In real life, I’ve been preparing a house to sell. Yeah I know, crappy timing with the market being what it is, but I have a nice job change waiting for me in another state 5 hours away. That kinda necessitates selling my house. It’s also becoming spring where I live, which means Spring Cleaning in all it’s insane glory. So I’ve been cleaning out the house of old things I don’t want/use, visiting home improvement stores practically daily, and talking to installation people about appointments to come to the house. It’s more than a little hectic over here.
I’ve found that the “change everything!” mindset has invaded my WoW-space as well. In my collection of alts, I had a human rogue named Duvesa, that I’d gotten to level 57. She was my first major alt, and until I got off my butt and leveled my mage up, she was my highest level alt for the longest time. However, she was permanently stuck at 57. Why? I just couldn’t get into her anymore. I’d loved playing her, but somewhere along the way, I fell out of love. It just wasn’t fun for me any more. I could not find anything that made me interested in playing her anymore. So yesterday, after not playing her (other than hopping onto her and unlocking a low level lockbox for a friend) for almost 2 years, I sold all of her equipment and items, mailed the proceeds to my bank toon, and deleted Duvesa.
Did it hurt? A little. But I’d found myself with no connection at all to her, and was starting to hate the fact she was in the second slot on my list, right behind Siana. Why have her there if I was never going to play her? So I deleted her and once the faint pangs of character deletion were over, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. To celebrate, I did the next obvious thing: I deleted another character. This time it was a Night Elf warrior, Ravaria, that I’d had wandering around. Only level 27, but she’d been a NE priest, a human pally, and then a NE warrior before getting deleted yet one more time. That name is one that I’ve had in previous MMOs and I have sentimental attachments to it, so I created a placeholder character with it. Will I ever play it? Who knows.
So after deleting two characters, I decided since the house feels weird with all the new paint and what not going up, I needed to change up Siana a little. So I did something that made several friends fall over into shock: I respec’d. Right now, she’s the “standard” 41/20 BM spec after being heavy MM spec (my usual choice). I raided last night with it and said I’d give it a couple more days of playing around with it. But once the time is over, I’ll be respec’ing again, this time to one of the MM/SV builds.
Why am I doing this? I’m trying to shake my mind out of any hunter ruts it’s gotten itself into. Specs are always a polarizing element in WoW, with this build or that build being held up as the Holy Grail for whatever your attempting to do, whether it’s PvP, leveling or raiding. But it’s not that simple. There’s not really one “perfect” build for each class/situation. There’s always something that affects the end result: latency, gear, random chaos, and most importantly, the person actually playing the character. It’s that human element that makes two identically geared, identically spec’d hunters have different DPS. It’s what each person brings to the table in personal experience and gaming style that affects the end results.
So I’m playing with specs, rediscovering what does and doesn’t work for me, and having a grand time doing it. I have a feeling I’ll be going back to my usual spec, but it’s always good to shake things up.
Tomorrow? I’ll be watching guys install new flooring into my house and trying to minimize the destruction to my belongings. I’ll get some daily quests done, maybe even work on some quests with my mage, or over on Moon Guard with the About Last Night group over there. Or I could say to hell with it all and hide in the bedroom with the two freaked out cats. 
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wow a busy time for you huh? Every so often I have a tidy up in-game too, funnily enough it does usually coincide with times that I have been very much a spring-clean mood in general lol.
Hope you get all the renovating and clearing done in plenty of time
Ah spring cleaning is always nice. I’ve done it several times to my alt-chars but never a char as high as 57… I have this rogue stuck at 53 I am thinking of deleting, but then again.. who knows when it will come in handy =)
How brave! I know that, despite the fact that, with my new combined guild bank for crap, I don’t need half of my characters.
BUT. I’ve found myself too attached to them all, even the little gnome warrior that I know that I’ll never play because One: She’s a gnome and Two: She’s a warrior but… well. Just staring at her bright blue eyes, I know that I can’t push that button and just… end it. (I can’t stand playing anything shorter than a human. Why, I don’t know. I do think female gnomes are adorable though!)
I actually almost did the same thing the other night until I somehow rediscovered my metaphorical boner for my boyfriend’s rogue, realized I could help the rest of the folks leveling leatherworking for drums, kick ass and take names and didn’t end up deleting my nooblet (skinner) rogue. But in the spirit of spring cleaning (and with the weather around here finally clearing up), I redid my UI, cleaned up my mods, reoptimized my tanking gear and then decided I should probably clean the whole apartment, too.
I also don’t know a lot about hunters, but it seems that there’s a real tendency for raiding hunters to go to the (as you said) cookie-cutter BM spec. I know that’s what all of Singularity’s hunters were until just recently when one finally got over 700 AGI and went Survival. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of fights are particularly pet un-friendly, in which case it doesn’t matter anyway. The nice thing about not being BM as well is that you can pick up a pet that’s pretty useless in terms of damage but ends up buffing the raid. Ex. our hunter that went Survival picked up an Owl. While it’s incredibly annoying, Screech stacks with all the other debuffs we use (Demo Shout, etc. etc.) and has proved to be useful. I’m sure you know all that bullshit, but that’s my latest hunter revelation.
Just found your blog - love it! Good luck with your house. We just moved across country and still haven’t sold ours. The market sucks!
Thanks for the comments.
This past week was insanely busy and I’m awful glad it’s over, even if i still have to do more dailies, grind out quests for other characters, replace lights in the house and work on some other assorted house-type things. Whee! /dies