Examples:
2v2 Arena (My Shaman is elemental, 441 Res, 940 Spell Damage) and I play with a frost mage. I have to be aware of both of our HP as well as the other team, I have to be able to decide if I should use my NS on a heal or a chain lightning to finish an enemy. Plus if I end up 1v1ing, healing is essential, I will not win without it.

Resto Shaman/Warrior: This is an amazing team because it slaughters priests. (I also have a 70 priest). Purge the crap out of a priest, and let your warrior beat on him with windfury while shocking his heals, game over.

Just saying you missed probably the most relevant class in the game to this article.

I appreciate that my SP has a healing page in the spellbook. 99.9% of the time it is utterly useless to me as a PvEer where it’s all about min/maxing. My renew ticks for 1/3 of a holy priess renew and I spend a bucketload more mana casting it. I have no cast time reductions or threat reductions on my heals. My equipment is set up to max shadow damage – not simply damage / healing and as such I have well under half the +heal available to me than our healers in raids do

There is a place for good hybrids and times when you can make the difference, but geenrally if you have to rely on shadow priests or boomkins healing your main tank then you’re doomed already and should just wipe, res up and start again.

If you far out-gear the people around you in an instance/raid, and all of the ranged DPS are asleep at the keyboard, then yes, you might come out on top of the DPS report. I love leveling with my ret pally but let’s be honest, respec to a defensive hybrid or a pure tank/healer if you’re trying to look for groups/raids.

As for your mana conservation as an offensive hybrid, if you take up talents that reduce casting time and mana cost, how do you make up for the lack of +healing on the gear compared to a full healing class? So yes, you’ll end up blowing your mana much, much faster b/c you’ll have to cast more heals to bring the target’s health up than you would in a full healing build.

If I’m not mistaken in what Lithanial is really trying to say, is that you can be efficient and, on occasion, more valuable in a group (more specifically a raid group) b/c of your capabilities which will inevitably include, but are not limited to: reduced casting time and mana cost on both damage AND healing/melee spells/abilities, minimal increase in overall damage and healing, etc. As posted above, Archimonde is a great example of when a few hybrid classes would be considered more valuable than all pure classes. The raid is constantly moving and spread away from each other, making it nearly impossible to always be in LOS of healers.

But it doesn’t need to be taken out of proportion. Some classes are not made to be possible hybrids, i.e. mage, hunter, warlock, etc., and at times, turning a class that is into one is not appropriate. Don’t be surprised if a group won’t take you into a 5-man or a Kara run as a hybrid spec. You need pure specs to do things like that more quickly and efficiently. But a raiding guild into T5+ content, it would be wise for them to at least have one person in a hybrid spec for emergency situations. So keep that pure spec until you get some decent gear, then feel free to try out a hybrid. All-in-all, it’s your $15/month so do with it as you please. Just trying to provide my opinion

hyporcite : An offensive hybrid WILL allways consume far more mana than a pure healer for example, its a common fact and common sense. Even if you dont dps as an offensive hybrid and just healed you will end up using more mana simply as your heals will not be as powerfull. Can you mitigate the loss of mana by speccing correctly? Absolutely! But you can in no way completely compensate for the general ineffeciency compared to a defensive hybrid.

Healing hybrids make up the majority of hybrids, sure there are a few tanking hybrids but more often than not they fall under the catagory of a role switcher due to equipment limits. For instance, while it is theoretically possible for a feral druid to be both a tank and DPS, while he is tanking he cannot actually be utilising his DPS role.

Equally should he switch to a DPS role he will be woefully inefficient due to being in tanking kit instead of DPS kit.

Also i am limited to a certain amount of words per article, so covering every single detail of each individual hybrid one by one would cause me to go many times over my word limit.

Kieoti : Unfortunatly, while you can spec across your trees in that manner for the armoury to consider it a “hybrid” spec; a hunters role will allways be DPS no matter how he is specced.

In order to be really good at DPS as a hunter you almost have to go 21/40 in two trees. If you do 0/21/40 you can have good traps for CC, but your DPS will drop by a good bit. If you choose 21/40/0 you will do great DPS and have very few mana issues. It’s hard to beat 40/21/0 for DPS though if you train your pet properly.

For those who would flame: I realize this is seriously short and not nearly good enough, just an example for Kieoti. We cover all of this in our hunter guide along with more than 48 individual builds. Unfortunately you’re all just going to have to wait until we release it to take a peek!

Past that, hunters are not really hybrids. They are DPS role players who can either do tremendous DPS or good DPS with tremendous CC. But that can also be said of the mage class, so no points for trying to squeeze hunters into a hybrid slot.

A true hybrid is not a mixed spec from a talent tree perspective, but a class that can perform at least two of the major group role functions = DPS, Healing, Protection (tanking). If you try to tell me hunters heal OK with their bandages I will slap you; and hunters can’t tank a murloc without a world-class healer – so they are stuck with DPS only.