Hybrids – why not?
When it comes to a lot of things hybrid appears to be a good thing.
For automobiles – hybrid vehs are somewhat better then the traditional car.
For food – fusion dishes can spark life into old recipes.
In pen and paper RPG’s – many of the more interesting classes are not quite one dimensional. (rangers, bards, clerics, etc)
Video games – once again many characters are multi-dimensional in their abiities and or spells.
Why is it for many MMO’s we see you can be this can, X job can do this and should not do this etc.
One thing that has always bugged me (and I do not play a made in WoW, although it does interest me), is mages stuck in ONE school of magic. Other lore (DnD, FF etc) mages are masters of magic being able to pull from more then one school of magic.
In WoW – Arcane, frost, and fire are one’s choices. Also depending on the gear, only one (maybe 2) at any given point will be a viable “optimal” raid spec. Shouldn’t the design of of a class, especially a DPS class allow for most of the specs to be viable in a raid environment? Also shouldnt the design of the gear also lend to this?
Seemed like arcane is the best spec atm for mages…though this may change to Fire and then fire will be the only one for a bit.
Looking at the other “Pure DPS” classes in WoW:
Rogues (excluding the ones spec’d into subtlety) Combat and Assassination seem to be both viable raiding specs.
Hunters (excluding BM) have Survival and Marksmanship.
Warlocks – all 3 are viable raiding specs it appears.
Hell, Death Knights seem to have multiple tanking and DPS trees, until cata.
While the other Hybrid Classes are able to hold their own, depending if they are DPS, tank, or healer.
Is it just laziness on developers parts to only let one spec of the “pure” DPS classes to be the top at any given moment, while Hybrids are good to go? Seems a bit unfair. (poor frost mages)
Orangeslice > Other Sodas 
With 25-man raid gear, particularly Heroic, fire is pulling ahead. I’ve not heard a lot about mages in beta testing arcane, I think the new arcane mastery scares them, everyone seems to be playing it safe with fire. But the rumor is frost will have a real shot at being viable. I’ll still never spec frost on Arioch, but I may on my night elf mage…
True that I have read that fire at the higher gear lvls is pulling ahead.
It just bugs me people cannot really play what they wish. If ya wanna play arcane do so, fire do, frost do so lol.
Seems like if ya really wanna play what you want to play…pick a hybrid.
DnD…mages can cast all spells, although one could choose to specialize.
Clerics. heavy armor/weapon and healing BOOM!
Another elf mage for you Arioch? I NEVER would have guessed that!! (also: /wave)
/wave!
Yeah, I’m a sucker for pointy ears.
I was reading a write up over at Empowered Fire comparing the fire and arcane specs in top end gear and it was very, very close in their testing. It pretty much boiled down to, “Well, which one do you excel at? That’s the one you’ll do more damage with.” Since I hardly ever get to raid on the mage (hell, Tir is raiding on my mage more than I am at the moment), I’m sticking with arcane. Very curious to see what 4.0 brings. Also scared.
My mage has a Fire and Frost PvE spec. Never done arcane even though people cry arcane is the best. It just didn’t seem so exciting to me. I find that I do swap between specs based on what I’m doing and which fights. For fights where AOE is okay, I go fire and basically just living bomb people until I get my free pyroblasts. Good times. I take the frost spec if there will be lots of AOE damage to me or otherwise can use the survival (fights like Faction Champs – lol who does ToC?).
I play as a like and do just fine actually. If you can play your spec well you’ll always pull more DPS and do more damage than someone who doesn’t play well. The improvement they need to make to frost is to reduce the cooldown on deep freeze, getting 24k instant cast crits more than once every 45 seconds would pull the DPS up for sure. Even if it was just once every 30 seconds.