Cataclysm-talent
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Rediscovering Alts: A private Cataclysm
I've been playing an enhancement/resto shaman since The Burning Crusade. I like my two shaman because they're not warriors; they have a different playstyle and instead of tank/DPS hybrids, they're healer/DPS hybrids. (Admittedly, they once kind of tanked, if you squinted.) Even to this day, I read Josh and Sarah and Joe every week. Once Cataclysm came along, I was forced to put my shaman on the back burner for a while. Raid needed tank. Me tank. Me tank hard. (Okay, so I neither write or speak like that.) I also got to enjoying messing around with the various warrior DPS specs. But with the passing of time, as my warriors got geared enough to perform the roles expected of them, I got to missing my shaman. My orc, I may never level again (at least not until I finally break down and buy a race change to tauren -- you can thank Garrosh "Where did my neck go?" Hellscream), but my draenei, I still enjoy a great deal. I know a lot of Alliance shaman players went dwarf, but I'm fond of my big blue. So I went back and started leveling him and quickly discovered a few things. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. A lot of the essentials of the class are still there, but a lot really has changed. Fire Nova works entirely differently now. Stat weights are entirely different. We have whole new abilities, and our older abilities were either redesigned, moved around, or in some cases removed entirely. Sentry Totem is gone. I won't lie: I cried. We have two forms of CC now! Two! Holy crap, I remember when Hex was barely even viable. Now, it's pretty solid. Mages have stolen Heroism. This also made me cry.
Cataclysm Beta: Death knight talents and specializations
The huge, earthshaking 31-point talent overhaul has hit the Cataclysm beta servers, taking the death knight class to new ground, back to the old vanilla era of 31-point trees. It may be for this reason that Blizzard's specifically said that our trees are far from done. With that in my mind, the trees and specialization skills we see can and will change pretty extensively between now and release. That said, there's no harm and certainly some good to be had in sizing up the trees as they stand right now and seeing how they pan out.
Shifting Perspectives: Cataclysm talent changes
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, Allie hopes she is too unimportant and destitute to be worth suing. While finishing the bear, tree and cat gearing guides, I dickered over whether it'd be worth it to examine the Cataclysm talent changes. It's kind of dumb to devote a column to changes that, for all we know, Blizzard slid into the upcoming beta just to scare data miners, but I finally decided ... what the hell. I enjoyed watching Wrath's development during its beta and often wish I'd written more about the class changes as they evolved. Anyway, this is a snapshot of what we know in May 2010. There is the minor matter of the, uh, Cataclysm talent changes no longer being publicly available. As with all alpha leaks, there's the ever-present threat of Blizzard raining lawyers on your head like some Biblical plague, but then I thought -- what good is working for an evil corporation if I can't marshal our own soulless legal tyrants? And how much fun would it be to watch Blizzard legal battling Aol legal? Aol's lawyers hate life and themselves, and this is the stuff of great entertainment. Why not haul out the deck chair, pack a lunch and have the traditional American day out at the Ninth Circuit Court enjoying the Fisticuffs of the Damned?
Ghostcrawler on Cataclysm's talent tree philosophy, abilities, and Ragnaros
Ghostcrawler posted a bit this evening on the philosophical direction Blizzard is taking in Cataclysm in three important areas: Talent trees New spells and abilities Recycled raid content The discussion originated from a mild QQ post about what the poster felt were the flaws in Cataclysm, and Ghostcrawler took that opportunity to clarify a few things that the community has been talking about since the initial announcement at BlizzCon 2009. Chief amongst those is that they are specifically designing talent trees now with an intention for there to be 5 to 10 talent points that can be spent where the player wants -- and that talent guides like you find in WoW.com's class columns will only go so far in the selection of the idea talent tree; the rest of the talent selection will be left up to the individual user. Of course, this information isn't exactly new per se, but it's interesting to hear some of the refinements of it all as Cataclysm's development progresses. Ghostcrawler's full statement after the break.
