Breakfast Topic: Which two specs will you be choosing?

by Dan O'Halloran Oct 5th 2008 at 8:00AM

When we heard back in June at BlizzCon International that players will be able to switch between two specs easily in the expansion I thought to myself "no brainer." Not just the concept, but I knew which specs I was going to choose. Being a Feral druid, I could already tank and DPS. I just needed to choose Restoration and I'm covered.

Flash forward almost four months later and Tigole confirms the functionality is coming in a patch shortly after the expansion. But suddenly I'm not so sure about my choices. Come Patch 3.0.2 major class changes are a coming. I switched from Restoration to Feral during TBC and learned to enjoy tanking, but I fell in love with cat form.

Now Blizzard is buffing cat DPS in a big way. Unfortunately, it's at the cost of tanking talents. So do I go cat and bear for my two specs or cat and tree? And the Moonkin DPS got a good kick in the feathered ass as well. The choices! Given how the classes are changing and many more specs are becoming viable, which two specs are you considering for your main?

Tags: cat-dps, dual-specs, patch-3.0.2, tigole

Filed under: Druid, Breakfast topics, Talents, Wrath of the Lich King

Subscribe to these comments

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)

szimm Oct 5th 2008 8:08AM

honestly... im gonna make a balance pve and a balance pvp spec for my druid, and a tank and arms spec for my warrior.

depends how clunky the mechanics are going to be. if i have to manually rearrange my action bars every time i spec change, for example, i could easily imagine myself not using it at all.

i would rather see them make every spec more viable in different situations than this dual spec thing.

Hydden Oct 5th 2008 8:16AM

Viable spec =/= best spec. Many people respec not because they need to, but because they want the *ideal* (min/maxed) spec for the task at hand

szimm Oct 5th 2008 8:50AM

...which again forces people into the same minmax cookie cutter specs. BOOORING!

i like having to weigh my choices when speccing. use those braincells, you know - to find the compromise between the parts of the game i want to participate in. if i mostly pvp ill spec for that, if i play both pve and pvp ill find a balance between the two, etc.

what i want blizzard to do is make every spec viable in every game aspect. and by viable, i dont mean perfect, but playable. theyve already come along way in wrath with the tanking spec damage increase and giving cc to most damage specs. what they need to do now is to give prot warrior and prot paladins some form of cc role in pvp, and all is good.

instead they decide to go with this lame half-assed dual spec system. imo, they should make the respeccing system free, but put it on a 3-day cooldown instead. that would actually incite people to THINK for once.

80percentChanceOf Fail Oct 5th 2008 9:06AM

Since macros and keybindings are saved server side now...

If they did not have one set of these to go with each spec, it would be an epic fail.

Hydden Oct 5th 2008 9:45AM

I thought the Prot Warriors / Paladins themselves *were* the CC (i.e. if someone attacks them, they're not attacking someone else).

Joker Oct 5th 2008 10:12PM

How do you make every spec viable? The issue is that no matter what the specs are going to have set strengths and weaknesses and will be more efficient for one thing than another. If a shadow priest could heal nearly as well as a holy or even discipline priest through vampiric aura and the like it would probably fast become the only real spec for anything because of the level of utility.

People look for the most efficient or powerful design, there is no way to somehow subvert that. Not to mention that some specs are by their nature more necessary than others, tanking and healing for example.

szimm Oct 5th 2008 5:27PM

ye whatever.

what blizzard needs to realize is that they dont have 27 unique specs out there, they have 5 different roles (tank, healer, melee, caster and ranged), and 27 (soon 30) specs trying to fill those five basic roles...

this is a flawed design by definition, and very hard to rectify now.

the only thing they can do, is to give each of the specs under each of these five primary categories roughly the same abilities. what spec you choose should merely be a selection of sub-niche and flavour.

these are my suggestions:

tank: high mitigation and slightly lower than average damage to make up for it. 80% of dps spec damage seems fair to me. threat increasing abilities to make up for the lower dps. cc in pvp would greatly increase their pvp value without upsetting game balance much.

healer: high healing through talents. lower than average damage to make up for it. 70% of dps spec damage seems fair. i personally think their current healing ability is way to great. a similarly geared healer and dps'er should only be able to exactly cancel each other out.

caster: high damage output at range. mana dependency to make up for the range advantage. more/better utility to non-hybrid specs, off-healing abilities to hybrids.

melee: high damage output with no mana dependency, melee range requirement to make up for this.

ranged: this would currently only cover hunters. i would still like to see some kind of energy system (ala rogues) implemented for hunters, it seems stupid for them to use mana.

Hydden Oct 5th 2008 8:14AM

Beastmastery Solo spec & Beastmastery Group spec :)

Clbull Oct 5th 2008 8:17AM

If pets can actually tank in instances in Wrath, then I'll go a BM tanking spec with a Tenacity Pet, otherwise, I'll go MM with a Cunning or Ferocity Pet

Arcaria Oct 5th 2008 9:37AM

Good luck convincing a group "it's fine, my pet can tank"

Bootsanator Oct 5th 2008 3:11PM

If the pet has enough health and avoidance that it's actually comparable to an actual tank, and it can keep threat like BRK is showing in his gorilladin videos, I'll heal a pet :P

...not that I plan on pugging very many instances, pugging makes me sad panda, usually.

Core Oct 5th 2008 8:24AM

I think i'm just going to pick a PVP spec and a PVE specc of majorly the same tree. E.g. a pve dps enhancement spec for my shaman and then a pvp enhancement spec.

I can't really be bothered keeping up with two majorly different gear sets, i cant even handle one right now :P.

Boydboyd Oct 5th 2008 8:29AM

Upon reaching L80, my druid will be a tank (as he has been since 70).

His second talent setup, honestly, depends on if Blizzard puts in changes to bag space. I would love to have Restoration as the secondary talent spec. Everyone always needs a tank, and they always need a healer; but the bag space required for both of those is going to be the determining factor.

Best of both worlds.

Sallix Oct 5th 2008 8:31AM

Protection and retribution.

BenMS Oct 5th 2008 8:32AM

Resto and Enhance on my shaman. I'm geared for both, Resto being my main focus like every good shaman should, but I do love to get out there and solo dailies and such as Enhance. It's great fun to see the big numbers fly!

Orbit Oct 5th 2008 11:20AM

You're guild must suck if you actually think that the only good shaman is a resto shaman.

BenMS Oct 6th 2008 4:30AM

Lol, way to get voted down. It was, as they say in the classics, a joke.

jsplat Oct 5th 2008 8:38AM

For my rogue, it will be one PvP spec that goes fairly deep in the subtlety tree with a bit of combat on the side and one PvE spec. Whether the PvE spec is heavier on the assassination tree or the combat tree remains to be seen.

For my paladin, one protection and one retribution spec (both PvE oriented).

For my death knight, whatever the mini-maxing tanking build turns out to be (I suspect deep frost with assorted blood talents, but that may be outdated now) and a deep unholy build for questing.