Friday 22 January 2016

Playing as a Hybrid

ever since the gear changes in 6.0+ for WOD, i am very satisfied with the way blizzard allow our gears to transform the primary stats according to our class spec. that make things so much easier for a hybrid class, such as my paladin, to be able to use all my 8 pieces of plate dps gears as my holy/tank/dps gears.

in WOD, jewellery slots (neck, cloak, ring, trinkets) gears have to be separately earned, but it is still a lot easier as compared to the past. although jewellery slots offer the most important secondary stats and proc, we are still capable of performing at 50% to 60% of a pure healer class by using a set of sub-optimal jewellery gears, since we already achieve our tier-set bonus automatically from the 8 pieces of plate.

and then things became even better during HFC. our class trinket is useful in all 3 specs and 1h weapon/shield is also use-able for both prot/holy spec at the same time, and we can also buy the legendary ring for all 3 specs. that makes us almost capable of performing a high 70% of our offspec role immediately upon demand.

i remember my role during mythic HFC progression is rather chaotic because im being requested to switch between retribution and holy as and when needed. just for your info, this constant switching between ret and holy is very bad due to the first floor of HFC. the healing requirements of the bosses in first floor is very inconsistent.

for example:- mythic progression

assault - 4 heal
iron reaver - 5 heal
kormrok - 3 heal
council - 5 heal
kilrogg - 4 heal
gorefiend - 5 heal

that means im required to switch my role every alternate boss, such as healing reaver, switch dps for kormrok, and healing council, switch dps kilrogg, then healing gorefiend. some nights, i heal 3 out of 6 bosses, sometimes 5 out of 6 bosses.

my raiding role initially is very confusing because i feel that im healing way more often than i dps, but healing is only my offspec, and my loot priority is on dps gears, not healing. the overall feeling is pretty bad until we progress into the second floor of HFC, where majority of the fights will be 4 heal, exception of Xhul being 3. when first floor is finally on farm easily, we can cut down healers and that is when i became a full-time dps raider.

and now i've been playing Legion alpha for a while, i notice some changes in the jewellery gears:
Neck - ITEM
Ring - ITEM
neck and ring slot has no more primary stats!
Cloak - ITEM
and the primary stats on our cloak is transformable now!
seems like blizzard is moving one step further with our gears. that means trinket is the only slots we need to collect for off-spec in Legion.

another good news is that the cost of switching specs is going to be free in Legion. changing specs and talents will be so similiar to D3. personally, i enjoy all the 3 specs of paladin, and have also invested a lot of time into playing them well, so i definitely welcome such a friendly change. Legion is around 6 months away so things may still change, but so far it feels like Legion will benefit hybrid players even more than WOD did.

my only concern will be the off-spec artifact. of course blizzard mention that we are able to get off-spec artifact as well (although this is not available in alpha), i'll assume the off-spec artifact to progress much slower than our main spec because we will be spending all the relic and ancient powers on our main-spec artifact first.

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