I love Spec Imbalance [PvE]

I am not being sarcastic. I love spec imbalance, and think that having a drastic difference between the meta (most effective tactics available) and the regular specs makes the game more fun. You can choose your difficulty mode, easy (meta), medium (off-meta) or hard (non-meta).

When the meta doesn’t move around too fast (meaning that the meta is generally the same for a whole season) then you have enough time to make more alts and play whichever one seems the tastiest. This is especially fun when it doesn’t take long to gear up to a relevant point, which is often the case.

The tradeoffs add an interesting component to the game. Will you sacrifice easy invites for fun 99/100 logs? Or vice versa? Will you be able to outDPS some damage dealer as a healer? Can you cheese mechanics by stacking specs that are so strong?

The drawback is the distortion of competitive integrity. However, everyone at the highest level will reroll to the meta even if they get things within 5% or even 1% anyways. With the meta, it’s easy to not care about rankings, because you know the enemy has an unfair advantage. When a meta spec loses to a bad spec, it’s really funny and unexpected for the meta spec player and really empowering for the bad spec player. But in any case, it’s not personal.

Rerolling (creating a new character) increases replayability and helps the leveling world feel more alive. People have a reason to create alts when they like to use the meta specs and the meta changes.

I like skill not mattering as much, I like the game being fun for everyone and I like people having as many options as possible. I wholeheartedly believe that the strong meta is one of the reasons WotLK is so popular.

I’m kind of new so I don’t have much to compare it to, save for other games. I think there are as many ways of doing things as there are games, to be honest.

Diablo II had a decent little tree, with synergies. Diablo III reduced it to picking runes. FFXIV doesn’t have talents, which is kind of interesting as it focuses more on player skill. Aura Kingdom (yes, I played it) had this large grid you could pick stuff from.

I tend to roll with whatever comes, without complaining. I’ve seen it all and done it all. Choice is great when you have it, but it isn’t a huge deal if I have less. It depends on the game, how many abilities and passives are baked into the class, and what I want from it.

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