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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zinovia" data-source="post: 5119687" data-attributes="member: 57373">It was my understanding that the biggest change we were going to see in Cataclysm was in how items work in relationship to your talent spec.  They are doing away with tons of secondary stats such as spell power or mana regeneration and instead tying it to the base stats such as intellect and spirit.  Stats on your gear will be applied based on your current spec.  Now I may be mistaken, but I didn't think they were changing how talent specializations work.  Allowing people to have two specs and swap between them seems to cover the need for versatility in WoW.  What may not be clear to people who haven't played WoW is that changing your specialization in WoW will often completely change what you can do as a character.  A simple swap of gear and spec, and you go from a great raid healer to a solid tank.  But you can't combine the two in any useful way; the jack of all trades character has no real place in WoW, at least not in the end-game.  I don't see Cataclysm as changing this.  What is the point of a raid tank that can heal better?  I think Blizzard is only changing how gear interacts with your existing talent tree, so the change is to itemization rather than character talents. Paper RPG's are a different beast entirely, and have always allowed a true hybrid character more readily than MMO's.  The GM can adapt the challenges to fit the group, while an MMO has a static encounter design that must work well for whatever group attempts it.  In WoW a hybrid is any class that can change roles when they change their talent specialization and gear. In D&D and other tabletop games, a hybrid is a character that has abilities from multiple classes, and can do any of them at a given time, trading focus for versatility.  It's a worthwhile trade in D&D, but not at all in WoW.</blockquote>

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