Questions about shaders - shadeless with specularity?

[SavageDogg38]

So, I have an idea about a way I may speed up a game a bit but wanted some feedback first. It's nothing new. It's a technique that can be used to save the hardware some strain by prerendering the lighting(light or shadowmaps) of an area of map or model - for instance with Blender's Cycles baking - Bake it to UVs and import it into the engine - such as Leadwerks - with a shadeless shader and now you have a good looking game that runs fast; however, all those nice specular reflections are lost because you cannot render those things because the perspective of the player always changes. Maybe it is good for something at a distance where the eye doesn't travel to much to cause a change in parallax, but up close, you cannot have specularity , it may still look good, but something is missing: the specular highlights of the walls. It also makes using normals map moot, so those details are lost.

 

To my question. Is it possible to have a shadeless shader - no diffuse shader - yet have specular and normal maps? Is it really saving any cycles?