Dual Spec

I only shelled out the money for dual spec on my mage so far and I decided to keep my main spec as Frostfire (as I’ve been for the past few months) and take an Arcane raiding spec as my second.  I think I just don’t have the arcana mojo though (or maybe it could just be that I’m geared incorrectly), because doesn’t just eat my mana like a mofo – which I expected – but it also is shelling out consistently less damage and dps on target dummies.  It seems like it might be a good non-aoe trash spec because of the large amount of instants and just the general lack of a 3 second cast (damn you frostfire bolt!  damn you to hell!).  To be fair, I didn’t buy glyphs for this spec yet, so maybe that’s where the 600 dps difference lies, but I doubt it…  I also won’t find out for awhile because glyphs have become so overpriced since the patch.  😮

If you’d like to check out the spec, check out my armory.  And don’t mind the gear…  I have been spending a lot of time with the dummies shuffling around stuff for arcane, so I might be wearing some weird combos.

On a minor note: last night we tried the new boss in vault (no longer lolvault) and actually failed.  But I was able to complete my T7/7.5 set with drops from Archavon and Sartherion.  We had some issues with the firewall glitching, but we were able to do that eventually.

Emblem of Heroism Refund

So, I did something stupid.  I assumed that the mage T7 chest would actually be any good.  Without checking online for stats (and without really looking at it at all), I dropped the 80 badges on the token and proceded through a very laggy Dalaran to purchase the robe.  The stats on this robe were worse than the blue-quality quest piece I wore before!  I mean, c’mon, SPIRIT?!

After getting very irritated with myself and having all those “I’m so stupid!” moments, I started to think about if there was anything I could do.  About 15 minutes after I purchased the piece, I opened a ticket to speak with a GM.  Thankfully, the GM was very understanding.  I didn’t lie about what happened – I simply said something like “I made a mistake and bought this chest piece even though it is not useful to me.  I was wondering if I could have the Emblems refunded so that I could buy items that will make playing more fun for me.”  The ticket was escalated to a GM that deals primarily with issues like this and, in a few days, I received an in-game mail with a nice greeting and the 80 emblems.

The reason I am making this post is so that people know that they don’t have to waste their hard-earned badges if they make a mistake!  I have heard some bad stories about similar situations, but I think the most important thing is to contact a GM early if you make a mistake when purchasing an emblem item.  Since I didn’t wear the piece in any type of game-play situation (i.e. dungeons/heroics/raiding), I can assume that it was clear to the GM that I wasn’t trying to fool them or take advantage of something.