wtb [Extra Hours In The Day] pst with price

I really need more time in the day. Maybe not so much during the weeks, but all this alting takes time on the weekends.

Up till recently, I've been heavily focused on the utility basis for alting. That's just a fancy way of saying I've been ignoring my alts once they hit 450 in their professions, of course. Malqueso, my noble hunter usedtabe-main, hadn't seen the inside of an instance in a long, long time, and Jurith, my warlock, had only been in enough heroics to get enough Ebon Blade rep to get the soul shard bag pattern. Both were clocking right along at a less than magnificent 700-ish DPS rate, and frankly I wasn't really inclined to take them in and suffer the embarrassment of being out-DPS'ed by the tank and sometimes even the healer.

Granted, their gear was pretty awful. Still is. Malqueso was still using the epic trinket you got from Exalted rep with Sha'tari Skyguard...you know, back in Burning Crusade, when flying mounts were new and sparkly. Part of the reason I hadn't worked on them was how much effort it takes to look up upgrades to be gotten from quests and then go do the requisite quest chains. I'm...um...well, honestly, I'm a bit lazy when it comes to that. I've already done the work to get one toon up to a gear score in the 5500 range, and (insert QQ QQ here). Discovered by accident that there's a Wyrmrest quest for a trinket that's better than the Skyguard one, so that one went bye-bye this weekend, but that's just serendipity.

Anyway, I went out and did spec and spell rotation research...twice. Learned that for a destruction-specced warlock, I was using entirely the wrong set of spells AND talents, and for my hunter, I was just using stuff in the wrong way. Respecced my warlock to take a better destruction build based on a couple of different websites...www.wowwiki.com is usually my first glance, but I always look at others too...and was pleased. Jurith's DPS doubled in one day, going up to the 1500-1600 range. While that's still pretty puny by today's seriously-overgeared-in-heroics standards, it's not a bad improvement for a respec and a change in rotation. Turns out it's best to start boss fights with Curse of Doom (who'd'a thunk that spell had a use outside of Karazhan?), then immolate, conflag, toss in a chaos bolt, finish out the immolate's timer with incinerate, and repeat.

See, this is where my leveling prowess with my lock had done me wrong. Shadow bolt is one of the first spells you get when you're running around outside the Undercity hitting demon dogs for a few dozen damage points at a time. Growing up, Jurith had seen the "Improved Shadow Bolt" talent and thought, "Ooh, that sounds like fun!" Shadow bolt had, thus, always been on my cast bar and had been a staple of my rotation. Wrong. The first spells you get aren't always your most powerful ones, it seems. Come to think of it, they're pretty much never your most powerful ones...my main, a mage, almost never uses fireball any more, and...the list goes on.

The hunter, meanwhile, didn't get a respec. Frankly, I can't respec him. He was the first toon I discovered Talents on. To call him the FIRST toon would be inaccurate; I still have a level 1 undead warrior out there on some server somewhere that heard, "run down the hill and talk to that guy" and ran all the way out of the starting area. At level one, I couldn't keep him alive long enough to get back into the safety of the starting zone, so...well, yeah. *singing* I'm the captain of the failboat....

*ahem* Anyway, Malqueso was really my first toon to make it to 10, that vaunted level where you first get to look at the Talents page and wonder, "What the heck is this stuff?" I presume...I hope, anyway...that I'm not the only person to just look at the first line of options, pick the one corresponding to the ability I use the most at that level, and clicky on it. Then, next level, more clicky based on what you're using currently. At some point (with Malqueso it was level 60) everybody realizes, "Hey, I need to be choosing talents based on what I need in the future," but that nuance is lost at first, and deserves its own blog post to boot.

At that point, most people, I'd suspect, run away to respec. I didn't. Malqueso, or MQ as we lovingly call him in my guild ("lovingly" might be a stretch, but hey, it's my blog, OK?) is specced as I wanted him, and nothing but a clean wipe by Blizz has gotten me to change that. That's happened twice to my recollection, and I remember those vividly mostly due to the panic that came out of me being in a raid realizing I was Talentless. "Um...break for a sec...I have no Talent" is embarrassing to say over Raid chat, by the way. Trust me, I know.

So...back to my original point...I haven't respecced MQ. Can't. I even took him into the Valley of Honor this weekend, with a web site of a Marksman Hunter raid DPS spec pulled up, and couldn't bring myself to erase his talents. Silly? Yes. But there it is. I even still have EVERY spell he's ever learned tied onto the toolbars. Still, by switching around his shots according to the shot rotation prescriptions I read (Serpent Sting, Wyvern Sting, then a couple other shots, then repeat Wyvern Sting...and don't forget Kill Shot when up!), I got his DPS up to about 1.5K. With that, I'm not going to win many DPS awards, but at least I'm not going to piss the random party members off enough to be Kicked...or even worse, ridiculed.

And so, the weekend closed with me now having a viable tank, a viable healer, an awesome DPS, and a couple of viable DPS alts. Not bad, for one weekend, even if I didn't get a chance to do my daily make-the-Frenzyheart-love-me quests.

More on the silly rep game later, though. When I have time.