Also, it never drops my loot.

People would be much more likely to just do one wing in an evening, rather than trying to do the entire thing in one night because they might not be able to get the group back together again later.

You could pick and choose which wings you want to run, if you have a group makeup that would work well in a certain wing. Or if you don’t have any gear you need from a certain wing, you don’t have to do it that week.

If you still want to lock out Sapph/KT to people who finished all four wings, give it a simple attunement, make you finish this quest to kill the final boss of each wing before you’re allowed to enter the last one.

Just don’t make us do the entire place with the same group! It’s the main thing I hate about Naxx.

Right now all geared up the Rogues and Hunters and Mages are rocking the DPS. More than the 5-10% that they’re supposed to be according to Blizzard. The only exceptions are DKs and Feral Cats who are doing insane damage still. (nerfs inc)

Also no matter what loot system you use the dual specs and those who actually honestly do it well, always lag behind the pures and the one specs. It’s simple really, twice as much gear means twice as much DKP/Suicides/Council wins are needed. And don’t get me started on enchanting and gemming two completely separate sets of gear, that crap gets expensive stupidly fast.

According to Ghostcrawler Druid Tanks are the least played of the four and Warriors are still, nearly 5 years later, the defacto tank. So much so they’re not nerfing Druids as much as they want to and they’re not buffing Warriors as much as they want to because of the imbalance it would reinforce.

For buff coverage you only need one shaman, or one paladin or one warrior/feral to cover them. That leaves 15 slots for whoever can pump out the DPS.

That’s not to say that a disproportionate number of alts are not hybrids. It seems if it isn’t a DK it’s a hybrid of some sort. Only rarely do you see a Warrior alt or one of the pures. They tend to be mains much more than alts.

2) /highfive for walking out of the pug for sexist comments. I’ve done that a number of times myself. Most memorably, my guildies and I (3 healers and a tank!) left a voa 25 pug because one guy telling bad dps to stop with the “f**gottry” (there’s a new one) led to a litany of talking about how “gay” dying to emalon is. Bye bye, bigots! Enjoy replacing us!

3) Yep, hybrids are where it’s at right now. Here’s the key in my view:

a) in TBC, hybrids by design compensated for poor performance with major raid buffs
b) in wrath, hybrids were pumped up to perform comparably well, but…
c) THEY GOT TO KEEP ALL OF THEIR RAID BUFFS, and each pure dps class got one at best.

Have you compared the benefits say, a ret paladin brings to the raid over say a rogue or warlock? It’s mind boggling. The paladin brings literally 7-8 discreet raid buffs. The rogue brings, at best, one if they spec into it.

I think the solution in the next xpac is to reverse that trend. Give rogues a bloodlust equivalent, and use the new talent points to allow pure DPS classes to provide more and more raid buffs, while removing some talented raid buffs from hybrids. At the same time, actually enforce the “slightly superior dps”. I’d also recommend balancing pvp so the 4 pure classes are considered superior by the community (yes, even above DKs) for a few patch cycles. That should fix it right up.

I LOVE dual spec, even on my rogue, and can’t imagine an argument that could prove dual spec is bad. It’s GREAT. It’s just that the rest of the game wasn’t prepared for it.

Great post, Spinks!

They have gone too far with the hybrid love, and dual specs enforced that trend. Now it is too late.

This trend is also revealed in armory datamining, Shamans are on the rise but still among the less played classes. Death Knights, Druids and Paladins are the most popular classes nowadays and especially DK and Paladin are often replacing Warrior Tanks with their AoE tank capabilities.

Maybe it’s time for Blizzard to offer pure dps specs alternative healing/tanking builds.
Warlocks could become Demon tanks or Dark Menders; Rogues could be Bards (healing) or Monks (tanking), for example.