Today’s new beta build brings us the first glimpse at the ripped-apart-and-rebuilt talent trees, courtesy of mmo-champion.

A summary of the changes to talent trees in Cataclysm:

  1. Each tree/spec has been reduced to 31 point length. There are more than 31 points in each tree, but the last talent is the “31 point talent”, the one that requires you to spend 30 talents in the tree.
  2. Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
  3. When you hit level 10, you will be asked to choose a spec. This will unlock a unique spell/ability and some passive bonuses, and will also lock you out of the other two trees, until level 70. After level 70 you can put points into the other trees.

Blizzard have mentioned that this is a “first pass” for all of the trees, and some clases, including druids, are not as far along in development – so expect changes. The work-in-progress talent tree is here if you want to play around. In the meantime though, here’s a quick idea of how things like for now:


What cool stuff do we get at level 10?

Balance: Starsurge + pushback reduction on balance spells
Feral: Mangle + ? + Vengeance (damage taken in bear converts to AP)
Resto: Swiftmend + pushback reduction on healing spells + Meditation


What’s our 31 point talent?

Balance: Starfall
Feral: Berserk
Resto: Tree of Life (duh!)


What’s changed, or new?

There’s nothing *new* in the tree (since the official preview) – the new talents are the same that they had already announced. So no new toys.

However, they’ve removed the “+X% spellpower” type filler talents, meaning that our trees are now all “meat” and no cheap fillers.

Nature’s Focus (pushback protection) is stitched in. Subtlety is gone. Good riddance, you point-leeches.

I believe we will be getting a talent point every second level or something like that – so at first glance, it seems like we’re getting all our talents super early – but I think they’ll be stretched out. Even so, great talents like Imp Rejuv, Living Seed, Nature’s Bounty – they’ve all been moved further up, which is nice. Strangely, Empowered Touch is quite far down – I would have thought we’d be given that earlier, for dungeon-ing.

The really nice toys are at the bottom – Efflorescence, Swiftmend, Emp Touch, Emp Rejuv, Wild Growth, and of course, Tree of Life.

In the balance tree, I’m sad to realise that Solar Beam is now out of reach for standard X-0-31 builds. Bum. I kinda liked that idea. Looks like Genesis and Moonglow are it.. still not sure what’s happening with Nature’s Grace. With only 10 points to spend, we can’t get any further down into the balance goodies.



Notable omissions/scratched talents

- Imp Tranquility
- Imp Barkskin
- Subtlety
- Naturalist (will the cast time of HT be reduced?)
- Omen of Clarity (to be trained)
- Improved Tree of Life (will the cooldown be reduced?)
- Master Shapeshifter (why bother with Natural Shapeshifter at all?)
- Gift of the Earthmother (boo, I was looking forward to the T8-style heal)
- Nature’s Splendor (from the balance tree) – will our HoTs be short now?



AMG IT’S BROKEN

Don’t stress, the trees aren’t broken, they’re just REALLY preliminary. Look at the resto tree – Master Shapeshifter is gone (since it was a flat buff to output), leaving only Natural Shapeshifter – but what do we trees care about saving a few hundred mana every 5 minutes? That means we have to waste 3 points to get to the next tier.

Bears, too, are forced to waste points in cat talents just to progress.

The balance and resto trees are both showing their Level 10 freebies as talents, so I’m not sure what the story is there. Update: Blizz have said they’re considering giving balance druids Moonkin at 10; Swiftmend is probably just a mistake, since the trees are so early in development.

I think what we have here is all of the talents that Blizzard wanted to keep, but thrown together in a hurry to release. I wouldn’t be surprised if they pushed it out ASAP in order to distract people away from the Real ID drama. So what we have is a super preliminary glance at what the trees MIGHT look like – but until they reshuffle, it’s hard to know what our specs will turn out to be. The scrapped talents might come back, the talents may be shuffled around, etc. We really know very little, so far.

My concern at the moment isn’t really the talents, but what is happening with TOL. So far, it’s a pretty mediocre ability – 45s on a 5min cooldown, to get a 15% buff, throw instant Regrowths (okay), double Lifeblooms (but we can only have them on a single person at a time, so that’s pretty crappy), 2 more WG targets, and we’re not sure about the rest. I’m not really sold at this point, because it’s basically a 15% healing buff with some weak bonuses sewn in. I want to know, at the very least, if they are going to let us shift in and out (to get to safety) without losing the rest of the buff.

I guess the only thing about the talents that worry me (at this early stage) is the fact that it looks like you can max out your tree easily, and there’s really no room for individuality or thoughtful decisions. I think the 31 point trees look to be moving us towards being even more “cookie cutter”, which is odd, because Blizzard made statements that they wanted our choices to be more meaningful. I wonder if anything will change in that respect.



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