Hybrids are alright, they just lack the raw endgame power of pure melees. If you're a casual player without a gang of friends always around you, hybrid is pretty much the only way to play melee PvP. You'll be somewhat less dependent on top-end gear than warriors, and you'll be less crippled by high resists than most casters are since your damage comes from melee.
You also get a lot of useful utility. Tracking is a godsend in PvP, as is SoW and the ability to snare/root (though it'll mainly be for pets at higher levels when people have resists), and a shadowknight's pet is useful for interrupting non-channeling classes who try to pumice, or for immediately telling you where your attacker is if he tries to snipe you from a hiding place or shadowstepped away. Paladins have pretty reasonable buffs, including magic resist, and root/stuns are amazing on low-resist targets. The ability to heal in some way, which all hybrids have, is absolutely crucial if you solo PvP, because a warrior or rogue who's down to half HP is fucked if he doesn't have a healer with him. You don't want to have to sit on your ass for fifteen minutes to recover from a fight.
Casters don't get any kind of raw survivability until Velious raid gear. A wizard in resist gear has like 1200 HP at level 60, and if you swing for 100-200ish, he's gonna crumble pretty fast. You won't mutilate people in three seconds with some ridiculous discipline like pure melees, but you'll have options more options than "run up and hit him". Don't underestimate the ability to root a pet, run around a corner and greater-heal yourself, or repeatedly lifetap the druid who's trying to kite you with winged death. You're still the caster's bitch if you get caught at max range in Dreadlands, but you're much harder to put at an insurmountable disadvantage than a pure melee is in that situation.
Paladins aren't great, and they'll have a lot of trouble actually killing people, but they're also really hard to take down and are pretty self-sufficient if you run around solo without wanting to actually hunt people. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who's looking for a well-rounded casual PvP class or a group PvP powerhouse, but all hybrids are decent generalists for people who don't want to limit themselves to glass cannons, group-only classes, or classes that can only really fight in dungeons. If the server turns out to have XP loss, the ability to 90% rez yourself will be huge as well (if that's possible with a PvP death, anyway).
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09-10-2011, 03:17 PM
Hybrid Mode
