Originally Posted by Douglas
You don't feel that this depends on your definition of "viable"?
Lot's of stuff is "viable" if you're not worried about server-firsts or bleeding-edge content or having a truly competitive arena team. But IMO one of the problems is, a lot of the theorycrafting on the web and in various forums is done by people who do care about those things, and who will say 2% less DPS on a raid boss moves a spec from "viable" to "not viable". Then the hoi polloi will read that stuff and then, like, kick someone out of their non-heroic Ramparts PUG for not having a min-maxed spec.
Not sure how to "solve" that, unless you maybe made respecs "free once a month, but completely unavailable otherwise". Nobody would be really happy with that, but I'd bet a bunch of at least semi-viable hybrid specs would appear in various forums.
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Actually this kind of touches on the issue I see right now. In pre-BC WoW, respec costs were semi-prohibitive. 50g was actually quite a bit of money to throw at respeccing. Now, however, it's not. But it's not free, either. So we're caught in a place where the respec cost really is just a tax. Not enough to discourage, but too much to be pleasant. I'm fairly certain that there wouldn't be a large amount of complaining if they increased the respec cost, aside from the deafening initial outcry. Players and guilds would understand that yes, Blizzard does in fact want you to make a decision on your spec and live by it, rather than the half-condoning of multiple respecs that we have right now, and respeccing for PvP would be less rampant, as players would either roll an alt for PvP, or choose a hybrid spec to be able to play both sides. Of course, in order for the second option to be viable, Blizzard needs to make talent trees more versatile in their ability to mix PvP and PvE.