I accidentally made a dent in the side of my bearing, will this affect performance?
Yes it will. I did this to the shields on my KK and it lost a lot of its spin time. Did you dent the "top of it (where the string sits) or the shields?
EDIT: If its the shields, just remove them and play with it shieldless, a little louder but the problem would be solved. 
Just the shields. So far though, I actually haven’t noticed significant spin time loss…maybe I didn’t dent it hard enough?
Also, to save forum space, another bearing question:
My other SPEC bearing had a problem where when spinning, a lot of tremors came from the bearing, and in turn caused spin time loss. What’s the cause and is there a solution?
if its the shield take them off and clean your spec bearing there might be something inside
This happened to my size A SPEC. I took the shields off, nothing was stuck inside of it, but it appeared that the saddles had somehow shifted around the balls, and they actually started grinding up against each other. Now that you mention that, It makes me think that this may be somewhat of an intermittent problem with some SPECs, but I’ll have to see how the one on my BOSS holds up before I make any decisions…
Try thin lube. when my bearings start to lose spin time or become responsive, i give them a little thin lube and I’m good to go.
Maybe, if you dent the bearing in the correct places, you could get a concaved bearing.
You would have to dent it many many times, because it would have to go all the way around the bearing. And even if that did happen, it would really suck because the dents wouldn’t be equal to each other, and it might break your bearing.
funny though 