official World of Warcraft

[treemonster]

oh, I agree there was things that were a waste of points, but you could spend them in another tree and gain more than just staying in one tree is what I was getting at.

not entirely sure how it works or if total points is reduced, but it's just a matter of spending them in one tree first. mind you, specs that use less than the minimum for the first tree should be ok, which they are now not.

i would put 31+ or w/e points into frost, i would just like to spend the first 15 or w/e into arcane for counter spell. now i have to do the opposite. annoying to me for sure.

[the evn show]

If the new trees were setup such that I could have a solid build avoiding useless talents that provide me little to no benefit for that tree, or for throughput. then I would have no problem. But why would I put 3 points into reducing CD on a spell/ability (for example) to unlock 50% haste when I could get 50% haste from putting 2 points into a general stat ie) +10% int in a different tree? (This is an example, and there isn't talents that match this, but for general idea)

For the sake of argument assume that the 'junk' points in a tree are replaced by "increases damage done by 50%" you'd never be able to spec anything else. It doesn't matter whether those 'good' talents are in the same tree or another one: you'd have to take them you could. By locking out the "good" talents from the bottom of other trees until you've picked up some 'utility' in your main tree you actually gain flexibility.

The choice between "cooldown on fear reduced by 5 seconds" vs "remove movement emparing effects every 20 seconds" might not be particularly exciting but it certainly allows for more variation than the old choices ("Do I take Hungering Cold, or free up 4 points to increase my DPS by ~20%").

i would put 31+ or w/e points into frost, i would just like to spend the first 15 or w/e into arcane for counter spell. now i have to do the opposite. annoying to me for sure.

That's intentional: they wanted to give you fewer points to spend but make each point more powerful. They also wanted to allow you to get powerful abilities sooner while you're leveling (most classes getting 20-30 point abilities at level 10) while preventing overpowered combinations like "arcane power+icey veins"

If they left the trees open at low levels you'd just end up with the bottom filled with crap so that after you've picked all the good talents from your primary tree, you'd only have garbage available in the others. That approach makes leveling from 10-25-ish less fun because talents have a trivial impact on how you play - now your first 11 points unlock stuff that used to take 50+ levels to get access to.

As an added bonus it means that people in RDF are likely to have a somewhat sane spec because you have to actively try to spend your 31 points poorly.

not entirely sure how it works or if total points is reduced, but it's just a matter of spending them in one tree first. mind you, specs that use less than the minimum for the first tree should be ok, which they are now not.

Every tree has about 35-possible points you can spend in it, of that there are about 20 "really good" talents (stuff like divine storm, shadow form, etc) and about 5 "situational at best" points (stuff like "reduce cooldown of BOP by 60 seconds") and 10 "okay" talents ("increase damage on snared targets by 5%").

If you're a prot warrior you must spend at least 31 points in the prot tree before you're allowed to spend any points in arms or fury. Due to the way they're spread out you basically have 25 points that are obvious: every spec is going to take these points and doing that means you get all of the necessary tanking/healing/dps talents from that tree. You'll be left with a handful of points that must be spent in your primary tree and only 'situational' talents to spend them on. Once you hit 31 points in your main tree you can dump your points in the other two.

The same basic setup could have been accomplished by just putting "mandatory 5 point black hole that does nothing" at the bottom of every tree. You'd be sinking 10 points into crap which effectively "locks out' the 'good' talents from other trees until you're at a high level. The current solution is much less likely to confuse new players.

[treemonster]

<snip>

kinda explains it a bit. doesn;'t totally satisfy my, but none the less thanks for taking the time.

i'm thinking i will trial and error it out and then look for cookie cutter build to pvp with at some point.

[Hell-In-A-Handbasket]

working a good farm point in the Basin about 66,49 Rainspeaker Rapids, undead spawning as fast as i kill them, and listtle bit faster then i can loot. titan shows about 57G per hour, with decent Cloth drops ( sells for 1G each Cloth on my server )

[firey]

working a good farm point in the Basin about 66,49 Rainspeaker Rapids, undead spawning as fast as i kill them, and listtle bit faster then i can loot. titan shows about 57G per hour, with decent Cloth drops ( sells for 1G each Cloth on my server )

Honestly, go out to ice-crown theres the barens pits that groups of skeles and a few warlocks will walk around. It ends up being a group of about 8 mobs but if you are level 80 and decently geared you could easily take them. I, as a disc priest (so a clothie) could down the groups as long as I played it smart, you can make well over 100g an hour, have the chance on epic drops, and you get insane amounts of cloth.

[the evn show]

Random dungeon queues yield 20g per clear from the RDF alone. Assume you win 2 blues per dungeon on average (2-3 items per boss, average of 5 bosses). Further assume that an RDF run takes at most 15 minutes:

• 4 gems (23 justice points per heroic clear + 16 points per boss * 5 bosses) * 5g = 20g
  
• 20g RDF reward * 4 = 80g
  
• 8 Boss items (vendored: armor starts at 5g, weapons up to 20g) * 10g average = 80g
  
• 80% chance of winning a frozen orb: 4g
  

185g per hour that you can absolutely bank on. On top of all that you've got random greens, cloth, greys, and the gold the mobs drop which adds up over an hour (say 50g per hour as a conservative estimate), and herbs or mining nodes in a dungeon.

If you're willing to sell gems instead of just selling them to a vendor (50g each on AH, well under market price) and convert boss drops into enchanting materials you can double your income.

Take it once step further: convert the uncut gems to cut ones and your enchanting materials into things like Berserking, 10 stats, and tuskar's vitality and you can double the value of those again. 500g per hour isn't out of the question.

If you can't or won't be a tank or healer and don't have a friend you can queue with then it still makes sense to queue as a DPS even if you can only run 2 RDF runs per hour the gold per minute is better than farming. While you wait for a queue to pop you can grind mobs in Icecrown or whatever.

[spacer]

<snipped>

Thanks evn. I was just about the post something along those lines. The RDF has made gold farming stupidly easy.

[spacer]

kinda explains it a bit. doesn;'t totally satisfy my, but none the less thanks for taking the time.

i'm thinking i will trial and error it out and then look for cookie cutter build to pvp with at some point.

evn.'s post mostly states the same ideas, but here is the a Blue's response to similar concerns.

Talent trees too easy?

I'm not convinced these posts aren't exaggerations popping out in the wake of major change. I've tried choosing specializations for several different classes and had tough, but fun choices to make in every case. There are at least a few talents in each tree which will provide extra flavor or utility according to your play style.

Will people determine the best min/max builds and spread them to the masses? Sure. That happened before patch 4.0.1 anyway. Prior to 4.0.1 you sure did have more talents and more points to spend, but the illusion of choice isn't the same thing as true choice. So many of the choices you had were between rather boring passive talents, and the choice was usually very clear. You usually chose the obvious power-increasing talents to improve your performance. Now your choices are a little more flavorful, and the best route to take is a little more subjective. You also have a greater choice of utility and power in your glyphs, and on your gear via Reforging.

Try taking another look at your old talent trees and let me know if there were truly a lot of very compelling talents that made choosing really hard, or if there were just a bunch more branches to throw points in. Look at the trees today and let me know if there are truly no choices for you to make that might enhance the enjoyment of playing your class.

[_neutrino Veteran]

Wow test site has updated and now has a picture of my character on it

photoshopped out my last name and nothing else.

[Hell-In-A-Handbasket]

I was farming the queue, and I'm a tank, and the abundance of people that like two pull random things cause of ichy finger, people saying to slow, going slaphappy on random mob, and a host of other crap. Been looking for a way to farm money for my last 2 levels of riding so I can use my bronze drake

[the evn show]

Been looking for a way to farm money for my last 2 levels of riding so I can use my bronze drake

"/2 tank offering instant queues, need dps + healer. The only rule is you're not allowed to pull mobs or you're kicked."

You can certainly get three DPS in a second, a healer may or may not be easy. But if you have control over your DPS

that should solve the majority of your problems.

Given the choice between 15 minute queues and waiting 5 seconds to pull a mob even the mouth-breathers in trade

chat will make the right decision.

WRT talent trees Here are the ones from 2.0

Try specing your class. You'll have to use two trees but you'll probably find out that once all the "perform better

in PVE or PVP" talents are taken you're lucky to have more than a couple to spend on junk like "increase wand damage"

[Slane]

I was farming the queue, and I'm a tank, and the abundance of people that like two pull random things cause of ichy finger, people saying to slow, going slaphappy on random mob, and a host of other crap. Been looking for a way to farm money for my last 2 levels of riding so I can use my bronze drake

I don't mind them doing any of those things. Hell healers who set the pace pulling are my heroe's. Mobs die so fast in dungeons that one taunt and maybe a stun and it's on you long enough. I only pull groups of 7-8 (unless there's a stun guy in there then it's less), so nobody is targeting the same target, but it's no problem to hold 'em. Rend, TC, Shockwave, TC is all that's needed per group in any instance. I also never grew out of the tab-targetting AoE tanking from BC, so I still do that which in the current state is overkill for AoE tanking.

[Argi]

My old GM has recently started a new wow-related video site. He went to Blizzcon and put up a special episode just for it so check it, and the other vids on the site out if you're interested. :)

[firey]

I don't mind them doing any of those things. Hell healers who set the pace pulling are my heroe's. Mobs die so fast in dungeons that one taunt and maybe a stun and it's on you long enough. I only pull groups of 7-8 (unless there's a stun guy in there then it's less), so nobody is targeting the same target, but it's no problem to hold 'em. Rend, TC, Shockwave, TC is all that's needed per group in any instance. I also never grew out of the tab-targetting AoE tanking from BC, so I still do that which in the current state is overkill for AoE tanking.

As a single-target healer (disc priest) I hated tanks that didn't care about my mana and would get mad at me for not sucking mana out of thin air (pots and shadowfiend on cd) and would attempt to take out full rooms just because "They are that leet". On the other hand, I hate the tanks that will tell me to mana up before every fight and I end up pulling the mobs because it's going too slow. Sometimes if the dps is lacking, I'll throw up my shield and renew on the tank and join in the dps just to clear stuff.

[the evn show]

As a single-target healer (disc priest)

Disc priests are/were raid healers: they have horrible single target throughput because after shield, pom, and penance you're waiting 6 seconds on cooldowns.

[treemonster]

evn.'s post mostly states the same ideas, but here is the a Blue's response to similar concerns.

meh aside from maybe one or two active spell talent spec choices(the frost mage's pet for example)i mostly preferred the spassives and passive mods to active spells such as reduced cast time and crit on frost bolt or reduction of CD's on my instants or bigger damage on them.

i'll have to see what the new tree looks like when i get in game possibly leading up to cata launch or just after.

I don't mind them doing any of those things. Hell healers who set the pace pulling are my heroe's. Mobs die so fast in dungeons that one taunt and maybe a stun and it's on you long enough. I only pull groups of 7-8 (unless there's a stun guy in there then it's less), so nobody is targeting the same target, but it's no problem to hold 'em. Rend, TC, Shockwave, TC is all that's needed per group in any instance. I also never grew out of the tab-targetting AoE tanking from BC, so I still do that which in the current state is overkill for AoE tanking.

my bro who plays a disc priest says he sets the pace and will only heal the tank. when dps qq that he isn't healing them he just says watch your aggro and let the tank do his job.

he also claimed that as a disc priest all of his spells either healed him or regened his mana or something, so he never has to to rest(or at least very rarely) so slow tanks annoy him.

this is ofc before 4.0 so i'm not sure where he stands now as he is taking a break from wow at the moment.

[Elliott]

my bro who plays a disc priest says he sets the pace and will only heal the tank. when dps qq that he isn't healing them he just says watch your aggro and let the tank do his job.

Your brother had to be exaggerating. There is such a thing as AoE damage, and it is unavoidable on many fights (though there's generally not much in WotLK dungeon runs).

[firey]

my bro who plays a disc priest says he sets the pace and will only heal the tank. when dps qq that he isn't healing them he just says watch your aggro and let the tank do his job.

he also claimed that as a disc priest all of his spells either healed him or regened his mana or something, so he never has to to rest(or at least very rarely) so slow tanks annoy him.

this is ofc before 4.0 so i'm not sure where he stands now as he is taking a break from wow at the moment.

Evn.. during the time I played my disc priest, I was single target tank and OT heals. Holy was the raid heal spec due to all the AOE heals. Disc has shield, penance, flash of light. We have like 2.. mana inefficient AOE heals, yes I can bounce around a lot, but even with high SP theres no way I could keep a group at full hp. Disc is more about preventing death with quick heals, but not about keeping multiple people alive.

As for the mana/health regen I rarely ran out of mana, and unless I had full agro I never died, and unless he is using binding heal, or just self healing Im not sure how he was gaining health from his heals. As for mana.. we have shadow fiend, hymn of (something), pots, and that's about it.

Atleast what I said above was before ICC came out I quit during the time ULD 25 was THE end raid. Im not really sure the changes that have transpired since then as I haven't gone on my priest since then. I had quit playing for 8 months or so, things have likely changed on the disc front since.

[treemonster]

Your brother had to be exaggerating. There is such a thing as AoE damage, and it is unavoidable on many fights (though there's generally not much in WotLK dungeon runs).

from the dungeons i did in tbc and vanilla content when i still did dungeons, there wasn't alot of aoe damage in those either and outside of a few boss fights with aoe attacks that were pretty easy for dps to avoid there wasn't like any aoe from trash.

iirc the damage i ended up taking as a mage tended to be along the variety of don't stand in the bad spot that spawned under neath you in tbc boss fights and the odd reflective shield or mind control spells or that sort of thing that were either totally unavoidable or easy to avoid after your first attempt on the boss in question. there as a few aoe spells in tbc from bosses but the scripts made them obvious with enough time to run out of range.

didn't do any dungeons at all in wotlk myself, but he seemed to be talking more about pre 60 content on his current disc priest which he was leveling up previous to our discussion.

what he was talking about was dps dying because they were taking alot of damage from trash adn qqing about it because they [pulled aggro off the tank, which in my experience with pre wotlk content was pretty easy to avoid even with out an aggro meter and a good tank with only gear from leveling quests and fast kills of trash with single target dps on your average pull. although i'll note i rage quit dungeons in tbc primarily because of tanks who would lose aggro on trash pulls to the healer who was only healing the tank as needed and tanks standing in teh bad stuff even on the 4th attempt at a boss. i hear overall it tends to be better these days, except with a good fraction of DK tanks for some reason.

dunno about raids though. but i'm talking about your average 5 man leveling dungeon here.

Evn.. during the time I played my disc priest, I was single target tank and OT heals. Holy was the raid heal spec due to all the AOE heals. Disc has shield, penance, flash of light. We have like 2.. mana inefficient AOE heals, yes I can bounce around a lot, but even with high SP theres no way I could keep a group at full hp. Disc is more about preventing death with quick heals, but not about keeping multiple people alive.

As for the mana/health regen I rarely ran out of mana, and unless I had full agro I never died, and unless he is using binding heal, or just self healing Im not sure how he was gaining health from his heals. As for mana.. we have shadow fiend, hymn of (something), pots, and that's about it.

Atleast what I said above was before ICC came out I quit during the time ULD 25 was THE end raid. Im not really sure the changes that have transpired since then as I haven't gone on my priest since then. I had quit playing for 8 months or so, things have likely changed on the disc front since.

not sure what he was using and maybe i misheard him. it was either hp or mana he was getting back. and no he didn't bother with healing anyone but the tank.

this is maybe 2 months ago that he was doing this? and another 4 or so months before that he was on his 80 disc priest farming mobs in the wild and doing some casual raiding as a disc priest and the odd pvp.

i'm only relating what he told me, and tbh he's a little weird sometimes. he actually thinks that he has won every duel we've ever fought each other when it has been the other way around 99% of the time. so i'd take it with a grain of salt. :p

[lalalawawawa]

My old GM has recently started a new wow-related video site. He went to Blizzcon and put up a special episode just for it so check it, and the other vids on the site out if you're interested. :)

Nice video. :) Thanks.

[vip]

You guys see the new Troll Druid epic flight form ??? CANT WAIT!

[_neutrino Veteran]

You guys see the new Troll Druid epic flight form ??? CANT WAIT!

I am not a fan of the troll flight form. I prefer the worgen if i had to choose one of the new ones.

[firey]

I find it amazing how much WoW has changed. In the past 4 years I have played it's gone from a lot of thinking, and planning from race -> class -> spec. Ensuring you have proper ammo, pet, etc. To now it's like hmm, I like the blue guys and I feel like being a bear. No thought of racials, or whatever. Hunters can spin in circles killing anything that comes close without running out of arrows.

It's just amazing how much of a change has happened to the game.

[I am Redbeard]

I find it amazing how much WoW has changed. In the past 4 years I have played it's gone from a lot of thinking, and planning from race -> class -> spec. Ensuring you have proper ammo, pet, etc. To now it's like hmm, I like the blue guys and I feel like being a bear. No thought of racials, or whatever. Hunters can spin in circles killing anything that comes close without running out of arrows.

It's just amazing how much of a change has happened to the game.

I find it amazing how people are surprised by progressive game design.

I'll venture to say that if the game had not changed in the past four years you would probably complain about that.

[the evn show]

Ensuring you have proper ammo, pet, etc. To now it's like hmm, I like the blue guys and I feel like being a bear.

It's just amazing how much of a change has happened to the game.

Yeah it sure was fun finding out that the main reason my alliance priest was getting a raid spot over a nightelf was because I rolled a dwarf.

Horde side it's awesome to know that I do 100 dps less than if I'd rolled a troll priest or Orc dk.

The really fun part is rerolling or paying to race change because a choice I made years ago (by total chance) that was correct and is wrong now. The same is true of professions: putting my gathering and "non raid/pvp professions" on an alt is awesome.

Something as simple as what your level 1 starter quests are should not cripple your toon 85 levels later.