I don’t know why I bother reading Jasi’s entries anymore. Here’s an excerpt from his latest entry:

I whole heartedly agree. Now before you jump on some sort of soap box or bandwagon and call me crazy for agreeing that “hybrid” classes have become overpowered, you have to take a couple steps back and look at things from a broader and slightly different perspective.

As I have written about a handful of times already, Blizzard generally gets out of control with their own PVP gear progression. The evidence is buried within the Arena and it doesn’t even take careful observation to see that certain classes have lost viability due to the fact that they are unable to defend themselves against the rate at which damage has scaled. Shadow Priests are a perfect example of this and even classes like Warlocks can be susceptible to pain-trains now while they were previously the most durable class out there. During season 1 and 2, Spriests were quite powerful, and you could easily find them in all three brackets. As damage began to scale in mid to late season 2, they slowly began to decline in overall representation and have become nothing but distractions now that season 3 is almost reaching an end. The TR has teams with Spriests simply because Armor penetration and damage hadn’t quite scaled to the point where they were no longer viable during season 2.

Here’s what baffles me. He starts by agreeing: hybrids are overpowered. Then he uses a hybrid class as an example of a class that has been outdone by hybrids. Whaaaaat?

Basically, the argument should be structured in a manner that defines a hybrid class. And then he should show how each and every (or nearly every) “hybrid” class spec is overpowered for certain brackets. You can’t generalize unless you support the need for generalization with premises. However, I’m pretty certain he wouldn’t be able to do this, because he’s going to come across specs for hybrid classes that simply aren’t optimal. And he as much admitted this indirectly by using the shadow priest as an example.

Personally, I’d also cite feral druids as an example as to why hybrids aren’t generally overpowered, despite Jasi’s unexplained statement that ferals are. It’s curious to point out how feral representation hasn’t undergone the same boost elemental shamans did in the middle of season two. So, if they are truly overpowered, they should have become a staple in cookie cutter compositions by now. Right? Feral burst and sustained DPS is certainly adequate in a 5v5 setting, so why isn’t this the case?

What it boils down to is the fact that feral druids don’t play a core role other classes can’t. And many of them do it better than feral druids. Mages, for example, bring DPS, survivability and CC capabilities, exactly what a feral is supposed to bring at a basic level. But ice block is superior to increased armor in many regards. And the mage doesn’t have to shift out or into form to polymorph or CS. I’ll further point out that mages haven’t taken a hit in representation in 5v5, despite being a pure class. If anything, they received a boost when icy veins was implemented. Just take a look at all of those pretty mage icons in the 5v5 listing on Arena Junkies.

So feral druids are only optimal in forming counter-comps, given the abilities they have that other classes do not. However, considering most teams stop playing when they hit #1 comfortably, there’s not a lot of opportunity to make use of a counter-comp against them.

In any case, this is why making generalizations is dangerous. And it’s a huge problem with many of the top blogs on Gameriot, unfortunately.