This is going to be a rant. The type of rant where you can picture the writer at the keyboard pounding blood out of his fingers and howling at the moon all Worg style. I’ve titled it, “Dual Specs Sucks”, but really the rant is about a whole bunch of things and dual spec is just a little bit of it. But I had to have some sort of catchy title that would bring ’em in from google search.

The fact of the matter is, in present day World of warcraft, playing a pure DPS class, such as a rogue, mage, warlock or hunter is just plain stupid. They may as well cancel out these classes right now. Just throw them away. Because that is what they have effectively done. The process of making hybrid classes equal to the pure classes in terms of roles, which began some years ago, was the first step in the process. Druids could heal for example, but not as well as the pure healing class of priests. So druids complained – a lot, and eventually Blizzard listened and they made all the classes shiny happy equal people. And this was okay, we could handle this. Because we were still needed. Then Wrath of the Lich King came out, and we suddenly realised that every single instance and raid was missing something: crowd control. In Magistars Terrace, if you didn’t have CC you were screwed. In Northrend it is completely gone. Thrown out of the game. None of us really said anything because we figured that the next raid around the corner would have crowd control. Well, it didn’t. So you can just bring any old DPS class now, because we’re all the same. Who can we bring to the DPS party now? Well, apart from us pure DPS classes you could bring priests, paladins, druids, warriors, shamans and the good old death knight. Actually it was more a case of who couldn’t you bring, and the answer was nobody. Everyone can do dps now, we are all shiny little stars. Bring the player and not the class. Remember that? And a lot of us thought that was awesome. It was bearable until one little extra thing happened:

Dual fucking specs.

You see, before this abomination happened, sure warriors could be dps, but why bother? You were a tank. Not any more. Now you are everything. Everyone is DPS at any time, at any moment, at any situation, and where did that leave us? Scraping along at survival level until patch 3.3 put the final nail in the coffin. The new Looking for Group system is now the most effective way of leveling. You can level faster running instances using the LFG system than by killing mobs and doing quests. You just que and go in. That is, unless you are a mage, rogue, hunter or warlock. If you have a tank or healing spec then your average wait time is probably about 3.3456 seconds to get a group. I am leveling my mage for the blue geared project and I can tell you that my average wait time is close to 10 minutes. And half the time I’m brought into a group that just has a couple of bosses to get down but lost a DPS. So after all that waiting I get maybe a third of a run.

The four pure DPS classes are now a sad joke compared to the multi-class characters. Blizzard, in their moronic effort to level the playing field has just about made us reduntant. Do you need to take a rogue in a raid now? Nope. How about a mage? yeah, if you want a teleport to Dalaran afterwards. Hunter? Can’t see any reason. Warlock? Only if we need to teleport someone in – oh wait, there’s the new LFG system, isn’t there. No, warlocks can go suck it up now as well.

The new LFG system is also killing the social aspect of the game. Leveling my mage on a new realm, I’m not meeting anyone. The only way to do an instance run with people on my own realm is to spam local chat channel. Which is useless, as everyone is using the LFG system. I don’t have a single person marked on my friends list from meeting running around. There is nobody running around at all, everyone is doing instance runs to level. If I pick up a quest that needs 2 or 3 players to do I just drop it immediately now. What’s the point? I’m never going to find anyone to help me with it. I do see some players running around though. Guess who they are? Yep, you got it right first time – mages, rogues, warlocks and hunters.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is, but it’s ridiculous. Blizzard cannot go back now. Their system is in place. So they have to give the four pure DPS classes a second role, ie tank or healing. What else can be done? Bring the player not the class. Moronic in principle, plain devastating in real-game playability.