I’ve been mulling about dual spec for a while now. As a mage, it’s not really been the best investment but I’ve changed my mind somewhat. The reason Dual Spec is useful for Mages, can be summed up simply as Elemental Fights.
As a Mage, your spec basically indicates what kind of damage you do. If you’re Arcane, you shoot purple awesome at people; Fire, you shoot your Fireballz at people, and Frost, you throw lances of ice. Frostfire Bolt spec can be written off for this investigation, as no mobs have resistance to Frostfire damage, giving FFB mages a free ride out of this problem.
Now, as a ‘normal’ mage, if you have a fight where the boss has heavy resistances to your type of damage. You are, to put it politely, fucked. You’ll get resisted more often, and as such, your spells will deal less damage.
Let’s take Sapphiron as an example. In Naxx40, he was immune to frost. In EZNaxx, he’s merrily resistant to it. If you go in as a frost mage, you’re wasting your potential. With dual spec, you can take your prefered spec through to him, switch to another, less gimped spec, for the fight, and be on your merry way. Mind you, as frost spec, you get fun mindfuck abilities in that fight, like wiping the raid like a douche, so /shrug.
Other people might like using their off spec for PvP. That’s great too, but is it really worth 1000 gold? If you’re serious about getting owned in Arenas, then yes, I imagine it is. To someone like me, who finds small scale PvP to be terebad, it’s not worth it at all.
So, is Dual Spec worth it? I’m still not sure, but if you’ve got a spare 1k lying around (after buying Epic Flight) go for it.
SPECIAL FUN BONUS QQ : Dual Spec is just another piece of proof that Blizz only wants people playing classes with multiple roles, and that they hate Mages, Warlocks, Hunters and Rogues. (/joke, guys, seriously…)