Both Guardians and Hunters can triggers conjunctions almost as reliably as Burglars, and damage conjunctions are now pretty worthless since they haven’t scaled them up with the level increase.

Burglars have one or two useful abilities that no other class has, but in almost every situation you could swap another class in instead and have an easier time of it. LotRO is primarily a PvE game, but it’s hard not to believe that the reason the Burglar has suffered so greatly since launch is because they were originally such a powerful PvP class. Post-Moria, they are apparently a joke in PvP also.

@Unwise I thought the burglar was such a fun class, I still do really. I loved how you could sub one in for a loremaster or captain with smart use of conjunctions … they never really seemed well understood by the rest of the players though. And that’s the hybrid problem in a nutshell. Why bring second best, even if it’s perfectly good enough, when you can get a specialist who is better?

@Jamesy: That sounds a bit like the dual spec planned for WoW. We still don’t really know how it’ll affect things but I know I’m looking forwards to it.

@Regis: I can really relate to that. It’s really fun to be a tank or healer when you’re in demand. But when you’re not … you can end up feeling very very useless.

@Cassini: I understand where that’s coming from but I don’t really agree. I think it’s fine that people who want to heal (for example) can choose between priest healing, paladin healing, druid healing and shaman healing and they’re all interesting and different. If I ask on guild channel for 3 dps to an instance run, I’m not going to care if they’re pure dps or hybrid dps and I like that I don’t have to. If that means that 10 druids could raid together, well why not? It doesn’t mean that the class is overpowered.

@Liore: I felt like that in Warhammer. But the majority of my friends also picked healing classes, and suddenly we just couldn’t easily play together. It would have made things a lot easier if people could have taken turns to hybrid it up when we wanted to run dungeons. I think being a pure grouping class is just a lot less fun when you can’t get groups is all.

I have to agree with Cassini above — there should be a bonus to ‘pure’ classes. The benefit of playing a hybrid should be that you can change completely with a respec and some gear tweaks, but at the cost of not being quiiiiiite as good as a pure class.

The point being, I want to heal. I want to heal real good. It’s not that I can’t do anything else, I don’t want to.

It’s not necessarily the answer to yours … but I don’t see that it will make things worse. The more flexible classes will be able to swap to whichever role a group needs more which presumably means more groups can form. For sure, not every player wants the hassle of gearing and practicing at several roles, but a lot do and every one that does will make grouping easier.

Loot drama I find can be avoided by telling everyone involved to stop whining and let the RNG sort it out

Whether dual spec is the solution is a separate question – healing takes a bit more in the way of dedicated skill and gear than tanking does, and neither is something that just any DPS can push a button and do effectively. Meanwhile, it will cause loot drama by blurring the line between “off-set” and main spec. Ah well, times change.

Dual specs would solve this problem since both on my WP and Knight I’m carrying around an extra set of gear for damage in the bags.

What I would love to have is 2 career sets, switchable but on say a 20 hour cool down. Now I know that developers like to charge us every time we wish to respect, I’m not saying remove that aspect, in fact I’m suggesting increasing the cost but for each of the 2 sets.

Imagine having your primary PvE Healing spec (career tree, tactics, morales, renown points, gear) and a RvR spec. Now say you’re doing BWE or similar on Monday, activate your Healing spec job done. Now on Tuesday (or after you’ve cleared said instance) you fancy doing some scens/ORvR so you switch to your RvR set. This would cut out all the nonsense of having to respec every time and allow you to jump in without any down time. This would also make levelling for players far more enjoyable.
Try lvling a Shaman to 40 with a pure healing spec…………….trust me it’s hell!