Talent Builds I Think I’d Like To Try (WLK – Level 80)
Messing with the new talent calculators for the different classes, trying things out that might or might not work, all for level 80.
If I had a hunter…
Survival PvE with a bit of MM, 0/16/55
Mage
Arcane PvE Master of Elements, 53/18/0
Frost PvP Torment the Weak/Imp CS, 20/0/51
Fire PvE Icy Veins, 9/51/11
Paladin
Holy PvE Crit Chance, Batman, 53/0/18
Holy PvP Stop it with the debuffs plz, 56/15/0
Protection 25-man You guys get the blessings, I’mma just tank this guy, 2/57/12
Protection 10-man What do you mean we don’t have a Retadin, 0/61/10
Retribution PvE, 5/5/61
Retribution PvP, 0/20/51
Shaman
Enhancement PvE Elemental Focus, 17/54/0
Enhancement Mana is for chumps weee Lightning Shield, 13/58/0
Elemental PvE Pure DPS, 55/16/0
Elemental PvE Hybrid healer, 53/5/13
Warrior
Fury PvE Hybrid Tank/DPS, 8/45/18
Arms PvE DPS, 51/20/0
Prot PvE Bringing some war, 11/3/57
September 30, 2008 at 10:28 pm
My alternative Prot PvE War – I like this better because it has great synergy between impale, cruelty, incite, and focused rage combined with both improved thunderclap and improved heroic strike.
Overall you seem to be skipping a lot of 1-point talents for no apparent reason. Your hunter build, for example, skips aimed shot and wyvern sting despite being far enough in their respective trees. I understand it’s a pve build but there are definitely pvp applications to those abilities, even in raids. Your elemental pure dps maxes out the shock talents in the elemental tree but forgoes Shamanistic Focus in enhancement. For shocks, that one point is 22 times as effective as a point in convection.
I was surprised to see arcane fortitude in your pvp build. I was even more surprised (and dismayed!) to discover that they nerfed it, of all things. Three talent points for 1.5xINT extra armor? Spell impact seems like a much better choice for a frost mage for the +6% damage to major instant abilities. Even Focus Magic is an extra buff to dispel, and pretty decent if they don’t. I also wouldn’t do without arctic reach in a pvp build, the extra frost nova radius makes a big difference unless you’re within spitting distance of the server latencywise.
That’s it off the top of my head. :)
October 1, 2008 at 3:23 pm
A quick note on Enhancement for Shamans. The latest build, by EJ’s astute calculations, is roughly a 20% dps nerf (between the changes to Maelstrom weapon, Flurry, Shamanistic Rage, Dual Wield and Stormstrike). The biggest change is how Enh dps no longer scales as well with crit, as has been discussed lengthily on this blog.
There’s still a lot of debate raging on whether the new build pushes shamans into fast caster-weapons with dual FT enchants, a Slow WF/Slow FT build, or Slow WF/Fast FT build. There’s some speculation that going slow WF/Slow WF means you’re better off NOT taking Maelstrom Weapon at all. This to me seems like bad design on Blizz’s fault, since average players won’t be able to make that correlation from the readily available information.
The fact that the current changes seems to push Enh shamans away from melee mail gear and into caster gear seems like proof enough that something is wrong inherently with the current design philosophy.
I’m hoping this is just an iterative change, that things will swing back the other way in a future build once the numbers get crunched. But when Static Shock now has just as high a DPS/Talent Point ratio as Maelstrom Weapon, something is up.
And what’s with Stormstrike now only affecting Nature damage? Why benefit only 1/3 of our shocks with such a deep talent? I can sort of see how it was probably making Lava Burst really stupid, but was Frost Shock REALLY so game-breaking?
October 2, 2008 at 2:46 pm
@Riki:
So far as warriors and skipping one-point talents go, I think Vigilance got changed between my building “Bringing the war” and looking at it today. I would take that (10% of their threat? damage caused by the target not reduced?), freeing up points from Gag Order I think, tossing the extra point into Incite for 1/3 in that talent. It’s pretty much a raid build, concerned with rage gen (which of course is a secondary function of damage (ie, Malice and Incite would help…)) and mitigation primarily.
As for the hunter, that one is pretty much raid-only. Granted there are some situations where Wyvern Sting/Aimed Shot could be useful but it’s a stand-still-and-dps thing in this case, with the caveat that I don’t actually have a hunter so there may indeed be some misguidance stemmed from that.
And you would skimp on Arcane Fortitude? With all the armor penetration effects they put in the game? Playing a mage in pvp (with the possible exception of 5v5 where the mage is often not a primary target, but for this reason!) is more about surviving and shatter combos in my experience, and I’d take 750 more armor or whatever over 6% extra damage from all those abilities, relying instead on Torment of the Weak for that extra 6% when it is the most painful. And Focus Magic, while nice in theory, has one problem in that I’m pretty sure you can’t cast it on yourself. I’m not 100% on that, but I think it is the case.
Lastly, the shaman build without Focus and Rage is mostly a joke, though it’s not really noted as such.
@Feren:
Argh, they changed it all! Argh. Well there goes that idea.
I admit I had personally wondered about the possible effectiveness of a dual-flametongue high-crit rating Enhancement shaman in full Elemental gear running around with +800-some AP from Mental Dexterity getting all these instant-cast 3000-damage non-crit lightning bolts…but I assumed it would be worse than using Enhancement (er, hunter) gear.
But Maelstrom Weapon is kind of bland now…it’s more fun to crit, Blizz! You made the numbers pop up big for a reason I thought!
Stormstrike is just back to the way it was, sans allowing other raid members to benefit. I’m not really concerned, as we’ll get synergy with other classes still from Imp Scorch/Winter’s Chill/Curse of Elements/etc. It’ll be ok.
Dual Wield Specialization was nerfed down to 3% though! Looks like we are going to need some +hit.