Will Duel Specs Fix the Healer and Tank Shortage in World of Warcraft?

You hop online and you decide you want to run a dungeon real quick. You ask in guild for some help and get two of your dps friends, now it's just a matter of finding a healer and a tank, sadly all the ones in guild are otherwise occupied, or running their alts, and your friend list is vacant. After forty minutes of spamming in every chat imaginable, you give up and log off for the night, cursing the lack of healers and tanks. Sound familiar? If you have never experienced this scenario in the World of Warcraft, or any mmorpg for that matter, count yourself lucky. Lacking tanks and heals is a staple we have all come to accept, and complain about to no end. But never fear, Blizzard is here to save the day... right?

In patch 3.1, Blizzard is giving us duel specs, for a small one time fee, any character can set up two seperate specs and switch between them for nothing. This means every one can have a pve and a pvp spec and switch freely, and most importantly this means hybrids can switch between tank/heals and dps. This in theory, will solve all of the World's (of Warcraft) problems, now that enhance shaman will happily switch to resto with no cost to themselves and heal and it's just a matter of replacing the dps spot!

As much as I would love to believe that to be the case, I highly doubt it. I have been a healer or a tank for most of my time on WoW and let me tell you, I hate doing pick up groups. Ask any healer or tank about their PUG stories and they will tell you horror stories.

But of course you as your hunter can share similar stories, so what's the problem? The thing is, as a hunter unless you pulled the mob accidentally and wiped the group, you rarely get blamed. Anytime something goes wrong it is instantly the tank or the healer's fault. Even if the dps ignores threat trying their damnest to see big numbers scroll across their screen, or stands there doing nothing the whole fight because they had to check MySpace. It is instantly assumed if something went wrong that it was the healer or the tank.

This is why you aren't getting that healer and tank spot filled so easily. Most tanks and healers I know refuse to PUG. Just flat out refuse to do anything outside of running with their guild. This will continue once duel specs come out. Once the aggravation of being blamed for every single wipe kicks in, no one will volunteer to switch from dps and heal or tank for PUGs.

The worse thing about all this is that there is no tank shortage or healer shortage. The tank shortage of The Burning Crusade was just heroic tank shortage. And even then the problem was everyone wanted paladins to tank so they could not use crowd control and just aoe the place down. They refused to tank warriors and druids. Healers were the same way, if you couldn't aoe heal due to people wanting to run instances in the fastest way possible you were useless, so paladin healers had it hard. This continues now.

Until people start treating other players right in PUGs, and especially once the blame isn't instantly thrown around, there will always be a tank and healer shortage.