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ironervousides
Well said! This is the true dilema of the whole deal.
And here a lot of opinions might differ. There are certain arguments for both sides, really.
As you pointed out, that Warlock might bring the cookie cutter specc to the raid in order to work at maximum capacity. However, what you should not neglect here, is the fact that the Warlock is still entitled to do what he deemed the most fun to him - dealing damage. That in itself is already a reward compared to the fate of, going by your example, a druid has to face in the endgame.
There probably are some druids that actually enjoy what they do in raids, but lets face it, most probably dont. So they sacrifice their own playing experience by a bigger margin than that hypothetical Warlock.
So, if a guild decides to open up a certain amount of spots for "offspecs", I dont see why that Warlock should be entitled to the Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal. There may be certain non-set items that might be BiS for dps classes, but at the end of the day the dps increase is irrelevant and they have their class sets.
So, if you decide to be more open minded with your raid, and obviously are not 110% cookie cutting, then why would you draw the line here? Might as well not take any offspecs in the first place then, i guess?
Making sure that everybody in that hypothetical guild or raid understands how loot and its distribution is going to be handled, is key here, obviously.
The extremely limited available gear to certain offspecs is already hard enough to get as it is, I for one, would not want to see it thrown at a pure dps just because his T2 Shoulders didn't drop yet. And might actually do in the same run a little bit later.
Like I said, if you do allow a certain amount of offspecs, then either make sure they get their gear to at least perform at some sort of level, or dont bring them in the first place. Hands down, I'd give those few offspecs prio to the non-set gear. Because they wont replace it for a VERY long time.
I think it is important to look at this in a broader view than just "what benefits us this exact second more". Because with that mentality you might as well not bring any of those in the first place.
Also, even if you do look at it this way...gearing those "offspecs" is certainly not an easy task. They only have those few items available to them and are more limited than other classes/speccs. So, in the end, your raid would still profit more from the chicken having the mantle, upgrading from probably a LOT worse than what the lock is wearing at that time.
Just as I stated somewhere above, if there would be a scenario where you dont bring offspecs to the raid, and those that would like to sacrifice their individual fun for the good of the raid, those should be rewarded at least so that they can enjoy their desired specc outside of the raid. So unless that Warlock runs around in green shoulders (...ya, I know, but I can bring up extreme examples as well) I would throw that thing to a dedicated innervation bot that would prefer to play chicken in the first place.
It's obviously a different story for dedicated players that actually enjoy the role they are forced to play within the raid. Good for them. It's beyond me how you can actually enjoy some of the specs hybrids get forced into, but thats just me in that case.
There are multiple methods to make sure a certain amount of balance is kept with a concept like this in mind. I could name multitudes that come to mind.
How about a different approach? Make hybrid tiersets have no minimum dkp requirements, dedicated healers / innervate bots, whatever you wanna call them, can spend their DKP on them if they actually do enjoy the role, otherwise make it cost nothing, let them roll on it or simply look which one benefits the most from it, gearwise.
Otherwise let them save their DKP for items they actually care about, for the spec they actually care about. With some sort of reasonable limitations, ofc.
I wouldn't want to see the first Ashkandi on the back of a retribution paladin that drops, just to be a bit extreme. Unless you have otherwise only alrdy reasonable equipped fury warriors in the raid. But those are a lot of if's.
The middleground is the desireable solution to this issue, in my opinion. I would not want to deny hybrids their extremely limited equipment for many months just because it is a temporal, most of the time not exactly big, upgrade to other classes. All they can do then is hope that after many months, all the remaining non-hybrids having absolute everything there is from that gear pool available to them. And then they need to actually see those, very few in numbers, items dropping. Again. The chance for them to acquire their desired equipment in a humane, reasonable amount of time is very slim, to say the least.
So if the stars allign and it should actually drop, let alone twice without extreme time-spans inbetween, I believe they should have a right to those items, as they either sacrifice their desired spec for the raid, or simply raid with it, to upgrade them for the roster.
They arguably play a bigger role in the raid than some of the dd's and on top are much fewer in number available.
Something else that might be an issue. How do you handle the absurd amount of dd's? What about the (most likely) remaining, waiting dds to get a raidspot, that sit on the bench or whatever. By the conservative nature of most guilds, those hybrids would be an eternity away from getting the gear for the spec they truly desire to play.
So ya, there are multiple ways to approach this problem, multiple ways of making reasonable compromises, from my point of view.