I should preface this by saying the idea behind a hybrid class is fantastic. I’m the sort of player that can’t stand being pigeon-holed. I like flexibility. To be stuck in the same role for months, even years, in a massively multiplayer online game sounds like torture – the sort you’d endure if someone were to swap your butt with your gonads and force you to sit the same way you always have.
Ouch? You better believe it.
No one likes being sidelined, underpowered or having their class poorly understood by their peers, but these are the issues hybrids have had to endure since the dawn of massively multiplayer games. Is there a solution to the hybrid problem, or should players of classes like the Druid, Paladin and Shaman face the fact that they will never be balanced?Why World of Warcraft?
Observant folk will notice that the Druid, Shaman and Paladin are all classes from World of Warcraft. They also happen to be the top three attempts I’ve seen at experimenting with the concept – the jack of all trades, the offensive hybrid and the defensive hybrid, respectively. If you were going to design a hybrid class, these are the prototypes you’d experiment with.
I’m using World of Warcraft as my foundation for two reasons: 1) I have extensive experience playing the game (and I also use quite a few links to the WoW forums to illustrate my points) and 2) it shows how a designer’s original concept ultimately did not work in the framework of a game aimed at demographic that always wants to excel i.e. hardcore gamers. It’s important how “excelling” is measured, but we’ll get to that later.
For now, let’s discuss what “hybrid” means.
What’s a hybrid?
From dictionary.com: anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds.
Okay, that looks confusing. Heck, I had to look up “heterogeneous” to remind myself what it means (from a foreign source, if you were wondering). Essentially, a hybrid is an entity made up of various, different elements.
But that’s, like, everything in the world! We need to tighten our definition and make it relevant to the classes in an MMO. So, let’s start with the “foreign sources”. Almost all fantasy MMOs revolve around the tank/damage/healer design, or “holy trinity” as it’s called in the business. These roles form the base classes, with the tank absorbing hits, the damage dealing it out, and the healer keeping the former two at their peak.
The history of the holy trinity can be traced back to pen and paper role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. We’ll revisit this later, but for now, we have our sources.
So a hybrid can be a tank/healer (Paladin), a damage/healer (Shaman), a tank/damage (the soon to be released Death Knight) or all three (Druid). How do you go about balancing these hybrids against their one-dimensional counterparts?
1 + 1 = Learn to play
Balance, at its core, is mathematics – after all, the strength of your character is but a collection of numbers in a database. A common method to come up with initial values for statistics, damage, healing, etc. is to throw all the potential variables into a spreadsheet and graph the results of various scenarios. For example, you want a boss to take five minutes to kill using a party made up of the trinity – healer, damage and tank – and drain 50 percent of their resources. By tweaking the boss’ health, rate of damage, resistance to effects, etc., you come up with an opponent that this party can kill within the established time frame. With this prototype battle established, you can playtest to account for those annoying random occurrences or situations you didn’t factor into the original balance model.
Let’s pretend, mathematically speaking, a party needs to equal “3″ in order to be considered “average”. It cannot contain more than one of each class type. Pure tank, healer and damage classes all equal one, so adding one of each gives us our three.
How is a hybrid represented mathematically? Let’s say we have our damage/healer hybrid. It’s half a healer, so that’s 0.5. It’s also half a damage dealer, so that’s another 0.5. Added together, we get one. There’s no problem, right?
Wrong. That hybrid has to fill one of our three roles completely in order to equal our average party – or “3″. If our party already has a tank and a healer, then our damage/healer hybrid must fill the role of the damage dealer. But the class is only half a damage dealer, so our party equals 2.5. In essence, the party is below average, and will have difficulty completing our five-minute boss.
This is the problem, I believe, World of Warcraft encountered early in its life cycle. People aren’t looking for a class that can’t excel at anything. Sure, players of hybrids will say they’re fine being a lesser substitute, but when push comes to shove, no one wants to be left behind because a pure class does better.
What can we conclude from all this? Mathematically speaking, the “half and half” hybrid is flawed.
But games are more than maths, of course.
The practical hybrid
You can’t have a hybrid that’s as good as the classes it is based on. Why then, would you play anything else? There has to be compromise.
Let’s go back to D&D. Now I said that the holy trinity has its origins in this pen and paper RPG. This is somewhat true. D&D had its fair share of hybrid classes. The Cleric is the best example – a fighter that can heal. D&D has been around for over two decades, and the cleric has been a part of the game since 1st Edition. So how did the designers go about balancing the Cleric?
They didn’t. Wizards of the Coasts believes it’s done a decent job of putting the Cleric in its place in 4th Edition, but even in 3.5 the designers believed the class was “good at too many things”. While the class lacked the finesse of a fighter, it possessed its core strengths – armour, hit die (health) and weapon proficiencies. Add reliable healing and multi-purpose spells on top of this, and you have a class that, on paper, is unbalanced.
I’m going to tell you a little secret: this is intentional. Something you have to understand is, if you play a hybrid, you’re naturally asking for more responsibility. This is the compromise. You have to master two or more roles instead of one. As a result, the reward should be greater. For a hybrid to work practically, it has to be a little overpowered. But only if played well. Take out the min-maxing, add in your average player, and classes like the Cleric balance out because casuals and chronic re-rollers tend to focus on one role.
But we can’t take out min-maxing, because it’s the players at the hardcore-end of the things that are going to complain. As long as it’s fun and easy, casual players don’t really care where their class falls on the power scale.
Healing factor
Healing also factors into this intentional overpowering – grab 100 players of any MMO, and more of them will say “dealing damage is more fun than healing“. Hardly scientific, but look at it this way: sure, you might like healing your mates all the time, but you’re not healing those instance bosses to death. And when you grind, those 100s of mobs don’t die under the blinding light of your healing spells. No, when you boil it down, players like dealing damage over everything else.
So to “excel”, a class must be able to deal appreciable damage in Player versus Environment content, or be able to defeat another player before they can make proper use of their abilities. It is by this metric that players determine whether a class needs to be buffed or nerfed. Of course, this is only important in a game where damage is vital to winning.
WoW has no true hybrids
The designers of World of Warcraft decided not to take the D&D way of balancing hybrid classes. Once they clicked on to the fact that “half and half” hybrids don’t work, all classes that fit into the category were fundamentally changed. Now, with the correct spending of talent points, WoW hybrids can fill the roles of the primary classes they’re based on, as long as they’re willing to not be a hybrid.
Yes, some flexibility remains, but not enough to really be called a hybrid. No, the WoW hybrid is now a class that can change its role with talent points rather than a re-roll. It’s definitely a way of solving the problem, but put simply, WoW no longer has true hybrids.
A solution?
So, what have we learned? Pure “half and half” hybrids don’t work, because they cannot excel at any role; “half and half” hybrids must be overpowered to be worth playing; players like to hurt enemies more than heal friends; and damage is the metric by which most classes should be balanced, at least in the minds of players (who are your paying customers, after all).
I don’t think it’s possible to remove damage as a metric – it’s burned too deeply into our brains that hitting a bad guy with a sword or fireball is path of least resistance to victory, loot, fame, etc. We need to forget about roles and replace them with themes, centred on damage as an equaliser.
As such, next week I’m going to put forward a replacement for the holy trinity, and a way to have true hybrids, of a sort. No tank. No healer. Everyone has their time in the spotlight.
Update: I’ve seen a few readers post about talent respecs and how this makes the three World of Warcraft classes mentioned in the article true hybrids. Sadly, this is not the case.
I won’t argue that a Paladin can’t devote itself into the Protection tree and become a great tank, or throw everything into the Holy tree and not heal like a pro – because it can. Blizzard has done an excellent job of giving hybrids a new lease on life by allowing them to specialise as one of the holy trinity. But that’s not what the article is about.
Tell me this: if a Paladin is Protection-specced, you’re not going to ask it to main heal. True, it can technically do it – the skills are there. But is it optimal or even noteworthy? Not at all. It doesn’t matter that a Paladin, with the correct gear, can serve in both roles with a simple respec. The point is that it can’t be both at the same time, and remain competitive against classes/specs that are dedicated. The case I’m making is that a true hybrid is, balance-wise, not possible in any MMO.
I’d also urge everyone not to get the game and the theory confused. This isn’t about a particular class in a particular MMO being over or underpowered. If it helps, replace WoW and Shaman/Paladin/Druid with another MMO and its offensive hybrid/defensive hybrid/jack-of-all-trades.
Editor’s note: Kotaku Australia previously posted several articles detailing the real life experiences of a powerleveller. You can begin reading the three-part series here.
Kuradora
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 12:37 AMI play a 70 resto druid, and I’m a semi-hardcore raider. I do not have a million alts, and have only changed my spec one time – around lvl 40 when I went from partial balance/mostly resto, to full resto (1/0/60).
“with the correct spending of talent points, WoW hybrids can fill the roles of the primary classes they’re based on, as long as they’re willing to not be a hybrid.
Yes, some flexibility remains, but not enough to really be called a hybrid. No, the WoW hybrid is now a class that can change its role with talent points rather than a re-roll. It’s definitely a way of solving the problem, but put simply, WoW no longer has true hybrids.”
I personally, carry several gear sets with me – my healer gear, which is almost always on, DPS, Tank, and 2 PvP sets: 5 gears sets in my bags at every moment. I am our guilds main healer- when we raid, it’s not a “pure” priest that they call, it’s a resto druid. When we happen to have a spare healer along, no matter the class, I tend to become the versatility button.
There have been several instances where I may be needed for healing here and there, but not much, so I pop out of tree form and start caster DPS. When we come to a place where an extra tank comes in handy, I pop my tank gear on, and off-tank – I’ve even been the off-tank during boss fights with/without adds, with out so much as touching my talent points. When tanks aren’t needed, and there’s no chance I’ll be needed to heal for at least 10 minutes, I pop on my DPS gear and go cat if it seems a better idea than caster DPS in that circumstance.
While I’m terrible on the damage meters compared to a DPS class, I’m a fairly decent tank, and I tend to be above and beyond your “pure” healer in both raw and effective healing by a long shot… without touching my talents, and only the occasional gear change (which is solved by having a mod to allow for one touch gear swapping). I AM a hybrid, no matter what my talent tree says, and I have seen plenty of other druids that function the same way. We have several in our guild, and PREFER them over pure classes the majority of the time. As Arienae said in regards to pure classes, “these classes are usually pretty generic in their chosen roles – it’s the hybrids who are typically specialists.” Hybrids require flexibility, along with the ability to think ahead in order to truly play well. The hybrids you refer to as being sub-par are the hybrids who are lacking skill, or who were played as an alt. Any hybrid with a good attitude and any kind of skill will find its home in a raiding guild, ours or any other.
When counting pure classes, you’ve completely left out the mage and hunter- and left out all caster DPS on the behalf of hybrids in the process. I don’t see any explanation for leaving out the caster DPS in your arguments. Perhaps you also find this to be part of what doesn’t work, but in my opinion, it appears more as though you just didn’t do your homework. Having 2 70 druids a a 70 paladin doesn’t lend credit to your arguments – there’s not a lot of chance that you tried all 3 specs for each(or a hybrid of the 3 specs), raided with them, and also tried to be versatile with each one. It’s also not very likely that a high level of skill, or understanding of the class, was reached on both classes – you refer to hybrids not being viable in hardcore raiding, and yet it is the hardcore hybrid raiders who will tell you that your arguments are missing the bigger picture.
“The game has too much variety to really pigeonhole anyone who doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, hybrid class or not.” -Kerrik
There’s too many factors, too much variety, and too many ways of doing things for any one class to truly be frivolous or excluded altogether.
-Kuradora, co-guildmaster of Chaos Requiem – US Sen’jin server
Narru
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:01 AMwell, to have played as a druid i believe you should know then that a feral druid is in fact a true hybrid, with just two, or indeed one set/s of gear you can fulfill a tank and dps role.
august
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:48 AMHealing is something that Blizzard has taken great pains to equalize over their 4 healing capable classes- while some encounters will favor the natural abilities of a priest, others a druid, others a shaman or pally, any one can heal any 5 man if they’re equivalently geared. What gets more imbalanced is when those hybrids are damage specced- Bliz seems to have made a choice between a vital group roll- healing or tanking, and having crowd control. All pure damage classes have at least one decent form of CC- each with some limitation, but it allows them to neutralize a monster for a while and kill something else. No class capable of healing has this. That’s where enhancement shaman, ret paladins and boomkin suffer most, I think.
Trevor M
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 2:02 AMI guess I’m in the low end of the player scale; I prefer to heal far more than I prefer to DPS.
In fact, I always believed that there should be a henchman system (or a sidekick system) a la Guild Wars where you could pick up a tank, healer, or DPS to quest with you while you were solo.
If that happened, I *could* “heal” my way to fame and fortune. But as it stands, only Warlocks and Hunters get pets, and true healers have to bite the bullet.
Although I will say, with the advent of spell damage on healing gear, this has become quite a bit easier. I have no problem doing dailies on my Resto Druid or Holy Priest (yes, I have both, on the same server too.)
Antrus
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 2:10 AMYou say that a party needs to equal 3, 1 tank, 1 healer and 1 damage. That’s fine, I get that. Then you say that, “Oh, you have a tank/healer combo so that’s .5 healer and .5 tank”; this is where you’re incorrect, and here’s why, in my opinion: I play a level 70 Prot. Paladin in WoW, when I go into a group, I’m 100% tank, NOT 50% tank and 50% healer, try becoming a healer while holding multi-mob aggro (as a Paladin tank is supposed to), it doesn’t work. Plus, have you ever had a pure hybrid party? Personally, those are a lot better in my opinion, my guild heroic group is usually as follows: A Paladin tank (myself), a damage Druid, a healer Shaman, a damage Shaman and a Rogue (which is pure, but we love her anyways). That party has never let me down and we very rarely wipe, but, hey, you’re the author and you can say what you want; even if it’s wrong.
Justin
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 2:48 AMlmao at this article. The article is founded on the concept that a hybrid class is only half a “whatever”, why don’t you support this claim with any evidence? A resto shaman is not half a holy priest, a feral druid is not half a prot warrior, a prot paladin is not half a prot warrior. Blizzard has done a pretty good job keeping them on par as long as you place your talent points and use the right gear. This article feels like is was written by a child who rolled a shaman and quit the game. This article is a disgrace to journalism is any form.
Miguel
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 2:59 AMFascinating how the “RPG” part of the MMORPG so often gets overlooked. Paladins, Druids and Shamans represent something to those of us who have been role playing since the beginning–some of us are more interested in playing the part than having a class that can instantly one-shot an “end game” instance. I wouldn’t want to trade my paladin or druid for anything.
Alex
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 3:00 AMThe difference between a person who plays a shaman, specializing as a healer, and gearing his character as a healer, and the person who plays a shaman, specializing as a half-healer, half-damage (whether its spell or melee damage), is INTENT.
The first player INTENDS to be a pure healer. He WANTS to be a pure healer, thus he excels at it. The second player WANTS to be a hybrid, he GEARS up for being a hybrid, thus he doesn’t excel in either role, but is able to quickly shift roles in combat from damage to healer, and vice versa, should the need arise.
This article might hold some weight in “Classic WoW” when paladins and shamans were terrible pure healers, BUT, in Burning Crusade, they have been fixed to the point where, each Healer-capable class (hybrid or not) has a niche, such as single target (tank) healing, or Area of Effect healing (the rest of the group). For example, Shamans and Priests excel at AoE healing, and Paladins and Druids are GREAT for single target healing.
rosh
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 3:20 AMSome of you need to re-read this part. He is not saying you can not go deep in one tree and do a great job. What IS being said is you can not have 1/2 your points in Balanced and 1/2 in resto and be good at both to the point that the party does not need a Ture full time healer. I understand what is being said and agree. Haveing played a druidfor 2 years and being told ” If you want to raid with us you must respec resto” all the time sucks. If I could be a TRUE Hybrid I would have no problem, just change my gear and i am good to go.
“The designers of World of Warcraft decided not to take the D&D way of balancing hybrid classes. Once they clicked on to the fact that “half and half” hybrids don’t work, all classes that fit into the category were fundamentally changed. Now, with the correct spending of talent points, WoW hybrids can fill the roles of the primary classes they’re based on, as long as they’re willing to not be a hybrid.”
Gimpb
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 3:33 AMI couldn’t agree more on your points on how wow has tried to push most hybrids into pure roles, it makes for characters that are good at one thing and crappy at a couple others, but great at nothing, you’re not even great at changing roles because of the way gear and talents work.
There are a couple hybrids that do work in wow though–shadow priests and feral druids. Ferals suck at pvp but in pve they can do a good job of either damage or tanking and that’s quite valuable to raids, hence why they get used. Shadow priests do good damage while also giving mana regen.
Both of those cases work because those two specs are the ultimate in their niche; shadow priests are unparalleled at mana regeneration and feral druids are unparalleled as a tanking/dps role changer, despite having to suffer tanking stats on dps gear and vice versa.
The other hybrids can’t be effective role changers and they don’t have anything they’re supreme at so they’re stuck being compared 1:1 with pure classes, which turns out bad.
So, hybrids each need widely-desired things they can be the exceptional at, it doesn’t have to be dps, tanking, or healing; it can be mana regeneration, role changing, crowd control, decreasing incoming damage against friendly targets, or whatever.
Logan Booker
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 10:34 AMThanks everyone for your comments and feedback, and I appreciate those who understand the article is about the fundamentals of MMO class design.
@Justin: Not only do I think some of your personal comments are uncalled for, it seems you didn’t read the entire article. I’m not saying a fully-specced hybrid can’t do the job it’s specced for. Far from it. I’d reiterate my actual point, but it’s probably best if you just read the article again!
Arienae
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 11:09 PM“it makes for characters that are good at one thing and crappy at a couple others, but great at nothing, you’re not even great at changing roles because of the way gear and talents work.”
Wrong. I could agree with the article’s author that in most cases the “hybrids” have to stop being hybrids in order to be viable (I only disagree that it is a problem or that it could have been done better without breaking the game) but your opinion that the specced hybrids are “great at nothing” indicates lack of experience. Blizzard balanced the hybrid classes very well using one of two ways:
A) By making them specialists in one particular area of their chosen role. Good examples here would include resto shaman and prot paladin. Resto shamans are second to none at group healing (only CoH priests can compete, but chain heals are often both more practical and more mana efficient) while remaining good overall healers. Prot paladins are capable of holding aggro on virtually indefinite number of mobs, while druids can reliably tank just 3-4, and warriors typically have problems producing any significant threat on more than 2 at one time. This makes them priceless as they can handle situations where other tanks are more or less helpless. They also remain very decent tanks in most other situations and can tank virtually any boss in the game (maybe except Kaz’rogal and Reliquary of Souls, but only these two come to my mind).
B) By giving them a powerful synergy with other classes. Examples of those would include balance druids and enhancement shamans. Druids can do very decent damage on their own (though probably lower than locks or mages) but they also give the tank 2% more mitigation, give all the physical dps 3% extra chance to hit and give all the spellcasters in their group 5% extra chance to crit. Enhancement shamans will usually fall slightly below the dps of well played rogues or warriors but the extra 10% attack power, windfury totems and totem-based stat boosts more than make up for it. As a result, it is usually more beneficial to add at least one of those characters to the raid than replace them with one more “pure” class such as a mage or a rogue, as the impact they have on the raid is way greater than their own capacity to deal damage. Their hybrid-based additional abilities (both the mentioned classes can off-heal if needed and druids can also res players in combat) are only the icing on the cake. Even without them, they are more than viable.
This makes the game way more interesting and complex than some new players think. It also means that non-pure classes are just as important and powerful as the pure ones. And if they are not quite “hybrids” anymore… Well, that’s just the way the game works. More than that, this is the way PEOPLE who play work. The truth is, even if you introduced a class that would be just as good at both healing and dpsing as the existing heal/dps specs, that character would still be used at one of those roles at a time. High-end encounters are pretty complex and people need to know exactly what and where they are supposed to do. Telling someone to either heal or dps (or, gasp, tank!) depending on what they think they should do in a given situation is the easiest way to turn a boss fight into mayhem. Probably a short one too…
Logan Booker
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 2:13 AM@Arienae: Firstly, thanks for the comment. I just wanted to point out that I never said a properly specced hybrid is no good! I was a main tank Druid for my guild when I played, and I was pretty damn effective.
I also agree that there’s nothing wrong with the solution Blizzard came up with. It works. People a lot more happier than they were pre-TBC. In the end, that’s what matters.
What I’m saying in the article is that trying to implement a jack-of-all-trades class in any MMO is close to impossible, if you want it to be a jack-of-all-trades for its entire gaming life. It has a novelty for a while, but once you hit end-game, people don’t want novelty. They want effectiveness. Obviously, I’m talking about hardcore gamers, but that’s where balance counts the most.
Before TBC, players of hybrid classes had no option but to spend points in their “strong” tree (usually healing) in order to be effective. This proves my point that “true” hybrid classes don’t work – they need the option to specialise properly. And that’s what Blizzard has done. What I’m hoping is that other MMOs can avoid a similar fate as early WoW, and either forget about having true hybrids, or think very carefully about how they will implement them.
Arienae
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 2:57 AMActually, that clarification of the power of hybrid classes was pointed at GIMBP and other people who seem to misunderstand the way these classes are balanced in end game content (“hybrids are good at nothing” opinions are still surprisingly commonplace).
“This proves my point that “true” hybrid classes don’t work – they need the option to specialise properly. And that’s what Blizzard has done. What I’m hoping is that other MMOs can avoid a similar fate as early WoW, and either forget about having true hybrids, or think very carefully about how they will implement them.”
I can agree with that. MMOs central feature is clearly splitting the roles of individual players in the raid, so that everyone does his assigned job and the team as a whole can complete the challenges thrown at them. There is no room for do-what-you-feel-like approach there and hence, no room for hybrids. Everyone performs one, clearly defined task and they’d better be damn good at doing it. Off-specs are at best an auxiliary feature that may occasionally prove useful. If MMO designers want more diversity than the simple tank-heal-dps pattern, they need to either specialize the classes deeper within these roles or create “support” classes that enhance the performance of “main” classes and are still at least as fun to play.
Payi
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 5:58 AMI have a shaman that I play, Rolled it when BC came out becuase I wanted more of the Hybrid type character to play. Personally in my experience, you can spec into one talent tree and still maintan an amount of flexibility. I can main heal any 5 man being specced DPS, just by switching my gear, and spend time off-healing on raids on a regular basis. granted by doing so, my damage dealing drops, but what is more important, my damage numbers, or the raid finishing the boss because I helped heal.
now I’ll give you that any of the hybrid classes can compete with most of the base classes if played correctly. however they do still maintain some hybrid capabilities. however the player has to be able to play the character good enough for the character to be able to do it. In all cases it all boils down to the skill of the player, and their ability to remain flexible and play the class to its full potential.
Jeff
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 6:10 AMHum, so your game doesn’t allow you to play like you want to, maybe it is time to look at other games. Dungeons and Dragons Online maybe.
Edguev
Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 6:04 AMI think the main problem with your article is the concept that a hybrid can be at most .5 dps and .5 tank (or whichever combo you prefer). the fact is that hybrid classes tend to be more in the .7 to .8 range (when properly hybrid speced) compared to their pure counterparts. In the example you give in your original post this tends to mean the you have .7 of a tank .7 of a dps and .7 of a healer. This is absolutely correct for this particular example, but the fact is that not all fights fall within the limits of your example. Hybrids give you the ability to face multiple situations that would otherwise require a party change. Kara has a number of fights that require 2 tanks and others that require only 1, so what do you do with the redundant tank? good luck 9-manning Nightbane and Prince. So when you need to cover all the different scenarios out there you actually want hybrids because you will, in fact, have 1.4 dps, 1.4 tanks and 1.4 healers (for your 3 player example). This doesnt break down in end game, as the boss fights and trash cleanups within any raid will differ greatly. I have raided as elemental/resto prot/holy holy/shadow and I have been successful in all the roles. finishing at the top of the dps/healing charts is secondary to surviving an encounter.