In light of the current discussions about hybrids, I'd like to point to a couple of my older posts. These were written back in December, after patch 2.0, but before TBC actually came out.
I think they sum up a lot of how I am feeling about the paladin now.
Thinking about the destruction of the jack of all trades hybrid, it is kind of interesting that this change happened all of a sudden as soon as BC came out. Reflecting of my own paladin experience, hybrid play was much easier at earlier levels than it probably is right now. Something important that I saw, however, was that blizzard added 10 talent points to every class' trees. This means that the 42->51 talent points are relatively extremely powerful. Whereas this is good for pure classes, having amazing high end talents is bad for hybrids because it essentially forces us to spec into a specific job, where otherwise we might want to do something else.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in classic, being 31 holy/20 retribution let paladins to be really good healers and decent DPS.
BC, speccing 31 points holy, and 30 ret is foolish. The high dmg of heroic mobs doesnt allow that, since neither the healing, nor dps are there. Its foolish to go 30 ret and not push for fanaticism, crusader strike and sanctified crusader. At the same time, its stupid to go 31 holy and not take Light's grace, holy guidance and divine illumination.
Gear also has a big part of it. For example, in AQ40, blizzard really hit the spot. The gear there had intellect, strength, stamina, crit chance, spell damage...hybrid gear. BC? Gear specialization towards those last 10 skill points kills hybridization.
In my opinion, its the fact that WoW has 10 more talent points that killed fluid hybrid viability.