I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the value of the Outfitter (and similar) addon might just increase with the advent of dual speccing.

I may have got ahead of myself. I certainly didn’t read the entire patch notes! This, from Blizzard:

“A new Gear Manager feature has been added. Players will now be able to save gear sets for easy gear switching.”

So while I thought Patch 3.1 might be a boost to this addon, it might be the death of it instead! We shall see…Gear Manager might not include the customisation of Outfitter and the like.

With 3.1 comes dual speccing – at a pretty hefty cost, however.

What is it?

Once you paid for the dual speccing….’talent’, I suppose I’d better call it, you will be able to switch between two different talent specifications at the click of a button. The ‘talent’ will also switch your chosen glyphs and action bar set ups (though how this will work with Bartender etc is yet to be seen). Importantly, this will be at no cost to you.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is, mid-raid you lose a healer. You have three tanks with you but one is largely redundant. Your Druid hits his dual spec button and there he is, fully talented, glyphed and action bar-ed as a healer. He need only switch his gear. (In comes Outfitter, proving even more valuable now.)

Sounds good, right? It is, but…

What does it cost? 

Available from level 40, presumably from your Class Trainer, you can buy the dual spec ‘talent’ for a ‘mere’ 1,000g. For level 80′s or those alts with level 80 sugar daddies, that’s no problem. But for your fist time level 40, that’s going to be quite the challenge!

Not that you’d need to dual spec below, say, level 70 anyway?

What use for warlocks?

Clearly, this option is is better suited to the Druid/Priest/Paladin when it comes to end game raiding and the like, but it’s useful for EVERY Class when you consider PVE and PVP specs. I can’t see too much point in having dual specs for raiding personally, but a warlock’s spec for PVE is vastly different from that for PVP. 

Think Destro to Demo/Affliction if you like. You know what you prefer for each kind of gaming. In this, it will shine. And, quite possibly, SAVE you money. 

I know it may well lead to me PVP-ing a LOT more, as there’s no way I could ever be bothered to respec every time. Any time I PVP I do it in my raiding gear and raiding Destro spec. As you can imagine, the results are not usually pretty…

So…overall a GOOD THING, in the Dead Man’s opinion. Does it seem like value for money to you?