Posts with tag re-spec

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 04 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby.

This patch hit me hard, harder than any patch before it, and I know I wasn't the only was one to be drastically affected by it. Other than the usual spate of patch-related addon issues, I was struggling to keep the downloader connected. After turning off all anti-virus, firewall and other sorts of computer safety monitoring programs, I finally got into game on Friday night. Mostly, though, I just lacked time to log in this week. Once in game, I was faced with just as many challenges getting Stoney in order and raid-ready as I was trying to get online. This patch was more disruptive in game than any patch before.

A far an enhancement goes, there's so much that still needs to be tested and refined. The greater enhancement community is working hard at the theorycrafting, but even the simulations are not fully refined for level 80 testing; the latest alpha of EnhSim is tuned to level 85 right now. The decisions I made in game are based on the best available data as well as some things I want to test out for myself. There was a lot to accomplish in-game including, respeccing, retraining, regemming, reforging, readjusting and refining.

A lot of surprises came with the awesome Patch 2.3. Shamans, in particular, have been getting a lot of unintended love. The recent three-hour server maintenance found a lot of Shamans on the WoW forums talking about getting free re-specs, after a bug in the recent patch gave some Shamans an additional Talent Point to spend in creatively undesirable ways. Reports have trickled in that some players' Shamans got their Talents wiped clean while others, such as WoW Insider's Mike Schramm, did not. The irony is that a lot of Shamans had already paid their hard-earned Gold to re-spec thanks to the buff-flavored goodness of 2.3 only to find that they had their Talent Points refunded a day later.

What about you guys who play Shamans? Did you get your Talent Points refunded? If yes, did you use the free re-spec to choose a new build or take the same Talents you've known and loved? Were you among the over-eager mobs who spent for a re-spec as soon as the servers came back on last Tuesday?

With the new talent trees and the challenges of leveling, I've had to adjust my talents several times. On my warlock, I did a post-2.0 build before the expansion pack that was very heavy demonology, a leveling build that was heavy affliction, then I tried multiple builds for post-70, settling on a hybrid 40/0/21 build similar to my old raiding build.

Fortunately I'd had my old raiding spec for a very very long time, and my cost to switch everything now is up to just 30G. How many times have you unlearned your talents lately? What's your re-spec cost up to?