For now I have removed the rule and given all mages the right to build their talents any way they like. I’ll continue to monitor the situation. One of the things we do not wish is for us to suddenly spend more and more time in Blackwing Lair then we currently are due to lost DPS if all mages go fire.

But for now we’ll see how it goes.

I personally am against forcing specs.

Gear and player skill generally are much higher factors than any particular spec.

Really I think the best way to do things is fostering a sense of competition on your raid.

If bob off spec is number 3 on the DM for his class and Joe off spec is number 4. You pressure Joe to improve, if the only way Joe can beat bob is by specing x way and he does it, suddenly he’s number 3 and bob is number 4. Now its on Bob to elevate his play.

Elevating his play is maybe brining more consumables, or getting better gear, or what have you. Whatever he does he improves and now is number 3 again, and so on and so forth.

The gain you get to the raid by making the bottom of the chart players better is going to be much larger than you get from making the top end people 0.001% better.

Focus where you can get the largest gains, and I think the way to do that is to force the people to compete, but don’t focus on your top guys. The guys at spot 1 and 2 are doing their job, regardless of spec, its the guys at the bottom that you worry about.

My guild has never forced specs, and whenever our healers or dpsers or what have you change to an off spec they usually miss their power then had on their "on spec" and switch back.

Trust your guild members that if they are in a progress oriented guild they will spec for progress. And if they don’t know how best to do that they will turn to a skilled leadership of class leads and officers who can suggest things to help them.

That’s my 2 cents anyway.

I've always viewed forced specs as the sign of a bad guild, although that might because the bad guilds on my server* are/were also the ones that forced specs on people.

Personally, I could care less what spec the mages in my guild have. Only two things matter to me about my mages:
1 - Are they getting the job done? If yes, then there's no reason to worry.
2 - Can they tell me why they've chosen their spec? If they have reasons for each point in their spec, then I have to trust that they know what they're doing.

In short, I was a mage who knows his stuff. If he knows what he's doing, he'll have an appropriate spec. It might not be a cookie-cutter spec, but it will be a spec that he knows he can play effectively.


*note: The most prominent guild on my server that forced specs gained their fame by releasing a video of their first Baron Geddon kill. It was a 43 minute long kill and required two repair bots. The mage who designed their forced mage spec also preferred spirit on his weapon instead of 30 spell damage. The guild is dead, but their legend lives on on Aggramar horde :).

My guild has never forced specs nor held strict class/loot priority (except recently on Dreadnought for MT's), sure its annoying when no pally has bok but we have put up with it and we have made reasonable progress without being anywhere near the bleeding edge (5/12 Naxx). Of course progress has a lot to do with other factors such as only 3 raiding nights, 60% casual guild, attendance issues, high turnover in certiain classes such as priests etc.

But a few weeks ago we ran into a real problem, 4 druids in the raid all feral or balance, no resto druids online (we have 2 in guild), thus no swiftmend for Maexena. We have killed her a number of time but this time we couldnt even get to P2. Is this the case of one boss you can't do without a resto druid or 2, or do we just need to keep practicing it?

It's an 11 point expenditure in a relatively useless tree for raiding. A very small price to pay (imo) for 10% more survivabilty for the entire raid, extra dps to non-casters, and more mana/regen for casters.

It's 50g max for a respec. Depending on how many times you wiped (one wipe is easily more than 50g in repairs, not even counting consumables), it may have been less expensive to cough up gold to respec a couple of your druids just for Maexxna.

When you have 7 raiding paladins in guild and 3 have bok, its suprising how often random odds can throw up that you only 3-4 paladins in the raid and none have bok.

On the other hand I have portaled, respecced and grabbed a summon on the realisation that we didnt have a bok paladin that night and I know a feral has done the same to resto.

Yeah I did suggest the bank pay for the druids to respec but the GM was against the idea - belives they should do it off their own back. And yeah we did wipe a few times so was a lot more than 50g. One of the druids then did hearth and respec and after a 15 min break to wait for him to get back we tried again only to wipe a few more times before the GM called the raid, so I think we either need a 2 or more resto druids - as we have had the time when we killed her.

As for palys I think we have 1-2/7 speced for bok, so you do get a few raids without bok, which really sux but what can you do?

Personally I think everyone should be raid speced because we are mainly a pve guild but with 3 raid nights people do other things

I bet the rogues beg for you in their group. The things you describe are monumentally difficult to achieve and would take 10x as much effort and time as changing specs around. In some guilds' case they are actually impossible to accomplish. I've seen your own guild leader (a shadow priest if "mind blast YA RLY" is anything to go by) complain about not having enough time to raid and being unable to recruit to replace shitty members. So maybe the other optimizations aren't being made because they're bloody difficult to make and you know it. Why, then, are the easier ones not being made? Perhaps because the feral druids and shadow priests running the guild aren't setting a good example and people say if the GM won't even sacrifice for progression why the hell should I? Just a guess.

I'm reminded of a (Rousseau?) quote I heard once, to wit, "If the executive should say to me 'It is expedient for the state that you should die' then I would lay down my life gladly, for it is due only to the protection of the state that I have lived." Maybe remind them who got them the shiny gear they'd like to pvp with.

Try raiding more. When you raid 5+ days a week people don't mind being raid specs as much. I don't enforce specs and we have 1 MS warrior (of 9), all fire mages, no shadow priests, all resto druids, 1 non-combat rogue. The only outliers are paladins really, but if I asked one of them to spec kings and he said anything other than "put up a port" I'd just laugh in his face on vent and it would send a chill down everyone's spine. Difference between loot council and DKP?

That said the unruly mage is right, fire is better for where you're at in content, insubordination notwithstanding, he should be your new mage class lead.

Pssst. You're quoting a resto druid, one of our best healers (er... and the guild leader. The other officers are a fire mage, 3 heal specced paladins, a prot warrior, and me.... who specs between shadow and holy. I'm full holy atm because the content requires it). =P He's been feral in the past and has a great tanking set but chooses to heal. Rebirth raids 6 days a week =P

It really comes down to a matter of priorities. You can prioritize recruiting people willing to spec without consideration and follow like sheep, or you can recruit for people willing to take that walk on the wildside and run thier own numbers. We prefer to keep an open mind about specs and promote healthy competition and number crunching so that folks understand what they're doing and why. We have 1 full frost mage who's still not convinced that fire is higher dps for him (given gear and the fact that he is really bad about going splat without an iceblock). I think he'll come around eventually, but if he doesn't we'll manage. I don't feel that leadership by fear creates a strong guild atmosphere- luckily my fellow officers agree.

Some mage in some guild had to have specced out of the traditional Frost and into fire to have that "Oh shit!" moment when they realized that Fire was the new hot raiding spec for guilds past the hump of BWL. Innovations don't happen on thier own and every last one of us hopping on the bandwagon is following someone who had that lighbulb go off a little faster than average. Recruiting people who innovate isn't certain, but if you can find them, they're worth thier weightx10 in gold.

I'm not much of an innovater personally, but I can look at numbers and understand them fairly well and I do a lot of research and as such manage to earn my keep.

Blood, you have no idea who I am, or what I am specced. I appreciate your use of psychic powers, but a bit of research please if you're going to go into flame-mode.

I'm currently specced 24/0/27. I'm the guild leader. I'm also our raid leader. We raid 6 nights a week, and still find time to play outside of that. Our progression is mostly a pacing decision, not a playtime decision. If you'd put a feral druid in a rogue group, you have misevaluated the value of the aura to the raid. (Hint, hunters get more out of the crit!). If you're putting moonkin in rogue groups you should seek counseling. I'm still not feral or moonkin. I stand in the druid group with the other 2 restos the OT specced feral, and a paladin for concentration aura. I could go into this in more detail, because I love to teach, but I'm sure you get the point.

Obviously all of the listed optimizations are very difficult, and entail a long building phase. However if you are not doing all of that, or at least trying to, your raid's spec is irrelevant. Fundamental breakdowns have occured, and the raid spec is a symptom, not the cause. Bad players with good specs are still bad players and they still die, wipe the raid, and then blame someone else. Trust me, having been a guild leader in wow for a year and change now, I can say with certainty that bad players will find a way to kill you. They are very creative.

I'll say that again - If your guild is forcing specs (usually because you don't trust your playerbase to make good decisions) then your guild contains, by definition, players you view to be bad. Instead of dictating to them what they should do, and having them be out of their depth when you do not give them a script, why not try improving their ability? There are very few guilds that can afford to run with the "Kick all the bad players" method, but I don't see forcing the bad players to play by rote as a viable long-term alternative. If the players are bad, they will wipe you with any combination of specs. If skill disparity exists and you cannot simply remove the worst player in each class, you must seek to improve them. If the players are good, they will identify what they need to spec to accomplish their goals. If your guild has done a good job of recruitment, and been forthright about your guild's goals, your member's goals will line up with yours.

It's all tied together, and if you think it through you'll realize that while it is a lot of work, the work is rewarding, required, and a fair bit of it does itself once you start working on it. While there are shortcuts, all of the shortcuts I've heard mentioned are temporary measures. If you're building for the long haul, temporary measures are not a good choice. This, incidentally, is why many guild masters burn out on the game, or have their guilds implode on them. You have to do the work.

I'm not interested in being the most progressed guild in the world. It's a concious decision, and it may change in the future, but the concensus among our officership is that being the first to content means being the people who have to deal with the frustrations of having horribly broken software, instead of the people fighting challenging, engaging, and interesting fights. That's an additional stress on the guild that can lead to player burnout. That in turn directly conflicts with the goal of building and sustaining a long term world of warcraft guild. I've accepted this, and thus I'm not pushing our guild to pass DnT. By the same token, I have zero patience for sheep. I am consistently told that Rebirth is one of the most "professional" guilds members have ever been a part of, and a large part of that professionalism, is a result of our culture and unwillingness to "force" a single viewpoint. Multiple viewpoints are healthy for any organization, it helps to fight calcification of ideas. Someone has to have the "New Best Spec" idea before it can become the standard for the rest of the sheep after all. If you pack your raid with sheep, you are cutting into your chances to have a good idea, and magnifying the reppercussions of a bad idea. No thank you.

So to reiterate: You can certainly force specs. Forcing specs is rarely the "correct" decision if your goals include longevity of the guild and establishing a professional guild.

Forcing specs should never be required if you do your preliminary work correctly, and indeed the urge to force specs would likely be a sign that something more fundamental is wrong with the guild, or it's playerbase. It can also actively hurt your guild to have players that can't evaluate what they should do to help your raid succeed, as their ability to recognize a bad decision or have a good idea is severely impaired.

Your mileage will of course vary.

Also, as a friendly bit of advice - the mods here don't really approve of the "You are a moron Har Har" type posts.

Edit - As usual bekah beat me to it.

While I appreciate your offers of education and counseling, I said that rogues beg for it (first for a druid to spec feral and then for him to be in their group) not that I give it to them.

I don't force specs either, I merely took issue with the haughty tone you had that forcing specs is always a bad idea unless you have a perfectly configured raid with perfect players. I pointed out that spec changes are far easier to implement than personnel changes because I felt that you'd led astray anyone who might be considering forced specs. They can be a useful guideline and a safety net for catching people who are somewhat less than team players. I did not endorse having bad players in your raid; I fully understand the effects bad players can have on a guild's progression, though I'll have to defer to your greater experience in that regard, Teach.

Bad is a warrior at heart. She tanked some mean ZG back in the day ;)

Furry warrior, no doubt.

Have you bothered asking your player to justify their spec? If they can't and it's not helping the raid I could see you requesting they change it but otherwise if they have a good reason and are still doing their job then leave it be I'd say.

the general thing they come up with: 'i love to pvp and i can't do it without this spec.'
if you are in a semi-hardcore raiding guild, thats just utter bullshit. we raid from 7 to 11-12 pm server time pretty much every day and i think most guilds that have any decent progress in NN raid at least 5 days per week. now almost all the people that come up with that pvp reasoning in our guild pvp at BEST 2 hours per week. hardly any more then that. but now lets say they pvp 10 hours, just for the hell of it. then its 10 hours of pvp against 20 hours of raiding. and while you are personally gimped while pvping, you basically make life more annoying for 39 other people. ofc you need to enjoy wow, but sorry, i don't enjoy wiping on patchwerk cause the 6 shadow priests are oom after 4 min while the shamans hit with their big heals for 2k. or wiping on loatheb cause warriors are MS and rogues pvp dagger.
and in reality, ppl in serious raiding guilds hardly ever pvp 10 hours per week. if one of my priests told me he wants to solo grind or group grind rank 14 and spec accordingly and he actually puts in the time for it, i have no problem with that. but if a guy wnats to be sahdow so he can pewpew in AV 1-2 hours per week and the other healers have to carry his back in 20-30 hours of raiding, he can start looking for another guild. my opinion might be a bit drastic, but every guy who has a 'useless' spec (if they can back it up with good reasonings, i have np with it, but a druid can't be feral cause he farms 1h and pvps 1-2h per week imho) needs to be carried by others in more difficult encounters. if you have 15 people with teh wrong specs, it starts to get a serious pain in the ass. most healers that want to do dmg just missed the right time to reroll anyway (while waiting for new instance to be released or whatever) as they originally picked the wrong class. at least i see that with shamans a lot. i really cba to put up with such people and in the long run, they don't enjoy doing their job anyway and will quit no matter what spec they have.

One of the "hardcore" raiding guilds that I was in for a brief period had partially forced specs, which I think is the most reasonable method of going about it.

All Warriors were required to have 15 points in the protection tree (defiance), Hunters were required to have 20 points in marksmanship, Druids and Shamans were required to have 21 points in restoration (NS - obviously), and so on for every class (I can't recall the requirements for every class - but they were similar to each of the above).

Its not an easy question, to be honest.

If you force specs, you lose the ability to evaluate players based on their talent specs too. A player who is useful will, in a guild which is progression oriented, re-spec if he or she feels that in doing so it will help. Oftentimes, people become acutely aware of their benefits to raids with various specs only through experimentation - Good players spec without having to be told to do so; Bad players wait to be forced. This assumes there is a reason for a specific spec.

By and large, there are many myths regarding specs. "Protection warriors are required and 'tank better'", "Feral druids are useless", "Shadow priests are bad for raiding guilds" are probably the most oft-encountered. Any good leadership will investigate the truth of these claims in correlation to the content they're at, and evaluate if their lack of progress (or slower progress) has anything at all to do with someones talent spec.

Forcing people when you clearly don't have to, and it doesn't provide a noticable benefit, is a bad idea. Smart people will call you on it, and you're going to look like an idiot or a power hungry guild leadership.

Yet another problem with specs is that non-primary specs tend to be contagious in early stages of guilds where goals are more free-flowing and not as defined. While you might not mind 1 shadow priest, you would mind 3 or 4 - How do you manage it, et cetera. That, of course, is up to the individual guild in the end.

We seem to be trailing recidivists, but I might as well throw some commentary into the ring. Although no longer a member, I helped draft the charter behind my old guild. Small excerpt:

Simple answer,

If you want to succeed in a zone like naxx, you need to have your dpsrs doing top dps, need to have competant players, and need to have gear.

Its a combination of 3 you're only hurting your progression if you arent setup right.

The problem with "forced" specs, in an area where min/maxing isnt that important, is you're forcing specs based solely on your opinion, and your opinion isn't always totally correct. If you were all-knowing and infallible, then yeah force as many specs as you want.

Forcing specs was necessary when everyone was walking around in Dreadmist and Valor, but as gear and itemization has evolved, and become more "uber", what you spec in isn't nearly as important. There is an addon called Item Rack, it works wonders for feral druids and dps warriors. A feral druid, in healing gear, can still heal reasonably well, and when it's time to clear trash he/she can still contribute when there's not as much healing needed. A prot warrior, who isnt tanking, is standing there with a thumb up his bum.