July News/Discussion

[Kevin]

It was mentioned as something they are looking into, I believe, or are planning to implement, but no details are out and I don't think this exists in current beta (or the EJ WotLK thread would have mentioned it more recently).

As someone that enjoys many aspects of the game, I'm hoping this option goes in and is quite flexible. As a raid leader, I am REALLY hoping it goes in and is flexible enough that some of our hybrids can swap their roles between boss fights (imagine the flexibility it would give Blizzard designers too, knowing they can design bosses that require stacked healing or bosses where stacked DPS matters more, and know folks can do that stacking without swapping people out of the raid).

I've kinda been wondering about something like this myself. But I'm not sure they will go that far. I'm thinking you might end up with something like being able to change on the fly (possibly with a fee still, or perhaps you just have to spend X gold to set up your 2 specs up front) and then slapping it with an hour or 4 hour cooldown or something like that. Possible to still swap in a raid but maybe not for every boss. 4 hours is too long to be able to go from farming to instancing spec nicely, but 1 hour makes that work pretty well.

There are other ways to do it as well, but yeah it is something I would like a fair bit, though of course it's more valuable to some classes than to others. Basically any class that can heal gets way more out of it than say a mage or a hunter. Swapping between fire and frost and arcane can be helpful, sure, someplace like TK where A'lar is fire immune but you want to be fire for Solarian, etc. It has uses, but for a hunter? Not a whole lot of reason for a swap on the fly. I suppose if beast is still the top individual DPS there could be reason to swap between it and survival (which looks to add some really nice group/raid stuff). If you have a melee heavy group it could help to go survival to get expose for them and provide that lovely energy/rage/mana/runic power regen to one of the groups. So again some utiltity, but not nearly the level of having a shaman that can swap between enh and resto or elem and resto. Or a druid that could be a tree one fight, a boomkin the next fight that really loves caster DPS and a feral the next fight where you need some extra off tanking. Yeah I listed 3 for the druid but who knows maybe you'll get 3 specs to flip between.

I'd like more than 2 myself. Even for my hunter if for nothing other than arenas. I prefer a survival spec for 2's and 3's on him, but marks for 5's and either beast or survival (depending on which other hunters are there that night) for raids. So even for one of the classes that gets less out of it, I could see me using 4 or 5 specs in one day if I'm doing 2 different arena teams and a raid that day, which I've done on days when I've had 6 hours to play (20 arena games in 2 hours and then 3 hours of raiding with an hour of whatever in there).