Devs have not and continue to not balance around Dual Spec.
Devs have stated repeatedly that Dual Spec is a convenience feature.
I’d be impressed they managed to flesh out an LFR version of the raids with downgraded loot.
LFD wouldn’t bother me an iota as having 280% flying the moment I hit 70 more or less eliminated anything interesting about getting to an instance.
Garrisons would be really impressive if they even managed to duplicate WoD’s Garrison for TBC, because that is a lot of stuff and would require a lot of in-game support to prop up resources and quests and so forth. That’d be quite the content patch.
Some of these things are not like the others, some of these things don’t belong…
Blizzard already opened the floodgates with #somechanges, and they’ve been pretty conservative about it thus far. LFD finding its way into TBCC is far more likely than entire content patches worth of PvE retuning and retooling.
When some of you argue so vehemently against changes, I have to wonder if you actually understand that arguing against vague “evils” like Retail doesn’t help your argument at all, or if you well and truly believe having a single spec was so core and so fundamental that changing it was what caused people to quit the game…
I would argue the expansion they made all dps/tanks/healers have a decent aoe (threat healing, or damage), interrupts, CC, defensive CDs, merged debuffs / buffs to not need a specific class/spec, exc option was the expansion they balanced dual specs existence around.
Which expansion was that again?
Also, it sounds like you really want retail with tbc content, the good news is you can do that in retail now!
This has nothing to do with Dual Spec, especially since Dual Spec took so long to get finalized that it was Patch 3.1 when it finally hit, and “Player-Not-Class” was already the incorporated mantra.
And if content isn’t designed around Dual Spec then neither are classes, since you can’t do the content without classes.
Content design is not class design they can have differences and still work.
Classes were made to be much more similar so spec and class were not as important, then dual spec was added to make spec choices not as restrictive after they verified the class design was where they wanted it. It wasn’t a mistake dual spec wasn’t released on wotlk launch.
They were making sure class balance was in a place dual spec wouldn’t break anything.
I understand that content and class designs are different, but if classes are designed around dual spec, then content is necessarily designed around dual spec because content is necessarily designed around classes.
This is speculative at best.
“Bring the Player, not the Class” did not eliminate spec/class restrictions, not even close. Tanks had the most parity but beyond that, Healers and DPS were still wildly different and the buff/debuff sourcing still mandated class stacking. The GC phrase was a bit of a running joke as every single iteration of WoW from WotLK onward had content that dramatically favored one or more classes/specs to the detriment of others.
Class design was iterated upon literally every content patch of WotLK, with some rather significant changes happening as late as ICC’s release.
Blizzard made repeated posts about Dual Spec’s delay between announcement and eventual release in 3.1, with most of the focus being on how to incorporate it into the UI and mechanics of the game (most of which got scrapped I might add).
How on Earth could Dual Spec break any class balancing? It isn’t like you can swap on the fly mid-fight and by WotLK we had very deep specs with little reason to deviate from going super deep unless you just wanted to be unique and woefully subpar.
The existence of Dual Spec and my secondary spec being Balance didn’t make me any more or less of an OP Tank throughout almost all of WotLK. It also didn’t do Warriors any favors on being the most fragile of Tanks unless Blizzard gave them a specific Block-centric mechanic or lots of adds to stun.
I have no clue what you’re going on about because none of this has anything to do with Dual Spec.
at this point…just put a damn trainer in shat screw it lol hate moving the bars and hate even more that i have to go to the capital city to respec…or give us DS =)
There are fights that prefer single target and some that have multiple targets.
Destruction wins single target, affliction wins multi target, or you could use a seed based spec vs a large number of adds mechanic fight.
Dual spec in tbc could make warlocks an even better dps than they already are and could cause a meta shift to even more warlock stacking. Blizzard has shown to try and discourage “mandatory” meta choices like this with the drums changes.
Dual spec was added after spec specializations were toned down and those strengths were out into the base classes a bit more or weaknesses of classes got made stronger to make them less weak regardless if spec. An example of this is rogues getting fan of knives and making blade flurry not as mandatory on multiple target fights. It’s still good in a 2 target situation, but it’s not as important in a 10 target situation for a rogue to be using blade flurry then because he has a different option.
Or hunters in wotlk got volley to have no CD and actually scale. This gave hunters much needed aoe and let hunters compete on aoe better. Traps gained base spec power and the talents were less important for hunter trap damage, duration, exc.
Dual spec was added after class power got buffed and spec power got nerfed.
The LW example is out of place for a couple of reasons:
Professions are supposed to be a substantially lesser degree of impact than class/spec, and yet people who would not benefit an iota from LW otherwise were encouraged to be LW prior to the change
Blizzard has done nothing to discourage the class/spec stacking we already have (see Warlocks/Hunters)
Blizzard has no plans to boost lower performing specs/classes or nerf overperforming specs/classes
Classes and specs in TBC have unique forms of debuffs and buffs with zero cross-over. You must have an Affliction Warlock to get the physical damage dealt debuff. You must have a Balance Druid to get the improved Faerie Fire and aura.
So if Warlock is your big example, you’re out of luck already. They’re brought for their superior DPS in almost all facets, barring Hunters, and they have phenomenal utility. As for AoE spec vs Single Target spec, that’s just silly given what we’re about to hit in T5. Everything you could want to AoE super quickly will fall just as fast with Seed of Corruption from any spec of Warlock. The best AoE situation we’re likely to see is P2 of Kael’thas with the weapons, and that phase is quite the joke compared to popping Shock Barrier in P4/5, which is all single target.
The other AoE moments are things like murlocs on Tidewalker, adds on Hydross, and adds on High Astromancer, none of which last long, none of which are particularly deadly, and none of which lack ample time to plant your feet and nuke the boss alone.
Which is not only irrelevant, but this doesn’t even make sense, especially for any hybrid class, or any class who had a single spec that could bring a critical buff/debuff like Replenishment, with rather glaring disparities on who could bring that buff and how.
So many people are pugging Warlocks for Magtheridon right now.
Even though I’m a hybrid class, it would neat if I could switch between Arms and Fury. Like, if we already had an Arms Warrior, they wouldn’t need the Debuff, so I just go Fury and…well, that’s that!
And threat isn’t an issue when 2-3 Warlocks, plus all the rest of the raid’s AoE, kills everything before it can even leave the confines of a Hunter trap.
Like I said, the biggest boon would be the weapon phase of Kael’thas and you have so much time before the Advisors respawn that a lot of groups are going to be idly finishing off the Shield before they pop up, if anything is alive at all. Speeding that up serves no purpose for most groups and single target is more important anyway.
Same is true on Astromancer, Tidewalker, etc.
Oh for sure! Which is why I’d actually build a Balance set if we got Dual Spec so that instead of always defaulting to Cat when I need to DPS, I could actually swap to something that greatly benefits said Warlocks/Mages while also keeping me out of melee range.
Almost sounds like you would be trivializing content even more by making your raid do more dps, and making druids even more viable because they can be a tank, decent dps with good physical dps buff for crit, and a decent dps with good caster dps buff with crit.
Bumping because blizzard has #pulltheripcord. The classic system that almost killed SL is gone, great move blizzard. Now lets get some QoL changes to classic and we can make the game a great success. True TbC fans are looking forward to it! Great job blizz