Death Grip pretty much fills that exact design idea. Has anyone heard if it's been tried in PvP on the alpha yet?

This thread has become absurdly stupid.

There are people here suggesting, with straight faces, that instead of letting people respec between two different talent trees with some moderate ease that we should be encouraging them to create two characters of the same class.

Because somehow someone else not having to waste money, time, and effort doing something they don't enjoy just in order to play the game in a fun way impacts on their enjoyment of the game. And not because that other person can do more at any given point than they can, or because that other person is perceptibly different in some unimmersive way (at least not any less unimmersive than someone hearthing from a raid, respeccing, and then getting summoned back), but just because the idea that someone else is experiencing a different playstyle without having to spend days in the game leveling and gearing an alt causes their gaming experience to be destroyed.

These are people who are advocating the wonderfulness of WoW that allows people to play the game differently depending on what they enjoy.

Just stop and think about that for a second.

EDIT:

The real reason for this proposed talent spec swapping option seems to me to most likely be 10 man raiding. Allowing such an option will give devs a whole heap more fexibility in encounter design as they will be able to turn a raids with a Druid, Pally, DK, Shaman, Warrior, and/or Priest into more or less Tanks, DPS, or Healers as they wish. They can have a three tank fight with a Warrior, Pally & DK, then turn that into a one tank fight with the other two going DPS in the next encounter, all without having to change the raid personel.

This will mean that raids will not need to have large rosters and people sitting out waiting for certain fights but still let them push things and mix them up more. It should also mean they can tune things a bit harder in order to make 10 mans challenging further in the progression. It will do a similar thing for 25 man raids also.

Which is great if you ask me.

The fact that it might be used by some for PvP and Solo stuff is just icing on top. It makes it an idea than 100% of the players might get some use out of if they wished to.

You've constructed quite a strawman here. The issue is, why fix the symptom (people needing to respec often) with a band-aid (talent swaps)? Why not fix the core problem(widely varying raid requirements and "gimmicky" off-specs)? The last thing I want to see is that issue get ignored because talent stables "solved" the problem.

Becomes sometimes (especially in the case of hybrids) it's fun playing a different spec casually? Because one's main spec might not be suited for PvP and they'd still like to be able to without having to conform to a weekly "spec schedule"? Or just because they'd like to precisely tailor their spec for PvP and PvE without having to half ass both? There are many reasons to want to respec besides varying raid requirements and so called gimmicky offspecs.

The symptom is unfixable.

1) Because some people will always min-max and talents are necessarily different in their strengths. Either things become 'fixed' to the point where tank=dps=healer in one spec and you have removed the 'uniquness' that talent tress bring the game anyway, or they dont and people respec.
2) Because it's not 'need' for some people but 'want'. They want to play their character a different way in different situations, and don't have the time or inclination to level another character from scratch (which, considering gearing and the like, takes even someone who knows what they're doing days of game time) just to do so.

It is a game. Widely varying raid requirements contribute far more significantly to the game being varied and fun than people being able to respec limits it from being so. The fact some role-play fascists can't have fun unless they are limiting the enjoyment of others has nothing to do with this.

People wanting to respec is fine, but having to respec (or be replaced) because different fights require different number of tanks or healers is a bad mechanic. Blizzard should decide up front how many tanks and healers they want 10 and 25 man raids to require and balance encounters around that number. Sure, if a guild has particularly geared/skilled tanks or healers then maybe you can bring and extra DPS or vice versa, but that should apply to the entire instance.

Hopefully the gear combining that's going on fixes the gearing for multiple spec things too, as it stands with raid lockouts and limited number of arena points you can earn in a week it's actually easier for some classes to gear two characters than a single character in multiple specs. Sure, if you're lucky enough to be in a guild that's been farming content for months, or a 2k+ arena team with points to burn, you can get offspec stuff, but in my experience there's a heck of a lot of healers out there with DPS sets that are pretty terrible compared to their healing gear.

You're all missing the big picture here.

When Blizzard designed the game they had two options for making talents.
1) Talents are generally weak "useful but not required" things that only marginally enhance your character's baseline abilities.
2) Talents define exactly what your character can and can't do do.

Blizzard so far has taken the second approach. Warriors can not tank raid bosses without a significant investment in the prot tree. 0/0/0 Priests aren't especially good at healing. Holy Paladins don't DPS (I'm looking at you silly shockadins). That is the way the game has been since the major class reviews in the 1.x (before then there were some cases of oddities, for example, the healing Paladin build was heavy Retribution while the solo/PvP spec was somewhat deep protection, but regardless the game is quite different now).

People aren't arbitrarily telling you that you need to "reroll to enjoy all aspects of the game". It really looks like instead they are arguing for a "return" to the first method of talents not being as important as they are now. They are, in effect, arguing for hybridization. Making talents simply enhance your existing baseline class abilities instead of changing the very nature of your class. In this scenario if you're short a prot warrior one night a DPS warrior could fill in effectively without a respec. Sure, he could be missing a few little things that would make life easier from the prot tree but he isn't required to respec just to do a baseline class job.

Which method is better? It isn't my place to say. Some people like the heavy specialization associted with the raid trees right now. Some people still try to play 21/20/20 builds to try and fill that hybrid role. To each his own.

I will say this though; Blizzard is moving more towards the first method. If Warriors are any indication (Shield Slam made baseline, extra threat from Defiance rolled into baseline D Stance) they are trying to make it easier for "offspecs" to fulfill a job without requiring a respec.

People (most recently Lamaros, but this is a general trend) talk about min-maxing as if the majority of people will live and die for a 1% difference in capability. They won't. We'll all theorycraft about it, just to find out, but quite a few people will sit in a supoptimal spec if the supoptimality is small and they get some personal pleasure out of the different build. It's the quantitative gap in the builds that lets Mutilate rogues raid while Shadowstep rogues sit at home. So no, the problem is not endemic, and it's not even insoluable. The desire to respec regularly is contingent on game mechanics for the majority of players.

Case study: A warrior protection build will probably always suck in PvP, fully admited. However, I remember the day when a 31/4/16 MS warrior was the standard Main Tank for just about every progression guild on a PvP server, caused by the difference in tanking ability between that and full prot for tanking, and that and 31/20 for PvP, wasn't worth the respec cost. This isn't quite what flyingtoastr is talking about, since the 31-arms was necessary to be PvP-viable, but the point is that when hybrid builds existed within a few percent of either optimum, the majority of people actually took them, rather than optimizing for one and bitching. I've been thinking for a while that if Holy Shield were a 21-point talent instead of 31 (or better yet, a goddamn base spell like it should be), I would anticipate a large population of 40/21 paladins that heal on bosses and tank on trash, because the performance difference isn't worth the 100g, and the trash tanking is worth the trash talents.

And yes, people in pre-TBC would still respec lazer turky [sic] for a week just to mess around with a new spec every once in a while. I liked it better when it was doing that was a big deal.


I think the main reason this has died is that the level cap keeps raising by only 10 each time we get another 10 talent points in each tree. I hope the next expansion goes up to level 100 so that 31 into a tree is a hybrid build. If 60 points prot with MS isn't an arena-and-raid-viable spec, I dunno what is. Until then, I think flyingtoastr is generally on the right path with toning down talents in general. Not every talent point needs to increase your damage by half a percent.

I'm fairly certain the days of MTing with MS aren't going to make a comeback; the point made about 40/21/0 paladins is valid for warriors as well. Offspec tanks will be better than they are now at trash and especially 5-mans, and these changes won't usurp anything about raids. They're there for when you don't feel the need to min-max, but still want to get stuff done.

I think the respeccing thing is a sign that upcoming raid design will have more of that Sunwell feel of constant changes in the optimal group. It makes progression take longer if only due to gearing requirements, and allows for a lot more flexibility. If you consider the proposed model of a couple months between finishing one tier and starting the next, the whole "everyone has offspec gear" effect starts to come into play a whole lot earlier than in TBC.

Why add extra talent points? I think it would be better for every second expansion to increase the breadth but not depth of talents.

They could have done it for WotLK, 70 talent points allowing 41/30 or 31/40 type builds would have been interesting, especially if you have more choice in the talents you picked up along the way. As it is we'll all be going down to the 51 point talents and overspecializing.

If you aimed your trees around it, then made more hyjal style "linked trash and boss fights" there'd be a genuine value in being hybrid. Someone who is 90% as good at A and 80% as good at B should be an important option sometimes (not just tanks, healers too as sometimes trash is more healing intensive than bosses or vice versa, and you can either end the fight at full mana or throw out ineffective DPS).

The applications in PvP are obvious too, if depending on what you're up against you can switch from offense (DPS type abilities) to defense (healing/mitigation/defensive type abilities) it'd make the game more interesting. Even DPS classes can benefit, for example mages could actually get much of the survivability and control of frost with the pew pew of fire. And you might actually get more people healing if it didn't mean giving up all offense (surely I'm not the only one to look at a BG scoreboard and realise I'm the only player on either side specced for healing?)

I disagree, I don't think Blizzard is moving towards the first method at all. Warriors are the only multi-role class that are getting a significant change like that and its because they are tanks. The problem in TBC when trying to do Heroics was always finding Warriors willing to respec, it seems to me like the tanking changes are to ensure there are plenty of tanks for 5 man content. Giving all warriors Shield Slam and defiance doesn't suddenly make them capable of tanking 25 man raid bosses as Fury or MS. There also the 25 man bosses that have adds that aren't really bosses and could be tanked by DPS Warriors if not for threat issues (thats all those 2 changes do, is increase threat while tanking for a DPS warrior).

Count me in on this. I simply cannot believe people would rather spend however many hours/minutes it takes to farm up 50/100g just to experience content with their friends.

I have nothing against making Gran Turismo-esque 500 laps around Skettis to farm enough Primal Water to sell for gold if I'm farming for a great piece of craftable loot or even for an epic mount, but are there really people out there who believe being able to hop into your tanking gear to for a quick 45 minute daily dungeon run without having to do Quel'danas to spec back afterwards is a BAD idea?

The problem is:
Easy and cheap respeccing will make it much easier for raids to demand speciall talentbuilds, so many people are worried about there future as Owl/Lolret/Ele/...
It won't help with people having a nice pvp and pve spec or a group and solo spec in the high end raid setting, because you won't have 1 build for raiding but 2 (or whatever the number of spec-slots will be)

I think it's more that people believe that hopping into your tanking gear should be enough, your spec shouldn't be such a huge deal breaker that even when you vastly outgear an instance it's just too painful to do it unless you spec for tanking (and that's just as a warrior, druids and paladins have it even worse).

Why would you be worried? If a guild WANTS a Moonkin, or a Ret Pally, or an Ele Shaman in their raid, they'll recruit one.

What does easier respeccing have to do with it besides these Moonkin, Ret Pallies and Shamans being much less reluctant to go into their Feral/Resto/Holy/Prot trees if/when the situation calls for it?

If the guild is FORCING you to go Feral/Resto/Holy/Prot when you're not any one of those, you tell them to stick it up their ass and find a new guild. If you're a helpful guy who wants to get a 5-man going and doesn't mind speccing into Bear for a couple hours, this makes it that less painful to do so.

(going to refrain from separating your post as you did mine, as its against the board rules, anyway)

Healers mitigate damage in PvP because their classes are balanced around it, you would be taking from one class to give to another making one class less viable in order to beef up another classes single "spec". Also, the types of mitigation are different, healer mitigation often relies on a finite resources, or a short duration increase, a tanks doesn't.

As for the second point..You need to read my whole post. I said tanks can't be designed for PvP because of game mechanics I never said they were useless (Seriously, go read my post(s), that statement was never in one, ever, you really just made this up, so please, before you tell me to make up my "mind", actually read my "posts")...

The substance of tanking not being viable in PvP is simple. The combat system on many levels won't work in PvP. I gave the rogue example to show you how your argument is overly narrow and frankly short sighted. Imagine a tank deflecting 30% of the blows with a 65% avoidance rate on a target with 35% avoidance themselves. Against a meelee attacker you are effectively negating a huge portion of their damage, much much more so than say, a caster.

Or, lets take "taunt working"..The blizzard developers have said, and I agree with them, that losing control of your character is not fun. Its one thing to get CCd, but things like mind control aren't extremely valuable to "game play", they don't want to add to that, in fact, from the numerous trinkets, DR switches and other changes they want to lower it.

Lets also look at the discrepancy between physical damage absorption and magical damage absorption. I got into it a little bit with the rogue/warrior link..but lets say the tank could "tank" people...How would it be fair that all melee within the game would instantly lose due to more then 90% of their damage being negated, while casters might receive 16%, at most.

Tanking was meant to reduce physical damage on a mob..Spell mechanics of mobs have no chance to critical strike for a reason, because they are controlled bursts of damage that encounters aren't designed around unless the entire encounter is based off it (IE resist fight). Which leads to the problem of how you make a tank good against casters, while not trivializing tons of PvE content built around it. You can say change PvE content spells to be more akin to physical, but again, your asking for a complete mechanics overhaul.

The game as it is designed now can not handle tanking in PvP. The discrepancies between magic/physical is too large and the synergies it creates would be too weak *or* too strong depending. Could a game be created with PvP tanking? Probably, but it would have to be built from the ground up with that in mind.

So, yes, it has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with being practical.

A tank doesn't have to be able to tank players in exactly the same way that they tank mobs in order to be viable in PvP. Spell Reflect, Devastate, Intervene, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap and Shield Slam are already moderately useful abilities in PvP, and more could be done in that vein. If taunt, mocking blow and challenging shout caused all offensive abilities used by the afflicted player to hit the warrior instead (maybe only with a talent in protection, so as to keep those abilities unavailable to other warriors), those abilities would be powerful disruption and mitigation tools in PvP.

Additionally, if you're "absorbing" hits on your teammates with Intervene or Taunt, you can't avoid them, and therefore your avoidance is moot. At that point a protection warrior has ~70% mitigation for physical attacks when they can absorb them, which would not be all the time, and a lower amount of absorption versus spells coupled with spell reflect. It's certainly not an unsolvable problem; it seems to me that protection warriors are really not terribly far from PvP viability. A class that could deal low-moderate damage, put up some useful debuffs (maybe talents to improve TC and demo in ways that make them more powerful versus players?), and mitigate burst on their teammates might be a powerful force.

I fully agree and warriors are not the only example for this. Druids had in early BC generic druid items that had all 5 stats and spelldmg/healing. Obviously this was flawed and corrected not long after because game mechanics didnt play into that.

What we ended up with during SSC/TK was rogue, cat, bear, moonkin and tree gear for leather, neglecting one or two speccs each tier for druids. Cat got merged with rogue, now bear gets merged with rogue/cat and moonkin merged with tree.

This effectively makes people who specialize in one kind of specc and give that 100% of their attention still able to do a 90% job in a related field. Feral druids are the best example for it and their Offtanking/Catdps switches even during fights is what made them very strong during SSC/TK, with scaling problems end BT/SWP. A true hybrid and maybe the most well done change to a class in BC.

What i dont get is why people dont like the idea of where this is going. The RP arguement seems weak, why does someone need hard restrictions from the outside to follow their own RP rules.
I don't see healers outperforming dps talented players either, even if they wear the exact same gear. You could half the amount of impact talents have and still would choose properly talented players over random ones.
You could however implement new phases/tactics into fights where in one you need 4 tanks 4 real and 4 hybrid healers and in the next 4 tanks 13 real and 4 hybrid dpsers. 70-75% effectiveness is what i would aim for, for such a hybrid in both fields. Right now they are way below 50%, making that option rather luxury for farming so you switch/respecc less (i healed gurtogg for months as balance specc).

I guess the downside is that those hybrids would be overpowered in duels, but then again i never spend hours in durotar to give that concern much importance.

(just quoting this sentence to avoid a wall-of-text, and because it's the essence of your argument, but I did read the whole post)

Well, I will simply and flatly say : you're wrong. Precisely, you lack a broader vision and creativity. With the present talents and abilities, of course a PvP tank isn't manageable. That's a given, and that's precisely why you don't see much prot warriors in arena.
But we're talking about what could be done with a bit of creativity, with adding some talents, some abilities, and changing/adding some game mechanics. And THEN, it's perfectly possible to make PvP tank viable. Others have already given some suggestion as to how do that.

If you can't see a way to reach this, well you simply lack imagination as to how do it, it has nothing with game mechanics limitations.

As for the Blizzard poor excuse for a reason not to allow taunt in PvP, I'll simply laugh. Saying "people don't like to lose control of their character", when the single most irritating thing in PvP is precisely the fact that you spend as much time CC'ed as actually playing, is a very weak argument.
Immersion is greatly defined by the rules of the world. You can make up your own rules, but at some point you need to also take in account how it actually really works in the game.
It's having a nonsensical plot, destroying lore and the like : in the end, it detracts from the experience, even if it allowed to have famous foes.
There is a reason Blizzard wants people to actually interact with Arthas, there is a reason why CoT1 was so popular. All is not pure gameplay, and feeling the world alive, sensible and coherent is also a large part of the fun.

Being able to respec at will make a bit of the lore disappear.
Also, I dread that being easily able to respec will also cause the death of everything but ultra-cookie-cutter builds. Another war of the clones, where every single guy is the same spec in the same situation, because there is always one spec a bit better than other in a particular case, and with free-swapping, you don't have any reason to hybridize a bit to get some versatility.

We had this argument before, but here's what it comes down...

Freespec, for lack of a better term, allows for the following Good Things to happen:

(1) A guild can run with closer to 25 people and 25 toons and let those 25 toons and people perform a multiplicity of roles
(2) People can participate in raids and enjoy themselves in arenas and BGs without having to think twice about it

The current system, call it, Taxspec, causes the following to happen:

(1) Some guilds sit people around outside the instance for hours on end to sub them in for specific encounters even though those people play the same or similar classes as people inside the instance. This causes displeasure for both the people sitting outside and the people who will be subbed out.
(2) Some people don't participate in arenas or BGs because their raid spec simply doesn't allow them to (think protection warriors) and they can't afford the time to make gold to constantly spec in and out of a PVP spec, especially to just queue seredipitously for a battleground when they have a free half hour.
(3) Some people are forced to spend several additional hours farming gold for the express purpose of being able to switch between PVE and PVP specs so they can participate in both PVE and PVP with their friends.

Somehow, the Taxspec crowd thinks that having Freespec will destroy the fabric of the WoW Universe, when the lone difference is the removal of the tax on the respecing and therefore the democritazation of respecing. It will become apparent to everyone they can enjoy both a PVE and PVP spec if they chose and / or that all guilds can make it possible to have the "9th healer" be useful as a ret pally / holy pally or a holy priest / shadow priest. Or have the "4th tank" be useful as a dps warrior or whatnot.

Quite frankly, if they didn't implement this, I was with a small but real minority that was going to either leave the game entirely or certainly play it an awful lot less. Already, I've given up on PVP this go round. It's pointless to try to PVP on the priest with the holy build and too expensive to go back and forth every time I want to run some arenas.

Everyone wants new talents and clearly Blizzard didn't want to add 20 talent points, which wouldn't have solved the problem anyway. Min-maxing is real and all raid builds are going to be too deep to allow for viable arena specs in many classes and vice versa. And, for that matter, few resto druids are going to do much as moonkins on Brtuallus without a respec (or insert whichever class your extra healer plays). And few dps / healer hybrids are going to get you through the Twin Eredars without a respec either. I mean it's all well and good to say "don't make encounters require a different number of healers or tanks" but that's just not interesting either.

The immersion argument is a canard and always was. Your "immersion" is not mine. We each accept a million non-immersive things in the name of enjoying the game. Whether it's summonable mounts, instances., whatnot, we all have the things that bug us and the things that don't. (My pet peeve? Evade.. evade... evade...) The fact is you can respec. Our previous argument was a willingness to actually undergo a process to earn the right to have multiple specs and switch between them. And to incur the trainer visit to do so.

I'm sorry that having easily accesssible respecs bothers some people. Resto druids in arenas bother other people. Should those be removed too?

One could argue that respecs at all destroy lore, the faster switching of which we got no clue how easy it is, is more of a convenience change. I guess we can agree on it going too far for your taste, while others who are less concerned with staying in one specc for RP reasons would have no problem in choosing a specc for the next 30mins.
Convenience seems to be always a matter of concern and i remember discussing with EQ players at the beginning of WoW that they despise all the convenience, but after gotten it and got used to it they would only look back with nostalgia, not real effort of going back to the inconvenience for the sake of immersion.
Im guessing the mainstream is not your level of convenience but the one that doesnt loose 20mins of an hour of gameplay for immersion.

As min-max raiders the majority of this forum is also closer to the mainstream as its maximizing their actual playtime compared to immersion downtime on waiting for someone of the raid to respecc or going into a 5 man heroic 15mins late because you had to wait for a tank.

Your second point in the quote is rather a problem of deeper talent trees each expansion. If you dont make the trees hybrid in itself (which is the exception with druids and DKs) you gain more specialization and a hybrid specc cant keep up with bottom heavy talented players. Secondary trees went from 4 out of 7 tiers to 4 out of 9 and now 4 out of 11 loosing a bit of the hybrid specc feel (meaning effectiveness) each time.
Ultra-cookie-cutter is an answer to hybrid-crap builds that loose too much at the bottom and dont gain enough from the new tree at the top.

I can't agree with your first statement, because I don't think that this change will have any effect on specs like Moonkin or Ret-Paladin, but I think you're somewhat right with the second one.

I am very exited about the proposed change to be able to switch between two different Talent Builds. I have respecced this week s ID 4 times from PvE-Raid-Build to PvP and back. So that's 400g of respec costs for one week and I wouldn't mind if I could safe that gold and invest it in some other way.

Nevertheless, I am rogue and I only have the option between PvE and PvP spec. But I am sure most high end raiders that play classes like Warriors, Priests, Druids and Paladins will not have the luxury of having an PvE and a PvP spec. They will be forced to spec Prot/Fury or Holy/Shadow or Feral/Resto, to provide two different "uses" in raid environment.

On the up-side, this change gives a huge boost of flexibility and creativity to raiding. You can have Priests that can switch between CoH and Pain Suppression, you can have the obligatory Haler who can do good dps on fights that don't need too much healing, you can have the Warrior who can properly tank when there are fights needing 2+ tanks and who can dps when only 1 tank is needed.

This helps enormously in 10 and 25 man raids, but even in 5 mans ans solo play, switching between offensive and defensive talent builds or pve and pvp builds will let people enjoy more choices of play.

While I welcome the flexibility it offers, I know some classes will still have to pay respec-costs to PvP, because good PvE specs don't go too well in PvP/Arena.