moonkin-talents
Latest
Shifting Perspectives: How to make the switch to balance
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Balance news comes at you every Friday -- learn how to master the forces of nature, and know what it means to be a giant laser turkey! Send your questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. It's another glorious patch week. Patch 4.1 had a few major balancing changes, but a majority of them were to address specs that were a little low or weak in certain areas. Balance druids, although taking a hit, didn't have too much going on for them this time around. Rather understandable -- we're in a good place damage-wise, and this patch was more a focus on new content and features anyway. Instead of spending gross amounts of time rattling on about such small things, I thought this would be a good time to address a question that I get asked pretty frequently. Cataclysm brought about a lot of changes, both to healing and DPS. Each player reacted differently to the new design, and there are many restoration druids out there who find they just aren't quite happy with the way things are for them any more. And I mean, who could blame them? They have to be trees -- who wants to be a tree? Trees are boring. The natural thing to do is to flow into balance; the gear is kind-of-sort-of the same, anyway. So how is it done? Well, I guess that's what I'm here for.
Shifting Perspectives: Balance druid talents and the illusion of choice
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Balance news comes at you every Friday. Learn how to master the forces of nature, and know what it means to be a giant lazer turkey! Questions, comments, or something you'd like to see? Email tyler@wowinsider.com. I often wonder how many people still remember beta. I mean, people will sometime reference beta now and again, but I often wonder how many people really remember everything that even just their own class or spec went through. For balance, one of the larger issues that we had was one of talent choices. The talent spec then was excessively bland. There was no choice, no variation, only the single option. Balance has changed since then -- quite a great deal, in fact -- yet how much of a choice is there within our talent choices? How much of a difference does choosing the "right" or "wrong" talents really make in our performance? There are lots of variables to choose from, but how much of them are actually a choice and how much of them aren't truly an option?
Shifting Perspectives: What are optional talents?
Every Friday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting balance druids and those who group with them. This week we are looking into the future, pondering what may be in store and learning a little bit about ourselves along the way. Talents are the in thing this week, so let's talk about 'em. Many of you know whom I am; I am Tyler Caraway, also known as Murmurs, and I am a balance druid. I deal mostly in theorycrafting about how things work for us -- spells, rotations, talents and the like. I'm not the only one who does this, though. There are others such as Hamlet who do great work as well; however, probably one of the most well known public figures is a guy who goes by the name Graylo. If you don't know about Graylo, then I have to ask if you live under a rock -- but you probably also know of his blog, Graymatter. It is no surprise to those who happen to follow both Graylo and myself that we often don't happen to see eye to eye on many topics. Graylo is a brilliant man -- bloody brilliant, I must say -- and one of his more recent blogs is something that I would really like to discuss. Apologies to Graylo if I am stealing any of your thunder in this, but this does happen to be a topic that I am highly touchy about. That topic, of course, is one of optional talents. With Cataclysm, Blizzard is hoping to shake up the cookie-cutter mold by composing talent trees primarily out of talents that are not direct DPS increases in the strictest sense of the word. Right now, it is fairly easy to argue that a talent such as Nature's Reach is excessively valuable within a talent build. Nothing about the talent actually increases the damage that you do, but the utility that it provides -- additional range and threat reduction -- hold an extremely large theoretical DPS gain. Having the capacity to not move as much to remain within range of a mob or the ability to output more damage before becoming threat-capped are essential parts of being a DPSer -- so essential, in fact, that every single caster class in the game has similar talents. It is these type of talents that Blizzard wishes for trees to be made of, but that means adding in a lot of additional utility to classes. How can we know what utility is actually useful, though? More importantly, does it even matter anymore?
