Yeah… but because you can’t assume everyone has Dual Spec you just make some of the 8 “Tanks” be anyone who pilots the Tank vehicle 
Later they just stopped with all the highly variable Tank numbers and we got much more finely tuned encounters.
You are pand.
As I understand it, Blizzard tunes raid encounters based upon desired outcomes during testing. Everything that is a factor in raid performance is taken into consideration as a whole.
Having, for example, an offtank and a healer switch to dps specs for an encounter, increasing raid dps by like 3-5%, is going to make an encounter easier and increase successful outcomes on average. This cannot be argued. It’s mathematical fact. The effect would be similar to giving the raid a +3-5% damage world buff, and it is going to affect tuning.
Now it may be true that they didn’t specifically consider dual spec as an individual factor. But they certainly considered overall average raid performance, and dual spec increases average raid performance by at least some factor. So it was considered indirectly.
For example, say there is a pie baking contest. And one of the judges says, “We didn’t judge the pies based upon the amount of sugar used.” Well, that may technically be true, but you judged them based upon taste, and the amount of sugar used is going to affect how a pie tastes.
Correct.
Incorrect.
What Blizzard tunes for has little to do with what Players are able to pull off. A difficult encounter is tuned such that damage is X much, boss health is Y much, and timers are Z long, and so on and so forth. That some players figured out that you can get two of those timers to collide in a consistent and controllable manner doesn’t effect tuning, it just means players found a solution that was potentially unexpected.
If it trivializes the encounter, the encounter was poorly tuned.
If it makes the encounter easier but not beyond whatever metric Blizzard was aiming for, the encounter was properly tuned.
Not particularly, as general feedback (with or without Dual Spec) tended to trend towards people hating having to go from 2 Tanks to 5 Tanks to 1 Tank in a single raid. That’s why Four Horsemen was entirely retuned and Naxx was the wonkiest of the WotLK tuning points because they were retrofitting an old 40m raid into a 25m and 10m format.
So it isn’t incorrect for Blizzard to say that they don’t consider Dual Spec while tuning since tuning is largely fixated on a fight by fight basis. If they know a Tank is potentially doing DPS while as a Tank spec for a fight, they either made those fights less about DPS or gave some mechanical oddity for the OT to handle.
If Dual Spec was an actual tuning point, we wouldn’t have seen so many Saber Lash mechanics where you just needed a warm body to soak with the MT and nothing more.
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Saber Lash does the opposite of what you say. It’s one of the only ICC boss that requires three tanks. Ideally, you’ll have a dps dualspec as tank to soak.
I would think that the goal is to get as close to what they are aiming for as possible. Closer is better. Further is worse.
Naxx 25/10 was also different in that it was deliberately tuned to be the easiest raid ever released up to that point (yes, it was even easier than MC/ZG/Kara upon release), reflecting Blizzard’s new design philosophy aimed at allowing even the most incompetent guilds to get decked out in the best gear.
I think it’s noteworthy that Ghostcrawler’s comment is made before Ulduar was released. So if he’s talking specifically about Naxx 25/10, he may be right in that they didn’t consider much at all when it came to tuning except make it really freaking easy.
Sure, maybe, I doubt they have such a rigid point to aim for. More like a large circle and hopefully they’re inside it kind of thing…
True, but Ulduar also really didn’t leave Healers or Tanks suddenly without something to do from fight to fight.
Ulduar was a long time ago, so I don’t really remember. I was MT back then so my role never switched.
But TBC does have fights where tanks and healers don’t have anything to do, and if dual spec were added, they’d all suddenly be able to contribute much more dps with a button click. It would make those fights easier than they already are.
And yes, this is possible now with port/summon, but it would become a LOT more common with dual spec.
Healers less so than Tanks, and frankly I think we dramatically overestimate what we need for a lot of these fights.
I get everyone just zergs Maulgar now but there’s absolutely no need for a dedicated Tank spec for any of the adds. Blindeye hits so anemically that I’m pretty sure I could hold him and survive in Cat Form, and only Olm needs someone on him at the start until fel hounds can get into play.
In SSC the oddest of the odd ducks is Hydross to be completely honest, but again, toss some DPS into Frost or Nature resistance and voila, you have add “tanks”. The rest are the usual 2-3 Tanks. There’s a lot of doing nothing once certain phases hit (OTs are bored when adds are dead on Lurker for instance), but that’s just TBC for you.
If you’re already prepped to bring 3 Tanks, with one of the Tanks ready/geared/suited for OTing and DPSing on the fly (Feral), you’ve covered almost every T5 fight.
Lol, no.
Lol, no.
It’s almost like you’re completely neglecting the -20% healing from having that healer switch to DPS.
Is it triggering to anyone else that it says “where” instead of “were” in the title of this thread?
It’s been here for like a day now and I assumed they would edit it but each time I see it i get more and more upset.
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Dual spec wasn’t even available at WOTLK launch. Not sure how the expansion would be designed around it.
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They would be doing so presumably because there is nothing for them to heal, and they are not needed in that role for that particular fight. In fact, the only reason they would be doing it is because it makes the fight easier.
If there’s so little to heal that you’re trading out a healer, that means the fight isn’t difficult in the first place. This isn’t Retail Mythic raiding.
Who cares if you do 3% more DPS on a trivial fight?
Some fights are dps races, or high dps helps by shortening the fight. And raiding won’t be trivial for most guilds by Sunwell. Just like it was in vanilla, they will get more difficult with each tier.
No one struggling with any fight in TBC Classic is going to have a healer switch to a DPS spec.
Since blizzard can easily filter out words on the forum it would be really awesome if they would filter out the words “dual spec.”
In wrath they homogenized the classes so much that you really did not need to re-spec any more but some did anyway to get by because they could not clear without optimal comps.
You see it now days also in TBC because they’re bad and need to do that to clear content, you see it with the “pumpers” who cant function outside their meme.
Then how about a dps switching to healer? It goes both ways. Point is exactly the same. That flexibilty makes difficult fights easier. It also makes easy fights even easier. Never harder, or even the same, or there would be no reason for players to switch.