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.

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 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

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.

- 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.

I was thinking of allowing respecs in Inns or something similar might work.

Good post. Got me thinking.

Gobble gobble.

BobTurkey’s last blog post..Random 3.1 commentary

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).

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.