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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsCataclysm beta patch notes build #12479, new 31-point talents
by Adam Holisky 
Jul 13th 2010 at 9:50PM
The new 31-point talent trees are now in the beta! More information incoming tonight as we get it in ...
Update: The patch is now available to download for beta testers. Just fire up the client and wait for 300 megs of new talent goodness.
BlizzardA first pass on new talent trees has been implemented.
- Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
- Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
- 31 points must be spent in the primary specialization tree before any points can be placed in additional trees.
- Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
- While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.
- More information regarding our plans for talent trees can be found on our Cataclysm forum.
The full notes after the break.
ZarhymWorld of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta Patch Notes
Welcome to the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test! Patch notes listed here are not comprehensive and will be changed throughout the testing process.
General
- The Alliance starting experience for worgen is available. Venture through the cursed lands of Gilneas to discover your true path! Currently the female worgen character is not available for testing.
- The Horde starting experience for goblins is available. Beginning on the Isle of Kezan in a goblin paradise, players will face a treacherous road ahead!
- The level cap for all characters is 83.
- Players may use our Character Copy feature for copying existing characters to beta realms, or may choose from high-level pre-made template characters.
Zones
- Mount Hyjal and Vashj'ir, two new level 78-82 zones, are available for testing. Deepholm, a new level 82-83 zone is available for testing. Players may find their way to these zones by speaking with temporary teleportation NPCs located in any major city.
- The level ranges of Gilneas and the Lost Isles are in the process of being adjusted slightly. Creature, quest, and quest reward levels are all being altered so that players finish questing in these zones roughly by level 12. Further fine tuning will continue in future content updates.
- Several zones have had quest maps integrated.
- Eastern Kingdoms
- Arathi Highlands, Blasted Lands, The Cape of Stranglethorn, Dun Morogh, Duskwood, Elwynn Forest, Hinterlands, Loch Modan, Northern Stranglethorn, Northshire, Redridge Mountains, Tirisfal Glades, Western Plaguelands and Westfall are ready for testing.
- Kalimdor
- Most zones in Kalimdor are available for testing, though work continues on polishing the quest experience and flow, as well as zone aesthetics.
Dungeons & Raids
- Teleportation NPCs in Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Dalaran can transport players to any available new dungeons, including players who are ghosts.
- Blackrock Caverns, a new level 79-81 five-player dungeon, is available for testing.
- Throne of the Tides, a new level 79-81 five-player dungeon, is partially available for testing.
Classes: General
- Ammo has been removed from the game.
- The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.
- The glyph system is in the process of being altered. Existing glyphs may not be fully supported or functional.
- Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.
- Rage has been normalized.
- Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.
- A first pass on new talent trees has been implemented.
- Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
- Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
- 31 points must be spent in the primary specialization tree before any points can be placed in additional trees.
- Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
- While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.
- More information regarding our plans for talent trees can be found on our Cataclysm forum.
Death Knights
- A dedicated tanking tree has been implemented.
- The way in which runes recharge has changed.
Druids
- A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids. The feature is functional, but the interface art is still a work in-progress.
Hunters
- Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
- Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.
- Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
- The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.
Paladins
- We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.
Warlocks
- Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.
User Interface
- The ability to use third-party addons has been temporarily disabled for the test environment.
- The Arena Teams pane has been improved.
- Auto-quests have been added to the game. Players will automatically be given an auto-quest by entering specific areas in the game world. This alert will appear distinctly in the Objectives pane via the Advanced Quest Tracking feature. These quests will still be given to players with full Quest Logs, but will count toward the 25 total allotted quests if the log is not full.
- The Character pane has been redesigned. Character stats can now be shown or hidden via the Show All Details/Hide All Details button on the bottom left. When shown, all character stats will be visible in a window to the right of the pane. Stat sections can be reorganized by clicking and dragging them up or down the pane.
- The Professions panes now have more filtering and search functionality, as well as buttons to easily link recipes in the chat frame.
- Many of the yellow System Messages that would display in the chat frame when leveling up have been removed.
- New text animations now alert players as they level up, also providing information on when new talents, spells and abilities are available.
- Professions and Class Trainers windows have been altered to more clearly display available and upcoming purchases.
- The Spellbook interface has been improved for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal.
Graphics
- Experimental support for DX11 (can be enabled by passing '-d3d11' on the command line or adding SET gxApi "d3d11" to the Config.WTF file).
- OpenGL Hardware Cursor support (can be enabled on the Video Resolution Panel).
- Improved water and lava rendering system (enabled by the Liquid Detail slider on the Video Effects Panel)
- 0 = Classic Water
- 1 = New Water (fake reflections)
- 2 = New Water (ocean has real reflection for terrain)
- These values are likely to change during Beta.
- Dynamic Sunshafts effect (enabled by the Sunshafts option on the Video Effects Panel).
Known Issues
- Selecting high Liquid Detail when using Geforce 6 & 7 series video cards will currently prevent lava and water from rendering properly. You can temporarily restore liquid to the world by reducing the Liquid Detail setting via the Video Effects Panel, or by typing "waterDetail 0" in your Config.WTF file.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 7)
krusty_burger Jul 14th 2010 12:55AM
is 48% weapon damage over 6 seconds really that much threat? then again i guess 7.5% total health over 5 seconds isn't that great either.
for heroics i think a blood craze survivability build would be better. but you're probably right about deep wounds for raiding.
Noyou Jul 14th 2010 1:05AM
@Mohsus
Full marks for the name (I see what you did thar) and *asploding* I think I too *asploded" a little looking at the Paladin trees. It looks good to me! Kind of neat how we stole Crusader Strike for the prot tree :) Putting Divinity in the Holy tree made lots of sense too. Will be interesting how it all boils down.
theRaptor Jul 14th 2010 1:05AM
@krusty_burger
Deep Wounds stacks. Every crit you do adds more damage to the DoT and resets the timer. Right now it is an essential talent for serious raiding despite needing to give up rage generation for it.
krusty_burger Jul 14th 2010 1:10AM
@ theRaptor: ah, did not know it stacks. yeah that's going to be necessary for raiding. i still maintain that blood craze/field dressing will be sweet for learning dungeons/heroics. and soloing.
Mohsus Jul 14th 2010 1:38AM
keep in mind that health pools will balloon in cata. A tank NOW can have 60-65k health. How will they have in new raid gear? This could be a seriously potent ability.
As for threat, we'll just have to see how the new "Vengeance" works out. Blizzard seems to put a lot of faith in it to fix some threat concerns.
Scunosi Jul 14th 2010 12:39AM
They mention making prof windows easier to navigate, I sure hope they also clean up a lot of them, especially Engineering. I mean two Misc. sections? Really?
Noyou Jul 14th 2010 12:45AM
@Scherbaddie
A stupid question is the one left unasked. That's what these forums are for. I guess I'm glad you are not a developer. And thanks for the personal attack :)
scherbaddie Jul 14th 2010 2:01AM
Aha.. but was it a personal attack? I said people "like" you (though I did mean you as well).
Do you deny that you failed to understand the statement I quoted from the patch notes?
Andrew Jul 14th 2010 12:46AM
The arcane tree looks TOTALLY FREAKING AMAZING NOW!! And they aren't even finished with it yet....just wait until Belt gets ahold of this. We can now polymorph warlocks and stun them too!
zdave Jul 14th 2010 12:50AM
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage#vAy-Fbvq5,,12479
look, cookie cutter arcane spec already!
Monion Jul 14th 2010 2:42AM
Cookie-cutter indeed. You're missing Slow, which is already useful in current raiding, let alone a world where CC matters again. Improved Blink would also be incredibly useful in a raiding environment for the extra blink and run speed. Think how much easier Putricide would be with that as a mage? What about Burning Soul for pushback resistance? Where would the extra points for those possibly come from? Improved Polymorph? Improved Counterspell? It's a bit minor right now, as the trees aren't done yet, but you didn't look very hard if you think that's the be-all end-all arcane spec in the new tree currently.
Sunaseni Jul 14th 2010 3:38AM
It's a bummer that Arcane loses Icy Veins. Half the reason that Arcane has great burst is because it has an extra CD in IV. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
I actually think Fire's the most complete tree.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage#_FQCJEXJB,,12479
Would probably be the spec I use, though the points in Frost and Improved Flame Strike can easily go into Imp Blink or Blazing Speed depending on which is better for running in Cata. Hell, even putting them into Impact and Fire Blast makes a lot of sense.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage#0N3xfU_o,,12479
That would be my Frost tree, though the point in Arcane Conc is wasted since Frost isn't known for going OOM. You could put it in any place like Imp Blink or one of the Frost PVP talents. The Frost playstyle also looks like it is forcing us to use Ice Lance and Deep Freeze during Fingers of Frost, with lots of proc watching.
theRaptor Jul 14th 2010 12:50AM
Where are our options? Blizz has been going on about allowing more options but from my playing around with Shadow priest, Enhance Shaman, and Warrior trees there are no more options than today. You either take all the damage stacking raid talents or you drop some for PVP/Utility talents. Exactly as today.
I thought the point of getting rid of boring static "+5% to all damage" talents was so that we had spare points to put into optional talents?
Right now those above trees are just shorter clones of the current trees.
EasyAnswer Jul 14th 2010 12:58AM
Warlock Talent Tree:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warlock#,,12479
The Demonology and Destruction trees look pretty fine to me. The affliction tree on the other hand, needs to be fixed slightly. it has too little options by mid tier, so it forces you into the fear/CoA talent, which kinda ruins affliction's raiding viability.
scherbaddie Jul 14th 2010 2:20AM
What if it doesn't ruin affliction's raiding viability?
What if despite this "problem", affliction is still raiding viable; and as bonus for being an affliction warlock, you get to choose between these two talents (and I assume you meant CoE, not CoA) without your raid leader dictating that you must choose one or be left out of raids?
What if you got more than one of these type of choices in each of the 30 trees in the game?
shannow Jul 14th 2010 1:13AM
does anyone else feel when they look at these new talents that blizzard have just plain given up on balancing or adding anything of challange, im half expecting a gm to pop up in real life to help me cross the road because they think im unable to take a decision on my own or look after my own intentions. i think this is the nail for me as the trademark later and soon for everything else they are dubiously planning is scarin me into realising the last thing on there minds is the customers/playerbase and more pure profit and how much they can get out of us with cata before slammin everything down an saying live with it.
shannow Jul 14th 2010 1:27AM
im not having a go at blizzard btw, im an swg pre cu vet an those out there who know what that is will know why i have these concerns, its cos ive seen it before. if there ideas at the min are if its hard work strip it out to its core so its just workable is there answer then i shudder to see whats coming. an if the same course comes as what did with cu/wookies/nge then whats coming with 4.0/cata/4.1 or 4.2
Mo Jul 14th 2010 1:48AM
What in the hell did you just say
shannow Jul 14th 2010 2:09AM
in context to what, the swg pre cu thing im guessing, go look up john smeddly, he makes kittock look like a freakin saint
striegs Jul 14th 2010 2:33AM
With each expansion this game changes drastically. If a vanilla WoW player was frozen in cryonic stasis for five years and woke up in time for Cataclysm's launch, they'd have a heart attack trying to comprehend all the changes.
It's all but guaranteed that Blizzard's revamping of talent trees will be full of holes come Cata's release, but people will make do. Things will get better with the first few content patches. When it's time for the next expansion, they'll expand on the foundation they laid here and they might actually have something great.
I understand if it's hard to get over SWG, especially after all the ways that he hurt you. But change is natural, and without drastic changes in the past WoW would not have survived as long as it did. Hopefully the changes the occur now will enable this game to keep trucking for several more expansions.