, it is patently false to try to claim that the potential can be exercised rapidly. 99.999% of the WoW population decides upon a spec before a raid/instance run, and does not change it until well after that run has completed. (Some high end guilds respec before specific encounters, but it is safe to discount them, as they are the vast minority.) This means that a player is locked into a role once a group starts rolling, and cannot stray far beyond that role without seeing a serious drop-off in their results.
Consider the case of a Druid, as an example (although the same logic holds true for all other hybrids). If our Druid specs feral-tanking then she can tank like a pro, DPS above average, and heal miserably. If that same Druid specs feral-dps then she can compete for the top of the DPS charts, can tank in a pinch, and continues to put out pathetic healing numbers. On the caster side of the equation, a balance-specced Druid can put out great DPS, can heal adequately, but cannot tank more than a few seconds. On the other hand, a restoration Druid puts out chart-topping healing, does mediocre DPS, but fails at tanking. (Side note: there are some hybrid specs - especially in the feral tree - that come in at high tanking ability and high dps ability, though I argue that neither is as effective as a pure spec for engaging in a specific role.)
While a sufficiently-skilled player can excel at all raid-roles if specced for them, there is no way that a hybrid can fill all three roles simultaneously. In fact, most players of hybrid specs will pick a single aspect of the class to specialize in, and never look back; many will not even identify themselves with the other possible roles. (I am a FERAL Druid, not RESTO, and not BALANCE.)
The expense of a hybrid
While it is easy to claim that hybrids are powerful because of their versatility, this is only true if the hybrid player has had the opportunity to create a raid-worthy set of gear to go along with every spec that they are expected to fill in for. In the case of a Druid, this could be four distinct sets of equipment!
Due to guild loot rules, a hybrid player's offspec set(s) of gear is almost always a full tier behind his primary set. (The exception to this generality is when a guild has been stuck in the same content for a long enough period of time). No matter the loot rules that a guild has, offspec raid gear always has a hand-me-down flavour to it - usually the gear is one step away from being disenchanted before it finds its way into a hybrids bags.
Also, it is not sufficient to simply own a set of offspec gear; if a hybrid player is to perform any role that is asked for, all offspec gear must be fully gemmed and enchanted - an enormous cost that pure spec players simply do not need to incur.
Conclusion
There is no arguing that the potential to switch between a healer, a tank, and a DPS spec is an amazing perk of the game's two total hybrid classes, however this innate ability alone is not, as Tobold suggests, a case of improper game balance. Hybrids neither require nor deserve nerfing, and there is strong evidence that they are finally actually well balanced against the other classes in the game. All of the various specs a hybrid may take are now equally raid viable, and that can only be a good thing for game balance. Gone are the days of hybrid spec ghettoization. Good riddance.
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