Off-spec Gearing

Here's yet another post that will probably alienate a number of people, but at least this one is Wow related. And it won't alienate them as much as have them rolling their eyes thinking, "Yeah, duh! We've done that for years."

Let me start off by giving some background. I've been playing Wow for over 4 years now. During that time, I've had exactly 1 main, my mage, Leiandra. I've also leveled various alts, mostly on the same server. My mage always hit level cap first with each expansion, but I've had these alts as well. My priest hit level cap back in Vanilla Wow. Both my Shaman and Priest hit level cap in TBC. And so far, just my Shaman has hit level cap in Wrath. Besides the actual leveling process, I haven't done much of anything else with these toons except to level them to level and sometimes profession cap.

Now, as I've mentioned, I've been focusing on my shaman quite a bit and having a lot of fun doing it. From 70 to 80, I leveled him as enhancement, but started looking for resto quest rewards at around 78, because that's where I wanted to eventually end up. So, now I have this hybrid toon. My first one. So while I have my main spec of resto, I have this other spec of enhancement. Now the logical gear choice probably would have been to be elemental for my other spec, but it still would have required gear, and if I want a ranged DPS, I might as well just use my mage, right?

So, I've done a decent job of researching my resto set. I know there's still a lot of upgrades that I need, but I've got most of my stuff pretty well tied up. Enchants are fairly in order. Proper gems, including my jewelcrafting gems. My resto set is doing quite well.

Well, now I have this semi-neglected set. And as the case would have it last night, I went on a run with a bunch of friends. And the usual healer is a dual spec'ed Disc/Holy Priest. She heals. That's it. We had enough DPS to cover my crappy DPS, so I wasn't worried about that. I even played the hybrid role and threw a few key heals. I even off-tanked a mob that was beating on the priest for a bit. And at the end of the run, when I asked how my dps was, I wasn't even surprised that the tank had done more damage than me.

Pretty sad though. But what do I expect with level 75 quest reward items (with a couple purples and greens, but mostly blues) that are gemmed with green gems and no enchants against a full purple tank? And since we're all friends, it was no big deal, but on a normal run, I'd be that guy. Then again, to be fair.. in a raid, I'd probably be healing, but still... I don't want to be that guy. I don't need to be top dps in my off-spec either, but I certainly want to be above the tank.

So, in a way, with one toon, it really feels like I have to spend twice the amount of time on him. That's twice the researching. Twice the farming. But at least it's only 1 raid lock out. lol.

Oh, and not to mention that the research is much more difficult when I'm now looking at 3 armor qualities instead of just cloth as before. Sure, I'd like to be in mail, but that's not always what drops. In fact, it's almost too much math. Like I just want somebody to tell me at each drop if that's an upgrade. 'Cause not only might it be an upgrade for one set, but possibly also for my other set!!!

Wow. I finally have a whole new appreciation and understanding for the raiders that we had that had gear for both of their specs.