PVPlab

With Blizzard recently releasing their own official version of the talent calculators we’ll see for the expansion, the forums are already buzzing about what talents border on overpowered and which one’s produce a collective yawn. Having looked over my current 70s, I figured I would toss my hat in the ring as to what I think is looking good and what needs some tweaking. As it stands, I have a 70 Paladin, Warlock, Mage, and Priest, so I’ll stick to what I know, giving my 2 cents for my particular class and spec. Feel free to toss in some of your own feedback in the comments about these and others!

1. Warlock: I primarily stick to affliction, since I enjoy not ever running out of mana and a variety of ways to earn back my health. It doesn’t look like I’ll have any shortage of methods to do just that, in the expansion either! Death’s Embrace looks particularly fun, increasing life drained but also giving affliction locks’ an ability similar to a fire mage’s Molten Fury talents. The low-life DPS increase will be particularly useful for raid encounters. Eradication providing spellhaste for affliction locks who typically don’t rely heavily on the stat seems a bit odd. Haunt is a wonderful collaboration of effects, including direct damage, a debuff to help out your dots, and health upon expiration or being dispelled. Overall I think my warlock looks to be very happy come expansion time.
2. Mage: Having bounced around between arcane and frost for most of my mage’s lifetime, there are a number of improvements to the trees that I’m happy about and a few that I’m not. I’m iffy about the addition of talents that rely on spirit. In BC, much of the itemization was retooled so that mage gear and talents didn’t rely heavily on spirit, and now we have two talents (potent spirit and student of the mind) that add spirit or rely on it. I’ll reserve judgment until the expansion hits to see how things are itemized, but I know that I do gnab spirit where I can as an arcane mage since mana regeneration is an important aspect of the spec. Arcane barrage looks interesting, proving burst damage for pvp scenarios whilst also giving us a quick punch to use on clearcasting procs. I’m not familiar enough with fire to make any comments on the new talents, but as far as frost is concerned, I’m underwhelmed by the limitations of deep freeze. A 1.5 second cast stun that requires the target be frozen to cast? I’ll pass.
3. Paladin: Holy paladins have it pretty rough these days, and I’m glad to see that some of their pains will be eased come expansion time. One of our biggest complaints is that we lack any ability for AoE healing, given that there are so many situations where your group or a number of groups will be taking consistent damage (Netherspite, Kael’thas, Hex Lord, etc.). At present paladins can only plug away at one healing target at a time, but the newest end-talent for holy is an AoE, HoT spell that I think will be quite useful. It has a quick cast time and be cast on any group/member, healing everyone near them. I doubt it will be able to crit which is disheartening, though. Sacred cleansing looks fun for both pve and pvp. I’m on the fence about the judgment talents. I’d love to be able to use judgments for the groups benefits while healing, which is good, but I wonder if they’ll be mana efficient enough to use in long fights.
4. Priests: My priest has always been holy, despite the…lackluster talents available at the end of the tree. Lightwell has been modified so that people taking some damage will retain the healing effect (30% of your total HP or less). This could actually be useful for raid healing given that change, and the stupidly long cooldown has also been mercifully reduced down to 3 minutes. Circle of Healing has been changed so that it now hits whoever happens to be close to your target, be that a raid or party member, which means you won’t have to go targeting different groups with it, you can just go where the damage is. Test of Faith is a welcome addition (And fun for lolsmite procs from surge of light). Guardian spirit certainly seems nice, but 10 seconds is a very short duration, I think it could go to 15 at least, given the 3 minute cooldown.

Obviously this just scratches the surface on what’s out there, and there will undoubtedly be a number of sweeping changes before we get to launch. That said, taking a look over your own character talents, what strikes you as the “best?” What do you think needs to be changed? Feel free to let me know!