It also doesn't solve the need for a farming alt for healers, since if you have a healing PvE and PvP spec, you have no room for a farming spec.

I wonder if you could at least solve the farming problem by giving healing spells a damaging component at a percentage of healing effectiveness (maybe somewhere in the 50% range). However, let them generate threat at the heal value. That way they'd be ideal for farming (powerful and efficient, since your spec is set up to benefit your heals), but useless outside of a solo environment unless you want to make tanks very unhappy.

I'm sure many of you played Diablo 2 (where respecing wasn't possible) and played a character that was really awesome for ages, then hit a brick wall due to some unforseen circumstance (like not knowing whole area's would have double schooled magic immunity). The same happens in wow, that point maybe 1850 arena ranking or dps requirements for Brutalus, but eventually without respecing it won't be possible for you to progress, however well you play with your current talents.

This means respecs are here to stay, I personally am completely against forcing someone to do something boring or unpleasant in game that is any worse than a corpse run, so I can't see any logic for high respec costs, if you make the cost high people will still do it (albeit less frequently), but they'll resent it more.

The talent slate idea solves so many problems it is by far my favorite idea I've heard from WOTLK (and as someone who is likely to be in a 10 man only guild I already have a lot to be pleased about).

Some possibilities

Pvp and raid.
Farm and raid.
Interchange who is the gimped affliction/divine spirit/etc guy easily so one person not always lumbered with an unpleasant role.
Adjust specs for novelty boss fights like Leothras tanking without big raid delays or gimping for other fights.
Fit into a 5 man group in multiple roles thus making it much easier to form.
Have a fun spec such for messing around with when you don't need to be overly serious (not just spamming shadow bolt for example).
Swap over specs for fights rather than swapping players (so for example your 3rd tank isn't a waste of space on fights that only need 2).
Shrink maximum guild size for high end guilds, by not having quite so many people waiting to swap in as you swap from 10 healers down to 6 and up again.
Stops people waiting long periods for other people to hearth and respec if person X didn't show for the raid as the spec is already pre written.
After quitting a holy priest in part because of how dull solo play was, I'm sure this would also encourage more people to play unfilled roles such as tanks or healers.

How I would implement
Allow normal respecs as you do currently with a very slightly increased gold cost to account for inflation.
Allow you to respec one of your "spec slots" for a slightly larger fee at a trainer.
Put a 30 minute - 3 hour cooldown on spec changes of all types of respec but allow for some kind of mistake correction.
Wipe buffs cast by you if you spec out of an ability (to stop people respecing just to buff).

You have to consider some people find DPS, or healing, or tanking boring and unpleasant, even though their class can do it (and it's not even avoidable, every class can DPS). If respeccing becomes an expected part of the game because it's so trivial to do, you've just moved the burden from those who enjoy all the roles but don't like paying for it onto those who are happy doing just one role.

The question becomes what's the greatest good for the greatest number of people? My personal impression from the people I've played with is that most people playing hybrid classes don't respec often. Those that do respec often do so out of desperation rather than desire: eg DPS warrior needs badges but can only get heroic groups by tanking, so they grit their teeth for a weekend of something they don't enjoy for the shiny DPS gear they get at the end of it. Now maybe there's an untapped market who would like to respec more often but don't want to pay to do so, I don't know. Hopefully blizzard do know the answer to this question and are getting it right.

I don't see how that will make it a problem. The DPS warrior in your example would still have to respec to get his badges, only this time he isn't paying for it. People that want to stick to one role can still do so, the only thing that changes is that they might not be understood by others for that. If anything, the hybrids (like myself) who can't be arsed paying 100 gold to tank the occasional heroic daily, can now fill whatever role is needed, which will even out the demand and supply of certain roles (e.g. if there is a huge lack of tanks, hybrids will quicker respec to that role than a different role as that will be the easier solution to get a group going). Therefore, the way I see it, it can only improve the current situation as people who want to stick to their role can still do that, but others who would happily fulfill a different role (but don't want to pay for it every time they have to) can now finally do so.

I don't understand why people think that Blizzard is going to lower the amount of gold required to respec. They're going to create some inflation when the expansion comes out. Why can't they just leave the costs as they are?

I wouldn't mind being able to go to a trainer and tell them that I want to pay 50g to switch to my other spec. 50g isn't an enormous amount of money now, but it'll be a trivial amount of money once we're doing level 80 daily quests.

I don't understand why people think that Blizzard is going to make level 80 Daily Quests that are worth lots of money.

More seriously, I could easily see Blizz not scaling the rate of Gold Income via dailies at all, or reducing it, at 80 and leaving many of the existing gold sinks untouched. That way the quests are less important in the grand scheme of things.

as the respec cost will not be something to consider when you respec at level 80 the cost to respec could be taken out of the game anyway. Why annoy players with an extra click to respec when it serves little to no purpose at all anymore.

If it is easy to perform outside of your role due to easy respecs, then the community at large will develop the expectation that people will comply, and for some people that expectation is itself a very, very bad thing. All you warriors, imagine this: all those whispered PUG requests that you responded with "sorry, I'm not tank spec", that won't work anymore.

I see both sides of this. My druid, I like to respec frequently to get a feel for all aspects of the class, and I like to spend time practicing something while offspec for that task in order to get better at it while on-spec (eg. my time spent feral spec practicing healing has made me a better healer when I'm resto spec). My paladin, however, will never ever spec Holy ever again, being a healer makes the paladin class un-fun to play for me. My shaman shifts between enhancement and resto even while he's leveling, but my rogue is in the "subtlety forever" camp. Whichever way they go, they're going to make things better for some of my characters and worse for others.

(This affects PUGers more than raiders by far.)

"sorry, I do not wish to tank'

If they moan, then ignore them its a pug and they can't force you to play something you dislike. Then have fun trying to get invited as dps, which is already a problem. Atleast 80% of pugs won't be PvP spec.

This week I turned down a ZA run because I was subtlety spec, I didn't want to spec for PvE for one run when I planned to do more pvp the next day and that would have been 4 respecs in one week. If i had two talent specs I could have one assaination for pve and one subtlety for pvp and this situation wouldn't arise. Currently I spec between mutilate and combat for pve a bit anyway to keep it interesting so I would still be respec'ing in the expansion with two talent stables. On my druid I'd still have balance, resto and pvp resto I would spec between, just means i can play pvp without feeling guilty that I'm going to have to do dailies to get the gold back.

Personally I would love jumping between restoration and balance in the expansion and theres plenty of ferals jumping between feral and resto now. It doesn't make it 'easier', unless you can do it without seeing an NPC, but removes the cost.

The only money I make is from selling badges, I detest repeatable daily quests as they feel like working so I can play pvp/raids. Before the gem vendor I hovered around 200g doing dailies only when needed and only pvping on the saturday. I'm sure i'm not the only one looking forward to two talent stables, and looking at various reporting websites its been one of the headlines of the announcements even on casual websites.

Imagine if someone was arguing that flasks and elixirs should stack. The only effects are positive, right? It allows you to spend time any time during the week to power up your character and get through the raiding content faster! What kind of asshole would seriously argue for more wipes?! The argument is flawed, of course, because the encounters are balanced around what players can do. As Shakes said, people who play hybrid classes, as a whole, tend to enjoy the playstyle of their specialization. So though the idea of being "sometimes a healer, sometimes a dps" might appeal to some, I don't think it's something we want the raid designers to be working with.

I think they should certainly balance all encounters around X tanks Y dps Z healers and not have the sort of jumps in numbers we see in sunwell from Twins to Muru. It shouldn't be the case that the 25 people you take to boss A aren't optimal for boss B; it just creates large rosters and people sat outside an instance when they should be enjoying a game. It should be a case of being able to fill gaps in attendance with a willing respec as we do now, or for optimal PvP after raids.

I don't think Blizzard will ever do that because it completely constraints encounter design. Some bosses you need 1 tank since there is just the boss to tank, other bosses you will want to have adds involved and create the need for additional tanks. Also, each encounter will always have a "preferred" class (e.g. melee dps on Mother), which means some change in raid composition (or at least for it to be optimal) is always present. Besides all that, it would also make the game a lot less interesting if each encounter favors a similar setup.

The problem is that you are arguing against what is already common practice when we talk about high end raiding, just not the way that is player friendly. End game raiding guilds in most cases stack their raids for each encounter when doing progress and that means that people stay out at the instance entrance and change in only for the encounter they are needed.

That is the most unfair way to handle the problem of different encounters requiring different setups I can imagine, but it's done and not by Blizzard, but by the players themselves. And before you argue that Blizzard is designing the encounters, yes they are, but the way they do it produces very challenging and interesting encounters (and by all reports the best raidencounters in WoW) if you look at Sunwell.

Encounters DO require different jobs done from the people in a raid group. Sometimes you have lots of adds to tank, sometimes you need more healing, sometimes you need more dps and less tanks and healing. That makes the encounters unique and interesting, but it requires raidgroups to adapt. either by changing the setup from boss to boss or by respeccing of some people within one instance (at least as long as you don't have all bosses on farm). You can't do Kalecgos with 3 Tanks and 9 Healers and think of downing Brutallus with the same group setup (at least in the beginning of your SW progress). Some people have to change what they do even between Boss 1 and 2 of Sunwell. So in my opinion its great if a Priest or Paladin can heal on Kalec and then instantly respec to Shadow or Retribution and do decent damage on Brutallus.

If you pigeonhole your character, by defining that you don't want to play any other spec than the one you chose, by all means, do it, its your character and your choice and no raidleader with half a brain would force you to play something you don't want to (or if he does you should find a new home). You just have to live with the fact that the raid has to fill the required raid slots for changing encounters and if that means that there is need for more healers or more DPS for a certain encounter it can happen that you get benched.

I really really hope that Blizzard will NOT do such a thing. Raid instances would become extremely boring if they did.

What Blizzard has done with Sunwell is creating the best encounters in WoW, in part because of how they changed the requirements on the raid with each encounter. Sure, if you have to switch around people for every encounter thats extremely annoying, but if you have a motivated and creative raidgroup where people are willing to perform other roles and excell in these new roles, you can have a really great time.

Would it really have hurt twins if flame sear targetted one-two less people, aoe damage targetting less people and then the dps requirements increased. Maybe the shadow images could be controlled by aoe/snares to prevent them reaching the raid and stunning them. Theres ways to tune it so that its optimal setup would be more in line with bosses around it. The more difficult part would be the 1-3 tank issue as always having adds to deal with or never having them wouldn't be as interesting as now.

I'll second my disagreement with this statement as this would be restrictive and boring. However, I also don't want to see a bloated roster. I dream of keeping the guild roster as tight as possible so that the wait list is at a minimum. I'm in love with the idea of making respecs more accessible as a means to expand encounter design while keeping roster bloat low.

The argument that people should only play the spec they want all the time is flawed in my opinion. People already play roles in raids that they don't necessarily enjoy for the good of the team. Mages spend the later half of Kalecgos chain decursing, shadow priests spend most of Felmyst mass dispelling, etc. My guild knows I compare WoW to playing on a community sports team and some plays are going to call for someone else to get to score while you assist. You can argue and say that you don't like being the assist and should never have to do it, or that you came here to 'play a game' and 'have fun' and this isn't fun for you, or that since you pay your club fees you can do whatever you want. Nevertheless, if it's raiding we're talking about, at the core is the fact that you are playing with other people.

Most of the people complaining about new respec possibilities don't seem to be coming from Sunwell guilds so I'm wondering if experiencing that content would not help motivate people to see the possibilities of players becoming a class and not just a spec. In my experience, players who have played multiple roles during raid are much better players than the ones who have only experienced one facet of it. I know that when I first ran my priest through Blackwing Lair after taking my mage through it and MC, it opened my eyes to the game and I was a much better mage as a result.

The possibilities of new types of raid encounters grows exponentially if the expectation of people to play more than one aspect of their class becomes more common.

Hey, I guess Blizzard was irritated that people mocked the difficulty of BT while praising Naxx, and they showed that they still could make fights requiring stacking if they wanted ^^

Assuming one of the reasons they're looking at allowing multiple specs is the issue of people who want to pvp and pve but don't want to farm 100g at each boundary, it would make sense to have it set up not like a free respec any time, but one specifically tied to the beginning of arena/bgs. That would not affect raids at all and the protadin who doesn't want to spec holy on bosses wouldn't be forced to (instead the onus would be on blizzard to make protadins somewhat useful when not tanking, at least as much as extra prot warriors).

EDIT: I'm just saying, everyone has a different pve and pvp spec. Not everyone has multiple pve specs. It seems silly to design something at essentially the UI level that would have totally different implications by class.

Blizzard have been talking about encouraging people to take part in both the pve and pvp aspects of this game and I honestly believe that the dual talent specs change is in this line. I would be willing to bet for damn sure that this is so that people can have 1 pvp spec and 1 pve spec, so that casuals can enjoy both parts of the game with a relative degree of success. Talent respec costs to some are a relatively large time sink and, for some, not worth it (in a sense of grinding time vs. actually playing the fun parts of the game time), for people with limited play time.

When I used to do pug heroics etc I would see alot of pug rogues specced shadowstep, mages frost pvp spec, warriors arms/fury etc. Respec costs are a big deal to people who don't have alot of time to put into the game and are currently prohibiting people with limited playtime from taking part in both pve and pvp, this is based on my personal experience (since becoming much more casual) and that of my friends who play the game casually. If any of you seriously believe that blizzard are introducing the idea of two talent specs so that they can go about balancing raid design around every class having 2 pve specs at once you have to be absolutely bonkers. At the moment hearth and summon means that people can essentially respec at will, as long as they have the gold. Respeccing is a gold sink plain and simple. This change has got to be aimed at eliminating this gold sink for people who want to play 2 different parts of the game.

If they change it, it should be so healers/tanks can respec to farm and then back for the raid, respeccing for PvP should not be a primary motivator in this change (the people that only PvP won't magically do PvE with free respecs). I make a point to do all my daily quests every day. If I am a DPS spec, it takes me about 1/3 the time, leaving me with that other 2/3 to do even more farming before the raid. If I am tanking spec, it takes significantly longer. If I respec to farm and then back again, I'm barely breaking even, while every DPSer doesn't have this problem. I farmed repair money and mats and everything for 6-7 night a week raiding during Naxx... as a resto druid, when gold was significantly harder to attain. Although I love daily quests and the easy money they give, I still find having to do them as my PVE low damage/low mana efficiency spec to be very unnecessary. Maybe Holy Paladins just suck at killing things (although I think priests/shamans/prot warriors share the pain), but it seems a bit unnecessary.. or maybe they should just buff the amount of damage those classes can do (or maybe up the mana efficiency of their offensive spells?).

Count me among those who think this conversation has gotten inane. Not because I dispute that there are two or more sides to this equation, but because it's devolved into the same people saying the same things over and over.

For me, this comes down to Blizzard's attempt to do two things:

1. Increase the variability of raid encounters while minimizing the amount of per boss respecs or player swaps by allowing players (especially hybrids) to move between essential roles [heal, tank, dps] to suit the specific encounter needs.

2. Allow players to easily swap between solo, raid, and pvp specs, enhancing their enjoyment of potentially new areas of the game.

Not everyone will be able to swap between all specs they want to play with at all times, but it will certainly help with your top two choices at any given time.

Certainly, these changes may have an adverse impact on some segment of the playerbase, particularly people who are resistant to respeccing for whatever reason (skill, desire, roleplay). The choice is ultimately up to Blizzard, but my guess is that these folks are just going to end up being disappointed, because the two goals above appear to affect more people, and seem to synergize with other changes Blizzard is also putting in place (more streamlined gear for hybrids, usable in multiple specs).

I'm amused that as one of the most casual players I know (I don't raid, I don't even like to commit to dungeon runs in advance, which means... I sometimes do the cooking daily? "ooh"?), I think the respec thing is great. Yes, my warrior is a tank. Yes, my mage's concept is that of an arcane maga.

And yet, for the love of Elune, would it be great to one-button-push to an Arms spec for soloing/pvp or a Fire spec for raiding -- because when you're in T4, sorry, lore doesn't make up for the fact that arcane sucks versus fire.

Note: I'm on an RP server (*waves to Douglas*). Breaking the original concept of my mage (who was my original main) was not an easy decision. But if I could do (say) heroics in arcane spec ("heroicslol"), wow would that make me happy.

It's not just the hardcore raiders who are happy.