Let's talk about "Hybrid tax"

[Aggrophobic]

If they serious start it off at 1.0... it will fail. WOW was horrible then. So much broken.

No one is asking them to.
What they should not do however, is to start and change numbers or how classes work.

[Tziva]

Think of it this way then. If all classes did the same damage but shaman could also bring a totem that increaded everyones damage by 5%.
Why would anyone play anything but a shaman?

Because it doesn't stack, your raid fits 40 people which is enough for ample class duplication, and most people pick their classes and roles based on what they enjoy playing anyway.

I'm not arguing that the hybrid tax should be removed for classic -- that probably wouldn't be true to the classic experience -- but that specific argument just really doesn't make sense and hasn't ever held up reality. People have made variations of that argument for similar situations throughout the years ("if mages get bloodlust, no one will ever play/bring shaman") and it's never really ended up being a problem.

[Airwaves]

I have always loved the idea of support classes. I love bard in Rift and Chanter in Aion. It is something that is missing from wow. Having a support class could let them try new raid mechanics. Instead of just reusing old one like they do for every dam fight. This teir is half firelands fights. Even most the raid textures are ICC turned green.

[MMKing]

I think when looking at ''hybrid tax'', you should look to how Blizzard designed the classes in TBC. Because in my humble opinion, TBC is as close to perfect has Blizzard ever came to balanced classes while still maintaining 9 unique classes with their own strengths, weaknesses and unique set of abilities not available to any other class. I think, going forward there needs to be several things to keep in mind when considering classic wow.

1 - Blizzcon 2005 took place about 11 months following the launch of world of warcraft, during patch 1.6. Very much the middle of classic wow. At which point, the Burning Crusade expansion was revealed to exist for the first time.

Considering that the Burning Crusade launched with by far the most content, in terms of dungeons, raids, zones and new mechanics. I think it's safe to assume that Blizzard knew wow suffered from some inherent design issues, that could never be completely fixed without the soft reset every expansion brings. In order to properly fix classic wow, into the vision that Blizzard held for TBC. They would have to do a hard reset on the realms.

Already at the launch of TBC in 2007. Wow was a completely different game, at the very least to the player base at the time.

2 - TBC utilize a tier token for armor pieces system, which the original wow did not utilize until patch 1.7 with the ZG patch. However, even at that point. It was not used to allow paladins and druids to pick between a tanking piece or a healing piece. It was used solely to allow more than one class to roll on a single item.

The token for armor system is crucial to allow hybrid classes to DPS. Classic wow items were not specifically tailored to a single class, but were made useful for several classes so that seeing the items drop would not be a let down. The tier pieces are the only exception, which had to be designed with a single role in mind. Seeing as the majority of your paladins are going to heal, designing the T1 set to be a DPS set would be idiotic. The Paladin AQ40 set could be designed to be a DPS set, as the pieces could be picked up by other classes.

The TBC system expands upon the classic system by tailoring the pieces specifically for the class AND the specc. This has the added bonus of allowing Blizzard to roughly predict how well the players should perform after completing certain raids, and picking up certain pieces. If Rogue DPS is a bit high, you reduce the agility and increase the strength on the tier pieces. Allowing you to Nerf Rogues doing T4 content, without nerfing Rogues doing T5 content. Blizzard did this in classic as well, changing out agility for attack power on some T3 pieces. Genius game design.

The token for gear system solves the gearing issue

3. Patch 1.7 increased the debuff counter to 16, and patch 2.0 increased it further up to 40. TBC also reduced the raid size from 40 man, to 25 man. Early wow, each raider had 0.25 debuff slots available to them, while in TBC they each had 1.6.

While some technical limitations may have contributed to this. Allowing all the classes to cast all of their debuffs on the boss, AND having Blizzard account for this happening. Fixes allot of the problems that hybrid classes suffer. In TBC, it's suddenly possible for the Ret paladin to maintain 3 Judgements on the target. While in classic wow, the raid would agree to apply judgement of wisdom and/or light, but only if the fight called for it.


While TBC was by no means perfect. The ''hybrid tax'' was handled much more elegantly.

Retribution paladin can maintain 3 Judgement on the target with crusader strike, including their judgement of the crusader which increases crit chance vs target by 3%

Balance druids got a similar debuff with the Faerie fire, but instead of crit. Anyone hitting the target received 3% melee and spell hit

Feral druids still retain their leader of the pack melee crit buff to GROUP. However, it was buffed to 3% and they could now use MANGLE which increased the bleed damage their target took.

Shadow priests still provided the Vampiric embrace, causing the target to take 15% more shadow damage. But they also gained Misery which increased ALL spell damage taken by the target by 5%. They also provided marginal group healing, and noteworthy mana for their GROUP.

Elemental Shamans got the weakest raid/group buff, only providing 3% spell crit to their GROUP. However, they still maintain very powerful totems which they had in classic wow as well.

Enhancement Shamans got the Unleashed Rage talent which, when they crit. Increase the AP of every GROUP member by 10% for 10 seconds.

In addition, all of the hybrid speccs got significant buffs to their damage output and to their mana sustain. While exceptionally skilled Retribution paladins could not compete with exceptionally skilled Rogues. They did provide very valuable buffs to their group and to their raid. Most importantly, all of the hybrid speccs now had access to tailored gear that could be completely bypassed should the raid group not wish to pick up that particular item.

With all that said. We are not asking for TBC, we are asking for Classic wow. Which even Blizzard at the time knew had serious flaws. Which is why TBC is so radically different from classic wow, despite only being a single game apart. In many ways. The difference between Classic wow and TBC, is greater than the difference between TBC and legion.

[Aggrophobic]

Because it doesn't stack, your raid fits 40 people which is enough for ample class duplication, and most people pick their classes and roles based on what they enjoy playing anyway.

I'm not arguing that the hybrid tax should be removed for classic -- that probably wouldn't be true to the classic experience -- but that specific argument just really doesn't make sense and hasn't ever held up reality. People have made variations of that argument for similar situations throughout the years ("if mages get bloodlust, no one will ever play/bring shaman") and it's never really ended up being a problem.

As I already said, if you actually read the posts it was a made up exampel. There are no 5% flat dmage totems either as far as I'm aware.
The point was, if you just have more utility with no downsides in any way then why bring someone that only does damage?

Heck, Legion had this issue as well. Why play anything but a rogue in ToS when they could ignore mechanics and just make fights so much easier?

Not all specs were desigend to do max damage in raids. That was the whole idea. The entire game would have to be redesigned if you want to change that. That has already been done and it's called retail. If you want this you already have it in the current version. Play that.

[NomCarver]

Classes in vanilla were balanced in the sense that every single class was needed in a raid. Obviously, druids, pallys, and shamans had to heal as it was just to inefficient to bring them as DPS. But, every class had multiple abilities unique only to them.

[Glnger]

The hybrid "tax" to me means that when they completely fuck up the mechanics of your spec, you're fucked... /signed shadow priest now back to warlock after I mained my priest from wod - 7.3

[Loxotron]

Lot of people forget that the key thing here is itemization:
1) Most people choose the path of less resistance, and it was way easier to find a group and gear up as healer (you will be able to gather pre raid BIS pretty fast since groups are always looking for tank and healers and there are no competitors for your gear), so all hybrid classes have this option.
2) It is also easier to find the raiding spot in a guild as healer (since healers are always in minority, same as tanks, in comapre to dps population).
3) Itemization in raids also benefit healing specs for hybrids since even all tier 1 sets for priest, paladin, shaman and druid are the heal gear exclusivelly, and you just don't have enough of gear in raids to fully build a dps spec since the good amount of such gear for pure dps classes come from set items.
So in my opinion gear was the main restraining factor for dps hybrid's to do decent in raiding enviroment, plus don't forget that you need to keep in mind pvp balance all the time, where hybrids were in a good balance, any buffs to make them better in raiding scenario probably would make them op in pvp. In my opinion classes feel interesting in balanced in pvp is more important than raiding for sure, since it's way easier to tweak mobs to act accordingly from developers perspective.

[kamuimac]

Part of the beauty of Vanilla WoW (or most old MMORPGs for that matter) is the idea that choice of class (and even Race) matters ALOT. It means you are uniqe and bring purpose to the group, raid or even guild. You cant have uniqe classes and races and at the same time av complete balance between all specs, classes and races. If everyone can do any role and easily switch between roles on the fly (read: Dualspec) then you can throw uniqeness out of the window.

Class/role/race-homogenization of TBC and onwards is one of several reasons WoW simply isnt uniqe and interesting anymore. You have what now? 5 tanking classes, 3 of which also can be very competent healers and ALL of which can be damage dealers aswell.

interesting that 90% of people who put this as base of their claim will be :warrior/rogue/mage/ priest heal - geee i wonder why

class identity my ass.

- - - Updated - - -

Classes in vanilla were balanced in the sense that every single class was needed in a raid. Obviously, druids, pallys, and shamans had to heal as it was just to inefficient to bring them as DPS. But, every class had multiple abilities unique only to them.

inbefore you will see now heal teams consisting of 7 priests and 1-2 innervate bitches to ensure real healers can spam heal

[digichi]

Yea hybrid tax sounds nice on paper. If it didn't affect player choice so much, and enjoyment of the game in general, i think it would've turned out better (which is why i enjoyed the balance of tbc/wrath a lot better. There was far more varied spec representation imo.)

Maybe if hybrids where more explicitly 'support' classes they would've gained more traction to be valued that way (a spell on a 5 sec CD that increases the targetted player's damage/healing by 5% for 20 secs or something, doesn't stack. Basically an even more active paladin.) I just think ppl had more fun playing classes that were highly specialized (and that's where the game migrated.)

With 40 people in a raid group though, and with each spec having some unique buff group-wise, there is no harm in bringing atleast one balance druid, or one shadowpriest. People will naturally migrate to some of the more specialized specs anyhow (and some raid groups will just take what they can get to fill those 40 people, which was arguably more important for some.)

[Zka]

1. No class would ever switch between specs in the middle of an encounter, so having you have to specialize to do damage, or to tank or to heal shouldn't affect "class balance" or make you regret picking a pure dps class just because if you picked a druid you could've healed aswell.

Classes did switch roles during combat in pvp and small group pve quite often if things went wrong. Heck, they still do it in these circumstances sometime.

Hybrid tax offsets personal DPS because some buffs brought by hybrids result in quite big RaidDPS increase. I remember my shadow priest did some 1200-1300 DPS in raids. But if we added the DPS gain provided TO OTHERS by her debuffs she was easily around 1800-2000 DPS and pretty much matched the top damage dealers. This also applied to vanilla. At least the design intention was exactly this. Classes were supposed to be balanced by RaidDPS+Other utility and not by personal DPS.

[Baroclinic]

I thought they realized the "Hybrid Tax" was a stupid idea. In fact, they failed to come up with a healing/tank tax too. I mean, common, with this stupid reasoning, shouldn't DKs tank and DPS better then a paladin because they can heal too?

While many people have no problems using multiple specs, a good majority of us stick to a single spec so you are now getting punished because you did not roll a Hunter/Mage/Warlock/Rogue. I see very few people with the time to keep up with multiple specs (especially since Blizz screwed that with AP currently)

Blizzard has pretty much shared all abilities short of Lock Closet/Lock Rocks so there is now no reason to not stack the 4 untaxed options. If anything, they should tax ranged classes, considering how effed melee get in most fights.

[Logwyn]

No one is asking them to.
What they should not do however, is to start and change numbers or how classes work.

Thats the trouble there was at least one major class overhaul in Vanilla maybe two. Unless you count the changes for TBC as well. As those went in before BC went live.

[ManiaCCC]

Thats the trouble there was at least one major class overhaul in Vanilla maybe two. Unless you count the changes for TBC as well. As those went in before BC went live.

1.12 was pretty interesting classes and spec wise, however, I am afraid many people demanding 100% vanilla experience will be angry, because some spec were not viable in some raids (when were released) but with 1.12 changes, they will be. Not sure what blizzard will do TBH.

[Tethyson]

As a player that only plays non-hybrid classes, my position is that there should be a hybrid tax. And my reasoning is because of something I feel all hybrid class players discount too frequently. It’s the fact that you CAN become a different role with the same character. My Rogue can’t magically become a ranged dps just because the encounter prefers it. I can’t switch to a tanking/healing off spec in order to get quicker dungeon ques when I’m leveling and/or farming for gear/upgrade tokens. Yes you can’t do it in an encounter, but if I want the same adaptability, I have to actually level an entirely separate character. Which is fine, that’s the choice I’ve made. I have a mage that I use when the situation requires/prefers a ranged class. I have a hunter and a warlock also. I maintain separate characters for separate scenarios. But you hybrids shouldn’t get both. You shouldn’t get the ability to be the top performing spec at any specfific role, and then also be able to perform any other role you want. It biases the game too much against classes that can’t do that. There should be a choice. If the “pure” class choice is I can’t do the other roles, then the hybrid class choice is you can’t be “as good” as the other ones.

It doens’t mean you need to be so garbage at it that you’re undesirable. But it does mean that a hybrid class should never be capable of outperforming a pure class at any given role. A 100% parse from a pure class should beat a 100% parse from a hybrid class.

[Jastall]

What you are saying is that utility shouldn't matter on overall output, and I think that is unreasonable, and let me explain why I think that is unreasonable...

If a Feral can do everything a rogue can do just as well as a rogue, but can additionally heal himself in a different form, shift shapes and break roots, is immune to polymorph, has a bear form to which he can serve as a third tank with, and can use ranged spells, then why would anyone bother rolling a rogue?

Because a Rogue has better mobility, better CC, better raid survivability, more abilities in stealth, perhaps a globally easier rotation, and some people would really just rather play Rogues?

You know, kinda like on live?

I don't understand this notion that all classes become identical, with no point of differentiation, as soon as you take away gross imbalances. Different classes/specs can be good at different things without arbitrarily deciding that one of them should do shit DPS as a ''tax'' in exchange for utility that other classes (that also have utility, mind you) do not pay. In reality it just doesn't matter that a Druid can DPS at range, the DPS is pitiful and drains its precious mana that is much better served on heals. So why should it pay a tax, for an ability that is arguably less useful than the Rogue's own toolkit?

[seventysix]

I see a lot of posts stating as to why any class balance changes or buffs to hybrid specs would be devastation to the game and raiding environment specifically. But isn't that exactly what they did with Burning Crusade? As far as I know the class balance between specs and hybrids was very good in TBC. Ehancement shamans were in a good place, same with ferals, spriests, elemental etc. Not any of this class were particularly overpowered? Is there any reason the same class balance couldn't be applied to Vanilla? People say if you gave Bears and Paladins the same tools as warriors no one would bring a warrior but that didn't seem to ever be the case back in the TBC days. And in early TBC gameplay was still very very similar to vanilla with limited QoL additions, so. idk.

No need to flame me if you disagree, just throwing in my opinion.

[Kaver]

The thing that people because of narrow mindsets and egoism don't see is:

If your class brings a buff that increases damage of a DD by 5%, you are basically doing these 5% more damage, because without you this portion is not there.
The problem here is that this DPS done is not counted in your own damage meter but in the rogues ones which makes you think you didn't bring something to the raid.

So in Short. If your Raid does 1000 dps more because of the buffs you can apply, you basically brought 1000 more dps to the raid.
You can basically view the classes that are affected by your buff as your pets that do increased damage.


So the Hybrid Tax is just a shifting of damage from your own class to another class because of the buff. In my opinion a good design that current WoW is totally missing because of narrow minded players who were never able to understand the mechaniques behind buffs.

I agree with you. Today there is waaaay to much focus on the dps meter and less on team play, which the game is surpose to be about.

The only problem with the old design is that you only need one player to bring the buff and in a 40-man raid this does not leave much room for certain classes.

You got a great arguement for your view and I think you can get it out there without calling other people narrow minded etc. Be the bigger person

- - - Updated - - -

No need to flame me if you disagree, just throwing in my opinion.

^^ This. You don't have to flame people just because you disagree.

- - - Updated - - -

No, it was just an exampel.

But an example is always best if it's true.

Which class would you stack if they were buffed to do the same damage as rogues/mages but still had extra utility? And why?

I'm not being nasty or anything, I'm sincerely curious about it.

[Deleted]

The only problem with the old design is that you only need one player to bring the buff and in a 40-man raid this does not leave much room for certain classes.

Depends on the buff. In terms of Curse of Shadows it is true. Windfury totem, or totems in general were Groupe wide. So only one groupe would benefit from one shaman. Technically you could stack in 8 shamans.
Same goes for Blessings. One paladin can olny apply one blessing per target, so you needed 3-4 in your raid if you wanted all of them.
Balance Druid also only buffed their respected group.

A lot of buffs in classic were not raid wide and thus more than one supporting class would be beneficial depending on your raid composition.
If those classes were that bad like some people try to say, raids would have been rogues, mages, warriors and priests only but that was never the case. You needed the support classes even though their personal DPS was inferior, their buffs however were a bigger dps increase than just stacling another rogue or mage.

[Aggrophobic]

But an example is always best if it's true.

Which class would you stack if they were buffed to do the same damage as rogues/mages but still had extra utility? And why?

I'm not being nasty or anything, I'm sincerely curious about it.

Any of the hybrides. You need at least one shaman for every group as totems only buff your group, not the raid and then druids for the combat rez and so on.
All the hybrides had more tools to buff their allies than, say a rogue did. The rogue did better and more consistant damage but if they did not have that, what would be the point?