Take These Points and Shove It!
( July 8 ) To those who don’t keep up on World of Warcraft news, get out from under your rock and pay attention. ’cause this might be one of the biggest news items about Cataclysm since it being announced.
We’re going from 51-point talent trees to 31, and you’re only getting 41 talent points to spend by 85.
“WHAT?!?!?!?!” Don’t believe me? You can read it here.
If you’re pathetically lazy or perhaps just in a hurry (either way, what are you doing here?), here are the important points:
- When you reach level 10, you’ll be asked to select a talent tree. When you do, the other two trees will be locked out for use, but you will be given the associated defining skills right away. For example, if you’re a warrior and you select arms, you’ll get mortal strike at level 10. Discipline priests will get penance at level 10. Enhancement shaman will get dual wield and lava lash at 10 – and so on.
- The other trees don’t open up until you’ve put 31 points into your selected tree.
- Instead of gaining a talent point every level, you will gain one every 2 levels. This means you won’t have access to your secondary tree until 70, and you will only get 41 points to spend by level 85.
- The Mastery system is being reworked. Now the passive bonuses associated with putting points into a tree will just be automatically given to you when you pick your specialization. These will be flat percentages instead of values that increase as you put more points in. The unique ability from the previous Mastery system will now be learned from your class trainer, and improved by the Mastery stat, found on Cataclysm items from level 78 on.
This means the class-defining talents will no longer have to be buried deep into a tree to prevent the other specs from getting it – you’ll just be handed it right away. It also means it will be significantly easier to cut away all the little filler talents required to get deeper into the tree, so you can just start picking up useful stuff right away.
As someone who has leveled 8 characters to 80, and is currently at level 53 with a 9th, among a slew of other alts, I happily welcome this idea. I’ve played 7 of the 10 classes fairly extensively, and almost all of them are a royal pain in the ass until at least 20, most until 40. Hopefully it will help prepare everyone for their roles at 85 much quicker, as well, as they’ll be handed the tools they’ll use at end-game content from the get-go, so they have plenty of time to get used to them.
How do you feel about it? Are you concerned there won’t be enough variety, or do you welcome the changes and trust Blizzard to make each talent a significant upgrade?
As someone who loves to level characters through vanilla content (I’m burned out on Outland/Northrend), I can’t wait to level my last three classes this way. The only thing I don’t really like about being locked into a talent tree until 31 pts is that there will be a lot less variety in specs. Granted people use cookie cutter builds mostly right now, but there’s generally some wiggle room in them to tailor to our needs. I feel that we will barely have any wiggle room and everyone will have nearly identical builds around.
As someone who plays Feral, I am very concerned how that tree will turn out, considering it will have to combine THREE different playstyles (Bear, Cat, and PvP). I can see them combining Cat/Bear and letting us use our gear/gems/glyphs to define if we’ll be a DPS or a Tank, but I can’t really see them rolling all three into one (the talent points would be severely over budget I think). But even the Blues said Feral would be a challenge, so I’m curious to see what the first few builds will look like.
On the other hand, I told my husband about their plans to bring back the vanilla feel and he was thrilled. I guess there will be a lot less room to severely mess up talent specs, ’cause right now if you just look at people in town, you see some really weird stuff going on. And thinking back to my DK when Naxx was the content, I used that really OP Frost/Unholy DW spec that didn’t get either 51 pt talent. Granted that build was insanely fun, Blizz doesn’t want us doing that ever again, and with the new system we won’t be able to.
I’m rambling a lot, but basically, I feel this system will make it a lot easier for Blizzard to balance specs in the long run.
I’ve been vacillating back and forth on this and like much of the changes in Cataclysm it just seems too early for me to say. That said…
I’ve got a lot of thoughts on the topic that I’ll have posted on my blog soon. For now let me say that I’m warily enthusiastic.
It sounds good as long as they really do pare down the filler talents and make what’s left, good.
As someone who levelled paladin in classic (when all three trees were full of trash talents), I wouldn’t mind ditching the feel of “which of these is least bad to put points into”. It would also make the first 40 levels till getting your “good” talent so much less depressing if it was at level 10.
I wonder if dualspec will still be at 40.
I would also be keen to see a mix of PVE and PVP talents, and/or a mix of ‘flat improvement’ vs ‘funky proc’ where there would be a decent _choice_ to select which one to take to advance to the next tier.
I agree. It’s entirely possible to get to level cap now without really “playing” all aspects (particularly the deep, defining ones) of your chosen class and tree/s, given that we level so much more quickly when compared with vanilla. Lower level dungeons, where arguably you practice those skills you need when doing heroics and raids at level cap, are entirely optional. If those alternatives and skills are available early on, people might get the opportunity to practice playing with those skills throughout the levelling process and, maybe, we’ll get better skilled players at the end.
That can only be a good thing, can’t it? :)
That’s generally, anyway. I do agree with the trepidation for classes/specs such as feral druids (tank vs DPS), but I’m reserving judgment for the time being to see how they manage that.