LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

I used to raid with a priest.  Real raiding, not the casual stuff, the kind that causes you to forfeit your social life, the hard-core kind.  I was a straight healer, this was back in the so-called “vanilla” WoW time, so healer was the only raid viable spec for a priest at the time.  And times were good, priests healed, warriors tanked, warlocks, rogues, hunters, and mages dpsed.  But then there were those pesky hybrid classes.  The druids, the shaman, and the paladins, what did they do?  Well originally not much of anything, at least not too well.  Druids were primarily spot healers and niche dps.  With lots of hots druids could move a little better than priests while healing, but when the healing meters were posted it was generally a priest on top.  Paladins and shaman were much the same; they mainly healed, in a style slightly different than that of priests.  They certainly did not attempt to dps, at least not without being laughed out of the raid. (Remember “critadins”? Hah.) Generally the “hybrid classes” (druids, shaman, and paladins) at the onset of “vanilla” WoW were used for healing or utility for spells like lay on hands or innervate.  Healing was the domain of the priest and tanking was the domain of the warrior.

But WoW changed and with it changed the roles of the classes as well.  Druids complained that they couldn’t main heal like a priest, paladins complained, well basically about everything, and shaman?  They just became OP.  Druids got huge buffs to healing and tanking (and later to dps when moonkin became less of a joke), paladins got buffs to healing and could suddenly tank (kind of), and shaman, well they just kept on being OP.  Times were great for the hybrids (especially druids).  Times were not so good for priests anymore-or for warriors either for that matter.  The buffs to druids and a weird bug (read screw-up, it’s not a bug if you do it on purpose Blizzard) with warrior rage generation made warriors obsolete.  On the onset of the TBC druids could tank better than a warrior, dps just as well in feral form, and oh yeah-they were arguably the best healers in the game.

I have to say as a priest (especially one who had recently started leveling a warrior) I was not pleased.  In fact I was rather disappointed.  Why would Blizzard with 9  total classes (at that time) let one class become so buffed so as to be the preferred class for two of the three roles in the game, tanking and healing, and not so bad at the third?  Why weren’t we all playing druids?  We could just raid with twenty some druids then sprinkle in a few shaman for good measure for your perfect raid group.  OK, so it wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t too far off.  My warrior certainly felt emasculated and my priest, the pride of my raiding career, felt like he just got castrated-probably by a swipe.

Luckily for both classes, and maybe the game as a whole, warriors had their rage “bug” corrected and priest healing was buffed.  These changes combined with coaxing down of druid healing and tanking allowed both priests and warriors to be viable contributing classes again.  The class war was mainly settled and everyone got comfortable with their respective roles again.  But alas!  The class war would be reignited again soon…

WOTLK again shook everything up.  The first hero class, Death Knights, became available.  Death knights were built to be tanks and dpsers but really excelled on the tanking side of the coin.  Now warriors had to share the tanking spotlight with another class.  But that wasn’t the end of it either.  Out of nowhere buffs to druids and paladins (and shaman too-of course) hit the game.  Now druids could tank again, maybe not better than warriors, but they certainly were in the same league.  Paladins finally got to put their plate to use too-the protection tree became a viable tank spec.  So not only did warriors lose their grasp on the main tank duties, they now also had to share gear drops with paladins? Even shamans could tank!-kind of.  But in WOTLK though it went both ways, suddenly boomkin druids and shadow priests, laughable raid members of yore, became viable raid dps specs. All of WoW’s classes were becoming homogenized. Now the list of hybrid classes ran longer than the pure classes.  Rogues, hunters, mages, and warlocks are now the only true “pure” classes.

So where does that leave us with Cataclysm looming over the horizon?  Ghostcrawler, head crab…err developer of WoW, recently mentioned the idea of a hybrid tax.  Simply put, the idea that a class that can perform multiple roles (tanking/healing/dps) should not be able to perform any of those roles as well as a pure class.  I had always agreed with this idea, especially for my priest!  The problem is the only pure classes left are dps!  Does this mean a buff for hunters, mages, warlocks, and rogues?  Does it mean that the class roles will be modified again?  Will my priest still dps?  Or heal?  Or do both?  What do you think?  Are we headed for a return to clear class roles?  Or our things going to get murkier still?  What do you think?