So my gnome is currently level 37, and has a little over 1500 gold. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, since the market for copper and bronze has crashed terribly. The bronze bars that used to sell for a little over a gold get cheaper every day, they’re less than half that now, and tin ore sells for more so I’m better off just auctioning what I find rather than smelting it. I’m not gonna argue, it certainly saves me some time.

At least iron is still really valuable, though I often sell that as ore as well. I made a tidy 15g yesterday when I noticed one stack of iron bars was about half the price of all the others, so I bought it and immediately put it up for slightly lower than all the others, and it sold within a few hours. I love easy profit like that.

But to make up for the lost smelting profits, my inscription has been catching up, and is now earning a sizeable income. I’ve been posting my glyphs (only a single copy at a time of each glyph that’s currently at or above 4 gold) for the lowest 12 hour duration, because I know it won’t take long for people to undercut me, and then they’re not going to sell at all for the remaining duration.

The reason I mention this is, that despite having enough gold to do so, I don’t think I will be getting dual spec.

Thanks to finding an enhancement shaman I pugged with who happened to play on the same server (and describes my tanking as “awesome”), I now have someone on my friends list. She whispers me from time to time asking if I want to run any random dungeons, and since she can also heal, they go by pretty quickly. She pulled me in to Cathedral when I was only 35 (Mograine was still red to me, but I did my best to tank him anyway — “dodge! 6 damage (glancing)! parry!”) and that finished the quest I had for a nice new sword to replace the blue axe I’ve been using since Deadmines.

Soon after, I queued for RFD to finish the quest I had there for another sword with identical speed and DPS but with Attack Power instead of Whale stats. But hey, they’re basically the same, so I should hold on to that second sword for when I dual spec at 40, so I can go Fury for soloing, right? So I equipped the AP sword and tossed the other one in my bags.

I was killing skeletons outside of Duskwood (in this character’s current quest to get Loremaster on SOMETHING before the expansion hits) when I got bored and decided to queue for a random battleground. Well, it turns out that the random daily battleground feature only works for level 80 people, but that’s okay, I hate Warsong Gulch anyway, so I queued for AB and got in almost immediately. I was standing on my mount near the gate, trying to decide if I would rather wear my AP sword or my stam sword, when it suddenly hit me.

LIKE OMG YOU GUYS I CAN TOTALLY WEAR BOTH OF THEM AND I DON’T HAVE TO BE FURY SPECCED.

I equipped one of the two swords in my offhand (*gasp* INSTEAD OF MY SHIELD ohno what’s going on here I’m supposed to be prot) and proceeded to have a blast charging at people on their mounts and gnawing on their ankles (hamstring has a whole new meaning when you’re a gnome warrior) and stunning them with that Hammer of Justice ripoff I have from my prot talents and then charging off to the next battle.

So when I got out of the battleground (we won, of course) I felt really smart and really dumb at the same time, as I continued about my quests, but this time, with more dual-wield. Though I’d imagine I’ll go back to using my shield once I hit 40, because Shield Slam is just that awesome. The things I’m killing die pretty fast anyway, and I’ve always got so much rage that I don’t know what to do with it. And once I hit 50, I’ll get Warbringer and I won’t even need to solo in Battle Stance any more (soloing as a warrior without having Charge makes me a sad panda).

I mean, it might be kinda fun to switch out to a different spec from time to time, to learn about a different playstyle, but I don’t feel that it’s completely *necessary*. I rather enjoy tanking, and if I can both tank and solo, why do I need to be able to DPS? The random LFG only sent me to an instance as DPS once, and the only reason my damage was so low is that I was still building up my weapon skill for most of the fights. (Sorry!)

Maybe when I get to 80, I’ll pick up a DPS offspec so that I can run heroics for better tanking gear, but at 40? My DPS is fine as prot, and I think that using the spec while soloing helps me remember where my abilities are for when I’m tanking. Having a second spec would probably just confuse me at this point. Until then, I’ll continue saving up my gold so that I can get epic flying training as soon as I hit 70.

This just proves to myself that I CAN earn enough money to get dual spec on a server that I have no other characters or heirlooms to help me (I made a DK to play with the SAN folks, but I never mailed the gold she has to my warrior), but that spending said money on said feature is pointless at this level.