Posts with tag talent-trees

In case you hadn't heard the news, patch 5.3 is set to hit live servers tomorrow. While 5.3 doesn't include a new raid, there are a host of different new activities, including four new scenarios, heroic scenarios, a ton of pet battle changes, and of course the advancement of Mists of Pandaria's storyline as the heat ramps up between Alliance, Horde, and an outlier faction of Horde rebels. It's back to the Barrens again -- and this time, Crossroads isn't the area of contention.

But on top of all of the new content comes a ton of different class and content changes as well. We sat down to chat with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street about patch 5.3's changes, as well as some upcoming changes for patch 5.4, response to subscription losses, Vengeance changes, that big unannounced feature we've all been dying to hear more about, and much more.

If you're interested in WoW design and discussion, but don't yet follow twitter, you might want to reconsider. A lot of the developers are regularly active there. For example, yesterday our own Adam Holisky had a nice little chat with Ghostcrawler, Bashiok, and some other folks about WoW's talent design, and wondering if there was another big overhaul being considered for the next major expansion. The answer, bluntly, is no. Blizzard seems content with the current system.

@bashiok @djtyrant @adamholisky The *current* talent design feels pretty solid to us. We'll iterate but no overhaul plans. #famouslastwords

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) May 9, 2013

Player Mihaly Ducz replied that three choices every fifteen levels feels kind of thin, but I have to admit that I kind of agree with Bashiok's response on that one: there are already plenty of spells and abilities in the game; I am perfectly content to have fewer of them, or at least more passive options so I don't have to agonize over how to redo my bars again. How about you? Are you content with the current talent system? What might you like to see changed or modified in the future?

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Cata also added a requirement that you get to the end talent of your main tree before moving onto the next, effectively removing the hybrid builds that had occasionally surfaced. But that change clearly wasn't enough, as most readers of WoW Insider will recall, there was a further revamp at the start of Mists, moving to the current system. It was a far more drastic change, too, with the disappearance of the talent trees we'd grown used to seeing. But was it a change for the better?

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

It's strange to think that players who first start playing in Mists might have no idea what the old talent trees looked like. To them, the new talent system is simply the status quo and the image above conjures no memories. The status quo has never lasted very long for talents in WoW. Through the years, talents have changed possibly more than any other aspect of the game. It's a good thing, too, because the earliest talent trees needed a lot of work. Let's take a look back!

The first beta talents

It's not easy to find solid information about the first iteration of talent trees from early beta. From what I can gather, WoW's original talents were more like spell ranks (which have also since been removed). You could invest talent points into particular spells to give them more damage/healing, longer range, etc. These talents were also tied to stats. By investing talent points, you gained stats relevant to your class.

These talents were generally considered workable but lackluster. They were removed from the beta in patch 0.6. Blizzard promised to "make them even cooler than before," and players speculated heavily about what the new trees might look like.

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.

That new Mists of Pandaria talent calculator is out. Had a chance to look through it? You might've been alarmed at the fact that several key spells appear to be missing from the list of skills and such. Not to worry, though, since Bashiok clarified that it was still under development. Anything missing is (hopefully) unintentional. A few classes are given previews of new skills trainable past level 85. The classes that don't have their stuff created yet are presumably still being worked on.

Blizzard played up the Cataclysm expansion as a groundbreaking expansion that would change everything, but the truth is that the Shattering was nothing compared to what is happening to class talent trees in the new Mists of Pandaria expansion. Those giant talent trees we visited every two levels are gone, replaced with six separate choices spread across the course of 90 levels.

To be fair, there are a lot of terrific ideas in what Blizzard is planning to do with our talent trees. Removed are the choices that everyone should make. And yes, Blizzard did say that in Cataclysm, but this time, the designers mean it. What shadow priest doesn't take Vampiric Touch? What balance druid doesn't invest that crucial talent point to take Moonkin Form?

But ultimately, if the goal here is to make things easier on the players, to make this a choice that players don't need to extensively research, Blizzard totally missed the mark.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. The Shattering is now, and Fox Van Allen demands you take sides! Do you stand with Team Fox in rejecting gnome shadow priest alts for now and all eternity, or do you, like, have a stupid little tea party with gnomes, sparkles, and fairies vomiting rainbows all over the damn place?

As you'd expect from a class that (now) stacks intelligence, we shadow priests are a classy sort. To prove this to my oft-skeptical bosses here at WoW Insider, I thought we'd start today's Spiritual Guidance with a little bit of class and culture. As such, I present to you, while sipping on a martini with pinky out-turned, a poem courtesy of our old friend Dark Cleric Duesten:

A Forsaken priest is a curious beast,
her path an unusual course.
Her shadowy rites cannot come from the
Light, so she seeks a more sinister source.

That's about as poetic as I'm willing to allow Spiritual Guidance to get -- we don't want this column turning into Frasier. I did have a reason behind today's poetic opener, though: The quote is just the tiniest sampling of the thousands of new quests that were put into the game last week. Cataclysm is still a week away, but if you're just twiddling your thumbs waiting, you're missing out on some of the best parts of the new expansion. These two weeks between "The Shattering" and the release of Cataclysm are prime alt-leveling time.

Sure, you can't be a goblin priest yet, but you can be a tauren or (ugh) gnome priest now. You can even reroll a race you've already played to enjoy a whole new experience. I spent the last few days leveling a Forsaken shadow priest from scratch, and it's just so much fun (once you get past that bugged first quest). There's much more flavor to be had on this go around -- it's just an incredibly enjoyable experience. I primarily play Alliance, but there's still no denying that there's something bizarrely satisfying about killing an already dead Marshal Redpath and then eating his corpse.

Whether you're taking on the roleplaying challenge of a tauren shadow priest or crawling your way out of Deathknell as an undead seeker of the ... sinister source, you'll need to know where to put all those valuable talent points on your way to level 85.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, your shadow-specced host Fox Van Allen copies Dawn Moore's latest column word for word and pastes it into Auto-Tune. After all those sour, holy-flavored notes are removed, what comes out is better than anything Jason Derulo could ever hope to achieve: priesting, perfected.

If you're a regular reader of Spiritual Guidance -- and I hope you are, because it's your page views that give me my special, magical powers -- then you know how excited I've been for patch 4.0.1. I've been beating it over your head for weeks.

Well, I can't tease you with it anymore, because that fabled new frontier of shadow priesting is finally here. It plays an awful lot like a new season of your favorite sitcom: entirely recognizable as that which you love, but with a few new twists. In patch 4.0.1, you create massive numbers of copies of yourself simply by moving around, your shadowfiend is on a variable timer and Betty White is your new anthropology teacher. (Change is confusing sometimes. Roll with it.)

With the way everything just changed overnight, it's all too easy for a shadow priest to feel in over his head. Worry not, though -- the magnificent (though self-aggrandizing) Fox Van Allen has you covered with a comprehensive, ten-step checklist to get yourself raid re-ready for 4.0.1. New stat values, new gemming guidelines and even new enchanting info -- it's all here, and it's all after the break.

Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2, Episode 1 now out!) as enhancement shaman Stoneybaby.

I can't wait for the new talent trees to kick in with patch 4.0.1. The game designers truly streamlined talent trees, including Enhancement. They've even gone so far as to make Primal Wisdom, our mana regen talent, into a base ability, and they've taken one point out of Unleashed Rage. This frees up two talent points right away and gave us some very viable specs to use right out of the gate of 4.0.1 for our last hurrah at level 80.

I see two different possibilities for level 80 specs for enhancement: Fire Nova or Improved Shields. First, an Improved Fire Nova spec of 5/31/0. Not only did this talent get moved to the enhancement tree, but it got dropped down deep, out of reach for elemental. The unfortunate part is that come Cataclysm, Fire Nova will require a Magma, Fire Elemental or Flametongue Totem and will not work off our new and improved Searing Totem. To further confound matters, the improved nova is right beside Searing Flames, the Searing Totem special kicker.

The improved novas make a big difference in fights requiring both boss and AoE damage, such as heroic Halion-25. Outside of that fight (or any future fights like it), Improved Fire Nova is a waste; better to put the points in Improved Shields. My main spec at 80 will be 5/31/0. Just moving those points isn't going to push your DPS up significantly, but with the changes to Lightning Shield, making it effectively a 10-minute, non-depletable buff (when glyphed), those two points are well spent there at 80.

Dipping into the elemental tree, after our requisite 31 points in enhancement, three points in Acuity are a must-have, especially as we start to level again. The last two points going into Concussion will pack an extra punch.

Welcome to Wednesday's shadow priest edition of Spiritual Guidance, hosted by Fox Van Allen. We bloggers are all about search engine optimization. As such, there are going to be some changes around here: Shadowfiends will be referred to as "Lady Gaga meat dresses," and Dawn Moore will be henceforth referred to as "NY Jets reporter Inez Sainz." Fox Van Allen will, of course, remain Fox Van Allen -- he's as optimized as he's ever going to get.

I spent hours riding a seahorse in Vashj'ir last night. I love a good video game cliché, and there's no video game cliché quite like the underwater level. The environment is beautiful and immersive, but those beautiful aqua blues and sea greens couldn't distract me from a fundamental truth about the new expansion that I was constantly experiencing: Shadow priesting is a lot more fun in Cataclysm. Period. There are more options. More abilities. And yes, even more DPS.

For those of you who want to get the ball rolling on these new abilities in Cataclysm, there's good news: Patch 4.0.1 is currently available for testing on the public test realm. It's not the full release of the game, but the new patch will cover almost all the changes that are going to be made to our spec for the new expansion. And better yet, the patch's appearance on the PTR signals that all these changes to the shadow priesting way of life are just around the corner. (And not, like, how we keep saying Cataclysm is around the corner, despite its being months away. I mean legit around the corner. For reals, no take-backs.)

The way you play the game, whether it's soloing mobs or raiding Icecrown, is about to change significantly. Are you ready? Follow me after the break, where I'll explain what patch 4.0.1 is, what it is not and what to do once it hits.

Here at WoW.com, we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

Talents! Everyone's still chattering away about the new 31-point talent system, and with the Twitter developer chat last Friday, a few questions were answered -- but even more were raised. Let's take a look at a few more posts regarding the new talent systems and various reactions to it:

• Empowered Fire shares some thoughts on mage talents.
• Borsked chats about the newly pruned restoration tree for shaman.
• Warcraft Hunters Union has some words about the developer Twitter chat in regards to hunters.
• Honor's Code simply says "Holy Power, Batman!"

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Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we should be following? Just leave us a comment, and you may see it here tomorrow! Be sure to check out our WoW Resources Guide for more WoW-related sites.

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Zach sees everything through the PvP perspective of The Art of War(craft), including eating homemade brownies baked by his supremely awesome and sexy baker wife. He sees the brownies as opponents that need to be devoured in a methodical, strategic and soul-crushing manner. He advises everyone to look at all things (especially food) as adversaries that must be defeated and guarantees that success in life will follow. Probably.

A new, exciting build of the Cataclysm beta has been released, implementing the promised overhaul to the talent trees. It's still raw at this point, but we get a glimpse of the direction the developers want to take. The basic or starter abilities have been defined and although some of these may change, such as Divine Storm for retribution paladins (Ghostcrawler, lead systems designer, mentioned that it would probably go back into the talent tree), the changes feel solid and refreshing. One of the ideas the developers have is that "both the 31-point and the 10(-point) ability need to have more single-target use," which means we should get very good one-on-one abilities early on as well as at higher levels. As we mentioned, the trees are a long way off from being done, but that shouldn't stop us from taking a look at them and picturing the possibilities.

One of the cooler, less noticeable things to come out of this build are the one-liner descriptions about each of the talent specs, allowing players to quickly grasp the concept of each spec. Blizzard seems committed to keeping this model, complete with talent tree lock-outs to prevent players from straying into other trees early on. As you might have suspected, the real culprit (or at least the most notable one) behind this change is PvP:

Ghostcrawler

Whenever a popular hybrid spec comes up, it's usually because of some sneaky build that is broken for PvP by snaking down to pick up key talents in two trees. It's not because the player really wants to play as say two specs -- they are just cherry picking the talents. Since those builds almost always feel broken (as in breaking the rules) we don't want to design around them.

source

The Cataclysm beta client now has the 31-point talent trees implemented, and though they are incomplete in some cases, they feel far better than the earlier, bloated versions that were available. Along with the new changes come a lot of thoughts around the blogosphere regarding talents and what they're shaping up to be:

• Forever a Noob shares some concerns with the mechanics of the new talent trees.
• The Mental Shaman has some immediate reactions to the news.
• World of Matticus clears up the new talents and shares some thoughts on priests.
• Restokin has some suggestions for druid talent trees.

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Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we should be following? Just leave us a comment, and you may see it here tomorrow! Be sure to check out our WoW Resources Guide for more WoW-related sites.

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My first reaction to seeing the new, streamlined talent trees was, "We'll all be cookie cutter specs now!" I mulled it over for a bit, hashed it out with some people on Twitter and came to the conclusion that the new streamlined specs are a good thing, in principle. Ask yourself, when was the last time you respecced to move one to two points around? How much are you really losing with the slimmed-down trees?

My shaman, Stoneybaby, hasn't respecced in ... I don't even know when, but I'm sure it's been many months. I have my raiding spec, in which I could move one or two points around -- should I take 2/3 Improved Shields or 3/3 Improved Shields? Ultimately, it makes little difference; I picked my raiding spec and my PvP spec, and I go forth with those until the game requires a change. I don't need a lot of choice because I won't use it.

On the other hand, my druid is a bit different. He's specced balance for AoE farming Chunk o' Mammoth (my wolves need their Spiced Mammoth Treats!) and feral bear for tanking alt raids. For raids, I either tank or I tank -- take your pick. He's mostly useless as DPS in raids because he doesn't have the proper hit, mana regen or focused damage talents; he's built to kill a dozen mobs at once out in the field. I like the choice so I can specialize in AoE farming.

In the case of my shaman, I really don't need that one- or two-point customization, and so lamenting the loss of deep, complex talent trees is just the loss of choice for the sake of choice. For my druid, I really do want and use the complexity of the current specs. Overall though, I think the slimmed-down trees will enrich the game without dumbing it down.

What about you? Do you really want deep choice in spec customization, or are you just lamenting the loss of the illusion of choice?

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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