This is a boilerplate response to people who try to argue that Frost is our PvP spec, and that therefore it doesn’t matter that it’s terrible in PvE. Please feel free to link to it anytime you encounter such a person.

Get bent.

WoW is a role-playing game. Role-playing games are a character-driven genre. Talent spec is an integral part of character design. Talents represent your character’s natural aptitudes, training and experience.

If you designed your character to be a Frost Mage (or a Beastmastery Hunter, or an Elemental Shaman, or a Feral Druid), but you can’t raid effectively in the same content as every other DPS spec, then there is a failure of game design that must be rectified. A player should not be required to retcon his or her character — replacing the character’s natural aptitudes, training and experience as if they were tinker toys — in order to participate effectively in the game.

No, of course not. Implicit in “jack of all trades” is “master of none.” Nobody is asking for a bad spec to be good in raids. What we’re asking for is that it be possible to build a good spec, in every tree, that is good in raids.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. PvE Frost Mages give up Frostbite, Permafrost, Frost Warding, Shattered Barrier, Frozen Core, Deep Freeze, and the snare on their Frostbolt. They are worse at kiting than other Mages; they can’t use a rank 1 Frostbolt for a ranged single-target snare.

Meanwhile, a PvP Frost Mage gives up 10% damage right off the bat by dropping the Frostbolt Glyph and Arctic Winds.

PvE Frost and PvP Frost are very different specs. If PvE Frost were to land between 5% and 10% behind Fire in the DPS department (similar to the difference between Destruction and Demonology Warlocks), then PvP Frost would be some 25% to 30% behind Fire, due to talent, glyph and gear differences.

We do. This is an RPG, you schmoe. These things matter. If you don’t think they matter, than I suggest you seek a game better suited to your view of your character as a reconfigurable weapons platform used to achieve objectives. Unreal Tournament, perhaps.

First, dual specs are an abomination; they are one of the worst things to happen to the game’s immersive quality since release. It’s like the whole world is populated by victims of multiple personality disorder.

Second, dual specs are not intended to create a situation where you are forced to switch trees to participate in different types of content. As Ghostcrawler wrote:

• Our design direction is not to change our designs at all as a result of this change. We are going to design instances and talent trees while pretending this feature does not exist.

  Examples of things we will NOT do:

  1. Have a fight that requires 8 tanks, because you know, half the raid can change specs.
  2. Have a fight that requires some obscure talent, because surely someone can afford to swap into it.
  3. Let Arms be the PvP tree and Fury be the PvE tree, because warriors can just switch out.
  4. Have a buff spec with low dps and a damage spec with high dps, and expect players to buff then swap specs.

  (Reference)

• There is a risk that (the dual-spec feature) allows us to be lazy: “Oh don’t worry about making Frost mages PvE viable because they can always swap specs to Fire or Arcane for PvE.” We would still like to get away from X being “the PvP tree” for every class.
  (Reference)

Different people are different. We’re not telling you how to derive your pleasure from the game. Stop telling us how to derive ours.

Blizzard has already come over to this vastly superior design philosophy. People clinging to the old philosophy might as well be arguing in favor of the geocentric model of the universe. Give it up.

• I understand the sentiment, but really we would like to make all specs viable in PvE and PvP.

  We don’t mind if some talents are better in one than another. But we don’t like the idea that Arms, Frost or Disc are only for PvP and Fury, Fire or Holy are only for PvE.
  (Reference)

• Among other things, we thought it was shallow that every raider of a class had the same spec and every Gladiator of a class had the same spec. For dps classes, that also tended to lead to the PvE spec, the PvP spec and the pointless spec. For classes with very different roles per tree (like shamans) it doesn’t make sense at all to have a PvP spec. So Resto shamans are only for PvP?
  (Reference)