Is it time to remove Dual Spec?

[Deleted]

If anything the convenience of things like duel spec aids in immersion. Things like duel spec and being able to change glyphs and talents on fly streamline the game and make you think more about what you are fighting and how they should be fought instead of having to go to a trainer to change everything. We should have triple spec and quadruple spec for classes like the druid class.

I will agree that world portals take away from the immersion. Flight points take away from the immersion. Id rather see a system of wagons going to and from travel points instead of flight points. I would also rather see more ship transport in the game with pirate attacks and sea monster attacks. Allow players to own there own ships and travel anywhere in azeroth on them. There ships would be like player housing also. The thing that takes away immersion from wow the most is the quest system. All of the quests are the same. They are all about killing ten of these things and collecting ten of that. The quests should be more like single player scenarios and dungeons, where you have objectives like recovering a special artifact that leads you to another objective and another. There are some quests like this in wow but not very many.

No it doesn't, people sticking to a class + spec + role as opposed to a class with 2 specs adds immersion. You deal with what you got and become good with that, instead of adapting to whats better. All the class homogeneity doesn't add immersion...

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No convenience is bad.. most of the times its really bad.

It's all about exploring a dangerous and interesting world for me, meeting other people, overcoming challenges with them.

Convenience on the other hand turns it into a camp for mentally challenged overweight tourists. It's no longer fun, just a bunch of people who never talk going through the wild, littering, competing who gets to smash the pretty flower first or who gets to tear the wings off the butterfly. In other words it sucks. So I strongly oppose "convenience" and think that those who cant or wont make the time should just move on instead of trying to destroy and ruin everything for all.

If you go to a big city in the world you're facing the question what you are going to do. I'm not going to say there are 2 choices, but I will say there are a lot of options for you with 2 different extreme paths.

The first one is you taking the theme park, you do what all other have done and stick to the path as it has been drawn for you and many others. You follow the herd as sheep.

The second path is of the explorer, you explore on your own and try to visit remote locations which are not (popularly) recommended to go to.

You know, just because you visit New York, doesn't mean you gotta visit the statue of liberty.

Allowing convenience in the sense of automatic respec provides too much the theme park experience.

[ophion1990]

I read some of these posts and sorry OP, seems like most people didn't bother to read your post, even if you made that super large bolded explanation at the top. :/

I don't think it's a bad idea actually. Just make us use dust of dissapearence or w/e it's called, like we do for swapping talents. Although I guess respeccing is the last use class trainers have these days.

[Deleted]

If you go to a big city in the world you're facing the question what you are going to do. I'm not going to say there are 2 choices, but I will say there are a lot of options for you with 2 different extreme paths.

The first one is you taking the theme park, you do what all other have done and stick to the path as it has been drawn for you and many others. You follow the herd as sheep.

The second path is of the explorer, you explore on your own and try to visit remote locations which are not (popularly) recommended to go to.

You know, just because you visit New York, doesn't mean you gotta visit the statue of liberty.

Allowing convenience in the sense of automatic respec provides too much the theme park experience.

Exactly, it diminishes the sense of exploring a big dangerous world.. WoW feels more like a themepark these days, completely safe. And if things dont go your way or you have to wait a minute too long, you just whine and complain till Blizzard hands it to you on a silver platter (and in some cases for only a low price of $9.99)

[Baconeggcheese]

Yes, with the insane flexibility of the new gear its literally just there so that people have an excuse not to switch specs around sometimes just like tomes exist purely to be a mild inconvenience so people have an excuse not to switch talents between fights because blizzard feels like people shouldn't have to do these things.

Realistically it's just an inconvenience for the sake of it, because if a fight calls for you to change specs to something you don't have you're going to go take the 5 minutes to switch. Trispec is the better solution though, not the removal of dual spec, guy on first page who said the thread title was a poor choice is correct.

[Kraineth]

Yea it is probably about time for it. On raid nights I run with Feral/Guardian specs, but I like to AoE farm mobs as boomkin for the ranged pulling.

It feels unnecessary these days, especially since I need an addon specifically to remember my action bar layout so I dont have to spend 15 minutes setting up bars each time I respec.

EDIT: As far at people not reading before posting, you should consider re-naming the title to something about giving us access to all specs. No matter how much you add to your first post, the title is a bit misleading and there will always be people who don't read the post before responding.

[namelessone]

No. I'd prefer it if spec remained an important choice, not something you could change on a whim.

[Mercarcher]

No. I'd prefer it if spec remained an important choice, not something you could change on a whim.

You can already change them on a whim. It just takes either an addon, or 5 mins to redo your keybindings which is annoying.

[Luko]

No. I'd prefer it if spec remained an important choice, not something you could change on a whim.

I'd love to hear your explanation as to how this betters the game as a whole versus the convenient choice we have now or the quality of life option the OP is proposing. Dual spec's been in the game for over 5 years, as in over half of wow's existence. For the better part of this entire game we've been able to change on a whim, all the OP is proposing is access to the 3rd, ignored spec in this already present system, especially considering the way the new WOD gear works.

[Geckoo]

No convenience is bad.. most of the times its really bad.

It's all about exploring a dangerous and interesting world for me, meeting other people, overcoming challenges with them.

Convenience on the other hand turns it into a camp for mentally challenged overweight tourists. It's no longer fun, just a bunch of people who never talk going through the wild, littering, competing who gets to smash the pretty flower first or who gets to tear the wings off the butterfly. In other words it sucks. So I strongly oppose "convenience" and think that those who cant or wont make the time should just move on instead of trying to destroy and ruin everything for all.

You are mixing some different concepts here that have nothing to do with the topic we are discussing.

Yes, of course i have to agree with you that it should all be about exploring a dangerous and interesting world, facing challenges alone or with other people. And that's exactly why giving more flexibility and freedom in how we play our characters goes exactly in that direction.

I had one of these situations yesterday but in another game, i was playing Wildstar with my stalker and had one of those 5+ people quests, we had to kill a mob that hits like a truck... and we failed. So i changed to my tank spec, i have no tank gear, another guy changed to his healer spec and we killed him. If that was the incovenient wow classic... then i would have to travel to a capital city just to change my spec and then travel back if there was no summoning stone nearby or a warlock. That's not fun, that's not immersive at all, that is just time going down the sink.

I rather be able to face any challenge in that world because i can adapt easily to face it than being stuck with a choice that might not be the right one for that challenge unless i spend time travelling just to make a minor, but determinant, change. Convenience is not bad per se, i repeat, think about what the alternative adds to the gameplay and what convenience is taking away from the gameplay, like everything, there is a balance.

That's what i'd like to read, how being stuck with only one spec and a set of talents and glyphs could be better for our game experience. I can somehow understand that you want the choice to be valuable, but the reality is that any choice in class specs or talents has never been final, we've always been able to visit our trainer in a major city to change any of those choices.

[Deleted]

No.

/10characters

[Chaosturn]

If it ain't broke don't fix it? It's not exactly problematic :x

Except you have to get an addon to save action bars for your third spec.
Also, druids say hello

[Kelimbror]

I think they should really really remove at least half the convenience stuff instead.

If their goal is to ensure millions of sub losses each quarter, I think you are right. For better or worse in people's opinions, rectifying what they feel are design flaws at this point will do more harm than good. The majority of people feel like removing features, limiting gameplay, and generally restricting concepts that have been in place for the better part of a decade are regressive and ill omens. They aren't wrong either.

[namelessone]

I'd love to hear your explanation as to how this betters the game as a whole versus the convenient choice we have now or the quality of life option the OP is proposing. Dual spec's been in the game for over 5 years, as in over half of wow's existence. For the better part of this entire game we've been able to change on a whim, all the OP is proposing is access to the 3rd, ignored spec in this already present system, especially considering the way the new WOD gear works.

"It's just convenience" isn't a good argument. Addition of a little "convenience" system can significantly affect gameplay. Case in point: Diablo 3. Auction House was added purely for "convenience", considering that you could always use third party sites to set up trades. Yet it ended up being the worst decision in the game's design, that ended up affecting almost every other aspect of gameplay.

If your argument is "it's a pain to change action bars", I'd much rather have them make action bar presets as part of basic AI, then making instant free respeccing.

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If their goal is to ensure millions of sub losses each quarter, I think you are right. For better or worse in people's opinions, rectifying what they feel are design flaws at this point will do more harm than good. The majority of people feel like removing features, limiting gameplay, and generally restricting concepts that have been in place for the better part of a decade are regressive and ill omens. They aren't wrong either.

You can't prove it would result in sub loss. In fact, so far all they did was add convenience and they still have sub losses. Fact of the matter is, every assumption you make about what causes sub loss is baseless, because you don't have nearly enough data on that. Blizzard understand very well that too much convenience can ruin games.

[schwank05]

I think what you are really looking for is Tri/ Quad spec in the case of Druids. Which I am all for, basically I just want my action bars saved and not to have to pay the 1000+ gold in order to recpec that it costs now.

[Kelimbror]

You can't prove it would result in sub loss. In fact, so far all they did was add convenience and they still have sub losses. Fact of the matter is, every assumption you make about what causes sub loss is baseless, because you don't have nearly enough data on that. Blizzard understand very well that too much convenience can ruin games.

You make a grand assumption that I'm pinpointing one isolated data set as the root of all subscription losses like some common forum drive by. That's on you. My statement amounted to making severe changes in design will result in people leaving the game. 'Removing' features, even if the design improves is not going to be perceived positively by a large number of people. If you need proof of that, you should probably get your common sense chip upgraded...because it's not functioning.

[namelessone]

You make a grand assumption that I'm pinpointing one isolated data set as the root of all subscription losses like some common forum drive by. That's on you. My statement amounted to making severe changes in design will result in people leaving the game. 'Removing' features, even if the design improves is not going to be perceived positively by a large number of people. If you need proof of that, you should probably get your common sense chip upgraded...because it's not functioning.

Yes, any change will result with people leaving game and other people coming back to game, and it's on you to prove that this particular decision will result in more people leaving than coming back. And you can't, because you don't have data, so you have to fall to cheap cop-outs, like "oooh, it's common sense".
Removing AH in Diablo 3 was a major success with the community, just for example.

[Kelimbror]

Yes, any change will result with people leaving game and other people coming back to game, and it's on you to prove that this particular decision will result in more people leaving than coming back. And you can't, because you don't have data, so you have to fall to cheap cop-outs, like "oooh, it's common sense".
Removing AH in Diablo 3 was a major success with the community, just for example.

Lol....possibly the worst example you could ever give. The AH wasn't a feature, it literally destroyed the entire design of the game. Not even remotely similar issues. If you think they are, you don't know much about either game. *shrug* GC said it himself before he left that making too large changes would be destructive. It seems he was the anchor keeping that common sense applicable. Maybe they are happy with fewer players, but making the game they want. I'm supportive of that, but I'm not so delusional to think it's going to raise their subscription numbers. They would go down regardless, but wide sweeping changes like removing flying just exacerbates the issue.

[Geckoo]

If your argument is "it's a pain to change action bars", I'd much rather have them make action bar presets as part of basic AI, then making instant free respeccing.

But, why would it be bad for the game if it had this 'free' respeccing?

I do think action bar presets should be a thing, but it's just a parallel issue here, just a consequence of the whole ability & spec system in wow when we have the possibility to change specs. It has always been an issue, but many players didn't notice it because swapping specs was not that common back in vanilla & TBC. I wonder if you would say dual spec or even tri spec is something 'bad' if it was present from the first day in vanilla wow alpha.

[schwank05]

But, why would it be bad for the game if it had this 'free' respeccing?

I do think action bar presets should be a thing, but it's just a parallel issue here, just a consequence of the whole ability & spec system in wow when we have the possibility to change specs. It has always been an issue, but many players didn't notice it because swapping specs was not that common back in vanilla & TBC. I wonder if you would say dual spec or even tri spec is something 'bad' if it was present from the first day in vanilla wow alpha.

I agree completely, I hate having to swap specs, If I have the gear and knowledge Icy-veins provides I can easily take on LFR or even Flex with any spec on any class, I am just held back by the fact that it costs so much in both time and gold to do it currently.

So what does it matter, it's not like your heroic guild is going to recruit me to be a Main tank or healer for progression kills. Really what would this hurt, but helping players to stay interested in the game longer.

[Luko]

But, why would it be bad for the game if it had this 'free' respeccing?

I do think action bar presets should be a thing, but it's just a parallel issue here, just a consequence of the whole ability & spec system in wow when we have the possibility to change specs. It has always been an issue, but many players didn't notice it because swapping specs was not that common back in vanilla & TBC. I wonder if you would say dual spec or even tri spec is something 'bad' if it was present from the first day in vanilla wow alpha.

He danced around the topic using an extremely specific and mostly unrelated example from an entirely different game to back his vague point. As you can see from what Kelimbror is dealing with right now, it's more of an exercise in futility, rather than a discussion.