Was dual spec never added?

The only thing it will produce is facts of what is, what it not is and lot's of biased opinions.

+1

As someone else said, with all the firings and the implementation of F2P a lot of what was promised pre-F2P goes out the window....for now. EA now has some data regarding the viability of the game in the long term since F2P. While I do not expect EA to immediately re-hire all the staff they let go, I'd be willing to bet that they do put some additional resources into the development team. And maybe in six to nine months we start seeing more "quality of life" improvements like the ability to save skill tree and key bind sets (probably available via legacy for either credits or cartel coins).

What you are forgetting is that it took them years to implement it in the first place. It was not even ready when the expansion it was supposed to be in launched...it came out five months later. And the equipment manager was not even part of it. THAT feature came out a year later (although there were add-ons that could do that already).

The last comment I will make on this is that Blizzard (makers of WoW) came out and stated that they did not like what dual spec did to WoW; that if they could repeal the feature they probably would, but they know they cannot. The fact that other MMO developers made the same "mistake" does not make it a good and right feature.

No matter how hard it is, by this time they could have implemented it by now. I will be very surprised if this is added within the next 2 years. BW has proved they do not deliver on a lot of promises.

I'm very reluctant to believe we will receive a new more convenient system when we already have one in place, when other common MMO features that are wanted by a large population of the community eg. paid transfers, still aren't even in the game at all.

I would very much rather them have taken awhile longer and actually implemented a better system rather than place a patch over it then put it aside forever.

And I'm happy with the system as is. I would much rather they did what they did instead of having nothing at all for the next 2 years. Not that I think your projected time or any of your statements are based on any facts of any kind. I'm just using your arbitrary number for the sake of argument.

You get free respects on the fleet. It's actually better than dual spec I think. You can try as many different specs as you want so long as your on fleet.

1) OP question was completely reasonable
2) Answer to OP questions is "No"
3) They did not introduced any sort of "alternative" system that is "better" and to say that they did is disingenuous.
4) Subscribers, after hefty initial investment can buy on per character basis ability to reset talents. Reset itself is free to subscribers only.
5) What is needed to make it passable is ability to store quickbars layouts the same ways the UI interface layouts already stored. Reason why it is not done is because UI interface layouts are stored client side in XML files but quickbar assignments are actually stored server side.
6) It's a quality of life improvement that is expected of modern MMORPG. It will conceivably also help with healer and tank shortage for group finder flashpoints and such. There is no logical reason to argue against it.

The end. Really. The rest is just perpetuating a worthless argument about a feature that may someday be implemented, but the OP won't find out about it until they once again come back to the game they keep quitting to troll the forums some more.

yesh, I concur.

You aren't understanding the reason behind wanting it in the game. It's when you are somewhere you can't respect like in a warzone. And maybe the spec you are using isn't really working and you know if you had an opposite spec you would do better for your team or could heal or switch from heals to damage or blah blah blah.

Then after you exit combat you could switch your spec and get back into the mix. Or the same thing for in the middle of a flashpoint/operation.

Or way out in the middle of a planet doing quests.

It is just a quality of life addition.

And I change my specs a couple times a week. Sometimes a day.

To be honest, since F2P took most of the UI development time (as F2P and the Cartel Store affect every part of the current UI) from around August to when F2P was launched in November, including a month or two of fixing Cartel Market interface issues, not one new UI development has come out. Not even the earlier mentioned 'improvements to the interface editor' and other things like UI performance, chat bubbles, and the bug with Unify Color not working correctly that was only recently fixed.

Knowing development teams and how these things work, they have probably started focusing more effort on Quality of Life improvements again since around the holiday season.. maybe after 1.6 hit Live servers. So if Dual Spec in the works, the teams working on it would not be available long to work on this. Meaning that, at best, now they are working on their first internal prototypes developed on the first designs. Considering nothing specific has been said yet, chances are it is not beyond that stage if it is being developed at all.

Thing is, if they took longer for the better solution, we would still have the same old system of only doing it on fleet because F2P development would still have been in there taking away all UI developers. Not to mention 6 months is probably not enough to develop this regardless. As others pointed out as well, WoW's dual spec was delivered almost half a year later than the expansion it should have been a part of, and it was not bug free until 6 months after that. Only then, an equipment manager was added as well. And who knows how long it took them to build it from design to delivery. But something that is 6 months delayed probably didn't have an initial development time planned of a few months. And at the time, WoW had a huge development team as it was in it's prime.

I'm glad we have the quick solution now. I realise this is all they could deliver for now. But I also look forward to seeing the better system put into the game. I have a very small hope improvements in respeccing are part of the 'new systems' that has been hinted at in Rise of the Hutt Cartel announcements. But I honestly don't expect it to be. Only realistic timeline I see would be this time next year, maybe before the holiday season 2013.