Would their dps be on par with non-hybrid class in ex. Warrior, Rogue, Hunter, mage etc?
No, not even close. The problem with hybrids is that the were never designed to be competitive in the “DPS” role like that and if you look at the game from a broad spectrum of methods to play, they should never be comparable to pure DPS in respect to DPS.
For example, Full BiS everything with almost optimal grouping and stuff Ret can do 1100 DPS… a less optimally built rogue with less gear and similar quality level of grouping can do 1300 DPS.
This is not to say you cant do “Good” damage as a hybrid, both Feral and Ret can push some alright numbers, but they will never be Warriors, Mage and Rogues, nor should they.
Additionally its also good to look at the whole game as a complete picture and not as “Raid only” because Raid is what… 2 hrs a week if you just raid one raid at a very very very very casual dad friendly pace, so with that in mind what do you do the rest of the game?? Normal players do things in the world, questing, dungeons, other characters (leveling) and PVP.
All of these other activities also need respect to balance, not just raid, and because these other activities are like 95% of what you really do when you play wow they have the lions share of the balance efforts; this is why even tho “Ret” is a less optimal pick for DPS and will not be a pick on a speed clear team (yet can get into GDKP KEK at you “Fresh boys”, its also a good spec for BG PVP, world PVP, Dungeons, leveling and just goofin.
4 Likes
Druids, Paladins, and Shaman were not designed to have the completely subpar DPS that they have, Blizzard simply had no idea what they were doing, most of their class design was borrowed from other games and they were making changes right up till launch. After launch more critical issues such as stability and significant missing functionality likely drew most of there resources, so most class balancing changes were pushed to TBC, which was likely the best place for them since it really required a complete class overhaul.
Anyway class balance is unlikely to be addressed in anyway, as we saw with SOD, its not a simple thing to make balance changes, especially since they have already decided to do some things like Dual Spec. So until TBC, if you want to DPS in a raid, do what others are doing and play a warrior or rogue, then switch in TBC when more options become available.
1 Like
Thanks for the lengthy responses, you and Cezar. Do you think that there should have been a possibility to increasing their utility or “support role”, to sufficiently carry out what the class was originally designed for? Or do you think a simple leveling out the dps is what it needed?
Perhaps if the buffs translated into dps such as, blessing of might, reflected back on the paladin as dps. For instance, for 40 members of raid all blessing of might dps increases were a +dps for the paladin and not for the rogue, and etc?
What if those dps were allocated for the paladin, rather than the dps. Even something like thorns, were directed or shown back to the druid. So for every +dmg that was done bc of blessing of might was shown as +dps to the paladin. THEN, I wonder what the actual numbers would be. Even mark of the wild back to the druid and battle shout to the warrior?
Hard to say what is best because of meta chasing, but sure could have been cool to see a TON more mechanics in raid that require you use your abilities other than just Zug damage; things that make it possible for hybrids to really shine in raids providing tools that are not just simple damage and healing.
Another problem with pure raid only PVE where you have the big boss and you gotta zug him down quickly is that the over simplistic PVE design used in WoW and games similar both before and after WoW suffer in that the PVE Raid stuff caters specifically to the Zug DPS meta; this I think is where trash in Raids were suppose to fit in making the PVE more balanced, but unfortunately the only people who care about trash clearing times are my fellow speed clear teams.
Another issue with the community is that we started off adding DPS meters, then Healing meters and expanded all the way to now where we use things like WarCraft Logs to track the whole raid, but rarely do players consider the other components of the raid mechanics as valuable and only consider DPS (parses).
If instead of only looking at specific parse components of a raid / boss encounter we instead gave each component value such as dispels, DPS, Healing, utilities tools, consumables use, etc. And then assigned a cumulative score based on that use, and balance the values VS the time to kill instead of raw speed of kills because speed of kills massively influences your parse; then perhaps we could change how people think about PVE a little making Non-pure DPS / Heal / Tank roles more desirable.
Could DPS on some hybrids been better? Yes, but some of the pures (I play them also) should not have scaled so well either, yet should have been a bit ahead of hybrids but not by as much. I am in favor more of brining the top down, not the bottom up.
No, they have enough utility, the problem is there is zero need for utility in raids., DPS spots in raids need DPS, especially in Classic ERA, since there are no raid mechanics that even require things like interrupts, you don’t start seeing utility used in raids until TBC, and even then its things like interrupts which is typically provided by rogues and warriors, not paladins for the most part.
From the standpoint of ret, they are just in a bad situation, and it’s compounded by gear and the impact of stats in WOW. Assuming they are wearing dps gear (Str/Agi/Con) they will be bad dps, a weak healer and a poor tank. While they could be a passable healer in T3, there simply is no reason to bring them over a priest, druid, or holy paladin, and this will destroy their already bad dps even further. Now balance and elemental wont have quite the issue since their stats are a bit better balanced for flexing between roles, but they like ret are also impacted by resources.a
Obviously this changes a bit in PvP where some of their utility is more useful, but even they fall short of other classes, but assuming they have a set like T2 they could flex around pretty good, however the problem is once you have people running around in T3 and R14, that gear is relatively weak.
One day, I was a fresh level 60 warrior in partial pre-bis, and I went to BWL. There was an almost fully Naxx geared Ret Paladin. I gray parsed as a warrior. He purple parsed. My DPS was higher.
The end.
2 Likes
it’s not a problem, they were intended to be healers/support and that’s exactly what they are
the “problem” is when people try to play them in ways they weren’t clearly intended ie as a DPS or tank.
1 Like
Thats normal there was maybe 10 ret parse vas thousand for warrior
I was being nice with this btw:
A not very well played warrior, not even in pre-bis, mostly un-enchanted gear doing almost double the damage of an almost perfectly played, almost fully BiS ret paladin.
And yeah, that is normal.
1 Like
blizzard knew exactly what they were doing 
hybrids should not deal more damage than pure classes. period. if you want nonsense class design, play SoD
1 Like
exactly. SoD is a very clear example of what happens when you mess with the delicate balance of Vanilla
Turtle is another example of blatant hybrid favoritism too
1 Like
Hybrid tax was a dumb thing tbh, it was so bad blizzard removed it.
TBC shows that wasn’t the case as fixing spec lines was one of the priorities they took in the expansion. Also if it was truly a support spec you would see much more in the line of shields and other active abilities, ret was just broken DPS spec just like shadow, ele and enhance. I mean come on priest had a melee spec shortly before launch that was removed, so no there was no great plan.
Also if hybrids should not deal more damage, and not even saying top damage but simply to be viable, then warriors are even more broken since warriors are a hybrid class also being both a tank and dps, have tons of utility as well as being a buffer. So the hybrid argument is silly and would only make sense if the pure DPS classes like hunters, mages, locks topped of the DPS charts, and where the meta wasn’t to bring 20 warriors.
Blizzard actually fixed a lot of things before TBC, but they also had to prioritize some things more like stability and content over class balancing which really needed a complete overhaul, it was also a good idea not to try and do that along with everything else. As SOD is a good example on how difficult it is balance classes when doing it piecemeal, its also why many of us want TBC, there just is no simple way to fix ERA without a huge effort and honestly all the warrior stans will come out against anything that might make anyone viable against them.
You must not have read what I stated, assumed and then kinda gave a glossed over version of basically what I wrote with out any of the nuance.
Also WoW vanilla is not a “Raid” game, if you want that sort of play then TBC+ is the game for those people. In Vanilla Raids are there for you to get gear for PVP; that was the point basically until TBC Ruined the overall game.