Why the inferiority complex about Mage?

[Deleted]

It's interesting how shortsighted people are when role switching is brought up. Role switching between raid nights, tiers or even expansions in raids, and the ability to switch roles freely for dungeons offers you a flexibility that we sacrifice in order to get to fulfill one role with whichever spec happens to the most suitable for it. Do people really fail to understand the difference between a Mage who in an ideal (to me) expansion would be swapping between all three specs on a fight per fight basis and a Moonkin whose adjustments total in swapping a few talents around? Who in turn can also simply go Bear or Tree for the sake of dungeons, questing, PvP and whatever else?

As much as Blizzard has tried in the past, WoW is still an MMORPG. The ease at which you can level and gear up alts doesn't change the fact that a lot of players, those who don't FotM reroll or are absolutely min/maxing players in a top world guild, end up more or less sticking with a 'main' character through their time of playing the game. If said character happens to be a Rogue or a Hunter who simply does too little DPS with all specs, then they're SOOL. Indeed, the only option they have is an entirely different character. How people fail to see the striking difference between this and swapping roles is beyond me.

But perhaps my casual friends and I are the odd old birds. Hell, I've declined guilds simply because some random person already had my name on their server

As an RP counter example, I played feral in vanilla and when I hit level cap and found out I could raid as feral I was so attached to that spec by then from an RP point of view that I actually rolled a second druid to play resto...

When my class leader told me in TBC that he was switching from feral (tank) to resto because bears couldn't handle some mechanic in BT and we wouldn't be tanking it I quit until WotLK.

You can have just as strong as an attachment to a spec as to to the class as a whole - in fact I never actually got to play resto or balance at level cap until multi-spec-ing came in later on.

If you want to play a ranged caster and you moonkin isn't cutting the damage then you're just as out of luck as anyone else would be. Swapping roles is only an option if you want to play the other role, otherwise you're down to rolling another class same as anyone else.

[Ipsissimus]

I sincerely apologize for being blunt, but there's simply no way you would convince me that attachment to a spec is anything remotely similar to attachment to your character. Call it DPS class bias if you will.

edit:
To clarify, I mean for people as a whole. By no means am I doubting your own love for Feral, it's just that there are likely quite a few more people out there who are attached to their character.