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Posts with tag respecs

Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?


Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and myself (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. At least, that's what the others said they were doing. I intend to use it mostly as a soapbox to complain. Absolute power tends to......something something.

Welcome to Tank Talk. I am your bear Druid hostess for this week, with a topic that occurred to me while reading a recent article here on the site. Eliah Hecht wrote that his guild is facing a not-uncommon tank shortage and that he has considered the possibility of leveling a tanking class to 70 before Wrath, or tanking on a Death Knight afterwards. A number of people on my server and in my guild have talked about doing the same thing, or switching mains once Wrath hits. With so many people playing Death Knights, I think it's very possible that more people will discover they enjoy -- or at least, don't mind -- tanking, and may seek to do so in a raid environment without necessarily knowing what they've really signed up for.

From those of us who have tanked raid content in vanilla WoW or BC, here are the 10 questions you'll want to ask yourself if you're considering the possibility of tanking serious raid content:

Continue reading Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?

Breakfast Topic: How often have you respecc'd?

My mage began her time in WoW as a fire mage, blasting everything in sight. I was in love with blastwave, utterly, but I couldn't seem to deal with crowd control at all, and since I was spending a lot of my time soloing, I respecc'd to frost. That was my first time switching specs. Since then I have respecc'd one more time, this time to one of the frost dps spec's recommended here on WoW Insider's Build Shop. I absolutely adore my spec now, and can't see ever changing it, despite my occasional longing for my Water Elemental by my side.

As I was talking over this little respeccing history with a friend yesterday I realized that I imagine that's fairly rare for players. I know in his case, as a paladin, he's had to respec numerous times, depending on the situation. It seems that being a jack-of-some-trades class means that you spend a lot of time and gold at the trainer erasing your talent trees.

What is the most number of times you have respecc'd a character? When would you consider enough to be enough?

Respeccing for 2.0

Tomorrow's the big day -- WoW is getting patched and rolling over to 2.0. Bye-bye honor rankings, bye-bye DHKs, hello new LFG system, and new spells and talents for all. Oh, and every character in the game will log in after the patch is applied with a completely free respec.

So things will likely look very different in terms of specs on Wednesday (my guild has an MC run planned, and I can't wait to see what happens). Personally, I like my rogue's combat daggers spec, so I'll probably keep it (he's only 50 now, so I'm not real worried about it). My warrior is currently specced protection, but hasn't been getting much play (or DPS) as a tank, so I may flip him fury or half prot-half fury. My priest is staying shadow, but my shaman -- for the expansion, I'm planning to switch him to elemental instead of restoration, so by Wednesday he may be much more deadly with lightning bolts than healing waves (not sure how that will go over in my guild raids, however).

If you're thinking about respeccing, Mystic Worlds has posted a nice little commentary on how specs work -- while you should really spec for the talents and abilities you play with, for each class there's usually three or four different ways to set things up, either for soloing (or leveling), PVP, or PVE play. Of course, you don't have to respec on Wednesday -- you could just choose the same talents you have in place now. But since everything is changing so much (even your regular spec will have a few new shines to it), this might be your chance to be something a little bit different than you're used to.

Forum Post of the Day: Cheap respecs make the game more fun

Priest on GryphonWell, I tend to agree with the sentiment expressed by this thread on the beta forums, which praises the 1 copper respecs currently available to beta players. Of course, not everyone agrees -- there are also those who side with Blizzard's standing opinion on the matter, which states that your talent spec shouldn't be a casual decision, and ought to mean something. And perhaps poster Warrenders hits the nail on the head when he explains that:

It would invalidate talent choices and specs as everyone can be any spec they want any time they wanted. Why not just make all talents baseline skills and be done with it then?

But regardless of your opinion on the issue, there is some excellent discussion -- from both sides of the fence -- here.


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