It looks like talents are getting rearranged to make currently little-used raid specs (i.e., Demonology with the new Demonic Pact) more raid-friendly and current top raid specs (i.e. Destruction with Decimate) less-used.

Then again, 0/21/50 gogo.

It's finally a decent solution to the age old casuals vs. hardcores for raiding, and I bet they thought of it from all the comments from the raiders chuckling over Magister's Terrace and the "Real Kael'Thas".

The hardcore get 25 man content that isn't nerfed into oblivion on the altar of accessiblity so the casuals can eventually do it. The casuals get to experience the same basic content in a 10 man setting, so it's tuned to be easier and more accessible. Should the casuals complain, that easier content can be nerfed without hardcores feeling raids have been trivialized. Hardcores get the prestige of doing the harder content, casuals get competitive gear without it being handed to them.

Everyone wins.

So far, the visuals, music, environments and lore all seem to be incredibly well-done. It really seems like Blizzard's taken the potential that they had in TBC and really worked to refine it and make it flow. Obviously we don't have enough info to be sure, but so far each leak has had me giggling like a kid on Christmas.

Looking at the trees linked to earlier it seems that Improved Disarm was finally changed and points to Shield Break being a warrior ability:

Reduces the cooldown of your Disarm and Shield Break abilities by $/1000;s1 secs and causes the target to take an additional 15% damage while disarmed.

Edit: Actually looks like a lot of the old prot talents were changed:

Name: Anticipation
Description: Increases your chance to dodge by 5%.

Name: Improved Bloodrage
Description: Increases the rage generated by your Bloodrage ability by 50%.

Name: Improved Revenge
Description: Increases damage of your Revenge ability by 25% and gives a $h% chance to stun the target for $12798d.

Name: Improved Shield Bash
Description: Increases damage of your Shield Slam ability by 10% and gives your Shield Bash ability a $h% chance to silence the target for $18498d.

Those are some extremely nice changes for what are currently pretty lacklustre talents in most cases. Source from earlier in the thread: http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/talentline.php?line=163

The old shadow priest talents sure got changed around a bit:

Shadow Focus down to +3% spellhit from 10%. (Ouchouchouch)
Improved SW:P changed to +10% damage instead of +2 ticks.
Vampiric Embrace down to 15% from 20%.
Vampiric Touch down to 2% from 5%.
Shadow Resilience changed to -4% physical damage instead of-4% chance to be crit by spells. (Still completely useless.)
Shadow Power changed to 10% crit and 50% crit damage instead of 15% crit.
Shadowform now also reduces threat.
Focused Mind now also reduces the cost of Mind Sear (a new 5 sec channeled aoe).

There's also finally a talent with anti casting pushback, but only 50% unlike everyone elses 70 or 100%.

I wonder how the talent that converts bonus healing to bonus damage works, will it work on generic +damage/healing, or only on +healing gear? The latter seems pretty useless unless you're a healing priest respeccing to level to 80.


There's also a ton of changes to old talents for the other classes, Feral Charge in catform, Conc Blow also deals damage and bonus threat, Soul Link as an 11 point talent.


And how about a Nerubian mount? ("Northrend Nerubian Mount (Test)" from http://srs-bsns.com/wlkspells.htm )

My first impression of some of the talents is the new mechanic of proc cooldown resets or refreshing debuffs.

It will make standard rotations a bit harder to map and probably require you to decide ability choices as you cast them rather than a pre-determined rotation.

So, uhh, I'm not convinced that anything "leaked" so far is actually real.

I refuse to believe that even in an alpha build, blizzard would have such silly grammatical mistakes in their talent descriptions. I mean, come on, the priest and warrior trees are just laughable based on the way things are worded in some of the talents. It's pretty horrible.

Even if it's just some blizzard programmer guy quickly entering these in for the alpha build, he has to have a college degree, right? I'd expect him to be able to form sentences that come close to making sense.

If not, what's the use of the talent in the first place though? What self-respecting tank is going to be crittable if they have a choice? I don't get that talent regardless of what they do/don't do to resilience. If it procs off of what would have been a crit but isn't due to resilience, it's a gimmick. If it doesn't proc unless you actually receive a crit, it's useless. The only explanation I have is pure PvP talent, but it sure would take a lot more than any of the ideas I've seen in the tree so far to make me think there's a PvP renaissance in store for ferals. (Though I suppose feral charge being extended to cats would point that direction a bit.)

War Tools :: Talent tree Death Knight Talents

^ DK Talent Trees... this should be the right version.

It looks like the DK's tanking talents seem almost wholly geared towards AoE tanking on freezeable mobs. Almost nothing that implies the "magic tanking specialist" that Blizzard seemed to want. Looks like they'd have some ridiculous synergy with frost mages, however, given all the freezing effects. Here's hoping that Mages get an AoE Ice Lance or something to capitalize on it.

(Looks like it still needs some work, too, the ratio of 1-point talents to 3-5 point talents is quite high.)

Also, looks like Old Strat will take place not only in Strat itself, but in the entire surrounding countryside of EPL before it was EPL. Kinda like OHB, obviously.

As noted elsewhere, these talents have been datamined by multiple people from the downloadable client build. You're welcome to all you want, but people aren't making this up.

Are you really trying to suggest that they intentionally created an alpha build with terrible grammar, then "accidently" made it publicly downloadable?

So even in the face of overwhelming evidence you would just stick your head in the sand and ignore it? Great stance.

Same thing happened to arcane mages and affli locks. About damned time that these specs stop being able to cap-out with 3 tier-1 talents for mobs at player-leve+2

As for the pushback you mentioned, granted you're the only 50% but the "everyone else's 70 or 100%" is rather missleading. The only cases of 100% are (a) a shaman talent which only activates upon being crit (b) Arcane Missiles, which has always been shite in dps-terms (hence, it never meant 100% uninterpretable dps) and (c) martyrdom.

Haha, I mean, movie studios do it literally all the time with leaking fake scripts.

But seriously, the warrior talents on that main site changed (slightly) at least a dozen times since yesterday, and they started out completely fake... but everyone seems to just be going along with it. Whatever, it's the internet, and that's fine.

edit: certainly not suggesting blizzard is behind anything, but when these supposedly legitimate independently datamined sites all change the "fake" trees to the new "real" trees in the same time period, I get suspicious.

Regarding the grammar thing: Why waste the effort to make sure the tooltip is grammatically correct when the ability is subject to massive changes? Grammatically correct descriptions seems relatively unimportant compared to balancing of new talents, spells, the new class, and testing the pacing of the new zones.

It's a little confusing whether they intend deathknights to use mostly physical damage gear or a mix with spelldamage thrown in too. I'm hoping they've learned at least something from the retri-paladin fiasco, and won't do the latter.

Blood seems to be mostly physical based dps-tree, frost a spelldamage based tanking tree and unholy a mix of both for pvp. Blood might end up using pure warrior dps-gear, and frost sharing spelldamage tanking gear with protection paladins. Unholy gets 20% of attack power as spelldamage similar to enhancement shamans, so maybe they don't need spelldamage from gear at all? This is all speculation of course, and they'll likely end up changing everything many times.

There are a number of anti-magic talents, but none of them (unless I've missed something obvious) are in the Frost tree.

In fact there seems to be tanking, or at least abilities which appear they would be beneficial for tanking in all trees.
Blood has Deflection, Spell Deflection, Blade Barrier (the use of which would depend on how frequently you are on 0 runes, which remains to be seen), as well as a less effective Ardent Defender (Will of the Necropolis) and to a lesser extent Veteran of the Third War (hp is always useful).

The Unholy tree has Magic Supression, Magic Domination and, although it's hard to say for sure without knowing the cooldowns, Bone Armor and Lichborne. Impurity could potentially be a decent threat talent too, depending on how DK threat works. And Unholy Command reduces the Death Grip cooldown.

Although it's hard to know without seeing the spells available to DKs, my initial reaction was that they were attempting to make all 3 specs viable for 5-man tanking at the least. Aside agro anyway, since it could turn out that the frost talents create loads of it. If DKs are supposed to be interchangable with warriors for tanking, then looking at the trees makes me think that there base, no talent tanking level would have to be higher.

Having said all of that, at this stage, it's far too early to tell how it will pan out. The most important thing for me is that Unholy looks like a load of fun.

That doesn't help the blood and frost deathknights

Blood doesn't seem at first glance to have a lot of spellbased abilities, but the same isn't true for frost. Frost has increased spellcritical among other things. On the other hand, if they make protection paladins and frost deathknights use the same spelldamage tanking gear, that would lead to less wasted drops in raids, and easier for blizzard to design loot.

I think the proposed changes and additions to the Priest talent trees are phenomenal!

It looks as if it would be very viable to have a 51-point spec'd Disc, Holy, and Shadow in the raid.

Well the Frost tree has something regarding spelldamage, not quite a conversion though.

Black Ice 2nd Tier Frost
Increases your Shadow and Frost spell damage by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Ghouls also have a neat new "rise from the grave" animation. Probably for DK spells, but I'm seeing this get some cool PvE use. :P Seriously, how much cooler would Duskwood have been with it?

I'm pretty sure it adds exactly 20% of the "healing only" increase as spell damage, since that adds up to the exact amount of spell damage the item would provide if it were pure spell damage. For example, compare [Golden Spellthread] to [Runic Spellthread]. Golden Spellthread gives 22 spell damage plus 20% of 66, which is 35.2 spell damage. Runic Spellthread gives 35 spell damage.

Basically this change is intended so that both shadow and holy priests can wear exactly the same gear.