Posted by ReDDoT in Blue Milk & Cereal | 26 Comments
Blue Milk & Cereal: Should TOR Have A Dual-Spec System?
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In addition to choosing your character class which determines your story and roughly defines the role of your in-game character, you’ll also have to decide on an advanced class which narrows down your combat role even further. Your advanced class also grants you access to two unique talent trees, with one additional talent tree being a shared between the two advanced classes. Essentially, from the point where you pick your class to the point where you have reached the maximum level – you could end up with one of at least 6 unique combinations. This is a very deep and interesting variety that will hopefully allow players to play the game the way they want it. But, some players want more than that.
For those who are not sure what a dual-spec system is, it essentially allows your character to save two sets of talents from the above-mentioned trees, thereby making it quick and easy to switch between the two. Typically this also requires the player to carry multiple sets of gear and brings a few other problems to the table (which are out of scope of this article).
Right now, BioWare’s position is that, although your character can switch between specs, a dual-spec feature that saves those choices is not needed. In my opinion, what it comes down to is how well BioWare will address the issue of having all specializations and advanced classes as viable choices for any flashpoint or operation, of course in their own way, but still viable.
By the way, the forum community seems to be split right in half over this as well, perhaps pointing towards the fact that no one truly knows how TOR is designed to play at higher levels and how balanced or viable the specializations are.
So what do you think? Based on your previous MMO experience and/or knowledge about TOR – yay or nay to dual-spec?
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Not at launch. Let people level and really understand their AC and then maybe implement it 6 months from launch after people figure the game out.
I support this… however, 6 months is kinda early. The content is made so that s and so many tanks are needed and so and so many healers for the content. If at some point, they decide that some bosses are gonna be tank n sp**k (only 1 tank needed) and others in the same Operation will require 3, I think they will implement the dual spec feature. I however do not support, that the dual spec feature should include, lets say: Juggernaut tank and the other spec: Marauder Damage dealer. it should be Juggernaut Immortal or Juggernaut Vengeance switch only. If you want AC switch, you should pay every time (a lot too). AC switch should be a credit sink, not something you do at the push of a button.
i think your right brax if they have duel spec it should be within the AC , I for one would love to be a Juggernaut immortal and then be able to switch to the Force Crush build ( forget what its called the shared one) .
At level 10 you pick your AC and that is a separate class all together. An IA Sniper does not play like an IA Operative. In other MMOs you are still playing a Warrior or a Monk, even if you have skill trees. In TOR it is like you are playing something completely different but it just shares some aspect of the “original” class.
I would not that kind of feature in TOR as ACs should be your class, and you should never be able to change classes (Unless for a very large fee).
With only two ACs (Shared for the third), I do not see the real benefit here. Classes in TOR, based on their AC can tank, heal, or DPS, so class balance or the lack of a certain trinity element is not going to be a problem.
I think you confuse a bit ACs and talent trees. Each AC has 2 unique talent trees, plus one shared with the other AC of their base classe.
Here what is asked is if you could switch talent trees. I agree with you though that ACs are classes in their own right and, to me, you shouldn’t be able to change ACs, or if you could it should either be a big hassle (quest line or the like), or it should be limited to a few times forever to enable people to change their mind if they find out that their AC doesn’t fit their playstyle.
my hope is that eventually its added (but at no cost to the current timeline), as its nice to be able to make slight adjustments to your character to meet the needs of a guild raid. Not since Molten Core olden days, have i been part of a larger guild. Allowing multi-spec sure helps smaller like minded people to maintain guild runs. (imo)
Dual Spec is a complicated question, and it leads to a lot of problems and makes the game significantly different. Maybe someday, but not a matter of months, more like years.
As much as I would love a duelspec for gameplay reasons… I’m planning on being on an RP server and I just can’t justify it for the purpose of my character development.
They should add dual spec at max level only and it should be obtainable through a really hard questline (the ability, not the action of dual speccing afterwards) – maybe it should even let you change your ac in this quest and this quest only, so you could see if you really wanted to change your specc.
Whether or not it’s needed will be determined by mechanics and difficulty found in Operations, as well as, whether or not you can have one spec that works equally well for PvE or PvP.
If I have to respec every time I want to PvP or PvE, or feel that it’s necessary to respec in the middle of an Operation to better handle a certain encounter, then it starts to become a nuisance.
Lack of dual-spec doesn’t prevent players from paying to respec when they want, it just makes it more inconvenient.
No way. SWTOR is about choice and how many of those choices are permanent resulting in repercussions that may not ever be reconcilable.
Since SWTOR decided to work with a tank, dps and healer setup for operation and flashpoint, they really should give a dual spec system.
This is, imo, the best change WoW ever made, you dont want a player to go back to his home city during a raid because a fight need 1 tank and the other tank has to go respec dps to make the fight easier.
Same way for healing, someone can love healing flashpoints, but when you go back to questing, being a healer can be very boring.
Dual speccing is essential if you dont want to have issue finding a balanced group for a Flashpoint. I really doubt servers will have a good tank/dps/heal balance, since most ppl usually want to pew pew dps.
I agree though that dual spec should be only available in your own AC, dual speecing between 2 AC would be dumb.
That’s my two cents
I don’t like the idea of people being able to hop between the only 2 specs they can have at any given time. In other games with broader arrays of talents it’s different, because you are not given access to every skill your character can learn, but if AC’s have 2 main trees and the shared augmentary one, which will be dipped into regardless of talent spec, a dual spec system would essentially give you access to everything that AC can potentially learn, which I don’t like the sound of.
Allowing dual spec also means that encounters within an instance have variance based on the ability for someone to change roles.
In WoW, they didn’t initially design the PvE encounters for a certain class with a certain build. They just designed the encounters with other things in mind. When players started using the respeccing to make different fights “easier”, or to up their dps on a particular encounter, then they decided to add the dual spec to allow for easier access to do so. Once they did that, then the design team for the boss fights and raids had to take into account that there are 10/25 people in with potentially 20/50 different specs, and change their philosophy to account for that, almost requiring dual spec just to get into a raid.
I like the idea of being able to try different things out and get a play style, but I don’t like the idea of being forced into different specs just to go raiding.
As long as the viability of the different trees allow for a sub-role (aka a DPS that can be a viable OT, or a OT that can assist in healing, etc), and the encounters don’t particularly punish you for not having a particular spec in the group, then I don’t see why there should be need of a dual spec. Maybe that’s just me.
I feel like the only real reason to ever have dual spec is if you have to have a spec for pve and one for pvp. It really bites to have to respec back and forth from a pve and pvp spec. Since we don’t know what the skill trees look like( unless you like leaked material), I do not know at this time if it is really needed or not. If there are certain talents that are geared more towards pvp then that is when it becomes an issue.
I think there would be a lore wise reason for having dual specs: There were Jedi Guardians who were powerful enough in the force that they could easily assume Jedi Consular rolls (I.E. Obi-Wan). Plus, there were Jedi Consular’s who were masters with their lightsabers and and other martial arts to be able to assume Guardian assignments (I.E. Yoda). The other classes can also be explained lore wise to be able to cross over.
So yes I think players should be able to dual spec if they want to.
Yes, with a caveat. I would like to add this that I don’t have a problem with money being associated with this. The issue is that if you don’t have a “system” to make switching easier, the pain in the ass is rearranging all your bars all the time when you switch. The hindrance is not the monetary cost of it. I just want it to be seamless…not necessarily needing to be free.
Maybe people don’t realize why dual specs came into play in WoW. Quite a few raids had specific DPS requirements and healing requirements across their 10+ bosses. This meant that a given boss might need 75% DPS, 10% tank and 15% healing representation. The next boss would need more tanks or less healing or any other variety. This lead to people banging their heads against their keyboards and finally just running back to town and respec-ing between bosses. Some classes were simply useless in a given spec in some encounters (rogues come to mind here).
After having played Rift, which has a different reason for dual specs, or 5 – you can see how it actually keeps you in the game and allows you to try out a whole bunch of different ways to approach a situation. On a boss in a dungeon who has a lot of friends? Swap to crowd control. Lots of AE damage, swap to AE healing. No need for a tank? Swap everyone to DPS. It really gives the devs the freedom to make nearly any type of encounter in a dungeon knowing that the players within will always have the tools at hand to succeed. The game at that point becomes less about forcing a victory but applying the correct strategy to overcome it.
Yes! A very emphatic YES! I cannot tell you how much a multi-role system improves playing a game, but it’s huge. In WoW, it allowed me to have both a tank spec and a PvP spec, although I would love to have had more specs. In Rift, I got that, and I loved it. It was great. I will be VERY disappointed if SWTOR doesn’t have it in. I feel it has become standard requirement now for MMO’s.
While it’s nice to have a dualspec feature. Assuming the game is balanced in terms of how many tanks/healers/dps are available in relation to how many is needed and how viable non-optimal groups are, I don’t see much point in having a dualspec system mainly because
1. Companions, there is not as much need for an offspec for soloing purposes as there is in other games.
2. Affordable, it’s not very expensive to respec (assuming it follows what they’ve said).
3. Raiding, it’s nice to have several specs for raids, sometimes. However it’s been mentioned that they probably won’t be extremely strict with setups in raids, it’s going to be more or less viable anyway (remains to be seen). But the other aspect of raiding comes in terms of loot. Especially in PUGs, having two specs can cause a massive amount of confusion when it comes down to loot, mainly because the majority of people are greedy, people will want to have every single piece of loot. I personally found WoW to be much less dramatic before dual-spec (again, talking about PUGs)
4. Story, it just makes more sense that you specialize in one thing, and if you want to learn something else, you have to retrain yourselves.
Wall of text, I know, sorry xD
3.
I don’t think people really understand what Dual-Spec means in the swtor. It means that you could flip-flop between your two AC’s (Advanced Classes). They are allowing you to rearrange your pts in your current AC. That being said I completely agree with no dual spec. Out of 5 trees you get to flip-flop between 3 and before anyone argues that there is 6 remember 1 is a shared tree so both AC’s get it. 3/5 is a great number vs. 5/5 cuz then anyone could be any role this at least limits that somewhat.
In other MMO’s you mainly find that the only time you need to re-spec is to fill the role of a tank or healer, Excluding raids, you can fill these roles partially with your companion characters which alleviates the need to re-spec.
Also from what i have seen on the game so far, tanks and healers will have good dps anyway, which means you will not have to worry about changing your tank or healer to a dps spec if your not main tank/healer ect… the only time a re-spec might be useful is if you are in a full dps group, however with the majority of players rolling force wielders, i don’t believe there will be any shortage of tanks (knight/warrior) or healers (inquisitor/consular).
So while i don’t support duel spec in TOR, i also don’t believe it will be needed, and i hope it wont be, as it is a major contributing factor to “The Grind” found in other games, as you need to continuously do dungeon runs ect…. to get your second set of gear, i hope there is enough end game content and updates to keep everyone busy in their original roles :)
I only picked up Rift to fill in time until TOR came out – however their soul and role system keeps me engaged at 50+. I have tried every combination within my class, I have 5 different roles – solo, PvP, support, healer, Tank. They might not all be perfect but they are great fun to play.
Rift has really surprised me – because of this system- I think that it could be a massive error not to include something like this when it seems that it is the unique selling point of a competitor.
I’m not a fanboy – just pleasantly surprised. I still cant wait for Tor and will drop Rift like a hot potato. But I think there were many like me who thought it was going to be quite ordinary – but it has some genuinely fine ideas for TOR to ponder on (or emulate!)
As regards to dual-speccing (not dual-AC), I am personally against it, mainly because from what has been said, the game probably won’t need it. But then my position is subject to change depending on game design.
Dual-AC, imo, should not be implemented, mainly because ACs are classes in their own right, with very (or even completely: SI/JC) different gameplays. People learn to play the class as they level up, and that is probably one of the most important objective of the leveling-up phase. So an idea that I stole from the Tatooine Press would be to make changing AC, if it is to be implemented, be a long quest (should last approx. an evening) where you gradually get your AC’s abilities, in order to learn them in a similar way as the leveling-up phase. This would allow you, if you finally find that you AC doesn’t fit your preferred playstyle, to change it, and it would prevent people from just changing class on a whim.
Since it was just released that there will be no collision detection in PvP, they just made tanks in a tanking spec useless in PvP. Respeccing costs credits that increases each time(current system I think), If you’re a tank PvP will be cut off for you if there are no dual specs, unless they somehow make tanks take/mitigate damage for other people. Free respecs would work great as well, but doubtful they will allow that.
Please follow the game if your going to criticize it. Tanks will be able to take/mitigate dmg from others in pvp(using Guard). Also from what I have heard (people who have played warzones at the conventions) tanks specs are viable for pvp because of the extra survivability and they put out decent dps.