Personally I see it as two very different approaches to making players socialise.
The TBC approach was to create a greater sense of attachment with your role, you as a player are needed by your team to fill a certain role. You’re the “interrupter role” for example.
This approach fostered longer term involvements as raid leaders would form composition around players identified roles and expect the same people in the same roles to attend every week.
WoTLK took the opposite approach, unlock roles, let players have more choice in what they want to do from raid to raid so that you could more easily group up, making adhoc groups was more encouraged (TBC has disincentives for adhoc grouping and incentivises guild and longer term planned meets by comparison).
Many of those of us playing classic like the old school way of doing it - planned longer term relationships and identification with a role or function.
Many of the newer gamers prefer the more modern approach introduced by WoTLK and expanded on in later expansions. That of facilitating more personal flexibility and greater adhoc grouping flexibility. This led to easier group formation but also shallower ties between people in groups.
Both approaches are valid but one is almost the antithesis of the other. Applying the Wrath approach to TBC is almost a hostile takeover ;p
If anything it did the opposite. We got 3 viable main tanks, locks got seed to compete with mages for aoe. Hyrbid dps specs were brought up to be much more on par. LoL the only really unique role was mages being the best CC for 5 mans.
What’s much more important and has always been is competent players who will show up, not just having a theoretical on paper perfect comp with toxic players and flaky attendance. And dual spec helps with that.
That dual spec should or shouldn’t be added isn’t contingent on how in-step with design philosophy it is, you keep making this strange assertion that dual spec somehow qualifies to be added simply because it “fits the design”.
I’m sure given some time and a round table, I could think of an entire list of features that would be “in line” with TBC-ish design, and I’d pitch that list for a Classic+ server no doubt.
This isn’t your mother’s potluck, though, where we get to just add any and everything that feels “TBC-ey”.
The whole idea is to succeed (or fail) at the game under the restrictions and guidelines placed on players during retail TBC, in an effort to mimic the experience.
Dual spec, whether it fits conceptually in to TBC design or not, adds a level of flexibility that was non-existent in retail-TBC. Adding it would decidedly allow for emergent styles of gameplay in terms of managing your characters build that simply never existed back then. Good or bad, it simply wasn’t available yet.
It will be soon though. WOTLKC is all but guaranteed.
Actually this does exactly what I claim, give more niches. One of the complaints against Vanilla that the design team of TBC were addressing was that so many classes were "forced’ to heal as their niche. They had no reason to be in groups except to pad out healer numbers. I recall (but can’t for the life of me find a link to it) that the lead designer at the time wanted to focus on more specialisation and roles and allow players more meaningful customisation.
This falls into that category. Pally’s for instance now had more choice but had to lock themselves in - changes were actually made to discourage hydrid specs and push you to take the max talent. You had more choice but the choice was more impactful. It’s a very different approach and dual spec runs counter intuitive to it.
Not arguing for no changes. Plenty of changes preserve the game design and are worth having. This one isn’t, it goes counter to the design intentions of TBC.
At any rate we have incomplete information we can’t read the developers minds and both of us are trying to. Thus our conclusions regarding design goals are incomplete.
The largest indicator I can give that dual spec ran counter to TBCs design is that even though it was a hot topic through TBC they chose not to implement it. Instead they waited until shortly after the class rebalance of WoTLk. That to my mind is a strong indicator that they didn’t think it fit TBC and that other changes needed to happen first.
Niches are a subset of roles. TBC gave specs that were previously underused buffs and such to offer the raid, look at arms warriors, and Boomy. They undid that again in Wrath to reintroduce spec versatility.
But those niches don’t mean very much outside of things like a pally tank, or mages CC(which is not spec specific) or a hunter for nightbane(which is not spec specific) or a shammy for hero(which is not spec specific).
I disagree. In fact I think the niches mean way more than they did in any expansion or in Vanilla. Outside you role you still then seek classes that can, when specced for it, provide specific buffs and debuffs.
Al lot of these were added in TBC high up in Talent trees to make demand for different specs. In Wrath they were made class baseline to reduce spec demand.
