Nobody wanted them in Vanilla when they were sitting around 50% of what a pure can do. They became much more common in TBC when Blizzard upped that number.
Granted hybrids did have party buffs to compensate for their lower DPS that the pure classes didn’t back in those days, but even in modern WoW DPS specs regularly are up to 25% less DPS than the top builds and you don’t tend to get excluded except in a few cases where it started getting worse than that.
Well once we get into player skill I’d probably argue that it’s impossible to have a system where one kind of build is not better than that other, because a good player and a bad player are going to need two different amounts of compensation in the specialized builds.
That means you can basically only balance around one level of skill. Everybody else is going to have it skewed, by how much depends on how far away from the balance line you are.
That is always true in all games.
A specialized build doesn’t have to have a higher skill ceiling than a generalized build though, so it shouldn’t really affect anything here.
The specialization compensation shouldn’t be about player skill, just compensating for the builds weaknesses.
TBH I’d much rather have a balanced game overall between all these playing types…
Primary-damage-centric
Balanced
Max-out-one-skill
As much as possible (for every class if applicable)
They have a nice way for Melee already (hit-effects), could assume similar with semi/ranged… So that’s something I like. BUT, would like them try go a step further, make “balanced” gameplay be something to “reach out” for… i.e. could add some conditional affixes on items that are INTENDED for a balanced gameplay:
as long as difference between highest level and lowest level of equipped skill doesn’t exceed 3 gain +50% damage per hit over 3 seconds as fire
damaging a target with more than 3 types of damage within 2 seconds reduces target’s defense rates by 15% for 5 seconds (stacks up to 2 times)
if highest resistance % is lesser than 15% than the lowest, gain 10% all resist, otherwise gain 10% of (X) resistance
I’d kinda like to see that kind of stat-affixes that could be a “hunt goal” for a balanced-gameplay style (i.e. not be all about maxxing-out one skill, cause otherwise what people will do is just find that one skill that pretty much beats 75% of complete content, and probably skip 15% of the rest :P)
Would like to see the devs potentially try reward a balanced-approach of gameplay… BUT in a nice/intended way