Dual Specs – Why it adds more imbalance to an imbalanced Game
Oh yeah those dual specs. We heard about ‘em a pretty long time ago and now they are put to test on the PTRs. And of course that brings us to the discussion if that is a good thing or not. BBB seems to agree with the noobish rogue that there is something off about this whole thing. Aurik disagrees and /hugs the idea of frequent spec switches.
I love the idea but I think the implementation is pretty much just nonsense.
The first point I absolutely don’t like, I won’t waste to many words on. Go check what the Big Bear has to say on the topic of pure dps class versus hybrid class. I agree. From a PVE standpoint this change has serious implications. If I’m a raid leader: Do I care if I rouge can specc from Mutilate to Combat? – No. Do I care if a ranged dps can switch to healer and back in a heartbeat? – Oh yes I do.
I sit next to a lovely rogue most of the time I raid. And melee dps is not always just fun. Rogues bring nearly no buffs to the raid (at least no buffs that most 25 man raids will already have). So all everyone is ever going to notice as a rogue is your personal dps and if you stand in the fire or not.
I’m a healer. Heal meters aren’t that interesting. Many guilds have a little lack of healers. Most of the time people are just grateful when enough healers show up. Most of the time a healer team is very friendly and there’s a lot less competition than amongst physical dps.
And I’m now not only an excellent healer but I’ll even have the possibility to switch to elemental or enhancement spec. With decent gear I might even get close to rogue dps and on some fights I might even top rogues in meters. And I think that’s just spitting in the face of classes that bring nothing else than raw dps. I loved the fact that as enhancement shaman I didn’t do really high dps but could really push rogues ahead with my buffs. But with WotLK blizzard has really failed to balance damage output, especially for non hybrid classes. And now I think hybrids bring far too much utility to a raid, compared to dps-only classes.
The second point I don’t like is the actual implementation: I don’t like that it is only two specs available. For PVE interested hybrids, that won’t leave any room for a decent PVP specc (which might have gotten me interested into arena). I don’t like the fact that you can switch between your specc whenever you want. This might just be personal taste, but this just doesn’t suit me. I always liked the fact that we all were tied very strong to our spec, not just because respeccing costs gold but also because it blew some live into my character. This feels very similar to the feeling I have towards Tier gear. In BC I was happy for every piece I got. I still remember when I got both, my T5 and T6 shoulders. Now with emblems I have two sets of gear, one heal one elemental, both with 4 piece bonus and mostly 25 man level. That just feels less epic. The line between making something easier for everyone or taking away a lot of the epic feeling of this game has just gotten thinner and thinner.
The third point I don’t like is the consequences. And here I disagree with some other bloggers: This will change raiding, recruiting and the daily life of many hybrid classes. I often read the argument, that no one would be forced to off spec and than probably not much is going to change. I don’t believe that.
- Everyone is already grabbing offspec loot. Just because 3.1 is being tested and will go live some when in the future and everyone is talking about dual specs. This won’t make loot distribution easier.
- Every serious raiding guild is soon going to ask applicants to their guild what their offspec is and how good their off-gear is. And don’t tell me it won’t make a difference if you have to excellent sets of gear or just one.
- Because it will be so incredibly easy to switch spec, people will have to switch to a talent tree they don’t like that much, be it only for a trash pack or half the raid. Making a portal to a major city, letting someone respecc, wait for him searching for his gear on the bank and summoning him back to the instance is annoying and because we are all lazy people we’d do that only if there was really now other way. Telling a Bear tank to go kitty I’d hear every raid, because it is easy for a druid to switch form and most of the time he has his kitty gear in the bag (and is very much expected to have so). So a feral can’t really say no to having bear AND cat gear. Just because it is easy to switch from bear to cat. And if it’s going to be easy to switch role for other classes there will be pressure to get a good equipment for an offspec. The more people in your guild frequently switch spec and do very good at it, the higher the pressure will be for everyone to have decent offspec-gear.
- My crystal ball even tells me, that this might have an impact on guild sizes and recruiting strategies. If you have dedicated raiders that can master more than one spec you might get along with fewer raiders. As a guild leader it is easier the smaller your raiding pool is and the more reliable people are part of that pool.
- If blizzard doesn’t design bosses around the perfect lineup, good guilds will find new bosses rather easy because it is going to be much more probable that a raid is going to have a near-perfect lineup every night. The second warrior tank won’t be shieldslamming but will quickly spec to fury. If you feel that you need a healer more but there is no one online in your guild, a hybrid will respec in a second. And if you then learn that this additional healer doesn’t help much he can switch back to dps. On the other hand, If blizzard would design boss encounters around the near-perfect lineup, every casual guild would struggle.
- I don’t like the fact that spending more time in the game will help you even more. Let’s look at tanks: One tank has a really busy RL but is a fantastic tank. The other guy tanks just as well but has loads of free time, which lets him run heroics all the time and do not only 25 mans but 10 man raids on a weekly base. Number one has fantastic tank gear and so does number two, but number two owns a splendid DPS set as well, while the first tank just isn’t as interested in DPS, doesn’t have the time to collect gear or read about his optimal dps rotation. I guess this will make an impact on who you bring to your raid.
Personally I like dual specs. I’ll go for elemental for the first time in my life, my gear is ready and my homework on theorycrafting is done. Still, the implementation is just bad and I just don’t see how this won’t add some more imbalance to the game. It is fantastic for everyone who wants to go from PVP to PVE from time to time. It is great for everyone who does heroic often and can switch role to fill in the last free spot of a group. But the imbalance it adds to being a dps-only class and the pressure that I guess will come to have decent second spec gear just doesn’t make up for the positive aspects. It is a close race though and for many players this will be fun and a huge personal win for overall gaming experience.
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I agree completely.
The only way I would be reasonably happy with dual specs is if they make it impossible to do on the fly. I understand and sympathize with those who find it prohibitive to switch back and forth from a raid spec to a PvP or money-making spec, and I totally agree that Arenas would be much more accessible for the casual player if they could have dual specs. Fine. Then make it so you can only switch your dual specs in a city. That makes it reasonably certain that people will use their dual specs for two different purposes, not for flip-flopping in a raid. Another possibility would be to have a cooldown on spec changing.
But even then, as you point out, there will still be the problem that guilds will prefer hybrid classes to have two raiding specs, to provide flexibility for raid composition.
Or if Blizz wants to encourage PvP, they could give us a designated PvP spec. You could talk to a battlemaster to switch your spec, which would last until either you talked to him again, or would automatically revert to your main spec if you entered a PvE instance. Tanks could use their PvP spec for dailies and grinding, which might not be ideal, but would be better than a raid spec.
I agree as well. I would love to see dual-specs – WHERE YOU HAVE TO GO TO A MAJOR CITY. If the toon has to go to say, Stormwind, and then get ported back, at least that would be enough of a hassel to discourage it. I wouldn’t even mind if there was say a lockout/cooldown (1 respec/day?)
As a Shammy, I just know that I’m going to be swapping back and forth between Ele and Resto all day long. (Right now my guild runs with 6 healers, and two healers DPS on bosses like 25-man Thaddius – oh well, at least I’ll do respectable DPS from now on).
Yeah I agree that near instant respecs is gonig to cause chaos. Can you imagine 25 man raids with half a dozen or more PUGs and due specs? Its going to be evenmore chaotic than it already is.
I was thinking of allowing respecs in Inns or something similar might work.
Good post. Got me thinking.
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BobTurkey’s last blog post..Random 3.1 commentary
1. Everyone is already grabbing offspec loot. Just because 3.1 is being tested and will go live some when in the future and everyone is talking about dual specs. This won’t make loot distribution easier.
- erm, I’ve always grabbed offspec loot. I like trying new things. I never take offspec loot when there is a mainspec who needs it except in very rare occasions where we have agreed that I may roll.
2. Every serious raiding guild is soon going to ask applicants to their guild what their offspec is and how good their off-gear is. And don’t tell me it won’t make a difference if you have to excellent sets of gear or just one.
- the difference it makes is in proportion to the amount of times you expect to ask people to switch and who you already have. If none of your healers have dps gear or inclinations to kill stuff then recruiting a healer with a dps offspec is fine. If several of your healers love to pew pew then the applicant without the dps offspec is actually at an advantage.
3. Because it will be so incredibly easy to switch spec, people will have to switch to a talent tree they don’t like that much,…The more people in your guild frequently switch spec and do very good at it, the higher the pressure will be for everyone to have decent offspec-gear.
Everyone? Erm, the only reason to have everyone switch is if you moved from, say, a 25 tank fight to a 25 healer fight. You will never see this in WoW. Even something like original 4 Horsemen which required 8 tanks is something that Blizzard now regret and will never design again. Many good guilds collapsed when their main tanks got poached so a more progressed guild could beat that encounter.
You will have one or two people switch, probably before and after every boss since trash demands different optimal composition. This isn’t really any different from what happens now, two or three healers get told to dps on trash since we don’t need all 7 healing. The only difference is they won’t suck at it.
For example you do Patchwerk with 3 tanks, 8 healers, 14 dps. You move to Grobulous and all but 3 of the healers go dps for the small trash clear. Then you do Grobulous with 2 tanks 6 healers and 17 dps. 14 dps have stayed dps the whole time, 3 healers have stayed healer the whole time, 2 tanks have stayed tank the whole time; 6 players have switched spec. That’s the scope of it – not everyone but about 1 in 4.
As for people being forced to switch into a spec they don’t like the only time I have really seen this happen is healbotting. And I think dual spec will alleviate healer boredom by allowing some healers to dps competitively when not required to heal. When we were progressing through Naxx we took 8 so we could be confident on Patchwerk even though we didn’t need 8 for any other part of the clear.
And quite frankly raid leaders have been asking Ret pallies and shadow Priests to healbot for a long time. Some do, some don’t, some lose raid spots over this, some get to raid as dps. Dual spec won’t change much here.
4. My crystal ball even tells me, that this might have an impact on guild sizes and recruiting strategies. If you have dedicated raiders that can master more than one spec you might get along with fewer raiders. As a guild leader it is easier the smaller your raiding pool is and the more reliable people are part of that pool.
- yes absolutely. But it just means that more guilds will be formed by those players who get left out. It is better to have a raid guild needing a roster of 35 players for 25 spots than 40 players for 25 spots. Because the surplus players get the very un-fun role of warming the sub’s bench.
The net effect of dual spec is less bored substitutes and more players actually raiding. Smaller rosters are a good thing.
“5. If blizzard doesn’t design bosses around the perfect lineup, good guilds will find new bosses rather easy because it is going to be much more probable that a raid is going to have a near-perfect lineup every night. …. On the other hand, If blizzard would design boss encounters around the near-perfect lineup, every casual guild would struggle.”
They already design content with the expectation that people may choose to min-max in every way. Hardcore guilds already tweak their line ups by having people respec then summoning them back in. This change merely allows casuals to do what hardcore guilds do already.
Blizzard are clearly creating raid content that is designed for hardcore players as well as content for casual players. The fact that casual guilds won’t clear hardcore content isn’t because it will be tuned for dual spec, it will be because it’s tuned for hardcore players.
6. I don’t like the fact that spending more time in the game will help you even more. Let’s look at tanks: One tank has a really busy RL but is a fantastic tank. The other guy tanks just as well but has loads of free time, which lets him run heroics all the time…
I think nearly all the time you pick a tank based on whether he can do his main job. If you envisage that one tank may switch to dps then you have a notion of who that will be. For example if you clear Naxx with 3 tanks you will be expecting 2 to tank the whole thing and one to switch. Your busy RL player competes for tank spots 1 and 2 but not 3. It seems reasonable to me. He’s not excluded and if he shines he will get the nod.
Thank you for taking your time and offering a great counterpart to my view of things. I absolutely see where you’re coming from. I think the points you mention are mostly about seeing the glass half full or half empty. Where you see stuff that’s already happening I see a shift from things that were until now exclusive to really cutting edge guilds to affecting nearly every raiding guild.
Some clarifications:
1. When I talked about loot I was thinking mainly about PuGs. For guilds there won’t be much change. But I PuG often, everything up to Naxx25. And there I might find it a lot harder to notice who is having what mainspecc if I don’t know the people. I see a lot more requests like “I only heal to make this group happen but I’ll roll for dps gear”. And I see more people in speccs that they don’t know how to play and don’t have the gear to support it, which isn’t entirely bad because it might bring people to try new stuff out.
2.+3. I really think the pressure to have an offspec comes from your officers and guild master and from your fellow players and how often they will switch spec and how well they will perform doing so.
The guild I’m in is really trying to push people towards getting out the maximum of their toons. And as the loot is distributed via some sort of loot council/dkp mix our officers are very aware of who is getting what loot.
We aren’t a very small guild though and there are many players that are far from 100% raid attendance. And we have problems like every other guilds: people stuck in traffic, having exams, getting pregnant, not being at the top of their game etc.
Our raid leader is also very fond of giving every raider as much responsibilty as possible. If we have 5 shadowpriests, every one of them will have their turn at Razuvious. This means we often have multiple wipes there, but like that everyone learns how to mindcontrol. All of our tanks are encouraged to tank all bosses etc.
All this for the purpose to being prepared for people not showing up to raids as good as possible. And having as many people capable of tanking any boss etc.
In my guild I’m sure that dual specs will have an impact on expectations officers have to us raiders. Because it’s going to become so easy to respecc I guess many raiders will be expected to have a decent off-spec, especially dps classes that can heal or tank and all tanks. I guess dual speccs will have an impact on our loot distribution, and much more loot that would otherwise be sharded will go to people so that they can build a second gear set.
And even if not every night everyone has to change specc, not everyone is showing up every raiding night. But if 4-5 people change their specc during a raid night and then the next time not all of them attend the raid, it just doesn’t look good if you just say “meh, if they wanna dps that’s ok I’d rather heal all the time, I don’t have a dps gear sorry”.
I do like your optimism though. And for the consequences there’s good chance you’re very right and things won’t look as bad as I imagine them. But even then, the inbalance between hybrids and pure dps classes remains, so does the annoying limitation to two specs only.
I have been thinking about this addition for a while now, trying to pin down whether I like it or hate it (notice neither is “love”).
I think it will make getting into the end game content easier for a lot of people. Being able to fit multiple roles easier is a plus in that regard. But I really think it degrades a lot of what makes progressing as your class/spec worth while.
There’s going to be a lot of identity crises going on where a person is both a DPS and a Healer, or a Tank and a DPS, etc. I totally agree that for classes like Mages and Rogues – where you only do one thing regardless of your spec, this is a great thing but for Shamans and the other hybrids I think this really takes and crumbles a lot of social ideology that make people play a certain class over another.
It will be less likely that people will be “Ribeiro that awesome healer!” Instead every shaman with enough time and luck to get off spec is going to be able to be that resto shaman everyone goes to for heals. I spend months gearing myself only for an enhance shaman to hop in with his offset purples he’s been scrounging up in PUGs to jump in and do just as well because he’s able to go back and forth and loot accordingly.
At the end of the day I came to the conclusion that for all material purposes this is a great step forward, but socially and theoretically, I think this could possibly tear up the mechanics that are built into the WoW community as far as classes and identities go.
RibeiroTheShaman’s last blog post..Heroic Nexus: Shaman Healing Guide
“But even then, the inbalance between hybrids and pure dps classes remains, so does the annoying limitation to two specs only.”
I’ve just written quite a lengthy analysis of this here:
http://deathknightspree.blogspot.com/
To sum up: it’s unfair, it’s almost certainly not fixable in a way that is fair to all, and hybrids will tend to win out over pures because a healer shortage is worse for the game than a rogue shortage.
I am just recently coming back to WoW after a 3 month hiatus.
One thing that struck me in reading the original post is, what if a simple solution is to force a toon to use the same spec as when they were saved to the raid?
If you go in and kill boss A as resto, you get saved to the instance as resto. Any time you zone in it is automatically switched back to resto.
Next week, you could re-enter as either spec. It would make the healing classes think carefully whether to save as offspec as not.