Lots of classes have the poor fortune of having their optimal raid specs be horribly ungratifying for solo or small group play. Cheap respecs completely change that and allow more freedom for different players, as well as doing a great job preventing burnout. A lot of people try to compromise this by taking 'hybrids' specs, or by intentionally gimping their specs to spend some points in tools that allow them some measure of self sufficiency (+10% damage in holy, etc)

People who played in Beta also know how much of a stress relief it is to be able to mess around with as many builds as you'd like. We had a group who ground 3 instances back to back, and the mage alternated between fire/frost and arcane spec, the warrior went from full fury to full prot, and I went from shadow/disc to holy. The change of playstyle is a very nice breath of fresh air, and the ability after you are doing grinding instances to respec into a build that allows you to solo efficiently or to melt faces in PvP is fantastic.

It would also do a lot to remove a lot of the bad blood associated with the 'who gets to offspec' dilemma. THe most progressed guild on my server currently forces all their members into optimized raiding spec, and once a week all the members of a class can 'roll'for the priviledge of offspecÃ*ng for the coming week, to prevent every one of their healers/tanks from switching into DPS builds. Most people here probably agree this is going too far, but if you allowed people a 'release' in respecÃ*ng outside of raids, the rate of burnout would drastically decrease for a lot of players.

What are the downsides of allowing free respecs though?
1- Losing character identity. This isn't a real problem, but I think Blizzard doesn't like the idea of avatars being so amorphous.
2- Certain classes right now have an advantage in being able to solo in raid spec. Allowing everyone to do it cheapens that advantage; I find this a crappy point but perhaps this influenced some people's character choice
3- Trivializes people who feel they need to make a sacrifice in order for their contribution to be important.
4- Would probably diminish the availability of healers for pug PvE/pug PvP, as a lot of healers locked into a PvE raiding spec would respec into a dps spec for unwinding outside of raids
5- Removes an important goldsink
6- Trivializes talent balancing. Who cares if talents are balanced if everyone can just switch between sets of talents?


The main arguments in my opinion are 5 and 6.
5 is arguably a good thing, as gold is far too rare in the game right now and causes a lot of need for a secondary market. 6 is the main issue. The truth however, is that while all things considered Blizz does a good job of making all talent trees equally valuable in a raid setting, they don't even consider the talent trees from a small group or solo perspective because it would be an absolute balancing nightmare. Going under the assumption that combat dagger and mutilate rogues are equally as good in a raid setting, mutilate are a tonne more powerful in PvP. Holy priests are excellent in raids, and shadow priests are coming into power now as a PvE powerhouse, but a holy priest kills mobs about 1/6 as fast as a shadow priest, including downtime. There are plenty more examples - Blizzard has not and should not consider small group play and solo as a balancing factor for the different trees, and allowing free respecs allows people to alter their playstyle to relax and enjoy the game more.

I realize this is traditionally a taboo topic because it gets brought up a lot by mouthbreathers on general forums, but can anyone think of more serious downsides?

Pleasure in something in large part comes from constraints. I like that it's part of your identity, that you're a "snow mage" or a "holy priest". If you allow free respecs, there's no longer any such thing as a "snow mage", then it just becomes "mage". It adds even more homogenization then what Blizzard has already done.

You make choices in life, and without choice, it quickly becomes bland and boring. Rare respecs adds idendity I think.

Many classes however don't have that luxury though, and I think it is an unfair penalty on a lot of people.

The double spec system is a great idea, but I think it hampers some of the effect that free respecs would bring about, mostly in terms of varied gameplay. You get to try out builds you'd normally never try out because they aren't optimal but are great fun. Or, what if you want to heal in a PvP battleground when you are with teammates, but CS people in the face when you are pugging and just want to unload? A better way would be to have two specs that you can choose from regardless of being in an instance or not.

The only downside is, as mentioned above, the lack of identity.

However- my guildies change spec so often anyway that it doesn't really work to achieve that anymore. If it did, it would at least have SOME value.

50g is still a lot to me (actually I'm still on 25g for next respec (!)), but will be proportionally less at 70 (and I hope they dont make it scale with level).

In light of the above, they should just make respeccing free, but put in on an arbitrary cooldown (say 24 hours or something). It would make a lot of classes a hell of a lot more fun.

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