For me, I’m hesitant to distill it past tanking, healing, and dps. I’d LOVE to see CC as a viable class role. We’ve seen the emergence of this as a crucial instancing element in the Burning Crusade and while I don’t think World of Warcraft will ever fundamentally shift to requiring a full-time CC role, I can easily see a shift in the paradigm of dps classes.

Take, for example, City of Heroes where an entire Archetype was devoted to crowd control. The healing role in that game was anemic to be sure, but crowd control was critical. Crowd control was often considered a suitable replacement for a proper tank. It was a fully-fledged role, much like it sometimes seems in certain instances in Burning Crusade. I realize the mechanics of the two games are vastly different but the point is in the validity and necessity of the role, not how the games themselves compare.

If the trend continues, we could easily see an increase in the necessity of strong CC abilities such that the four dps classes could spec for heavy/primary crowd control at the expense of some dps, in essence allowing even them to fill multiple roles.

Perhaps it will only happen with a few; more likely it will happen with none. But the possibility remains in the ever-changing landscape of an MMO, that the specialists will expand their roles while the ‘hybrids’ focus theirs, bringing the breadth of capability enjoyed by a few to many.

Until then, Hybrids remain the subject of debate and controversy.

There are five different roles in WoW, basically:

* Melee Physical DPS
* Ranged Magical DPS
* Ranged Physical DPS
* Healing
* Tanking

You have six “specialist” classes — the class that is typically the best at a given role.

* Melee Physical – Rogue
* Ranged Magical – Warlock and Mage
* Ranged Physical – Hunter
* Healing – Priest
* Tanking – Warrior

This isn’t to say these are the only roles that those classes can do, or that those are the only classes that can do those roles — only that those classes are typically capable of being the best at the role in question, gear levels being roughly equal.

Now, that leaves the three other classes — Shaman, Paladin and Druid as the “hybrids”.

The Shaman and Paladin, originally faction-specific, were the “can do any of the roles at any time, but have to gear and spec intensely to do them comparable to a specialist”. i.e. the Pally could tank, but lacked some of the snap aggro abilities that a Warrior had, but he could heal while tanking if he needed to.

The Druid, OTOH, was a “modal” hybrid — the Druid could tank, but couldn’t heal or DPS while tanking. The Druid could do ranged DPS, but couldn’t tank or heal while doing so — the shapeshifting forms remove the ability to do different things at once.

This probably reflects the original (pre-BC) class design a bit more than the current one — with the deeper talent trees, spec has become more important, and with Shamans and Pallys no longer faction-specific, it’s much more open.

Except for Rogues, Hunters, Mages and Warlocks (who can only ever DPS), each class does have multiple viable things they can do, depending on spec and gear.

I think it’s Blizz’s intent that there are multiple ways to play given class, and they design encounters such that each class is needed in some capacity. I mean — if you’re going to give a class a Tank spec, then they should reasonably be able to tank things without needing a warrior.

All in all, I believe a hybrid class should be something that can perform any role based talent/gear choice, rather than a class than can perform any role with anything on.