Honestly, why do you feel that this is necessary? It seems to me that over the course of BWL, the fire mage would keep up with your frost mages. You don't seem to be learning the drakes anymore (those are what's fire immune, right?), so min/maxing would lose it's importance. Although I know that Firemaw is annoying no matter how many times you've done it.

Also, if you force specs on mages, there will be more mages telling priests about how hard it is to grind or pvp when they're pve specced, and we just don't have any sympathy. :p

I think Nef is too, but you really shouldn't have very many phase 2 wipes anyways.

unless your deep into naxx, with BWL/AQ40/Naxx only having shelf lives of 2-3 months I'd say let people play as they want and have fun. Realistically if your not already 8-9 bosses deep into Naxx your likely not going to be at Kel'Thuzad before expansion is released, so why try to force anything?

You should judge them on performance, not what their spec is. Their spec will affect their performance to some degree of course. I've done experiments where I've stealth specced back to shadow, done a full AQ40 run, and not a single person has noticed. Your problems really come offspecs who refuse to adapt their role in a raid. i.e. my job in a raid is to heal, that's all there is to it. Not to raid in DPS gear, not to DPS, but to raid in a full healing set. The feral druid who bitches about healing, and never takes any healing gear is going to lag really far behind, and then you can sit him out of raids and explain why. The shadowpriest who is in Naxx with a few pieces of Prophecy and is always whining about wanting to DPS is going to be a joke, and so on. Those are the people who you sit on the bench. The ones who enthusiastically adjust to what their raid role is, the ones who take gear and use the necessary consuambles to help them do that, are the ones you want to keep.

Judge people's attitude and performance, forget about the specs for now.

I fairly recently started not enforcing speccs, but as class leader for our warriors saying what I expected out of the raidforce and then starting to prioritize based on a combination of specc, attendance and attitude towards invites on raids.
My crew knows that if they want to go MS/Enrage to have more fun in PvP they will be spending more time outside looking at the big swirly entrance to the instance.

So far the feedback has been good and people like it, personally I went from an MS/Enrage specc with ash to 5/31/15 OT specc with ash and it works really well.

I agree with this poster. Forced specs aren't always the solution and honestly, unless you're facing the edge of content or trying to race through old content significantly faster than gearing will allow (MC/BWL/AQ in 3 months with no prior gearing GO)- you're more than likley attempting to tweek preformance where spec gains aren't necessary.

We've always had 1-3 shadow priests and a feral druid or two and we're progressing just fine in Naxx. (7 bosses down with Gluth on the table). Look, instead, at what level of effort folks are giving you with thier spec and see where they can improve. Look first to the folks who are underpreforming with no spec reason and once you've nailed down the people who just aren't trying or giving the effort- THEN look at your hardest workers who are working with sub-optimal specs. Don't drive away your highest skilled players who are contributing higher numbers than people with better specs just because you see an ignite or shadow weaving on the boss!

I'll accept criticism about a shadow spec when 2 conditions are met.
1) The current content requires a pure spec.
2) I cannot preform at the same level as the pure specced folks.

Judge those two things well and look at overall preformance first.
THEN you can get snotty with the people who don't spec the way you want.


THAT SAID. Rules are rules even if they suck. If these rules were in effect when the players joined, they knew the rules and they're choosing not to follow them. Your leadership should have consequences available for not following the rules and use them when they feel it's appropriate. This is why I chose a guild with no forced speccing. There should, however, be a method available to talk over or reconsider rules that may not the relevant anymore. Forcing frost spec isn't going to help you a damn bit in AQ40 or beyond. =/

I disagree with forcing specs unless you are forced too because of a fight. Spending another week on an encounter is better than burnout, but you may also be running a 100% completely different guild than me. Most of my players are semi-casual, and like to do what they want in their spare time, fuck, I believe I'm the ONLY Combat Rogue in my guild (or at least the only active one). Most of my players are intelligent and know what spec suites them. The majority of my priests are Disc/Holy, most Warriors are 31/5/15 or deep Prot, ironically most of my DPS classes are off-specs :/ Burnout and drama really does not happen in my guild which is nice.

With TBC rolling around soon, I don't expect people to even have "optimal" specs anymore, fuck I'll probably be some variant of Assasination/Combat.

One thing about forcing specs though, is the fact that you basically cannot have any strengths that certain builds do have, even if they are minor and situational. Example: Lightwell, as stupid and gimmicky as it is, still has great uses on certain fights.

Edit: I force jobs though, forgot to mention that. Shadow Priests heal, unless they have the judgement to put up Shadow Vulnerability, Druids heal unless they are called out to have Feral Gear on to back-up tank because we're short on Warriors (never happened unless we're in ZG or something). We have Moonkin Druids who do damage on trash but they know they heal.

we used to have a laid back attitude on specs as well. it kinda changed with nax when we came up to the heavy dps encounters. almost all our rogues were pvp dagger and went combat dagger or combat swords, our mages are all fire and our dps warriors went from MS to fury. the difference is HUGE. the ignite trains on patchwerk and loatheb are fairly sick and suddenly we do not see patchwerk get to his timed enrage any more.

but in general its mostly dps classes and the hybrid healing classes, taht do not want to spec pve. you always have a few warriors that really want to tank and go ms/prot or full prot and i do not any raidnig guild that has a seriuos issue with too many priests being shadow. but all those shamans, druids + paladins ... the dark side is tempting.

Seconded, this tends to lead to fairly good results as well. (A skilled fire mage is a killer on Nef Phase 1 when you use AoE when applicable and Blastwave on the zerg tends to be a very, very quick death for the mage unless he popped a Limited Invul pot / BoP.). The job will get done and Fire, while extremely unwieldy in BWL with 4 bosses immune, remains very handy, in the hands of a skilled player. In my opinion then.

Oh, and never 'force' specs, just say that you'd rather have x or y and let it be known that you assess the class. (What Arawethion said basically, it's doing your 'job' at the end of the day.) I personally didn't care how one did damage. (Unless he consistenly pulled aggro, but that was luckily reserved for those 10 % chromaggus TL resist with good vulnerabilities only.), as long as he did what he was supposed to do. If that involves you playing a different spec, fine with me. Just know that you might get subbed out if needed. (Which hardly need be done, really.)

It's much better to threaten peoples positions through competition if that's the case, if someone is forced to compete, they will put in their all if they care for their position. Recruit people who are willing to spec that way. This won't work in a more laxx guild (all of my Rogues don't give a shit that I trump them 100% of the time because they still push out more damage than other players except our token DPS Warrior).

Forcing speccs is not a very good idea since it makes the game less enjoyable. On the other hand, you don't really want to be raiding with people who can't be bothered to atleast specc apropriately for whatever instance you're currently progressing through.

Also, specc matters for abit more than you seem to give it credit for. We had a mage climb from his constantly puny puny <8 (usually lower) position on the damage meters to a consistent >5 after respeccing, increasing his damage by around 20%.

Though, ideally, the guild will be made up of enough people who want to specc the optimal specc that those who don't aren't really dragging you down, but if the majority, or even more than say 8+ per raid, start doing it it gets noticable.