WoW Insider

You start on the road to Dual Specs at any of your class trainers around the world. For today, I'm using a class trainer in the Exodar because due to the PTR being what it is, I had a lot of crashing problems in other cities. Any trainer works fine though, so this isn't really a problem for what we're doing.

When you talk to the trainer, he (or she) has all of his usual dialogue, with an extra option to learn about dual specs. Obviously, this is what we're looking for. Click that dialogue option to get the party started.

The trainer will just tell you a little about the feature. You get two specs, two sets of glyphs, two sets of action bars, two sets of keybindings, the whole spiel.

When you switch from one spec to the other, all of that stuff will automatically switch over. We'll show you a bit more of that shortly.

Click the dialogue option that you want to purchase the Dual Spec ability, and it'll prompt you for your sweet, sweet gold. As of February 24th, Dual Spec costs 1000g on the PTR but it's possible this price will change before patch 3.1 goes live.

Dual Spec can currently be purchased as early as level 40, but a brand new player probably won't have 1000g by then. Players will high level characters will be able to 'twink' their alts in this way, though.

Hey, look at that! Another 10 epeen points for our Overachievers!

Plus, apparently my mind has been expanded. That's pretty cool. I wonder if it hurt...

You've opened up your Dual Specs, and now it's time to start speccing. Both of my talent specs are empty, so I get to start filling them in. On the right side of the Talent pane you'll see that there are two buttons there, each representing your talent specs. They'll list which tress have points allocated into them and all of that, you just click them to look at whichever spec you want to be working with at the moment.

I'm primarily a Shadow Priest, so my 'primary' spec will be PvE Shadow.

I've spent all of my talent points, and the button on the right side has updated to reflect what my spec is. It just looks at which tree has the most points spent in it and uses that to determine which icon to use, nothing complicated.

The Glyphs pane is no longer found in the Spellbook. It's on the Talent screen instead, using a little tab on the bottom. Each spec gets its own set of glyphs. These are my Shadow glyphs, they'll go away when I switch to my secondary spec and be replaced with my secondary glyphs. When I come back to my Primary spec, they'll be there again.

Speaking of my secondary spec, let's get started on that!

To switch talent specs, it currently only takes a click of a button. You go to the pane of the talent spec you're not currently using and click "Activate these talents." It'll start a 5 second cast bar, and once it finishes casting everything will change over. There's no cooldown at all currently, you can do it as often as you like as long as you're not in combat, in a battleground, or in an arena. Curiously, it also seems to drain all of your mana when you do it. Strange.

I cobbled together a Discipline PvP spec as my secondary spec. I didn't plan it out very well, I sort of flew by the seat of my pants, but it works to show you how it goes.

I spent my talent points, and if you look at the bottom of the screenshot you'll see that I loaded up my actionbar with random healing spells. This isn't the sort of setup I would usually use, but it'll show you how this works.

I switched back to my Shadow spec and loaded up my action bar with Shadow spells. Also, I turned on Shadowform because I wanted to look pretty.

If I switch back to my secondary spec...

My healing action bar comes back, and the Shadow bar goes away. It does the same thing with your glyphs as I've mentioned before.

And that's all that I have to show you for now. It's a very smooth, clean process. It will take you some time to set everything up like you want it when you first make your purchase, but it'll save a lot of time and frustration down the road.

This is all we have for now, but the patch 3.1 news is still flowing. Make sure you keep an eye on WoW Insider's Guide to Patch 3.1 for all of the latest news.