Spec Thoughts -- Steady or Oscillating?

I was talking with Cil the other day. He keeps trying to tell me how I should respec my mage to fire. (He's been telling me this forever now, but I keep ignoring him.) My reason? Mel has been frost forever. (She has dabbled into fire before (for Master of Elements, but found it not to her liking, and is now permanently frost.) I have found that with some characters, I don't mind respec'cing (such as Losse, of course. "Which spec are you this time?" is the best question to ask if one wanted to invite me to an instance, as I could be resto for one instance, then a few hours later, feral), while, with others (such as Mel and Cir), the idea of being anything but what they are is... strange.

Why?

I think with Losse, my openness to her being something else comes easily, just due to the fact that she is a druid, and, in my mind, in order to take the most advantage of being a druid, I must be open with how I play her and her spec-style. As a tree, I can be found DPSing (Moonfire! Rawr!). As feral (bear), I tend to pull out of bear form (both for more aggro, and for the simple fact that I like to patch people up right after a pull so my healers don't have to drink as much. And to get Furor benefits after that. Feral, in PvP, means that I heal (and so does tree, clearly, but...). I always carry my feral and resto sets around on Losse (bag room is a jerk), so that I can switch gear with ease to do whatever I find necessary at the time (and, when I respec, I don't need to keep running to the bank!). It's such a versatile class, and I try to take the make the best of it. Losse comes from a history that left her nearly constantly seeking solace within nature, and she has always felt indebted to them due to the amount of comfort and peace that the woods lended her. In return, she feels compelled to both defend the forest, and, at times, to even become one with the woodland.

Now with Mel, beside the fact that she has a fair bit more of +frost damage than anything else, I just can't see her with anything but her faithful water elemental and a water shield, her hands glowing blue as the power surges through her. I originally chose frost because of the survivability -- I tended to die. A lot. So I figured that I'd go frost -- why not? We're supposed to not be as good of a friend with death as the other two specs, and we're fairly mana efficient as well. Great! Well, now, at seventy, with quite a few played days, she's still squishy as all anything and still is mating with death, as well as eating through mana like none other. But, despite it all, I love it. So when people suggest for me to try a different spec, I find myself refusing. "She's a mana junkie! Just think how bad she will be as fire!" or "She does enough as it is -- why would I want to die more?" tend to be my most used excuses for her. In the roleplaying sense, it is the cooling power of frost that keeps her lightheaded and less flighty, and her water elemental, Aeros, always helps to strengthen her resolve in battle...

Now, for my hunter. While I don't play her enough to really fuss, she's had her kitty, Void, since they were both thirty-three (ish). It's one of those panthers from STV (yes, she did quest through there), and both she and I love our kitty. (A friend can attest to the fact that I talk at my screen, and at Void, while I'm playing. In fact, I talk to my screen so much that he couldn't figure out whether I was talking to my screen/myself, talking on Vent, or talking to him.) As well, her having a cat is crucial to her roleplay story, due to the fact that panthers are... their creatures, I suppose. They revere them so, and it was just fitting that Cirwen has one and pampers it. With that light touch of the roleplay history, she has to be beast mastery, for that is the spec that pays the most attention to the pet.

So I guess my reasons for either staying a spec or flipping around have a fair bit of lore swirled into it, along with practicality and play style. The different characters, in themselves, keep things interesting, but thinking and understanding why things happen on one character but not another adds a whole different level to the game.

What keeps you playing? Why do you spec the way you do? Is there a story to tell from the why's and how's, or have you never really put much thought into it? I like to think of myself a writer, and everything can have a tale behind it -- consider your characters from that view.

[[ Bah. Stress! If people have been following me on Twitter, they will have seen my spaz a few days ago. It's been rather crazy over here, me shipping myself off to college (parents are *so* supportive), figuring out classes, remembering that I share living quarters with people now, and I shouldn't leave by crap EVERYWHERE... And then remembering to go home and grab a cable so I can hop onto the internet (ew for no wireless)... No WoW for a while, but hopefully, after I send this pos of a laptop over to a friend of mine, he will make it run WoW smoothly. (At the moment, there are days when I dread to run even Firefox. Eep!)

This is the first time I've been able to visit the blog since all of that stuff started. So my apologies for the slight poof there! ]]