edit: I fail at reading and skipped a post. Ignore.

Actually I quoted the entire post to put an end to some of the guessing that was going on in this thread.

Highlighted one point of interest to me (as i'm levelling a DK at the moment) but feel free to actually read the rest of the post.

I completely agree that shadow priests for example make capable healers especially with the change to spell power that occured, but for vanilla its actually quite hard for a druid (one example of a class that i have levellled) to heal as feral without the support of a semi decent set of healing gear that can be quite hard to get.

What intrigues me about this the most is the ability to swap glyphs. So many people have said that they'll be using "prot" or "resto" or "holy" as one of their specs, but offhand I can think of 4 holy specs that I'd seriously consider using, as well as 2 prot and 2 resto. I don't think that this will significantly lower the amount that I respec, since I'll often change talents for a specific instance / PvP etc. Eg I'd happily heal Naxx as PvP spec, or BGs as PvE spec, but for Sarth + drakes or arena I'd want a specific spec.

Glyphs, on the other hand, stay very constant between respecs. I could potentially see myself replacing the PvP focused FoL glyph with divinty for extra LoH mana for PvE, but otherwise, at least for prot and holy, my glyphs would remain the same regardless of alterations to talents. This would effectively allow me two 'main' trees, in terms of glyph selection (and two is about the max I can manage really, I've tried juggling all three trees but one always ends up being left behind). I'd continue to respec into certain talents at certain times, but I'd shave 50-60g off each respec by not having to re-glyph.

<Misread that post, I think. Sorry! Snip.>

I think a lot of people are obsessing too much over the portable lexicons. Most of the swapping will probably take place in towns, except maybe in raids. Non-scribes aren't locked out of dual-speccing by any means.

No, they didn't. They said:

"Nethaera: How do you switch between specs?
Ghostcrawler: Players will be able to switch between their talent specs by visiting any Lexicon of Power provided they’ve paid for the ability to have a secondary spec."

There's an initial cost, probably higher than your average respec.

There's a miscommunication here, I think. I read the post as him saying "each time you access the spec," which is refuted by the interview. Poor reading comprehension on my part.

That said, I'm not sure that a very high cost is to be expected. This seems like a very time-consuming, expensive feature to implement so people can ignore it because they don't have 10,000g to spare. I wouldn't expect it to cost much - probably more than 50g, sure, but the value is pretty clear and it's a permanent benefit, which is also very attractive.

I think it's sort-of necessary.

If they put in dual specs in such a way that there's no barriers at all, either up-front or per-respec, then the player base will come to expect everyone to take advantage of it. And so, the people who do not want multiple specs will basically be forced to give up and submit.

A plausibly-high barrier means, if your enhancement shaman doesn't want to ever heal, you have a somewhat reasonable excuse. You cannot take for granted that every character in every PUG has access to the ability. This hopefully prevents the PUG ecosystem from essentially forcing people who don't want to heal into doing so, and helps prevent Blizzard from tuning around spec-swapping.

1000g sounds like a best-of-both-worlds price-point to me -- low enough that anyone who really wants it can get it, but high enough that you really can't take for granted that everyone else has access to it.