Other “raid-spec” classes have it even worse. A resto druid in our guild is rendered useless when tasked with solo questing. I’m sure other healers have it bad too, not to mention the prot warriors. Gear switching can alleviate some of the drudgery but the real issue here is that to succeed in one area of the game (namely raiding/grouping) we have to gimp ourselves in another (solo & pvp).

Blizzard’s current answer to this is the respec system. They allow you to change your character’s talents for a significant amount of gold. Ok fair enough, you don’t want people “abusing” the spec-switch right? Well let’s think about this. What good does it do to require a player to head to a capital city and drop approximately 50g for the chance to “forget” what they’ve specialized in, only to instantly specify a different set of talents and pay to relearn a repertoire of spells that they have most likely known and subsequently forgotten numerous times already? It seems like a lot of work just to shift to another style of play.

It’s really just a money-sink and an annoyance. Ultimately it’s a deterrent to respeccing on a whim. So why do it? The same tanks that are paying outrageous repair bills have an arguably harder time grinding cash to enable them to continue. Our poor healers are required to tag along with others just to finish daily quests.

“Oh, you wanna try out the arena?”

“Too bad, you’re worthless with that talent setup. l2play nub.”

“If you want to experience multiple game-play elements with one character, well there’s a tax.”

My suggestion is this: At the very least, let a character keep all spells that they have already paid once to learn, but make them dormant when they aren’t “talented enough” to use them. Switch back to your regular tanking/healing build and there’s no need to relearn what you already once knew.

There’s always the option of doing away with the respec cost all-together, but I don’t see that happening. Blizzard needs our hard-earned gold to pay all of their NPCs. =P

A third and final option would be to let a character effectively have two specs with the ability to switch between them on the fly (I think EQ2 actually has something like this). The mechanism for switching could be an item or trinket that worked much like a hearthstone with an extended casting time and a significant cooldown. You could have the best of both worlds without the prohibitive recurring cost and annoyance factor. Blizzard could even make said item require a significant time investment to obtain with a chain of quests that require both soloing and grouping and the extensive use of a class’ entire repertoire of skills (think rogue poison quest). Lore-enforcers and RPers could be appeased by making the switch-item a journal or tome of sorts.

Please increase your quest-item drop-rate. If you want to make me work harder or longer, just increase the turn-in requirement. k thx bye.

I probably don’t have much room to complain. I know that Blizzard has gone to great lengths to make this game extremely user friendly and reward-centric. I’m thankful for the quest diversity, the awesome rewards, the rested xp system, the lack of a harsh death penalty… the list goes on.

The fact remains, that a good majority of Blizzards quests use the following template:

Bring me X items that drop from killing mobs of some sort.

This would be fine if said quest required a plentiful bounty of lets-say: 40 toenail clippings from a certain tribe of ogre and each one would produce at least one good sample. Blizzard’s quest designers are a little bit more sadistic though, and will only request 4 toenails, but the drop rate will be a measly 10%.

Some may argue that it would work out to be the same. Potentially yes but there are some caveats. You may get lucky and get all 4 in a row, but more likely you’ll be stuck killing ogres over and over with nothing but trash loot. This problem is compounded even more when you’re in a crowded zone with multiple people competing for the same kills for the same quests. This doesn’t help parties that quest together either.

So maybe I’m spoiled. I get easily turned off when my progress comes grinding to a halt (no pun intended). The only rationale that I can conceive is that in some way it makes the quest seem less daunting with a smaller number attached to it. There is something to be said about “just one more before I log” (as opposed to 20).