Nah, TBC was when they found their footing.
WotLK was all improvements, Shamans got better, Druids got better, Paladins became amazing.
Nope, Spriests were brought along because they did crazy amounts of DPS due to VT solving the problem that held them back from being solid raid DPS in Vanilla.
VT affecting the rest of the group was just a bonus.
Noone called hybrids hybrid during Vanilla ?
Hereās a gift for you :
https: //web. archive. org/ web/ 20050320045751/ http ://www. wow-europe. com/ en/info/classes/
Look at the date : 2005 18th March.
I rolled for a melee hybrid primary role and secondary healer not the opposite. So no I didnāt know at the time being my role would change from melee hybrid to healing b iatch 40 yards behind.
For many months (years ?) they left the paladin beta skills on the page (example : Holy Strike).
Blizzard lied to a big part of its community during Vanilla and thatās all.
One last thing : Internet NEVER FORGETS !
And hereās a working link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050320045751/http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/classes/
Not strictly true, as many just picked a class with no realisation how the game worked at max level. Even the 5man dungeons; the tank+healer+3 dps setup wasnāt default until well beyond starter dungeons.
No descriptions ever said āDruids - healer or meme speccā or anything of the sort.
As for no one caring if people rolled for off specc (or main specc if playing an off specc role)ā¦ yeā¦ lol. People who werenāt ever going to be rolling against you would still complain if they saw you wearing equipment your class āwerenāt supposed to haveā.
Actually - you are so far or course youāll end up hitting rocks
There was one kind of build in Vanilla - what folk enjoyed
All of the stats - fan sites - pro-guides etc. came later
I know you will disagree and quite yet more stats
But this is the simple truth at the heart of the debate you choose to ignore - itās just a game
The concept was to create a community of players who could hang out and enjoy themselves
All of the issues followed later because of need some folk have to be the winner - the best - number one - the head honcho
Thatās not what the game was supposed to be - it is very much what retail is - and itās where some would wish to drag Classic
Iām always mindful that less than 1 half of 1 percent of subscribers visit or comment on these forums - and that is what gives me hope that Classic will remain - Classic
I never go more than 500 yards (0.25 nautical miles) off course.
Thatās because I am a pro.
In a version of the game with no competitive content?
No, irl. Thatās my job.
My guild has 2 ret paladins, 1 shadow priest, a feral off tank, weāre open for a balance druid too if one should want to play as such.
We clear MC and we usually have no issues
I agree that thereās less slots for these specs but thereās also less offer for them too.
In PvP anything goes
The game you are playing was mostly made when Mark Kern was project lead. He left the company before release and Rob Pardo took over. Pardo was a member of Legacy of Steel, a āhardcoreā Everquest raiding guild along with Jeff Kaplan. Their vision for the game differed greatly from Kernās. His idea of a raid? UBRS, thatās his.
Pardo couldnāt re-design WoW from scratch, he had to work with what he had but both he and Kaplan wanted Everquest-style raiding in WoW. Kaplan revealed they rushed to create MC in just a few weeks. They rushed basically to shoe-horn raiding into the game, which is why raiding feels almost like a completely different game and why MC has so many re-used assets that makes it look ugly.
The classes, their roles and mechanics were all concieved long before this. They are so restricted in their viability for raiding because the raids have not been designed around the classes as they are; players have to shape them to fit the Everquest-standard, so even Warlocks have to be more like Mages and any class that can heal has to be like a Priest.
This was all done so late that PvE raiding isnāt even included in the physical manual that comes with vanilla WoWās boxed copies and it is a very detailed manual that even talks about features that were delayed so Pardoās team could focus on inserting MC and Onyxia. One or two features were dropped entirely and the PvP system butchered because they wanted to nudge everyone towards raiding.
Blizzards goal was not to make classes into what they are today.
They tried different things, experimenting with class fantasy.
Clueless?
No, they just had great ideas that didnt work out they way they wanted.
Take Druids:
They wanted this Class to be a shapeshifter and tried to work around that, but discovered that their ideas with shapeshifting ( jumping in and out of different shapes during combat to fulfill all roles ) worked well in game as on paper.
The Everquest raid-roles are as we know; tanks, healers and damage, or āthe holy trinityā. There is no concept of āadaptableā or āversatileā as roles in the raids, but there is in virtually every aspect of the game that has nothing to do with raiding. Look at how quickly people forgot Shaman could tank(non-raid instances) after the first expansion happened and that fighting with 1-hand+shield was generally a good idea for them anywhere except raid instances.
The Burning Crusade was the first opportunity the new project lead(Jeff Kaplan, who had been working in the games industry literally less than 3 years) had to shape the entire game how they wanted. Class-designs were changed, but they were done so in order to enforce the holy trinity of raid-roles. Hybrids got more specialised in tanking, healing and damage, but started having the hybrid-ness stripped away and what a āhybridā was even got redefined. Now apparently we were hybrids because we had different talent specs for different roles, in which case it was worth asking why more specialist classes like Warrior and Priest were far superior āhybridsā than the original hyrbids were?
Despite Enhancement and Elemental Shaman losing the means to quickly switch to effective healing mid-encounter, they never recieved any competitive increase in their damage to be on par with classes that could do just that(like Shadow-spec Priests). Enhancement completely lost tanking, even in levelling dungeons. Whilst TBC and WoTLK were improvements on the design Blizzard now wanted, it meant losing all the possibilities that vanilla presented and Classic reminds me of.
If only that were true.
Outside of PvE, there is PvP, and Mages, Wariors, Priests, Rogues and Warlocks are the strongest classes there, too. (In that order)
Hybrid classes in vanilla donāt work because there is this weird inbetween world of generalist classes and specialist classes.
The problem with generalist classes is that they donāt have a niche and therefore donāt have the same direct gear support that something like a rogue or a warrior have.
Take Thrash Blade for example, the sword in and of itself is a good sword, but rogues sword specialization buffs the already good effect on the sword turning from āāgoodāā to āāgreatāā innately.
Druids and Paladins, especially their DPS specs are too general, their talents are too āābasicāā, āāreduce cooldown of Xāā, āāreduce cost of Yāā, āā10% increased damage with Zāā etc, this means they scale very poorly with gear since their talents donāt support many, if any, gear drops out in the world.
The classes arenāt bad, just that specialised specs have so much support for the gear available through raids they just scale infinitely better into endgame
Im not saying specs are balanced, but they do have advantages.
Feral druids are great dungeon tanks
Balance druids are great for solo wpvp
Ret and prot paladins are nice for farming and solo pvp
Spriests are amazing at solo pvp
Elemental shamans are amazing in pvp
Enh shamans suck overall Iāll admit, nice windfury crits though.
There is no point in them. They are very niche and canāt hold a candle to pure classes. Iām hoping for Classic + and updated balance just for that
Rets were far from garbage in TBC - you needed at least one for Improved SoTC and Improved Sanctity Aura (which was 3% crit for the raid and 2% damage for the group).
In WoTLK Ret pallies were perfectly functional as mid range DPSers and insanely strong until near Glad level in PvP.
A friend of mine got into one of the (if not the) best raid guild on the server in Vanilla, as a Retridin. He simply proved his worth in that role.
And even now, with everything theorycrafted into the third decimals and beyond, there are still a lot of guilds that will take hybrid classes playing something other than the absolute most optimal specc.
I am a druid and I am the main tank of my raid group. We have a retpaladin in our raid group as well and a shadow priest. The guild leader is not family or IRL friend in case you are wondering, we became friends after playing classic and he agreed on me being a tank when i applied for the guild. Your problem is with the players around you not the game.
The classes just werenāt designed for raids, nor the raids designed for the classes because there was such a short window for them to get made and stuffed into WoW before release.
They delayed and then borked the PvP system for this.