I kind of half agree with you bolteh, but Hybrids shouldn't be a half assed version with each spec, they should be fully viable for the amount of time that people play the game, they shouldn't be penalized for class they rolled and spec they decided. I do however think they should be specialised in certain areas, but decent enough in the others. Take for example tanking, Warriors are the all round best tank, they have high single target threat, great abilities like Last stand, preventative measures, anti fear(stance dance) etc, they are the most even balanced tank, but paladin tanks can tank mulitple mobs like they're play things, but stick them in-front of a slow hard hitting boss and you better have some good healers with you. Druids are like walking shields when tanking, they hardly get scratched, but holding more than 2 mobs is a chore for them, on slow hard hitting bosses they can tank rather well since their single target threat is awesome and their damage reduction is absurd, put them against a fast attacking boss and they're a strain on the healers since they have to take crushing blows (cant be immune unlike war/pal) and if you get 2 in a row, you're pretty much a dead bear. These things seem to be changing in the expansion though (especially since crushing blows are going), they're narrowing down the stats and making classes more generalised.
I'm not exactly against this since I haven't played wotlk yet, but I'm assuming its also to cope with the fact that all new raids will be playable as 10 man, which imo for a casual player is the best decision they ever made, and if small guilds of friends (like the guild I made) can see end content without having to organise 25 people to all be online at a certain time every certain day that's brilliant. I for one never knew exactly when I was going to be online, so I much preferred going with my guild whenever they were on and having fun. I think blizzard have finally realised that it shouldn't just be completely hardcore players who get to see endgame, this is the one think that really urked me about wow, that dispite me spending the majority of my spare time playing the damn game, i needed to rely on 25+ (plus, since not everyone always plays at once) other people to get me there.
Then if you want me to talk about pvp... lol. Arena is fun, it is. My fav was 3v3 just because there was a massive mix of variations in the teams, but it wasn't absolute chaos. When you're playing other players arena is fun, but not when you're playing win teams who are grinding up a team to sell it. The win team I hate most are; Disc Priest - MS warrior, Resto druid - (add dps class here). I really dont understand why druid healers are so ****ing good, I play with my friends a lot, one of them has a druid, but he only tanks with it, he moved a while ago, and he didnt have the internet for 3 weeks, so he said i could play on his account. He'd got a few nice healing items from kara runs, but i went out and bought all the rep pvp set for healing to fill out the gaps gemmed him up and made a team with my other friend who plays an enhancement shaman, We won more times in a row than I ever did with any other team i was in with my paladin or my hunter, giving that I had only played a few BG's with the resto druid before hand, and I'd leveled both my other classes to 70 and played more than 70 days gametime between the 2 characters, this was a big slap in the face. Within a day of logging onto the character, I was earning more arena points than my main and my alt. Resto druids are rediculous. One team I was in we had a 10 min game against a druid healer and a mage, I was playing as my hunter, and my friend was resto shaman, I killed the mage in about 2 mins, after which I was chasing the druid around for the rest of the game. I had to actually wait untill my shaman friend could get mana tide back stick it down with aspect of the viper on and regen about 3/4 my mana bar, mean while the druid is running around in cat with prettymuch full mana, that was the worse arena game I ever played.
Battlegrounds went to **** for my battlegroup since horde would play for about 3 weeks evertime a season set was released for honor and you'd win about 70% of the games you join. After those 3 weeks, you'd find that you'd join a game and horde would be outnumbered 2 to 1 for the first 5 mins, in which alliance are going "bur bur" as they spawn kill your graveyard. This is because my battlegroup (the appropriately named "misery" had a horde side 1/3rd the size of alliance.
As for balance, 90% of the time I think its a L2P issue, since I've met people of every spec who have been outstandingly skilled. I play ret as my pally for pvp, mainly cuz i hate healing, but they've got incredible utility in pvp as well as having some pretty top notch burst damage, yet i still see people on the WoW forums complain "OMG RET IS USELESS WTF???" when I know paladins aren't useless, for a start in arena you're the only class that has a remote cc breaking device (blessing of sacrifice), you also have avenging wrath for those times you just wanna pound somebody down, or divine shield for those times you wanna soak up some damage and attention. Towards the end of my wowing I was trying to have more fun with the game, so i quit my arena teams and joined ones with my good friends on there, since I didn't really care about items, just wanted to have some fun, my fav was with my RL friend who's enhancement shaman, 2v2 with me as ret him enhancement shaman was the most fun I've had in my wow experience, mostly because we both were good players, we knew our classes and how each other played and there wasn't any resentment if we lost. We had some fun games as that combination, It's a surprisingly good combination too, I cant be cc'd while bos is on my friend (and can dispell cc upon him) and I had my tanking trinkets equipt (darkmoon card and commendation of kael'thelas) , so I'd always run in there at the start and soak up any damage and bubble/heal if it got too serious, or if they ignore me I'd pop avenging wrath, pound on a clothy/healer and blessing of protection the shaman, or if i needed too, blessing of freedom he has purge, heals, not to mention ghost wolf so he couldnt be sapped (again bos rocks for sapping) and bloodlust (BL and AW = pwned) and most importantly we both were burst damage. It was a really fun combination, but we'd fail against disc priest + ms warrior, almost everytime, paladin + ms warrior isnt so bad, since paladins cannot dispell buffs, and with my paladin I know how to eat druids healers for breakfast (seal of justice ftw).
Playing private servers is only 10% of the real experience. Trust meh.
I'm prattling on, i miss the game, I'll pick up Wotlk at some point but i dont wanna get as deeply into it as I did before.
