talent-trees
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All characters to receive free respecs in patch 3.1
This may seem obvious considering how many changes are coming with patch 3.1, but we've been asked the question enough that I'm glad to finally see a confirmation on it: Yes, characters of every class will have their talent points refunded when patch 3.1 hits, Ghostcrawler says.Reading further into his comments, however, it looks like the amount of changes happening to the talent trees may not be the reason for the free respecs, but rather the result of it. The free respec actually seems to be something that was necessary when implementing Dual Specs, and they went ahead and did some extra fixing and cleaning because of that.That sort of makes sense, in the past it seems like they've mostly tried to target a few classes at a time rather than making heavy changes to all of them all at once. Patch 3.1 has hefty changes for every single class, and I don't remember very many content patches that had such widespread class changes. One way or another we would all need to respec after dual specs went in, so they saw an opportunity to make some additional changes and they took it. I'm okay with that.
WoW Rookie: Do you have talent(s)?
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.Are you a talentless n00b? It's really ok to admit it here, among friends -- you wouldn't be the first player in the world to have overlooked (or been completely befuddled by) talent points. Just take a peek at this post about a player who purposely skipped training his talent points, just to see what would happen. If you read through the comments after the post, you'll find plenty of players who missed training their talents along the way, either through not knowing that talent points existed or after becoming paralyzed by the sheer variety of choices.The talents you choose for your character can completely change the way you play the game. Your "spec" (specialization) is determined by where you've distributed your points among the three talent trees available to your class. So-called "hybrid" classes such as Druids or Paladins take on entirely different roles depending how they are specced: tanking, DPSing or healing. For other classes, spec is more of a flavor tool that determines how your character goes about doing his or her thing.
Lichborne: Talents for catching up
Welcome to Lichborne, where Daniel Whitcomb is doing some last minute agonizing over what face to give his Death Knight on Thursday.So there are quite a few of us, I imagine, who are still on track to switch to a Death Knight, or at least play one quite extensively, immediately when Wrath of the Lich King hits the live servers. But the fact remains that you'll be 15 levels behind everyone to start, and if you have friends to catch up to, you're going to want to get up there pretty quickly, most likely. Even if you plan to take it slow, you'll still want a good effective leveling build, most likely. So today, we'll look at three solid solo DPS builds from each tree, and discuss how to use them most effectively for grinding and leveling.
Scattered Shots: Wrath of the Hunter
Welcome to Scattered Shots, where Daniel Whitcomb is totally making plans to walk with rhythm so that he can attract the worm.So with Wrath less than a week away, we got our work cut out for us, so to speak. Luckily, 3.0's early release has given us time to learn to handle our pets and respec to take advantage of new talents, but now the big push is upon, as 10 levels and a whole slew of new zones opens up for us. When you step off the boat or zeppelin in Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, where will you go? What will you do? Here's a few quick Hunter specific tips to getting started in the Wrath of the Lich King.
Scattered Shots: Getting started with talents in 3.0.2 as a Beast Mastery Hunter
Welcome to Scattered Shots, where Daniel Whitcomb is doing a special happy dance over that whole Aspect global cooldown removal thing.Before we get into the meat of this week's column, I have a confession to make. I was tempted to make a very short column that consisted primarily of a recording of me making squealing noises that you would generally only expect to come from a giddy schoolgirl, punctuated by a bit of gibberish that might sound something like "Aspect of the Dragonhawk." But that said, there's a lot of other things I could talk about, and I won't leave you hanging. It's a busy time in WoW, and Hunters have a lot of stuff to do now that 3.0.2 is out. By now, hopefully, your server has calmed down enough for you to get on, play around with learning all your companions and mounts, and start trying to figure out talent specs. Hopefully by now, you've seen some of our articles on the subject, such as Big Red Kitty's Hunter and Pet Talent overviews, and David Bowers' guide to exotic pets currently available in game. They're great resources, so I'm not going to attempt to replicate them here. Instead, I'm gonna focus on a quick and pertinent question: You've finally found some time to play WoW, your server's stable enough to let you play WoW, and you've just logged on your Beastmastery Hunter for the first time since 3.0.2 went live. What do you do?
BigRedKitty: 3.0.2 Hunter talent trees
Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary. We didn't make 80. Nope, we were much more focused on obtaining a Spirit Beast for a hunter-guide movie. We failed. But we spent hours patrolling in Sholazar Basin, playing with Gorilladin, making leatherworking gear, and trying out all the hunter talent trees while not leveling as fast as we could have. Actually, we leveled from 77 to 78 without doing any quests at all. We also haven't run any dungeons or raids. OK, we did one Utgard Keep, but it didn't count. The entire party, except the healer, was was way over-geared for the place. We also haven't done DPS-testing with Recount or Training Dummies in sufficient quantities to provide factual evidence of one hunter-tree's superiority over another. We also haven't done hours of arena, battlegrounds, or PvP-zones. We've done a little, killed and been killed, but nothing that would give us a serious insight into the solutions that Blizzard has come up with to make our class more amenable to PvP. But! We have played all three trees, full 51-points each, for at least one entire level. We have tried just about every tree/pet-class combination at least once. Except Spirit Beast, natch. And we've cranked our leatherworking to 432! /win! So when we discuss the new hunter talent trees, keep in mind that your opinion of our opinion my vary. We may have some seriously beta-PvP-experienced hunters who disagree with some of our assessments of the new talents. We may have some Naxx-raiding hunters who disagree with some of our conclusions. But that's OK! The major purpose of this column is to give you, the WoW Insider reader, a point of reference. You know our writing, you know our play-style. You should know our limitations and the areas at which we're not too shabby. Read, absorb, analyze, and prepare to test to it all yourself on Tuesday.
BigRedKitty: Hunter-pets in 3.0.2
Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary. From: The Big Bossman at WoW Insider To: The WoW Insider peons Subject: Get to work! Write a post on each of your class's trees, or you're fired. Fired with extreme prejudice! Love, Dan O., aka The Punisher ... /gulp Holy crap, we're in trouble now. Why? Because not only do we have to write about Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, and Survival, but we've now we've got pet talent trees too: Tenacity, Cunning, and Ferocity! Six talent trees, are you kidding us? This is going to take a while. And we should probably start from the beginning.
Disengage and trap changes coming to Wrath Beta
With all the Hunter changes we've been promised in relation to PvP, one that has recently been announced may be the biggest yet. Disengage will be getting a new trick.In a future Beta build, Disengage will cause the Hunter to jump back from their target 10-15 yards. As a result of this buff, however, the cooldown will be extended to 30 seconds. This really is the change Hunters need, more that the recent Aspect of the Beast and Mongoose Bite changes by far. What we really needed is a way to get back to range, and between this and Master's Call, we should now have a relatively dependable non-talented way of doing just that. 10-15 yards may seem a bit low, but it should be more than enough to get off a quick concussive shot, set a trap, or use a talented crowd control ability such as Intimidation, which will become instant cast rather than on next attack. Another set of baseline ability changes has to do with traps, and should be very helpful in both PvE and PvP. Freezing Trap will no longer break on any damage, but will instead break on a set amount of damage -- meaning a stray cleave or a miscast DoT won't completely ruin you. With this new functionality, Bear Trap will be removed and replaced at level 80 with Camouflage, which is returning after being discarded. Since setting a trap won't break Camouflage, it will become incredibly useful for setting PvP ambushes as well. There's plenty of other exciting changes on the way for Hunters, including a talent tree revamp that's currently up on Blizzard's official Beta site. Look for analysis of that in the coming days on WoW Insider. It's looking more and more like Wrath's going to be a great time to be a Hunter, and we're looking forward to seeing how the class plays with all their new toys at level 80, in both PvP and PvE.
The bloat
Blizzard has been rather vocal in the community lately, a nice change from the long bouts of silence that usually echoes in the official forums. In the Wrath of the Lich King forums, particularly, Blizzard has been wonderfully candid. One blue response addressed the apparent "bloat" in the new talent trees, a sentiment I've heard more than a few times, including from our readers.Koraa says that bloat is another term for "I can't have everything I want" and that Blizzard actually intends to make every class tree feel a little "bloated", forcing players to make tough yet interesting decisions regarding the talents they take and, ultimately, the talents they sacrifice. I said as much in a response to one reader, noting that talents look so good now that it's hard to ignore a lot of them.This is actually a good thing. This allows for creative gameplay and diversity in builds... although of course, with millions of players looking to min/max, I have no doubt that there will eventually be cookie-cutter specs. If anything, it might be what Blizzard is trying to avoid. It would indeed be refreshing to see a little less homogeniety in viable specs in the game. Looking at the Wrath talent trees, do you think that they're bloated? Are there too many good talents to pass up on? In this case, I think, a little bloat is perfectly fine.
Lichborne: State of the Death Knight
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW Insider's newest class column. Every week in Lichborne, Daniel Whitcomb will explore the ins and outs of Blizzard's newest class, the Death Knight. It's Wrath of the Lich King Beta time, and finally time to meet the new Death Knight class. Unfortunately, we can't really guarantee you'll be meeting the same class that you'll see in the live game, per se. It's not that the class isn't shaping up well or isn't quite distinctive, it's more that there's just so much that's changing. The next build that's scheduled to hit the Beta servers is a perfect example. Not only will talent trees be changing extensively, with some talents becoming baseline and some baseline abilities becoming talents, some talents switching tiers, and others even switching trees, but the very way we inflict and stack diseases will be getting some tweaking as well. In addition, many of the Death Knight's baseline abilities, especially related to disease and damage rotations, are changing as well. So with all these changes, what can you say about a class that's changing drastically on a weekly basis, and may look completely different from how it does now by the time Wrath goes live? Is it really possible to speak about an overarching unifying theory of Death Knights? Well, let's try. Welcome to the first annual State of the Death Knight address.
Blizzard's Wrath talents updated
Blizzard's Wrath talent trees page has been updated with minor changes, such as new icons for Wrath talents, as well as major changes such as a long-clamored for polish to the Mage trees. A noticeable change, for example, is the removal of Spirit from the equation for the Arcane tree. Potent Spirit and Student of the Mind, Spirit-based talents, were removed to make way for Arcane Flows and a reworked Netherwind Presence. The former reduces the cooldown on Arcane Power, Presence of Mind, and Invisibility by 30 seconds, while the latter now grants a passive 6% spell haste at max rank.Most changes are cosmetic -- the humorous placeholder icon used on many of the game's spells in development have been removed -- although astute players may find updates to the wordings of talents across the board. Other changes include some talents buffed and reduced in talent points such as the Paladin talent Vindication (down to 2 talent points, from 3; buffed to 20% from 15%). Check out Wowhead's talent calculators, which haven't been updated as of this writing, for comparison.
WWI '08 Day 1 roundup
We had bloggers onsite for Day 1 at the Worldwide Invitational 2008 in Paris. Elizabeth Harper, Turpster, and Jennie Lees were all in France to provide in-depth coverage with liveblogging, pictures, and videos, and our entire staff was back here in the US to break out the analysis and coverage of the live streams. Here's a roundup of all the posts from Day 1.Liveblogging Opening ceremony Developer's panel Q&A with Developer's Panel Analysis by Class Death Knight Druid Hunter Mage Paladin Priest Rogue Shaman Warlock Warrior Analysis by Topic Diablo 3 Announcement Gear resets High expectations Linux Raid buffs Talent trees Media WoW Insider podcast Gallery: Diablo 3 Gallery: Splash screen speculation Gallery: A first look at the WWI digs Movie: Turpster talks to people waiting in line for WWI Movie: Turpster amok in Paris UPDATE: A round up of our entire weekend of coverage can be found here!%Gallery-26320%
News from the WWI '08 WoW Dev panel
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Class_changes_announced_at_Worldwide_Invitational'; At WWI, the WoW Dev Panel is underway, and spending a little while talking about the Death Knight class, and other class changes coming in the expansion. As the panel continues, we'll update this post with more information as we get it live from Paris.Update: Tons (tons!) of new official Wrath information after the break. Don't miss!Update: It's over, but we'll be talking about this stuff for a while. Titan's Grip is confirmed -- two-handed dual wielding for Fury Warriors. Hunter pet skill points are out, and pets are getting their own Talent trees. Shaman CC is official, Ret Pallys are getting new itemization, and Rogues are going to be able to sap a lot more. It's all after the break, more analysis coming up soon. %Gallery-26320%
Blizzard changes the description of the Death Knight talent trees
Curse has noticed a very intriguing change to the Death Knight information page. The descriptions of each of the talent trees has been changed. Here are the old descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on damage dealing abilities. Blood Presence increases damage output by a percentage. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on tanking abilities. Frost Presence increases threat and lowers damage taken by a percentage. Unholy: Talents in this tree have a variety of functions including summons, diseases, and PvP-focused abilities. Unholy Presence increases attack speed and reduces the global cooldown on death knight abilities. And now, the new descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on weapons, armor, and strikes. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on control, counters, and combos. Unholy: Talents in this tree focus on spells, summons, and diseases. This is quite a drastic change, but what could it mean? Let's look at the possibilities after the break.
Frost Mages and Frost Death Knights
Over on the forums, Scorp brings up a Death Knight concern that I haven't heard before: as we all have known since last BlizzCon, the Death Knight's three talent trees are "Blood," "Unholy," and "Frost," and the one that Scorp has a problem with is the last one. Should Blizzard change the "Frost" tree on the Death Knight class so people don't confuse it with Mages?If you're asking me: no. "Restoration," "Holy," and "Protection" are all reused in a few different talent trees, and for both of those, while the talents are different, the intent is the same. "Frost," for both Mages and Death Knights, will have the same aim as well, as far as we've been told so far -- both classes will aim for DPS in those trees, with extra consideration given to crowd control and slow debuffs. In fact, depending on exactly how the Death Knight's talents work, the "Frost" title might help newer players understand the tree a little better anyway, especially if they've played with a Frost Mage before.Not that people don't have ideas -- "Ice" (yes, Ice, baby), "Chill" and "Really, really cold stuff" are all names being thrown around on the forums. But Blizzard will probably stick with "Frost" -- no reason to change it up, especially if the abilities line up with the Mage tree as much as we expect them to.
Forum Post of the Day: The discipline tree remix
So much as been going on with revitalizing underutilized talent trees of late. A long while back Feral Druids and Shadow Priests were changed so dramatically that they are now coveted members of raid groups. In Patch 2.3 Retribution Paladins will see passive threat reduction, and a boost to DPS that will give pallies back their Jack-of-all-Trades persona. Now there is talk of turning attention to the discipline tree. In a post today on the forums Eyonix laid the foundation for what will become some juicy speculation on what Blizzard has wanted from the discipline priests:Yesterday I took an extensive review of what we have in store for discipline (though it will see many changes between now and release) in Wrath of the Lich King. For quite some time I've been providing the designers with feedback from the community, as well as my own thoughts and ideas. Though it may not always be apparent every member of our team works very hard communicating all aspects of player feedback. With that being said, the current iteration of the tree literally blew my mind. I was in the class designers office in under a minute discussing the changes like I was a nine year old child who was given a sneak peak of an entire set of unreleased Garbage Pail Kids cards. I can't say much but I will say this: The tree will stand on its own two feet. It will be viable in PvE. You will notice impact from player feedbackThe statement is so marvelous I wanted to give it to you in its entirety (minus the first line, that merely let us know no formal announcement is being made at this time). We're going to see a fully -functional Discipline tree in WotLK, able to stand alone as a viable PvE option for priests. Finally it appears that Blizzard knows where Discipline fits in now in the scheme of things, and it seems their goal of giving every class three viable trees is coming to fruition. Who will next receive the love, do you think?
It's not as easy as you think
We all get frustrated with the Blizzard developers at one time or another. Sometimes we even post messages on the forums, rant in chat to our guild mates, heck, we might even blog about it ourselves. But as Fate pointed out recently on Apathy Inc., there's a few things you should consider when spewing your venom at the creators of WoW.As an example Fate shares with the readers an experimental talent tree for Wrath (and a very nice job, I should say), and references this as just one very complicated aspect of the design of the game. Analyzing every angle of a spec may go very well, until you open it up to the players and realize what you thought was balanced really is no where close. Things go from bad to worse, and the players begin to complain, and complain, and then they, you know, complain. Trying to keep everyone happy is really a thankless job, and this is only one tiny aspect of the game. It doesn't take into account building boss battles, creating loot tables, designing armor and weapons, or anything else that makes this Massively Multiplayer game so very massive.I haven't considered exactly how much work really goes into building this game, keeping it running, pushing through new content and keeping it balanced at the same time as not completely ruining the old content. Fate has put it all into perspective for me. Although I'm not much of a ranter or a railer when it comes to the Blizzard devs, I certainly from this point on will give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Light and How to Swing It: Must-have and must-miss talents
It's hard to determine the best and worst talents for a class that has three different roles. The best tanking talent is obviously going to be useless if you're primarily a healer, and the worst thing for a prot pally might be excellent with a ret build. Nevertheless, there are certain talents in all three trees that shine brightly, and other talents that make you ask "Who actually takes these?" These ... are those talents. Best Holy Talents:
