Who is the Best Hybrid DPS ?

[ShaqPack]

In terms of best hybrid dps I'd have to go with moonkin's. They have regen talents and innervates, while shadow priest also have the regen talents in the discipline tree, they don't have any fast mana mechanic like druids do. Ele shammies in particular don't have either mechanic, so once you go oom and those potions are still on CD timer you are boned. Enhance shammies.... you just sit there and auto attack for the most part, possibly toss out some shocks but you'll end up out of mana just as fast as an ele shammy, plus you have to divide up your stats even more, as you end up going for +spell hit and crit as well as +melee hit and crit, some of the gear will have spell power on it.... it's all just a big mess. You won't even find gear that gives you sustainability but also let's you properly damage so you can catch up with the other classes.

Boomkins at least have a few toys and you could always do wacky things like off heal when necessary as well. They pretty much require AQ40 gear at the very least though, as you get no crit or hit from any talents, so you need that stuff but you also need a lot of spirit just because of the regen. The other great thing is since they use an arcane spell, you almost never have to worry about your spells being obsolete in a raid. An enhance shammy for example will get major resists in molten core, and you can't be a fire mage at all in MC or BWL, but a boomkin never has this problem.

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[Nugeneration]

In terms of a pure DPS role:
Shadow Priest
Fury Warrior

Those are the only two who fill that niche in a very effective manner. The other hybrids can fill other jobs/roles but NOT to the extent of these two as pure DPS.

Druids/Paladins:
Work best as tanks not as DPS (not considering resto/holy).

Paladins make amazing aoe tanks that can be utilized to great effect in BWL/AQ/Naxx.

Druids make amazing off-tanks in damage soak encounters.

Now, both of these will need to have healing sets as well. In fights where they are NOT utilizing their niche they are better off healing. Staying cat form 100% of a fight doesn't warrant enough DPS increase even providing LotP to be better than wearing a full set of healing gear healing. Cat is great to use when you are going to be utilizing bear form as well. If bear form won't be used during said encounter you should be healing.

That being said you only want 1 Feral 1 Prot pally 1 shadow priest for a min/max setup as well.

All the duties these specs provide can still be provided by other classes just fine, however they are wonderful and do help progression in those niches when played correctly over the course of a raid which does involve gear swaps and complete role changes at times.

This is based off a min/max perspective only.

Edit: People who say it is sub par to keep at least 1 Feral and 1 Prot pally for progression are just as wrong as those claiming Druids/Paladins are best at all roles all the time.

I can't speak for shamans as I have never raided vanilla content horde side so I omit discussion on them as I have no experience from retail progression horde side. I just lack first hand experience and prefer to give no information instead of bad information.

[Pottu]

ShaqPack, I've looked at moonkins and even though they are made out to be dedicated casters, ultimately it seems their scaling is too weak to keep up as spell damage gearing improves. I suppose they do get the benefit of a Curse of Shadows as an arcane damage dealer, but even with that I'm not sure they have competitive damage. Perhaps in the pre-1.9 world when CoS still provided negative resists they were stronger.

Nugeneration, from a minmax perspective an Elemental Shaman actually scales so aggressively it competes with DS/Ruin Warlocks as long as it doesn't run out of mana, and his mana efficiency is not too bad either.

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It actually surprised me to learn, on Warsong Feenix there were actually TWO elemental shaman that did competitive damage in naxxrammas. It's important to note that these shaman had BIS gear from naxx/aq40, and were using insane amounts of consumables, but they keep up with the warlocks!

This isn't too surprising when you look at the amount of talent support that's available to Elemental Shamans. If you go all-out, you can get a Lightning Bolt with +5% damage, +3% spell hit, +11% spell crit, -10% mana cost, 10% chance of proccing clearcast (which should fuel max-rank Chain Lightning), and a -1 second cast time (while keeping the coefficient of a 3 second spell, ie 50% more DPS than spell damage normally provides) from a single talent spec. Chain Lightning benefits from all the talents too, except it has much higher base damage and higher spelldmg:DPS scaling by going from 2.5 to 1.5 cast time. CL's mana cost is prohibitive but Clearcast procs allow you to cast it for free. Lightning Bolt's mana cost on the other hand is just 265 at max rank pre-talent (so 238.5 post-talent). The main problem Elemental Shamans face is sustaining their mana pools unless they downrank, although down-ranking is fairly effective for Shamans given Clearcast procs and the extraordinarily strong DPS they obtain from spelldmg gear.

[Nugeneration]

Nugeneration, from a minmax perspective an Elemental Shaman actually scales so aggressively it competes with DS/Ruin Warlocks as long as it doesn't run out of mana, and his mana efficiency is not too bad either.

Being Alliance we never used DS/Ruin always SM/Ruin since we have Salv. I actually mained a warlock back on retail vanilla through Naxx.

I suppose shaman would be OK then, but not sure why you just wouldn't take another fire mage from a min/max perspective of course.

Vanilla content is old and to be honest you could carry a handful of these hybrids in off-specs without them ever role changing after you get at least your tanks and healers geared through progression quite easily. I was just using my evaluation from a 100% min/max seeing as how most people only consider that the viable standard for some reason.

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[Aethelwulf]

I suppose shaman would be OK then, but not sure why you just wouldn't take another fire mage from a min/max perspective of course.

Because an Elemental Shaman outscales a Fire Mage even with Curse of the Elements boosting the Mage's output.