Posts with tag Talents

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret 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 suggestions!

Back in October, the blues issued a challenge to themselves, a goal for their new talent system in Mists of Pandaria -- there would be no mandatory talents, zero "no-brainers" or similarly choiceless situations. The same has been said for glyphs in the past, straight from the mouthparts of the head crab himself.

Now we all know that there has always been a chasm of varying width separating what the designers intend for a system and what we as players experience. Sometimes the devs do really well and the gap is but a crack in the sidewalk, while others look more Springfield Gorge, and others still like Valles Marineris on Mars. Even so, we can hardly blame them -- we players, as a whole, are a fickle bunch. It is only natural that a group numbering in the millions would have diverse opinions on what works and what doesn't, particularly when it pertains to how each of us play the game.

Before I get into this week's topic, I talked about War Banner this week (in case you missed it). If asked for my opinion of the ability, it would be good but not yet great. Each banner needs a little love -- perhaps a longer duration or more of a powerful effect -- before I'm totally sold on it. But I did enjoy playing around with it.

This week, however, I want to talk about the content we have, not the content we're going to have. The reason for that is because it will help me illustrate what I like and dislike about the current talent paradigm and how we're losing things at the same time we're gaining them with the new talent system. I am not calling out for the new scheme to be scrapped. On the whole, I am a big supporter of it. But that doesn't mean the current talent system doesn't have things to teach us. So let me begin with the following statement.

I deliberately specced fury for heroic Spine of Deathwing because I wanted to do less damage.

No, I'm not explaining that here. You want to know why? You come with me past the jump. Them there's the rules.

When I first log in with the default UI, I always enable all four extra action bars on my screen. I then drag every possible spell I can onto my bars. I figure out what's important later as I beat up various quest mobs, reading tooltips mid-cast and dragging abilities around mid-fight. I suppose I'm just too excited (or impatient) to sit with the spellbook for five minutes.

Yet I still noticed the spellbook changes in the beta. My racials, guild perks, and flying licenses were jumbled up in the same tab as my spell passives, talented abilities, and regular abilities. Without even a search box up, I had to flip through all the tabs multiple times to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

Ghostcrawler posted two weeks ago about the pros and cons of the new beta spellbook design. I don't quite know what four to five tabs he's talking about -- to me, everything appears to be one big mess in the same tab.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Last week, we covered some of the more notable monk abilities along with the expected playstyle. Recently, the level cap on beta has been raised to level 87, allowing every class access to their new level 87 spell. Much of the talk this week on the major sites and blogs is about Symbiosis. We touched on it several times, but now we get to take a closer look at it in further detail.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

If you have been raiding 10-man Dragon Soul every week, Wrathion should be handing over the Fangs of the Fathers any day now. Even the second rogues in most 25-man groups will be collecting their last Elementium Gem Clusters shortly. For many rogues, these daggers are the first legendary weapons that they've ever acquired. When you receive them from Wrathion, it might feel a bit overwhelming. What do you do with these weapons? What will they do to you?

There is a quote that's been passed down from thief to thief, assassin to assassin, and rogue to rogue for generations: "If your blades are happy, you're happy." You want your weapons to work for you, and not the other way around. You can't starve your blades, trying to forcefully adjust their diet to tolerate Morchok's rocky hide or Hagara's snow cones. If you want to keep your blades happy, you have to feed them what they really want: player blood, and lots of it.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

This week, in a discussion of War Banner, some interesting points were made. In his response to the discussion, Daxxari said something that really made me think about the warrior class and where it is going -- more importantly, where it can go.

Daxxari - War Banner

Ultimately, we wanted to try and expand the design potential for warriors a bit. Increasingly, it seemed that any new ability had to be another type of movement, a weapon strike, or shout, or it wouldn't feel like a warrior ability. We wanted to try something new, and we're hoping that warriors will give them a shot once we're in beta and let us know how it feels.

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What I really found worth examining is this idea of what feels like a warrior ability, exactly. So many people objected to War Banner based around the idea that it's a totem, and totems are shaman-only. War Banner isn't going to be implemented like a totem. But the idea of trying to design new abilities that broaden the feel of warrior abilities leads us to ask what, exactly, does feel like a warrior ability. Should all warrior abilities be shouts, movement-based abilities or weapon strikes?

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

Can you believe there are people out there who have yet to play World of Warcraft? It's totally true. In an attempt to be investigative and thought-provoking, I've begun writing a few pieces on bringing brand new MMO players into World of Warcraft more than seven years after the game's initial release. For the purposes of experimentation and all that jazz, I turned off every single addon while my ... subjects ... toiled away.

It was uncomfortable at first watching an addon-less screen, but bearings were gotten and life went on. However, there were a few points of the user interface that were not necessarily troubling to my brand new player, but moreso gave a feeling of being "lost" on the screen during moments of tense combat or heavy movement.

I wrote down the observations that I believe new players can benefit the most from. With little to no customization needed, these addons and tips can greatly enhance a new player's starting experience while removing some of the tedium of certain tasks mixed with hard-to-explain concepts. Maybe we can even get some of these features in game as part of Blizzard's new player initiative.

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 questions, comments, or requests to tyler@wowinsider.com or @murmursofadruid.

Greetings, druids. Last week we talked about the new changes that had been made to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, which held a few good changes for us. This week I want to focus in on two criticisms that I've had growing for a very long time. It's no shock to anyone that reads my column or follows me on Twitter that I abhor the new direction of Insect Swarm.

I've talked about this topic before, but I want to discuss it further.

Looking into the why

In the essence of fairness, I feel that I should go into why it is that I believe Blizzard is tweaking Insect Swarm the way that they are. To start with, Insect Swarm has been an extremely problematic spell ever since it was created. In TBC, it didn't deal enough damage in order to be worth using, the same was even true at the start of WotLK, and it nearly fell off the map again late in the expansion as well. It hasn't been until Cataclysm that Insect Swarm has finally become a sold piece of our rotation, and even now it's still the weaker of the two DoTs.

Last week, Blizzard updated the Mists of Pandaria talent page, giving us a new look at what it's working on for class customization in advance of its mid-March press tour. We hunters got a peek at some awesome new stuff going on with the class, with improvements both in PvP and PvE.

The hunter news from this preview falls into three general categories:

1. Our three new level 90 talents were revealed.
2. We saw some meaningful changes to existing talents.
3. We saw some changes to other classes that could impact the hunter class.

While we're seeing a bunch of new hunter info in this update, Blizzard did go out of the way to point out that it is still working hard on the hunter class and it's not as far along as some other classes. In particular, we don't yet have any new class abilities or new spec abilities for level 90. We also don't know what route Blizzard's going to go with our pet talents.

With that in mind, let's take a look at all the new stuff we did learn!

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

Throw out everything you know about rogue poisons. No, we need to go deeper than that. Throw out everything you know about rogues altogether. In the past few days, we've seen more blue posts on the official rogue forums than we'd seen since Cataclysm's launch. Poisons have been at the heart and soul of the rogue kit from day one. Even though parts of the poison system have changed over the years, the general concept has always remained the same.

Let me blow your mind: In Mists, you can have two poisons on each of your weapons at once. Let me do it again: All poison proc rates will be percentage-based. And a third time: Poisons are no longer applied to your individual weapons but to both weapons at once.

What does it even mean to put your poisons on both hands at once? What in the world am I supposed to write this column about if nobody's asking which hand to put Deadly Poison on any more? I'm going to slip and tell some new rogue that IP/DP is the best, and he's going to laugh and call me an old man.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, Blizzard treated us to a nice new chunk of news this past week with an update to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator. Death knights received some new talents and new skills as well as adjustments to old ones that definitely deserve some analysis. We'll start by looking at the talent tiers, then move on to some of the new modified skills we're seeing in this build.

Level 15 begins our journey with a couple pieces of very welcome news. Outbreak is back to a general class skill, once again taking its place at level 81 for all three specs. In its place for tier 1 talents is the old-school Unholy Blight, in all its AoE glory. That's right, you can once again have that awesome semi-permanent damage aura. Alas, this welcome change is accompanied by the similar removal of Corpse Explosion in favor of Vile Spew, an ability that will explode an undead minion for AoE damage and disease infection.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

If you recall, last November when Blizzard released its official talent calculators for Mists of Pandaria, I declined to make a full comment. At the time, the calculators seemed incomplete, with various abilities absent from the level-by-level breakdown for each spec. Without a comment from the blues on the matter, I didn't want to speculate on all of it until I felt I was looking at something more concrete.

Well, last week it seems we finally got something more concrete. The calculators don't seem that much different, mind you, but a few comments from the developers answer a lot of questions priests might have had about the direction of the class' design. Let's take a look.

Question: Why didn't the priest tree change?

Answer: We are still in development. It is a challenge, when giving players a sneak peak at work in progress, to decide when to release what we have versus waiting to accumulate even more changes.

Question: Do Discipline priests have Prayer of Healing or not?

Answer: Our current design direction is this: Holy does AE healing with Prayer of Healing, and Discipline heals with (a much more powerful than today) Holy Nova. Divine Aegis would work with Holy Nova under this model. However, please see the question above. The priest tree is still in heavy development.

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Anyway, news! Finally! I've returned from my brief hiatus, and happily, there's lots to discuss. Blizzard has updated the Mists of Pandaria calculator with tons of new info, so let's take a look at what we could be seeing Soon(TM).

Baseline abilities

I won't cover everything that's changed, but here are a few tweaks that I thought were interesting for feral druids:

Bear Hug This is now available to all druids at level 22 and is essentially the replacement for Bash. The damage (30% of your HP channeled over 3 seconds) is fairly decent; I can definitely see this being used as a finisher in PvP for trolling purposes. Personally, I'm just going to macro /hug to it.

Thrash This former Bear ability is now able to be used in all forms, so we might see a change to our AoE rotation from Swipe, Swipe, Swipe, zzz.

Symbiosis This ability probably deserves its own column; a blue post revealed some more details on how it would be implemented. Three abilities signposted as likely to be received are Feign Death, Frost Nova, and Soul Swap. The first two aren't that interesting, obviously, but if I can SS my bleeds? Hello, Mists, you have my attention.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

Blizzard recently promised to release a flurry of Mists of Pandaria information in March, but apparently it's opened the gates early. The Mists of Pandaria talent calculator and ability list received a massive update this week, giving us new info on the talents and spells that holy paladins can look forward to in Mists. In addition, the Blizzard community managers have been answering questions about the new data at a rapid-fire rate.

Holy paladins have a lot to look forward to in Mists. It's clear that the developers have been looking at our weaknesses as healers, as several of our long-standing issues have been addressed. While we've always had a wide variety of utility abilities, until recently, holy paladins really only had single-target heals at their disposal. With the introduction of the revamped Holy Radiance in late Cataclysm and now the new talent options we'll in Mists, our base healing toolbox is looking more and more complete.