I 100% expect dual spec in the prepatch, and I’m OK with it.
1 Like
It genuinely surprises me how vehemently opposed people are to the idea of levelling alts and having concurrent toons.
It seems like among the most common gripes on the forums are Dual Spec and Dead Servers. Levelling an alt to balance out your role repertoire would help address both.
The game even encourages it by giving you multiple character slots and boosted XP for taking a break from one character.
3 Likes
Dual spec won’t increase the number of tanks. Geared tanks don’t do heroics because there’s no reason to do them. You probably don’t need the gear, the badge, or the nethers at this point. There aren’t enough new players and alts to keep that stuff current.
1 Like
It’s made worse by the fact that Tanks are expected to generally outgear the dungeon content they’re doing.
By the time a tank has the gear to run people through heroics they don’t need them anymore. Dual spec won’t do squat to fix that issue.
Changes that further discourage running Alts and grinding/questing in the world exacerbate this problem they don’t fix it. Dual spec would be one such change.
This is why I claim it won’t work. It didn’t work back in the day and it still won’t. The current retail talent system and role adaptive gear was brought in precisely because dual spec didn’t work.
These are all objections that were raised and discussed in detail months ago btw.
1 Like
Yeah, but I doubt a poorly geared tank is going to be kicked. They get a lot more latitude than other roles. Maybe things improve a bit when the new vendor gear drops, but even then, anyone that’s current with the raiding tiers won’t need much of that stuff.
I honestly don’t know how true this is. This is only anecdotal but many players are so pushy these days. They don’t even want to try unless they can get through it without any incidents.
I’ve had many an occasion where I’m all but begging the Feral DPS Druid to just try tanking, or the Shadow Priest to give healing their first crack. Players so seem intimidated at even trying unless they know they can kill it, and other players are more than happy to leave the group if they wipe in the first quarter of the dungeon because somebody made a mistake.
Dual Spec won’t fix player mentality.
1 Like
I suffered through plenty of poorly geared tanks in the beginning and there was just never a scenario where I’d consider kicking and waiting for another. It’s not an efficient use of time.
I’m sure blizzard thought it was a good change that fit in with what they considered the aim of the product is to be like an already transpired and known product. That answers my question.
They aren’t always right, and I never said they where, but whether they are right or wrong actually isn’t really relevant here.
2 Likes
How many servers did you play on during wrath? It has to be a tiny % of the servers that existed. That’s a extremely small sample to base a personal opinion on. You know that. Yet you keep repeating it as if it’s a fact.
That’s not a fact either. In my personal experience tanks are so hard to get that people will put up with an undergeared or inexperienced tank just to find a group and get a dungeon done how ever difficult it might be rather than spam lfg and not find a tank or do a dungeon.
It’s relevant when you authoritatively interpret the game through your personal interpretation of what “the aim of the product is to be like an already transpired and known product” means. That’s what it means to you but clearly it means something different to blizzard.
It’s still not.
Every change they’ve made, we’re given a thoroughly detailed reason as to how it works within guardrails and is an appropriate change, and usually it’s in an effort to keep it matched up roughly to the experience of real TBC.
That doesn’t mean they’re always right, but whether they are right or wrong absolutely is subjective but at the end of the day they make the call.
Dual spec is uniquely against TBC’s core design tenets, and that’s really the issue here.
It’s one thing to change the starting rating of arena teams; we don’t have any documentation of Blizzard devs commenting on how inherently crucial or core to the experience a 1500 rating or 0 rating starting point is for arena teams.
Therefore, the wiggle room is there because…Blizzard never really made it crystal clear in the first place, probably because it wasn’t that important it be one way or the other…therefore changes on this front are likely to not really be very controversial, especially if it’s something that “helps”.
Dual spec is not such a circumstance. We have proof that devs very succinctly did not want such a feature when designing TBC, so there is no reality in which dual spec fits within any wiggle room of subjective “good” for the game. It specifically was not wanted, and kept out.
Whether Blizzard is right or wrong about not wanting dual spec in TBC is irrelevant because they designed the game and so they decide what is right or wrong about that.
1 Like
I suppose different players will have different experiences. I think what I was getting at is that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink - if there is a shortage of tanks and healers because people don’t want to tank or heal then dual spec isn’t going to change that.
Sorry but your “probably” doesnt mean anything when i have direct anecdotal evidence from both my friends and myself to the contrary.
Sure, but you guys are the exception, not the rule. Heroics are largely useless by this point and they get more useless by the day.
Except that lack of dual spec actively encourages people not to tank/heal.
Oh yes it’s the lack of dual spec that makes me not tank or heal on my hunter…
You realize you can do what I am doing and level another character?
I’m levening a paladin specifically to tank, when I feel like tanking.
You don’t need dual spec for role diversity. You are using this as an excuse out of not wanting to out any effort in to achieve role diversity in your gsmeplay.
Besides we saw how dualspec played out in wrath.
Most players used it for a pvp spec. It didn’t make more tanks or healers. It did improve pvp participation and that’s a point I will agree with. But it doesn’t really even help the healer or tank shortage.
2 Likes
Not really. If somebody wants to tank/heal, then they’ll find a way to tank/heal. Likewise, if somebody doesn’t want to then they won’t.
Governments have this same problem. You can create incentives and subsidies for particular courses and industries but if people don’t want those jobs then they won’t do it, or at least won’t stick with it for very long.
1 Like
/shrug it’s really not rocket science that if you have more barriers to tank/heal less people will do so.
Not sure why some people think having an hour+ farm time to switch to tank/heal doesn’t dissuade people from doing so.
That works if there’s only two roles that people can choose.
Also, 50g isn’t much of a barrier. The gear and skill/confidence are more of a barrier.
Turns out people like to do more than two things in the game. In Wrath the people who had a second spec for Tanking and healing were generally Offtanks for their guilds - people who were willing to pay 50g to respec anyway and had a full tanks set.
Everyone else did just about anything else - an aoe spec plus a single target spec, a gold farming spec and a raid spec, a PVP spec and a raid spec …
2 specs turns out not to be enough to make a dent into tank or healer shortages … thus why the system never survived two expansions.
1 Like