pandaria-talents
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The Light and How to Swing It: Ret talent preview for Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned retribution paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or compliments! This year marked my very first BlizzCon, so naturally I camped nearly every WoW class and talent panel I could manage. With bated breath and a semi-charged smartphone, I sat ready to transcribe my thoughts on any and all retribution tidbits that flowed forth like honey from the developers' proverbial beehive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how much faith you have in the ret community to produce cogent questions), there weren't many big revelations related to our spec at any of the Q&As. There remains, however, one relevant topic that we can discuss, and that is the revamped talent system coming with Mists of Pandaria.
Totem Talk: Post-BlizzCon restoration shaman thoughts
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how. It has been a very exciting weekend for every World of Warcraft fan. BlizzCon is that one yearly event where news unlike anything else we've heard all year comes out. We were treated not only to the announcement of the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria, but a plethora of changes for every class and spec. The big news outside of the expansion was the announcement of the new talent system. In patch 5.0, a new talent system will come along and replace the one we have grown to know right now. It came as a bit of a shock, especially after we were bumped down to the 31-talent point system we have now. The system has a lot of exciting things that will have an impact on our healing; probably most important is that talents will no longer be a key factor in determining a character's power.
New Mists of Pandaria talent calculator live
Our friends over at Wowhead News have burned the midnight oil, and have transcribed all the talent information released at BlizzCon to create a Mists of Pandaria talent calculator. (Druids chosen for the screenshot because they're the best class in the game...though I may be biased.) Now, I'm not sure how much calculation you'll actually need to do when you only have six choices to make, but congratulations to the Wowhead team for getting this put together so quickly. Fore more information on talents, check out our liveblog of the Class Talent System Panel. The news is out -- we'll be playing Mists of Pandaria! Find out what's in store with an all-new talent system, peek over our shoulder at our Pandaren hands-on, and get ready to battle your companion pets against others. It's all here right at WoW Insider!
BlizzCon 2011: Blizzard reveals new talent system
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street got on stage at Blizzcon a few moments ago to unveil an entirely overhauled talent system for Mists of Pandaria, the next World of Warcraft expansion. After four expansions of "cookie cutter" talent builds, Blizzard has broken and reconstructed the entire talent system in order to put the choice for talents directly into the hands of the players. They strove for this in Cataclysm and made some good advances, but ultimately fell short of the goal. Like the current talent system, players will choose their specialization at level 10. This specialization chooses what abilities you'll be gaining as you'll level up, rather than there being baseline talents. There will be a few baseline class abilities, but not nearly as many. According to Ghostcrawler, these spec abilities will be "anything your spec requires." Spec abilities will be learned out in the field when you level; you only need to visit the trainer to choose a new specialization! In the preview at Blizzcon, the holy specialization for paladins received staple holy abilities, such as Holy Shock, Holy Light, and Beacon of Light. Some specialization abilities will be available to two specs, such as both ret and prot getting Hammer of the Righteous. The other part of the talent system is that there is now one talent tree for every class. At every 15 levels, you get one talent point, which can be put into one of three talents for that level. You can't go back and take previous talents. These talents are looking to be abilities, not boring things like passive healing or damage buttons. There are no ranks for these talents. The goal is for there to be no mandatory talents, and that you should choose what you want on a per fight/per content/per choice basis. Retalenting should be as accessible as reglyphing is right now. So, for example, a paladin will choose holy for her spec, and as she levels up will gain all her core holy abilities. When she hits level 15, she will gain her first talent point, which will be usable on either Speed of Light, Long Arm of the Law, or Pursuit of Justice, which all sound like a speed boost to me. Once she makes this change, she won't be allowed to choose the other two talents when she gets her next talent point, though she can later choose to retalent if she feels she chose poorly. The three choices you have to take at any level will all share a same theme in common. In the previous paragraph, you have three talents that will be mobility based. (Warriors also get mobility talents at 15, their choices being Juggernaght, Warbringer, and Double Time.) The idea is that you don't forego a mobility ability for a dps ability, or a cc for a survivability cooldown. An important point to note is that even though these abilities have the same names as current talents in the game, they will not have the same effect. They are being redesigned to try to appeal to all three specs in a talent. The point of new talents is to offer a form of utility that you can customize for your playstyle, and not mandatory choices for maximum DPS/HPS/Survivability. All in all, it's looking to be a simplified, better, and ultimately more choice-driven take on talenting, and I couldn't be more excited. Turn to WoW Insider for all your BlizzCon 2011 news and information. Look for our liveblogs of the convention panels, interviews with WoW celebrities -- and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!
