[Edit: the thread votes for the mod Talented, available from wowace.com!]
[original post follows]
searched EJ: check
searched wowace.com: check
searched curse.com: check
searched the web at large: check
Internet - 4 Kew - 0
Lately, I've been finding myself respeccing a lot. Sometimes just PvP on the weekends, sometimes for an encounter I'd like to try in a different way. Sometimes it's an alt. The money's no problem (hooray for dailies). The number of different specs to remember is getting out of hand, however. So is the temporary feeling of angst while I click 61 buttons. Seems like a job for a mod to me!
Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be a single mod out there that manages your character's favorite specs, somewhat akin to ItemRack managing your favorite gear outlays. Ideally, I could see poking in a build once, saving it, going back and changing it whenever I like, then visiting a trainer, selecting the new build with a single click, hitting "Confirm" (two or three times for extra safety, maybe), and having it all go in.
Since the usual searches seem to reveal nothing, I figured I'd ask the EJ crowd if they know of any such tool. Brief perusal of the API seems to indicate that such a tool would be possible...
Will talented eat your hard earned cash by learning talents you don't want ?
I certainly hope not.
To my knowledge, there has only been a few hours where one version of Talented, with Talented_Data, could spend points in the wrong talent for the paladin class just after the 2.1 patch hit the live realms. This won't happen again, as there is several checks made to make sure that an outdated version of Talented_Data is not loaded.
Talented has never, even during early development, spent a talent point on a wrong talent for me. I take this very seriously, I use the addon myself. I can't make any promises, or tell you that it can't bug, but be assured that every safeguard I could think of has been taken to make sure this would not happen. If by any chance this would happen to you, then I certainly want to know about it. So please post about it on the forum.
Using it now. It shows great promise. I haven't actually used it to respec yet, but it seems to do what I want. Thanks to all.
Wowace's add-on listing on the website tricked me, ultimately. I clicked on the letters B, S, and T ("build", "spec", "talent"), and skimmed the subcategories, and never found anything that way. For some reason, the raw listing in the section at the bottom escaped my attention (I probably thought to myself "no way I'm going to go fishing through a list of 500 vaguely-named mods", and mentally wrote it off).
Or JWoWUpdater which I much prefer to WoW Ace Updater for some reason.
Both are great tools to keep yourself updated and make it easy to install/remove/find Ace2 based addons.
Wow, thanks for that link, I'd never seen that one. I've been using MacAceUpdater which has a really incomplete interface on the Mac - no ability to do the non-embedded libraries as an example.
Thanks for this thread. I downloaded it last night and successfully respeced using it. Spending the first 50g with it was nerve wracking let me tell ya
Actually, I -do- use WAU, regularly. The trouble with it is the same with the site: it doesn't facilitate searching for "a mod that does X" as well as I'd like. What it facilitates is window shopping - scrolling leisurely down the alphabetized list, skimming the one-line comment field, taking your best guess at what it really means, and maybe downloading it if it tickles your fancy. I've been burned too many times by misleading names to trust skimming just them.
This in turn is because modwriters are, like most software writers, better at writing the actual code than they are at writing the documentation. And I'm guessing that WoWAce's crew is busy enough trying to maintain the framework without having to also police mod documentation, keyword matchups, etc. So here we are.