Blizzard, I think dual spec is a bad Idea....

#0 - Jan. 12, 2009, 8:34 p.m.

I’m going to try to keep this as short as I can, but please understand that this is a sore wound I’m dealing with.

I do not like the idea of dual specs. I don’t like it because it’s a way of saying “you can’t tank unless you spec protection.” I find this incredibly disturbing because when WoTLK came out and the talent tree’s got a face-lift I read that even arms and fury could tank! That meant a lot to me. That meant instead of people criticizing my spec as I tanked, I could have my DPS spec AND TANK JUST AS GOOD AS ANYONE ELSE. And that Prot would be JUST LIKE arms or fury in that it did DPS just as well but in a slightly different way. I wanted to see Prot warriors rolling on DPS one-handers and Fury and Arms warriors rolling on two-handers.

The point is, I don’t want to switch my spec AT ALL. I want to be able to tank as ARMS in my own unique way! I have been spamming sunders too long to go back to that stupid tree and spam them again. I LIKE 1-second cooldown on rend, my thunderclap critting and making my opponents bleed as though I had consecrate, and to tame an entire group of people with bladestorm and retaliation. I loved it!
I don’t think that it’s a good idea at all to give up on the idea that all specs can tank. When it comes down to it, I have always believed that skill and gear are the things you need to tank well. I believe these two things are achievable and as long as that person wants to tank they should be able to without changing everything they they have built with their character. Putting on an entire different set of gear, being in a completely different stance or aura is enough of a change! Dual speccing will just force us to keep being the plaything of other people: getting rid of the 50gold cost is NOT the problem, the problem is that we just want to roll what it is we roll and have that be enough.

Please give me a reason to not be so upset about this. All I know is that I’m doing fine tanking 5-mans. In the raids I am the offtank (by choice) and in one raid I could bounce back and forth 5-10 times using a mod to switch my entire set of gear so that I’m tanking for one pull then dpsing the next pull. I LIKE IT THIS WAY! I, with one spec, can do what I love to do. Tank AND Dps. I don’t have to switch to main-tank. If I wana main-tank I just put on the gear and say, “guys I got this.” And people should understand. Its not a moment where people go “lol, ret paly thinks he can tank.”

Atleast if you implement Dual spec let it be because people want to experiment with two specs that just do things differently. Not because Arms fails at tanking any ‘serious’ content. Why tank a 5-man instance as arms if I KNOW that you implemented dual spec as a band-aid for arms not being able to tank but being ooook to tank 5mans. Again. Serious content is raiding which all of us dreamed to do when we made our warrior and said “I’m going to tank” and DPS’d our way through 60+ lvls of “go kill that and some more of that stuff that looks just a little different then the stuff you just last killed, oh and make sure you get a satchel full of its crap too I don’t know why I need it I just want to laugh at you when you get your hands dirty lol.”

I tried not to rant.
Sorry.
Blue help me out. Are you really saying Arms can’t tank above 5-mans? Are you saying in order for me to tank the biggest and baddest thing you have in the game that needs to be tankedâ€¦ I have to roll prot to do it? I can’t be Arms?
You put so much work into getting us to tank in all specs, why give up –facepalm-
AAAUGH!!

I is sad panda expressâ€¦

#48 - Jan. 12, 2009, 8:07 p.m.

We like the way the death knight's talent trees are shaping up. Specifically, you can tank using good builds from any of the three trees. One may be slightly higher than another at any given moment in time, but overall the goal is that they are very similar and they are certainly more similar than the other three tanking classes.

We can totally imagine a world in which Arms, Fury and Protection all can tank using different styles. The Prot tree would just be more about sword and board style than tanking per se. Perhaps an Arms warrior would tank with a two-hander more like a DK does. I'm not saying we will 100% for sure go down that road, but it is interesting idea to think about.

It's harder with druids and paladins because some of the other trees can heal or are ranged. (You could probably come up with a Ret tanking system). Being able to tank and heal effectively with

To some extent druids are always going to be about being able to fill very different roles. While a DK tank might have a Frost tanking build and Blood tanking build that she switches between, I don't know that you would see many druid tanks switching between Bear build #1 and Bear build #2. Some will, and that's cool. But I suspect a lot of them will swap from bear to cat or from bear to Resto.

I could easily see a Prot warrior who wants two different Prot tanking builds -- a high threat build vs. a high survivability build for example. I could see a Prot warrior who wants a Prot tanking build vs. a Prot off-tanking build or even a Prot PvP build.

But I don't think this feature automatically locks us into Prot = tanking and Arms / Fury = dps if we don't want it to be. There is a risk that it allows us to be lazy: "Oh don't worry about making Frost mages PvE viable because they can always swap specs to Fire or Arcane for PvE." We would still like to get away from X being "the PvP tree" for every class. Likewise we'd like to get away from having tanking trees too, but it's harder or perhaps impossible for some classes.