Originally Posted by
khalltusk
The issue with Vanilla was that anything for Hybrids like Shaman Druids or paladins (and priests) was that their healing specs were the only viable ones in raids and the end game dungeons. Not even about competitive, it was the only ones worth taking. Your damage was so low compared that you would struggle to get into a pug or guild that wanted to do any form of high end dungeon/raid content.
Looking back at Vanilla, if you applied to a guild as a tanking paladin or druid, you would 9/10 times be told go to away. Then one lower end guild stuck in MC might let them in. It was a very rare thing as leather gear was really not optimised for it and the talents were not so good. Sure some people might still be able to play it but they were few and far between. Now if a vanilla server had used the pre TBC patch talents then it would not be so bad. As Shaman, Paladins Druids and priests all had viable alternative specs so they could do damage/tanking or healing respectively.
Hybrid tax in TBC was a real thing and sucked, but it was better than Vanillas setup by a long way. In TBC, enhancement shaman were taken as they provided serious DPS buffs for melee groups. Their DPS was also not so bad. totem twisting was a major thing and enhancement via shamanistic rage could keep it up. DPS druids were sub par but had some uses, and shadow priests were mana batteries. But you only took 1 or 2 of these hybrids as otherwise their damage would be too low to consider progressing on high end raids (ssc and above).
For TBC shaman would only affect bloodlust on their group, not the entire raid. So you would cycle shaman in and out of the group to bloodlust certain op specs in say sunwell. Brutalis fight comes to mind here. You needed to stack shaman (so we had 3 resto two enhancement one elemental with only one enhancement being in the raid the other being subbed out and in as needed). As you needed to make sure you could beat enrage timers.
It was fun at the time, but im glad we made things like bloodlust raid wide and removed hybrid tax.