I don’t mean people should never switch classes or never play alts. I believe alts make people better at their original class by showing different ways things could be done and possibly adapting those tactics to your main. Or if you’re just not having fun, regardless of power, it’s stupid to keep playing that class.

I was originally a shaman, but I switched to a paladin a few months into BC and have stuck with it ever since. When I had less fun I played other classes. I learned from having moderately high level alts of every class (60+) except for mages. They baffle me.

But jumping on a different bandwagon each month is not the answer (imo) – there are so many DKs, and they have essentially been tarred with the same brush: 14 year olds who can’t play their class. Not true in the vast majority of cases, but deemed that way by the actions of a mindless few

But switching from frost to arcane is less a change of play style and feel then switching from Enhancement to Resto.

And you can use the same gear for frost and arcane. An enhancement shaman probably is 1 tier behind on resto gear.

Both might not be what you want but I think this is an advantage of the pures as every class always has at least one tree which is raid viable and for the pures this is guaranteed to be a dps tree.

I know come Cata as I have no idea what will end up being viable my ‘main’ will be a hybrid. Either my Dk or my Shammy. Much as I love my lock i want the option of being able to raid as DPS/Tank or Heals/Ranged. Probably the later as I prefer ranged to melee and heals to tank. I love my ‘lock but limiting myself to DPS will give me less flexibility both for leveling and 5 man content and then again for raiding.

There is no room anymore to feel like a special snowflake just because you play a warlock. That was very different in vanilla, where you really were.

I’ll stick to my main, which is easy, as the main is the character you don’t really play because there’s nothing left to do. You raid a few evenings and that’s it.

But I’ll definitely play the alts which are “better balanced”.

E.g. I stopped playing my druid with 3.3 because I have no interest of seeing cloth upgrades get shared because of the new system. And I’m not interested to create groups through /trade for the ICC% instances to gear my char up just to have a geared char who could then use LFD but doesn’t need it anymore.

And I stopped playing my paladin tank and replaced it with my DK as the mana problem was driving me nuts. In todays gogogo-rush heroics a tank who needs mana brakes just doesn’t feel right. And using less abilities to conserve mana isn’t my idea of fun.

That’s ok, I can switch to another alt.

Thanks to the Min/Maxing extreme, you can adapt the rotation of any class into your routine, within a few hours.

I have tried this, with all tank classes and once you became familiar with their concept it is perfectly doable.

Of course, every class has a wide set of abilities, some even unique, but when it comes to fullfilling a certain role, you usually end up with a basic routine, that will do the job at the best.

But how did that happen?

Well, it is already within this blog.

At first, Blizzard faced the problem, that in order to achieve certain victories very fast or easy. Some guilds simply swapped classes for their unique abilities during a raid. So for Boss 1 they brought a Elemental Shaman because of its Bloodlust, for Boss 2 they kicked the Shaman for their shadow priest.

So instead of having set Raid-Members and trying to find a solution for the problem with the given pool of abilities, they brought the easiest match for the problem to the raid.

In order to do this, you need more than 10/25 people during one raid periode of course. This ultimately ended in people fighting for the same raid slot.

Blizzard tried to end this, by making Raid-Puzzles solvable just by the use of core abilities.
In their eyes, this would bring more people to stady raiding, and in fact it did. The guys that sat on reserve during a raid, waiting to be invited for a certain boss, now formed their own raids.

By limiting fights to core abilities, they made classes compareable. A rogue DPS was compared to a hybrids DPS, although the hybrid may offered certain utilities that could be of help, but since you can not measure utility but DPS, they were “balanced” around their DPS.

At the moment you can easily follow this discussion at the example of the tanks. In nearly every of Ghostcrawlers articles about tanks, he is explaining, that they will not give the same abilities to every tank. But this is what the “crowd” demands. Paladins asked for “last stand”, and received “ardent defender”, now Warriors are asking for “ardent defender” and so on.

So we, as players are asking for “egaliterianism” of our characters, which in fact makes learning a class in depth obsolete.

And then there is the even more real advantage of playing what is most fun for you to play… but fun is obviously a very subjective measure!