World of Warcraft Diary, Part Five

The guys at GameRifts let us know that they’ve posted the fifth installment to their ongoing World of Warcraft diary. Here’s a little something to get you started:

All talent trees are progressive flow chart-like affairs. The early talents are small passive bonuses, things like a 1% increase in your chance to land a critical hit or a 1 point increase to your defensive skill. These increases are small, but they add up over time. I would add here that Blizzard should rethink flat bonuses in favor of percentages though. A 1 point increase to defense is huge at level 2. At level 50 it’s miniscule. Delving deeper into each tree and you find all new abilities available to you. Things like Concussion Blow, a targeted five second stun with a one minute cool down. Or the currently overpowered because of its lack of cool down Mortal Strike which does 150% damage after adjustments like critical hits and bestows an anti-healing debuff on the target. In order to access the powerful abilities of a given tree, you must meet pre-requisites in the form of having specific talents and X number of total talent points spent in that tree. Each tree has at least one ability that is not available until you spend 30 points in that tree. Doing some quick math you can see that with a level cap of 60, and a talent point for every level except the first.it’s impossible to access more than one of these per character. This is a good thing and will result in diversity among the classes, assuming the balance issues get hammered out with the various trees. Right now there is much concern that since a Warrior’s primary role is to tank, that all Warriors will end up sinking the majority of their points into the Protection tree. There is some validity to that, but as long as you are using a shield and in the defensive stance you are can effectively tank. Unlike those two criteria, points in Protection are not required to be a group’s main tank. Similarly, Fury being tied to the Berserker stance makes those talents less effective currently as the Berserker stance is incomplete.