I like this train of thought.
As someone who has walked around classic for a year with 3 sets of epic raid gear, I agree whole heatedly with this. Even though my guild knew how flexible i was and that I had the gear to help fill any role, I was still “The feral”, not “the druid”. Any distinction between “main” and “secondary” spec with the Dual-Spec system will quickly fade into oblivion.
That’s a fair argument but I’d have to disagree.
Hardcore guilds would already expect their players to be able to respec and have multiple sets of gear, regardless of dual spec or not.
In non-hardcore guilds, you wouldn’t be expected to do more than a single role.
If it wasn’t a problem in WotLK, why would it be more of a problem in TBC? Was there a fundamental change between TBC and WotLK aside from LFD that would make dual spec more of a problem for TBC?
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1: Not everyone is in a hardcore guild.
2: Even classic guilds I’d consider pretty “hardcore” (not world-first stuff but guilds that fully wbuffed/consumed/check logs every week) never expected the raiders to have a fully enchanted and prepped off-set. The dps warriors were dps warriors. If they stepped into tank gear to help out a bit, then that was great, but they weren’t expected be GOOD at two specs because dual spec didn’t exist.
Edit: Also important; Putting on gear and filling a role is different from changing your whole spec and being expected to fully understand abilities you never had access to.
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I’d bet that most of the people crying over not having dual spec are the super zoomers that can’t stand being the same spec for more than an hour and is constantly switching specs/roles/main chars… We all know these people
Or we just want to play both PvP and PvE.
Then respec…when you do pvp? hello?
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lol Lexcin I literally know a guy with 3 level 60 warriors that are all different specs.
It’s simple for you to say if all you do is PvE and don’t have to shell out 200-300 gold per week.
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300g on respecs each week? Haha this is a you problem my man
Guess we had different experiences of WoTLK, I was in what I would consider to be a casual guild in WoTLK and I had three sets of gear for almost the entire expansion.
I am in a fairly “hardcore” guild now and we have zero expectations of anyone having multiple sets. We would just recruit another member who can fill that niche because it’s easier. If we decide we need a feral druid then we will bring one in, we don’t expect our resto druid to go feral and have two sets.
So lets analyze your scenario for our guild. Dual spec is a thing, now we do expect our resto druid to have a feral set & a balance set and be able to play all three specs. Not a big deal we have very good players and we will help them get the gear they need. Now we kick the feral druid we just recruited out of the guild because we don’t need them anymore for anything.
(I remember back in actual TBC how special I felt when my guild told me they needed me for a boss fight and I got invited to the raid for the first time. If their main fury warrior at the time could just respec arms then I would have never got that message or invite.)
This argument is undercut a little bit by the profession requirements in TBC but I think a druid is a great example because they can fill all four nieches with just tailoring & engineering adequately enough.
Well, it’s not all about end game where everyone is decked out in gear. I think you may be looking at it solely from an end game perspective here. But if you choose to level up a tank and do dungeons for groups while leveling, that shouldn’t be overlooked either. If someone can just swap over to tanking mode and then swap back to keep leveling, that definitely does devalue people who choose tanking as their role. The PVP argument is definitely fair though.
But also, on a role playing aspect, I don’t like the idea of adding dual spec because it takes away my sense of identity. I just feel invested more in my character when I have an identity. And I feel like dual spec was Blizzard’s first step away from that, and into the more cookie cutter mold where every class can do anything. I kinda think not everyone should get to do everything.
You dont need top end gear to do either content. If you have good pve gear you can pvp and vice versa.
*edit- wrong person I replied to
I agree with what your saying and I can see the value in that argument.
I’m looking at it from a PvP perspective personally so I have personal bias towards having dual spec, I’ll be far less likely to go raid with my guild if it means having to respec all the time personally and I know plenty of people who feels the same.
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not really
You don’t have to either. You choose to. A choice with a cost associated with it.
True, but consider this as well, if I want to play heal for dungeons, dual spec would also allow me to have a spec for questing alone outside of dungeons while I level.
Not to forget that dual spec wasn’t free in WotLK, it had a steep price of 1k gold.
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You can’t do competitive PvP with a PvE spec and using a PvP spec in PvE is very far from ideal.
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Eh, I’m fine to let it play out for another expansion. Duel spec changes the game a lot, I’d probably rather have the ability to pay the DS fee up front for free respects for the rest of the expac.
DS is the death of hybrid builds, and build personalization to begin with. Retail has actually done a decent job of reintroducing choice back into specs, but for a while after DS was introduced there was a correct spec, and nothing else. No DS is a good reason to play something that might have a few deviations in the build if you need them to fit a niche for your team.
I’m not a fan of being able to switch specs out in the game world, if I needed to head back to a main city every time it might be enough to not want to swap around during the content, but would be able to switch it up for things like PvP or filling in a tank slot for a kara team etc. Still I’d probably just prefer to leave it alone.
I’m not beholden to #nochanges, or some romanticized fantasy that I want “real choices, that matter” but I do like the value single spec gives to hybrid specs and the community in general. If you don’t have a tank you can’t just respect and find a DPS, you need to look for a tank, maybe meet somebody new. Less people needing items “for offspec” as well, which was always a bit of a bother for me, legitimate or not.
Right, but more what I was trying to say was that you have value because of the role you chose. If I level a tank I don’t get to blast through mobs while I’m solo, but I get to protect my party members in a dungeon.
There’s a cost to the choice I made by being a tank, and I actually like that, it’s a major part of role playing to me.
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