Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to playing A Hybrid Class.
You want to play a hybrid class? What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t make up your mind if you want mayo or squeezy-cheese on your hamburger so you mix them up into some hideous condiment mélange, an abomination against nature and the sign of the first Seal of the Apocalypse breaking?
Oh, all right. You’ve looked through the class list and found the infamous hybrid classes; on paper, it seems neat – a priest/warrior? Neat! You get to dish out a bit of the ultra-violence and also rez your friends (you do have friends, don’t you?) Oh! How about the caster/whatever hybrid? Nice – damage plus utility! How can you beat that?
Easily. The first rule to remember about hybrid classes is:
You can never be good at anything.
I’ll repeat that:
You can NEVER be good at anything.
“But!” you say, “why not? I can heal, I can tank, I can julienne potatoes – what’s not to like?” First of all, you’re the Swiss Army knife of classes. You have lots of fiddly little tools, including a toothpick for God-knows-what reason, but they don’t quite do the job as well as a real tool. Ever tried to open a can with the little can opener attachment on a Swiss Army knife? You end up with bruised fingers and an unopened can of soup. As with the knife, so with the hybrid class; you can tank but not as well as a “real” tank. You can heal but the single-spec healer does it better. You can cast but don’t have as much damage as a pure caster.
This means that you have two choices: a) overspec in a single line of your skills, i.e. healing, and therefore be pretty good at one aspect of your hybridness and rotten at the others, at which point why didn’t you just bloody create a pure class of that type? or b) always be the last kid in gym class to be picked for a group (“oh…a Tankydruid? Let me see if we have an open spot for your useless ass. OK, we do. Just don’t heal. Or tank. In fact, just sit at the back of the group and try not to aggro anything.”)
Once and a while the developers will take pity on the hybrids and give them Something Nifty. Inevitably this means that for once the hybrid will actually be USEFUL and therefore, in the eyes of the rest of the player base, something to be loathed like broccoli coated with rusty nails. Let’s take our theoretical Tankydruid and give him a taunt – let’s call it “Wild Expectoration” – which actually can divert aggro off of tender squishies. So every Tankydruid specs in Wild Expectoration, and soon you’ve got a horde of spitting Tankydruids running around helping groups out by making sure the fragile healers and mages live through a combat.
“Well,” thinks the Tank player-base when confronted with this, “we can’t have THIS. Aggro control is OUR role in a group. It’s OURS. Come, comrades, let us repair to the game forums and commence to whine like a schoolroom full of Kindergarteners denied naptime!”
Thus, next patch, Wild Expectoration is “adjusted” so that it only pulls aggro every even Tuesday under a full moon when the sign of Scorpio is in the ascendant.
So…if you can live with marginal usefulness and the constant sniping of “pure” classes who you play with you can still manage to have a marginally good time playing a hybrid class. The most important rules to follow are:
1 ) You’re utility. That means you’re the second-stringer, the backup, the spare tire in the trunk of the party under the luggage and the stale bag of French Fries that someone left in the car four summers ago. That’s not to say you’re useless. Rather, you can catch the aggro that the tank drops, add a few extra DPS to snuff out an add, or rez the healer after he does something colossally stupid like over-healing the rogue and drawing aggro.
2 ) Live your life like you’re an English butler. A good butler anticipates his employer’s needs; you’ll be sitting in the back of the group keeping an eye on everything, ready to step in to whatever role you’re needed at the time. “Excuse me Sir, shall I rez the thief? Very good, Sir. Ah, I see some ruffians have broken away from the tank. Let me just tidy them up. Very good, Sir. Pardon, Master Wizard seems to have run out of mana, here’s a quick jolt of mana transfer, no, Sir, you’re quite welcome. Shall I decant the brandy? Very good, Sir.”
3 ) Spec for soloing. You’ll be doing a lot of that. It’s not that you’ll never group, just that you’ll never consistently group unless you have very good friends. Once you get into the big leagues you can spec for group PvP or raid healing, but until you get there be prepared to be slaughtering Dyspeptic Weebles on your own.
4 ) Try not to compete with the “pure” classes for loot. That tends to make them cranky. On the good side, since no one sensible ever plays your class, class-specific items will be yours by default unless you’ve got some knob in the group who insists on looting that stuff “for his crafting alt to disenchant.” If you meet up with one of that sort find out his address and burn his house down.
5 ) If you’re a damage caster hybrid, remember not to get too caught up in the DPS game. You’ll lose. You’re the ketchup on the DPS hot dog – flavorful, a bit spicy, and nice to have, but not the meat of the damage. Use your damage to finish off weak bad guys or to bolster the main DPS but be ready to switch to your alternative focus – tanking or healing, for instance – if necessary. Again, pay attention.
6 ) Oddly enough, you’ll end up being fairly good at PvP. Why? Well, because while the enemy is roasting all of the wimpy dress-wearing mages and healers, you’ll be sitting there in your Reinforced Leafy Squirrel-Snot armor and look like something else that PvPers usually ignore (tanks, for instance) and ready to give the enemy a Feral Sloth Fungal Wedgie faster than she can squeak “overpowered!” Relish the fact that after levels upon levels of uselessness you get to vent your frustration out on a bunch of pure-class saps.
7 ) Have fun with your weirder abilities. Can you transform into a Killer Turnip? Go for it! Can you charm monstrosities and let them loose on the hapless enemy? Drag ‘em to the capital city of your faction! Embrace the weirdness. Enjoy the weirdness. Sure, it’s the plastic toothpick of your class’ Swiss Army knife, but no-one else has it, so live it up.
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