Spooncraft

Drysc has been going on lately trying to reason with people about PVP and overall spec viability in the game. It feels good to see Blizzard going a little more in depth as to the method behind their mayhem when it comes down to class balancing and the philosophy around it.

I do pretty well in battlegrounds with mine, but if I’m going to want to be viable in higher end competition then I would be well advised to respec. That isn’t to say that shadow priests won’t one day be more viable than they are now in PvP, or that changes may not come for other specs to help them become more viable. The point is that not every spec for every class should be expected to be as viable as the next for each aspect of the game.

[edit] I’ll qualify this statement and say that this is our general take on spec viability for now, and isn’t necessarily intended to be taken as the end all look at spec comparisons in various aspects of the game for all future balance and development. That possibly was not made as clear as it should have been in my original post in the other thread, and certainly not very clear in this one.[ Post edited by Drysc ] (src)

As well the thread spins off towards respec costs. More after the cut.

Q u o t e:
Then. Why. Do. We. Have. Respec. Costs?

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Any game attempting to keep any type of economy stable and steady needs gold sinks. To make a comparison to one of our own games, look at the Diablo II economy and how much gold was actually worth. It’s thrown out all over the place at great velocity with nothing to spend it on, it becomes worthless, and actually a liability in some cases. It still feels cool to get money, but what’s the point when there’s nothing to spend it on? Any consistent or semi-regular sink is generally going to help keep and maintain economical health. As the economy naturally inflates though, 50g continues to lose its value as a sink and there will inevitably need to be other things to take its place.

That said, I’ll quote Tom from the last BlizzCast (http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode2.xml)

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Q u o t e:
We definitely want to make the respec process more graceful, especially considering how much respeccing people are doing. Right now, when you respec, it unlearns all the spells that you have that are talent-specific. It takes them off your action bars, et cetera, and, then when you spec into a new spec, it doesn’t fill those in for you. Something we’d like to do is have the game remember or be able to save settings with different talent specs so that you can more easily switch between them. That goes along with potentially, in the future, doing some things to ease the burden of respeccing back and forth. If you’re doing kind of high-end Arenas, high-end raiding, that kind of thing. Because we do want to encourage players to be able to enjoy a variety of different elements of the game. So, we definitely want to make that whole process more graceful in general.

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He comments on some other large topics too if you haven’t listened to it already, I recommend checking it out.[ Post edited by Drysc ] (src)