More catchup from last week. And look! It’s another back-and-forth that involves a mention of class popularity! (SPOILER ALERT: I’ll be posting a couple of other GC tweets in the near future that also address questions related to rogue (un)popularity, so I won’t spend time in this post commenting on the “nobody was playing warlocks” bit you see below.)
I wrote recently about my concerns regarding rogue spec differentiation. The TL;DR from that earlier post is that while I’d like to see stronger differences between the specs, I *don’t* think it’s a good idea for the differences to be mechanical. I’d rather see the specs differ in aesthetic/thematic ways. However, Ghostcrawler’s second tweet above suggests that the design team is leaning toward a more mechanical solution for setting the rogue specs apart.
To which I say, bah humbug. Hmph. Fooey. Fartknockers. Plerg.
I’m not too confident that many other players share my desire to see three rogue specs that have similar mechanics but different aesthetics. The sense I get from forum browsing is that there’s a fondness for each spec having a “niche.” (This was very much the case back in Cata (particularly in PvP), where Mut was regarded as the slow-playing, single-target damage monster, Combat was priceless in cleave situations or when fighting raid bosses from the front, and Sub ruled the roost in survivability/burst/mobility. I did not like this, because it made spec selection feel less like a choice and more like I was obligated to keep switching to whatever spec was regarded as “optimal” from situation to situation because its niche was more valued in that situation.)
Forums represent a very small proportion of the playing community, though, so I can always hold out hope that secretly my opinion is awesome.
I think your opinion is the most widely held; most players seem to have a favorite spec they’d like to play through thick and thin.
Being limited to two specs at any given time reinforces this, as well.
I don’t see that ever being full realized in a heroic raid setting, and maybe not for high-end PvP either, but for anything else it’s alright. It’s nice being able to tell people that they can level as any rogue spec these days, for example.
The only thing is that if every spec can do everything, the only way I can see to give them different aesthetics is through different mechanics. Otherwise they’d all play the same, do the same, act the same, and basically… be the same.