Of course it is more synergistic to have spell power hybrids spec into healing or DPS. The problem with being gemmed appropriately for your offspec I feel is moot. You're an off-healer/dps and I would expect your numbers be just that, offspec range. You may not be healing/DPSing as much as your counterparts (5-10% less) but that is still 80-90% better than you healing when your raid needs more DPS to not hit the enrage timer.

As for certain specs needing different sets of gear. It's at least no worse than it is currently. I personally will be Feral Bear/Feral Cat but for an Enhance shammy or a DPS warrior, even if you are using the same gear in a different spec you'll still be better off than using the same gear and same spec.

I am confused by the phrase, "My two specs will be..." in this thread. It seems like saying, "My one spec in BC was...". I don't know about your hybrids, but my main is a pure dps class and I had at least 3 specs in rotation for most of BC. I am more interested in "What will my one free spec be?" because my "second spec" is going to be at least 3 specs. I can see having my tuned raid spec available for all pve content, but the idea that I would carry around a pve frost build in my pocket full time just for A'lar and Supremus is laughable. I would have done (with two specs) what I actually did (with just one): dropped 50g on raid night to switch my arena build into an A'lar-friendly pve spec. But under a dual-spec system, I just use it for the convenience of an instant respec and clear the rest of the instance as deep fire.

My point is that many plans for dual specs are misguided because we're not really being offered two specs but only one. A tank with a healer offspec is amazingly adaptable, but if you have a surplus of healers don't be surprised if someone in charge asks you to drop 50g on having a dps off spec instead. As has been pointed out, dual spec makes even more unattractive the idea of trying dps without a full 61 talents to back it up. Corollary to this, dps classes need to show up with a max dps spec and a this-instance's-gimmick-boss spec.

Pure dps will be expected to show up to raid with a second spec that is particularly suited to the night's raid. Druids and paladins will have a main spec that they are best geared for, but will be expected to swap their offspec depending on raid attendance. Warriors have drastically different raid buffs in their two dps trees, so they will find themselves in the same boat if they want to maintain a prot minor. Shaman may escape this since the gear changes between the two dps specs much more radically than for warriors. So shaman and priests are the only classes who truly have the luxury of saying, "my two specs are...", oddly enough because they only have 1 viable dps spec available at any one time. If Guardian versus Divine Spirit is a hard question for priests, you may see the curious phenomenon of raid holy priests all having the same shadow offspec while their raid healing build changes from night to night.

As a barely relevant aside, remember that a lot of serious arena players use different specs in 2v2 and 5v5. If you feel like pve flexibility is robbing you of your free pvp respec, remember that pvp flexibility is stealing their badge farming spec from them too.

Except that, precisely, it's also because you do like your class, that you cringe when you see it being simply "worse".
Someone said "when you have your healers and tanks, having a hybrid doesn't add anything to your raid".
Yes, when your back is already covered, it's the case. But the advantage of hybrids is precisely ensuring your back is covered, because that's far to be a given, particularly in part-casual guilds where attendance is not 100 %.

As for the dual-spec feature, honestly I really don't like it.
Sure, it adds flexibility, and it is convenient. But there is two points that make it a bad change in my opinion :

- It's increasing the advantage of "hybrids" compared to "pure" classes. I know it's subjective, but from my point of view, hybrids are already more than sufficiently interesting, to not need yet another relative buff.

- Even more importantly than the previous one : Blizzard took enormous pain to make sure that any spec is "good enough". They increased enormously the damage output of tanks and healers, they added PvP utility in all trees, they tried to give everyone their place in raid.
In other words, they ensured that you could play nearly all aspect of the game with nearly any spec, and so you would NOT need to respec.
Giving a free second spec destroy the very point of making a spec able to hold its own in all the aspects of the game (and it also remove all the meaning of being "this spec", which is more of a flavour point).

Quite a self-defeating move they made here, I think.

That doesn't make sense at all. An arms warrior being able to tank is not the same as a holy paladin being able to tank. Heck, as a pure DPS class I had four specs I switched between (although usually it was only two) between PvP and PvE, and that's without wanting to switch roles at all. Saying "You don't have to be prot/holy to tank/heal a 5 man" is nothing at all like saying "We don't want you to respec ever".

I'm afraid you misunderstood what I meant.
I didn't imply you would never have to respect, but rather just that you would not NEED to respec constantly for convenience, as the "weak points" of each spec were smoothed quite a bit.

Of course, if you wish to change role, and be the best in a domain, a respec will be in order no matter what. But with the new mechanisms, you do not feel over-punished by being of any spec and wanting to try a bit of something (or just doing your dailies). As such, there is no more such a need to be able to switch spec.
So they corrected the problem twice, making one of the correction counter-productive to the game.

Tizzlewump: I'm confused by what you're saying. You seem confused by people saying "My two specs will be x and y" but then go on to just explain your two specs will be "x and y and if the raid calls for it I'll redo y into z."

Akka: I understand your points but you (and others) are missing what I think people are trying to get at because you guys are thinking about this from a pure DPS class point of view. As a feral druid I have the option of speccing more bear or more cat. When I spec more bear I lose DPS when I'm not being utilized as a tank. So I have my other spec be filled with something useful. Whether that should be heals or dps is dependent on my guild and raid but in either case it will be more useful than my subpar DPS as a bear specced feral. It's just not the same comparison when talking about a mage/lock/rogue/hunter; any one of those classes will bring different tricks to the table if they are specced differently but it's not close to the same as a tank going to a DPS spec from trash to boss.

This seems like largely a hybrid problem but is hardly what the OP was trying to get at. He was talking about a way to min/max using the two specs which if it starts to happen, Blizzard will make it impossible to do. That makes this thread what the conversation has turned into "what two specs will you spec?" which makes this thread pointless.

The more I see blue posts about the dual spec feature, the more I'm uncertain how it's going to work. (No doubt partially because I think at this point, the devs are a little uncertain how it's going to work.) For example, a recent blue post stated:

That statement makes it sound more like it's intended merely as a convenient time-saver... not a cost saver. Some of the very early blue posts on the topic did suggest the cost-saving aspect, but it's been a while since I've seen any along the same lines. Has anyone seen any recent confirmation that switching between the two won't cost gold? Given that both of my favorite characters are hybrids that have had their respec costs capped since the cap was introduced, it's definitely going to be a convenience either way, I'm just not sure whether I should be looking forward to saving money as well.

In response to Finhosh: I wouldn't be too sure that we'll see the end of the days of not being able to find a tank or healer despite having a group full of hybrids, even if there's no switch cost. Plenty of people dislike a role their class can perform; as an example, I know plenty of feral druids who love the class, and even switch out of form to help heal in emergency situations, but refuse to put together an actual healing set. I'm sure the same could be said about some fury warriors. Yes, the dual spec feature will help, with people like us willing to switch between our specs all the time because it's fun, but don't expect it to solve all our group problems overnight.

There haven't been *that* many recent posts about dual-spec, so the fact that they haven't mentioned the cost in the few they've made doesn't really suggest anything. If they were to retain the cost of spec switching, then it would certainly be in substantial opposition to what they suggested was the point of introducing dual-spec, which is that they wanted players participating in both PvE and PvP if they have the desire to do so. Very few people really give a shit about having to allocate their talent points and add a few skills to their hotbars.

They have never mentioned the cost (or lack thereof) of swapping specs in any of their posts about dual-spec, not just recent ones.

They did mention that the dual-spec would swap your glyphs for you. I'm certainly much more worried about hotbar setup time, travel time to and from capital cities and instances and talent-reassignment time than I am about the gold cost of respecs.

I don't see things the same way.

The advantage of the dual spec system for hybrids is overstated I think. Hybrids were already hearthing/respeccing/being resummoned back to Sunwell raids. The only advantage gained here is pure convenience, there's effectively no new practical advantage that wasn't there before. It's not like any player can succeed at it anyway, they have to first be competent in both roles, have the gear, and the motivation. Those are fair assumptions for these boards, but not the entire populace.

"Pure" classes can also make good use of the dual-spec system. For example, Affliction Warlocks can easily have a backup spec for when they're causing problems with the debuff limit. Even Warlocks who prefer Destruction or Demonology can have alternative specs designed for survivability when the fight calls for it. It's not as though Hybrids have a complete monopoly on raid uses for Dual Specs.

On the second subject, I don't believe Blizzard intended for any spec to be capable of everything without sacrifices. Even Feral, once thought of as a Tank/DPS/PvP spec in one, has been changed so that you can't do all three optimally with the same spec. That's Blizzard's intent. You can't spec for raid DPS and be optimal for PvP and/or tanking at the same time, but you can spec any one of the three within the same tree.

Yeah, you can use the dual spec system to complete your dailies faster than your tank/healing spec might have, but with the changes Blizzard has made that's not as big a deal as it once was. Besides, some people are going to split their specs between tanking and healing, or healing raids and healing BGs. Blizzard's work at raising the DPS potential of healers and tanks isn't meaningless even with the Dual Spec system.

I can't refute this claim, because it would involve searching through far more blue posts than I'm interesting in searching through. But it's not the impression I've gotten. If they're not planning to remove the respec cost, then there's no reason to limit it to only two options, since it's trivially easy to let a player save more than two.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but can you provide a reference for this? They must have made this claim fairly recently, because the last I'd heard they were non-committal about pretty much all aspects of it. When a player asked explicitly whether it would support glyph swapping, they quite directly said, "we don't know, we're not done with it yet. What would you like to see?"

I'm pretty sure you're in the minority here. I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that the big draw for the average player is the ability to participate actively in PvE content *and* also in arenas and battlegrounds, with an appropriate spec for each. In that case, if you're joining arenas or battlegrounds, then you're likely already in or close to a capital city where you can respec, where you could "un-spec" again when you're done. You seem to be looking at this from the perspective of a player having multiple PvE specs to swap between throughout a single raid, and while there's some added flexibility there, it's just not the group of players Blizzard is targeting with such a feature.

And anybody who really has a lot of difficulty setting up their hotbars should just write down the configuration so they can recreate it later.

Speaking as somebody who has spent just under 2000 gold on respecs since 3.0 came out, the ability to keep hotbars saved for talent switching would be a huge benefit.

When I am speccced holy, I have 3-4 Holy Specific abilities on my bars, as well as slightly reorganising seals and judgements.
When I am specced prot, I have 3-4 Prot specific abiltiies on my bars, as well as taunt, shield wall (the pally equivalent), et cetera.
When I am specced ret, I have 3-4 Ret Specific abilities on my bars, as well as things like Avenging Wrath and a couple of DPS Macros.

I think that makes my point. When switching between specs, the meniality is not simply in clicking the talent tree and leaving the city. It's in putting your abilities on the bars - removing old ones, replacing them with new ones from both macros page and spellbook, and making sure that everything is there. It's rather embarrassing to respec prot, start tanking and then realise you have forgotten to put Taunt on your bar...

Adding the ability to switch hotbars with specs is a huge bonus and shouldn't be overlooked.

There will be some kind of place in town you have to go to. I doubt they will let you be able to change on the fly. There will most likely be a cooldown too.

Actually, all three of those statements have been flatly contradicted. You will, yes, be able to toggle your specs at any time while out of combat, with no cooldown, regardless of location, with no gold cost.

I think this is also a feature that will cut down the time you need to farm old content. Often you would want to bring more healer than really needed because they were nice to have for some fights. However for trash and less healing intensive boss fights those healers effectively went afk due to the fact that there was nothing to do at all. A good example for this is actually Naxx25 where most fights can be played with 4 geared healers - nevertheless most raids bring at least 6, if not 7 healers.
I really look forward to being able to switch to my secondary gear and spec and being able to contribute even when my heals aren't needed.

While this is true as a third tenmanhealer or a healer in heroics, this falls a bit short when you are a "primary" healer (say one of two in 10man). Your spellpower might be comparable, your sustainability is not (and not even close). So you are more like 0.8 or 0.7 of a healer in the sense of how much healing you actually can put out.

That said, it really is a great change due to the fact of reducing amounts of raids cancelled due to lacking tanks or healers.

I personally cannot see how the dual spec feature would cost anything at all, and involve anything but your own interface when it comes to swapping. Like the devs. have said multiple times already, a respec is just a portal and a summon away, so the entire feature would be somewhat "pointless" if all it did was save you a portal and a summon.

Marginally off-topic, but as a druid who respecs all the time, my solution is to have macros for each ability, as a macro won't disappear from your bar even if you can no longer cast an ability in the macro. They're not complicated, they're literally just:

#showtooltip Wild Growth
/cast Wild Growth

I have a bar set up with healing abilities, and other bars set up for other jobs that I switch between based on spec. (Technically it's easier as a druid with automatic bar switching based on forms, but I do this similarly on my shaman where Bar 1 is all my enhance abilities and Bar 2 is all my healing ones.) Admittedly, depending on what you use as a bar mod, how your have your keybindings set up, and how close you are to your macro limit, this might not be a trivial solution, but until the dual spec thing lands it's a reasonable workaround.

Having two specs is better than having one. Blizzard acknowledges that people change specs, sometimes multiple times a day which takes time and money. More and more this game is changing to remove things that are tedious and generally inconvenient, and long may these changes continue. There is no doubt in my mind that the changes will be cost free and not involve returning to town, there would no point in making the change if this was not the case. Some classes will benefit more of course but at the end of the day it is a change that will make everyone’s life easier and that’s a positive change. How anyone can argue that baffles me, seems people want to have their cake and eat it.

I have to say, from the way things sound I'm hoping this will be treated like a 'meta-stance'. We're familiar with stances already: Warriors have built in hot-bar swapping, Rogues do it for Stealth, etc. Personally, dual-specing SHOULD be like an extra layer of this, so for example a warrior has his Def/Bat/Ber bar setup for one spec, then switches to his other spec and can have a totally different bar setup for all three stances. The idea of glyphs changing as well isn't really much of a stretch, since you'd already be switching between hotbar setups with completely different talented spells [potentially]. Still, that's a 'should', and we all know how that can turn out...

I think they realized during the design process that allowing people to switch quickly was pointless unless they included all the other related things as well. There's no point in releasing a major new feature and then basically requiring people to have mods in order to use it well. However, it's a much more significant undertaking to have saved hotbars, glyphs, and all the other related things than it is to just add a "respec here to other spec" button. It also introduces the possibility of lots of bugs such as retaining abilities from the other spec. So it makes sense that it has slipped in deployment. I suspect the spec swapping will be like the voice chat patch from BC, a significant sized patch (perhaps 3.2), but one that doesn't include a new dungeon.

The dual spec feature will be very good for me. I play a shaman and while my main spec is resto and that's what I enjoy doing most, I also have quite some nice enhancement gear that I keep up to date with enchants and gems, etc.
While they did buff resto DPS with the spellpower change, I still kill mobs 3-4 times slower as resto than I do as enhancement.

When I log, I go do some dailies, then I go raid, after the raid I might do a quest or two, or I may do a heroic on which I could either heal or DPS, so that means that I would need to respec 3-4 times every night to really enjoy what I am doing.
Not only that that would cost up to 200g, but it would also waste 30 mins or so. Also I would never bother to change glyphs unless I planned to play the same spec for a few days.
As others mentioned, even in raids you could use different specs for different bosses, and if you have the gear and experience for each spec, you could top the healing meters on Patchwerk and top the DPS meters on Thaddius.

In reality I don't do the respecs therefor I go and do my dailies as restoration and feel miserable that mobs take ages to die. When I try to make a heroic group I don't ask other healers since nobody really respecs just for a heroic.

If I had a 1 button click to go enhancement I would enjoy the game a lot more, therefor I will be very glad if the feature they plan to implement only saves me the 5 minutes + 50g.