the cap is 25.
Bandages. Your move.
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The hybrid tax is a myth. It was a thing that some of the original devs implemented into the game because they personally did not like some features of certain classes in games like Everquest. It was very much a new idea when WoW started it, and was quickly removed because it was a BAD idea. And is also just clearly not properly implemented. Paladins are “hybrid Taxed” in original vanilla to be unable to fulfill any role other than healing but warriors get to be the best tank AND the best dps? It’s nonsense.
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Best Blizzard can do is nerf Hunters a fifth time
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The Hybrid tax is a myth and is never coming back to Season of Discovery. Get used to it. That’s actually BY design.
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Not at the same time. Paladins aren’t giving up their divine shield and heals in order to dps spec. If they do equivalent dps then there’s no reason to take a warrior, because warriors can’t ignore and shed raid debuffs. It’s basic logic and game design around tradeoffs.
They got rid of class stacking in retail by spreading group buffs around and reducing the raid size. They pulled back on the pure glass cannon status of warriors and gave them more group buffs like rallying cry that allow them to balance the power budget in a healthier way. But mostly the smaller raid size means you are incentivized to bring a bunch of different classes for their unique raid buffs, and there’s not enough numbers to stack unless there’s a specific reason that one class fits an encounter better, which some fights occasionally have.
The way that vanilla is designed, fury warriors absolutely should do higher dps on single target because they are melee range glass cannons with no threat drops. They don’t do the highest aoe damage, that’s mages.
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Actually it’s mostly a vanilla wow thing. I can’t think of any games that have a “hybrid” tax that work on the trinity system for roles like WoW other than vanilla. And honestly, it’s mostly a thing the players made up to justify the reason why certain classes aren’t as good balance wise.
First, it was only EVER applied to healers and no other classes. Warriors in vanilla were the best at both their roles and never got a hybrid tax for it. Second you do have a tradeoff, it’s called talent specialization. If you choose to invest your talent points into better healing, you will have worse damage output. And vice versa. You don’t need to arbitrarily hold back classes that can fulfill different roles when you have talents and specializations. And gear.
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i’d rather warrior get some utility runes later than leave every hybrid in a state that no one wants to bring them ever, most of your specs sucking is horrible game design through and through
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Not true at all since you can use your last points that don’t matter for dps to get MORE healing power, if you want more survivability you should lose dps, period.
Sure there is. There are many trade-offs between classes, not just how much DPS they output on boss fights on WCL.
Anyway, my question as to whether there ever has officially been a hybrid tax has not been answered.
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Not quite, but yes. Basically, there’s always been this false idea that hybrids would be “too good” at being able to do multiple things, so they needed to be weaker at it than pure classes in order to compensate and prevent them just overshadowing pure classes. E.g. the fear paladin, if they could tank AND heal AND dps, would be so good that you’d never want a warrior to tank if you could get a paladin. It’s never been true, but designers keep being afraid of it so they kept doing it.
EQ made that mistake and hybrids were basically useless. WoW, for some reason, ignored at the time 4-5 years of EQ having shown this to be nonsense and not true at all, and assumed the same thing (urban legend saying it was intentional due to Furor’s hatred of Knight classes in EQ, him being a Warrior tank and wanting tanking to remain “pure”, allegedly staging a warrior strike and crashing a server when he was out-tanked on a raid boss by a Paladin; IIRC Tigole was actually a Halfling Rogue in EQ, so while he may have hated hybrids too I don’t think it was for the same reasons. Also it’s confirmed by Kevin Jordan that if he ever beat Tom Chilton’s Warrior in a duel on his paladin, Paladin would get nerfed, so the hatred was real), so made the exact same mistake, only to once again realize it was a myth.
How does the saying go? Those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
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Every game is designed around these principles, it’s not just MMOs. Also MOBAs and other games.
If you are a melee only class, you need to have a big payoff for being more exposed to mechanics and counterplay. Melee units and DPS generally have a premium on dps in any game, including MOBAs, RTS games, MMOs, etc. Everyone understands range is a huge inherent advantage.
If you have strong defensives you get less offensive output than a pure glass cannon. Classes have a power budget. Hybrids like shaman and paladin can do both things at the same time. The power budget for paladins is more for divine shield which is the most powerful defensive CD in the game. But also they can full heal themselves in seconds, which warriors cannot do. So warriors get higher throughput because they’re pure glass cannon offense. To tank effectively they need to change gear. Dedicated healing requires a gear swap for shaman/paladin, but spot healing does not.
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Ret paladins have always been good at low levels once they got a good weapon, I soloed elites easily once I got the lvl 20 paladin hammer in classic era. Hybrids poor scaling wasn’t that noticable until about lvl 50.
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Indee3d, warriors can tank so nerf their dps TO THE GROUND BABY! As one blizzard dev was fond of saying when it comes to nerfing classes that can do more than 1 role.
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Paladins can also tank so by this logic you should nerf their dps as well. But your logic is mostly brainless.
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Tigole design cues for original vanilla.
If hybrids are good at everything there’s no reason to NOT run hybrids, they will outheal, outdps, outtank and outpvp everything you do.
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Correct, characters have a power budget and if you get insane defensive CDs like divine shield you necessarily must have tradeoffs elsewhere or the game isn’t providing proper incentives. If you can self-cleanse and self-heal you also need to take a hit in output, or there’s no reason to take classes that cannot. Given threat mechanics in vanilla, threat drops are also a tradeoffs. So is range.
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Nor should they. First of all, Divine Shield has nothing to do with any role the paladin can fulfill. Second, a paladin focused on dealing damage is going to be weaker at healing than a paladin that is focused on healing. That’s a tradeoff. Paladins lack other features such as mortal strike effects, crowd control, slows.
That’s not entirely true. There is absolutely still class stacking in the game. Spreading around the buffs meant you had more flexibility in your raid, and reducing the raid size was primarily a means of better balancing raid mechanics not to deal with group stacking. It’s insanely hard to balance a raid around 40 players and much easier with a 25/10 architecture.
Ah we have found the problem. You are defending warriors. There’s the bias. Anyone claiming that warriors are a glass cannon that deserved their highest dps slot is just lying to themselves. PLENTY of other classes have no threat drops and are squishier than warriors, while only being able to fulfill a single role, and ranged doesn’t matter when uptime is 100%.
This is just people that want to keep the status quo from vanilla where the game was poorly balanced and badly designed because they liked their advantage.
And this is coming from someone that greatly enjoys playing vanilla. Anyone that can’t admit that vanilla was a terribly balanced and flawed game while still enjoying it need to take off their rose glasses.
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Exactly, which is the fear, but it’s never once been true and almost every single time it’s been overcompensated by nerfing the hybrids or relegating them to a single role for fear of this boogeyman.
You haven’t made a single argument as to why a class with stronger defensives should also have stronger offense. You are just skirting around the point, as people generally do, because there is no basic logical reason that this would make sense. Nor any reason why stacking 20 paladins would somehow be better gameplay. It would be the same problem, only dumber. People are going to optimize when there are extra slots available after you fill the required number of raid buff, tank, and healing slots. In vanilla, since threat and healing throughput are no longer serious issues, that means stacking the highest risk/reward glass cannon class, which is fury warrior. If they nerfed warriors tomorrow people would stack rogues as they did in original vanilla, because rogues get a premium on damage for being melee with low armor with no heals or cleanses.
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