Quote Originally Posted by Nahara View Post
I'm worried that any class/job that fills a "hybrid" role is going to cause the same problem as what happened in WoW with it's classes, specifically power creep.
The way that WoW had hybrid classes and the way that Yoshi-P is describing their intention for hybrid classes are completely different. WoW's hybrids (at the start) had multiple different roles that they could specialize in by using different skill trees: Shaman was hybrid healer/damage but could only choose one of those roles to fulfill at a time, Paladin was hybrid tank/damage/healer but could only choose one of those roles to fulfill at a time, etc. The "hybrid cost" was added under the assumption that a tank with heals, a healer with survivability CDs, or a DPS with heals would provide some substantial advantage over single role classes (and, yes, Warrior and Priest were designed as single role classes). The devs realized just how stupid this idea was very quickly because it didn't take long for the player base to realize that your spec determined your role and that, because of gear with specific stats and talents specifically designed to augment certain capabilities, effects that weren't part of your actual spec'd role were effectively worthless. Hybrid, in this sense, would mean that PLD, SMN, and BLM are all hybrid classes because they have access to Cure/Physick; this isn't really any advantage because the healing they net from Cure/Physick is so pathetic (thanks to not having the MND to actually heal effectively) that there's no real reason to use it so they don't really have hybrid functionality in any meaningful way. It would be like punishing SMN and SCH because they're both jobs based off of the same class.

The way that Yoshi-P described it, hybrid is intended to fulfill multiple roles at different times, likely by explicitly swapping forms so that they're not doing all simultaneously, akin to Druids in WoW (cat for DPS, bear for tank, neither for healing) so that you can only perform one at a time while also being inferior to those jobs that are specifically designed for it. I fully expect them to be *intended* to act as DPS a majority of the time (seeing as they're going to be "taking up" DPS slots and it's not like you really need an extra tank or healer in 4 man content) and simply be able to swap to tank or heals for either emergencies (a healer just died) or specifically designed cases (top 2 enmity targets get CCd so one hybrid swaps to tank to keep the boss from ripping apart the DPS and the other swaps to heals to make up for the increased damage taken until the tanks get freed) that are put there in order to justify the hybrid role. In this sense, the hybrid would likely be dealing about 80-90% damage in "normal" stance (noticeable but not worthless) and be about 75% effective as a tank or healer in those relevant stances (more effective than a DPS at that role but not enough to actually supplant it). Because they're likely supposed to swap mid-combat to adapt to changing circumstances, I doubt they'll be required to have multiple gearsets or high complicated stat allocations; I'm pretty sure they'll just use DPS gear (tank stance would be just like the WAR and PLD tank stances: effective damage taken and damage dealt decreased while enmity generated increased; the fact that they're using non-tank grade armor would be enough to make them noticeably inferior to real tanks; heal stance would be like the inverse of Cleric Stance: swaps INT and MND or attack power for healing power, which would increase healing while dropping damage; the lack of a full healing suite would prevent them from actually supplanting a healer, especially if they're lacking something fundamental like an AoE heal and/or cleanse).

I see less problem with the actual development and implementation of the hybrid role and more of a problem with modifying existing content to accommodate them. You *could* just leave the content alone completely and either buff the existing DPS to make up for the relevant DPS loss (i.e. hybrids are 90% of current DPS while DPS become 110% of current DPS), reduce the hp of all of the group content by 4-6% (the loss of group DPS accrued by reducing one DPS's damage by 10-15%), or leave it alone and just accept that the loss in total is negligible and that the hybrids will act like DPS instead of hybrids in anything but new content.

How many abilities and traits do you need in order to be successful at your role? Sure, Scholar comes off a DD class, but with the exception of those DoTs and the INT boosting traits, everything else is still viably useful to a healer. Would these hybrid jobs have to come off specialized classes that are build from the ground-up to let it comfortably fit all its roles?
Less than you think, especially if they're not supposed to fully supplant that role. To be an emergency tank, all you really need is a taunt (to put you at the top of the enmity table when you swap over; likely only usable in tank stance) and a tank stance (to keep you alive while getting beat one); you're still squishier than a real tank thanks to lower armor and are missing the full tank CD suite, but you can act like one in an emergency. To be an emergency healer, all you need is a couple heals (maintenance, *maybe* burst, and *maybe* AoE) and something to make those heals actually effective (since your heals shouldn't be appreciable except when you're healing, just like BLM, PLD, and SMN get no real use out of their heals). Force the heals to operate in a severely resource limited manner by preventing some mp regain mechanism or having them use mp when DPS relies upon tp and, even if their heals are just as effective while they're healing, they can't maintain it for long enough to replace a healer.

Tanks just need 2 abilities and Healers need 3-4. The "standard" allotment is 17 class with 5 job abilities (which is completely arbitrary; ACN has 18 class abilities so it's not set in stone; the only constant is the levels in which abilities are gained). If you make the *job* the hybrid role (i.e. RDM is a job of the hybrid role that grows out of FNC DPS class), you can have it provide the relevant stances and throw in a couple stance dependent abilities to round out the minimum functionality (i.e. attack that acts like Provoke only if you're in tank stance and another heal, since the heals would only be useful with the heal stance active). The remaining job ability could be some kind of mega-cooldown that either acts like all stances are active at one time without any of the penalties (i.e. you get the DR of the tank stance and healing potency of the heal stance without either of the penalties) or provides some big buff for whichever stance you happen to be in. This leaves you with only requiring only one "non-DPS" ability for the class (i.e. the baseline heal) with, nominally, 16 abilities to distribute like a perfectly normal DPS class (the survivability/utility suite would be exactly the same; imagine DRG if you removed Feint, MNK if you removed Howling Fist, BRD if you removed Swiftsong, or BLM if you removed Lethargy: they'd still have everything needed to be a DPS class).

It's important to recognize that a true hybrid role (not a hybrid *class*; one that is supposed to be able to swap on the fly and not just out of combat or outside of content) isn't supposed to have the full suite of abilities that the other "pure" roles get. Just like a tank, they would need to have fully fleshed out combat abilities (the damage "nerf" would be derived from the class abilities themselves; if they get a DPS job in addition to the hybrid job, they could simply get a stance or job ability that has the job make up the difference), but they wouldn't need (and shouldn't be provided with) the full healer suite (combat rez, maintenance heal, cheap heal, big heal, AoE heal, cleanse), or a full tank CD suite (at least 60% total uptime) because they're not supposed to be doing those as well as the pure jobs.

WoW did hybrids completely and totally wrong so you're only going to have a problem with balancing hybrids if you try to do things exactly like they did. If you actual understand how hybrids are *supposed* to work and build around that concept rather than the failed notions of a completely different game, it's not problematic at all.