That’s not the same at all. It takes a lot longer to port, switch, and get summoned.
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Um…correct? That’s part of the reason why players want Dual Spec. It’s far more convenient than taking all those extra steps.
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I understand that, and in a vacuum I want that too. But one direct consequence of that convenience is that it enables the Ulduar style spec switching meta in PvE.
Better raiding involves better time efficiency. Therefore, something impractical like getting ported and summoned just for a spec switch suddenly becomes highly practical when the process changes to hitting a 3s cast out of your spellbook and drinking back all your mana.
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Um, no it doesn’t “enable” something that was always enabled since the game was first implemented.
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You’re right, maybe “it encourages” would have been a better choice of words.
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Players don’t need to be encouraged to chase the meta. They will or they won’t. Streamlining functions won’t change that anymore than Summoning Stones giving players the ability to get players to instances faster.
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I don’t understand the relevance of whether or not certain players are meta-chasers.
I’m talking about the meta itself changing. Specifically the meta for min-max players that derive enjoyment out of optimizing their characters and performance.
In any case I was a part of a raid that went through this change when dual spec was introduced, so I don’t see how you can justify flatly telling me nothing will change and leaving it at that.
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You mentioned it.
Dual Spec doesn’t change the meta. It changes accessibility to a function already used by meta-chasers.
I never said nothing will change. I said it doesn’t change the fact that players make the choices that they do.
All that changes with Dual Spec is accessibility and convenience. Again, no different than turning a Meeting Stone into a Summoning Stone.
It changed the meta in Ulduar.
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No, it didn’t.
See for yourself. I can’t post links but these are direct quotes so if you copy paste them into Google with quotations you should be able to find the full discussions they came from.
From a guild recruitment post
From a Blizzard announcement:
I could go on and on. There are tons of examples of people discussing raiding with dual specs in a way that they don’t currently.
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You can’t preplan a bg in discord to have your group log in at 530pm and go straight to the bg.
Uncontrollable wait time is not the same as the time it takes to clear the content.
One is waiting to even start playing the content, the other is the time it takes to clear the content.
I think people are really focusing too much on the queue time itself. Classic Horde had bad queue times too, but people didn’t really complain as much and there wasn’t anything done to address it. You could say that’s because #nochanges but I think a reasonable person would recognize that if a change was necessary it would have been made, such as the changes that prevented alliance AV premades.
Another crucial reason that necessitated this change is the fact that the queue times were causing Horde and Alliance to accumulate honor at different rates. That’s a pretty big balance issue when they are competing against each other for arena rating.
This balance issue didn’t exist in classic because Horde was competing against Horde and Alliance vs Alliance for their ranking points. Hence, no change was necessary.
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Sorry, but I’m not sure what all these quotes are supposed to be proving.
Correct. You can’t raid with dual specs currently because dual spec is not in the game. Hence why they wouldn’t be discussing it.
Anything else?
But I would make an argument how many gilds are really going to do that It’s like maybe the top 20% and even if it’s not right even if it’s not.
It’s like what we’re talking people switching between bosses and trash it’s just not that big of a deal.
It really is that simple. Dual spec changes the game because if it didn’t change that game it would be pointless to add.
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Um, yes. Correct.
Anything else?
Right it’s not that big of a deal to you. It’s not really that big of a deal for me either. I enjoyed raiding with dual spec.
But there’s a time and place. WotLKC is the time for WotLK style raiding with dual specs, death knights, 51 point talents, and all that good stuff, and TBCC is the time for TBC style raiding. I wouldn’t mind something that helps people access their other specializations as long as it doesn’t change the way that we play through the raiding content. Right now, you design a spec that you show up to raid with, and you and your friends go in and try to overcome that challenge. You bring one spec to the table, not two. And if you want to change it, you can, but there’s a time and gold cost, so you have to weigh those costs against the benefits.
I also don’t see how you can estimate the % of affected players. When the meta changes at the top level there’s usually a trickle down affect as players that want to be top players emulate the way the game is played at that level.
World buffs used to be a top 0.5% mechanic but in Classic it ended up impacting the majority of raiders. Dual Spec could behave similarly.
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So now your admitting it will happen, but trying to downplay it.
I’ll go into more detail let’s say you have a paladin and a shaman. Some fights the paladin is better to have healing the tank, others the shaman is better because the tank isn’t take much damage but the raid, and melee near the tank are taking more damage. You can rearrange healers based on fight mechanics to maximize your raid comp and have healers change to dps and dps change to healer, or even change tanks around based on fight. Have a lot of adds and no need to change tanks on the boss. Well now you can have 2 paladin tanks instead of one warrior and one paladin by having your ret paladin go prot before the boss fight starts and having the warrior go dps.
The boss fight is very unfriendly to melee? Have your enhance shaman dual spec switch to ele and use his ele gear, he now does more dps to the boss, buffs your caster dps who can still hit the boss, and reduces strain on healer mana from melee taking damage (think lurker and melee dps vs thrash, playing properly results in a good bit of downtime because you constantly have to move away to avoid it, and mistakes cost healer mana).
It’s not just 1 or two classes that would be doing this, heck hunters would do it to vs fights that are VERY pet unfriendly to change out of BM because it would be a dps gain to be MM or SV because the pet isn’t able to connect with a target for over half the fight or there are mechanics that insta kill the pet.
It’s not just 1 or two classes that would do this. So down try to downplay it now that you have admitted it would happen.
I’ll try to explain it one last time, just because I don’t think we’ve reached any kind of understanding.
Any change to the game changes the meta. The meta is a function of the attributes of the game. Adding summoning stones changes the meta because now players can summon other players without a warlock in the group, which might change the way players interact with the game (LF1M healer SM Cath, have warlock!). I don’t really have anything against the summoning stones. They don’t affect the game once I go through the instance portal.
However, when I zoned into Ulduar, I did take dual spec with me. And I used it, so did my fellow raiders. So did countless people according to their discussions from that time.
I really hope that you make a genuine effort to understand my point of view, and recognize that it does not require that you change your mind about dual spec. I wouldn’t expect you to. I think I understand your point of view well. If you could make an effort to understand mine I would appreciate it.
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