Cataclysm Talent Trees for Priests, Rogues, Druids & Shamans!

[Pf0llz0r]

"....and increases your damage done while in Tree of Life by 5/10/15%"

O'rly?

[Zxian]

My main is a rogue, and I'm really sad to see the trees rearranged in such a way that there seem to be a LOT of wasted talent points. Perhaps Blizzard is relying on Rogues to use Recouperate more actively (similar to what Lore mentioned in one of his weekly marmot videos), but there seem to be quite a few times when building talent trees that I find myself throwing away points to get further into the tree (simple example, try getting past tier 2 talents in Assassination - Malice -> Ruthlessness -> ???).

[swelt]

Malice (5 points)
Increases your critical strike chance by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Thought we weren't getting these talents any more...

Vendetta (1 Point)
Marks an enemy for death, increasing all damage you deal to the target by 20% and granting you unerring vision of your target, regardless of concealments such as Stealth and Invisibility. Lasts 30 seconds.

Too good, won't go live with 20% and 30s as the numbers.

[Maèl]

I'm intrigued by the Disc changes. Especially since you can grab some DPS talents without forfeiting essential healing talents.

Does 2/2 Grace stack up to 2 on life? 1/2 Grace stacks to 3 according to the tool tip. 8% bonus healing for the second direct healing
spell is definitely something that would be somewhat acceptable, if it does affect the second spell and not only the following spells.
Nevertheless, the whole concept of Grace is ludicrous. The buff is too small to make us serious tank healers. I've been tempted for
a long time to move out of it but haven't yet found a better way to spend those points. It seems like now I have.

I don't quite understand Attonement. Smite once and get healing equivalent to a single tick from Renew on a semi-random target?
Evangelism and Archangel seem to imply that if you use 5 DPS spells you do get a buff to your holy DPS spells. You can consume this
buff which gives you another buff that ups your healing by up to 15% for 18 seconds and restores mana. Channeling Penance on the
run is a nice touch and those talents seem to be very accessible for a pure Disc priest. I do hope this stays in but we will have to see
if this is practical or not. I guess this highly depends on the encounter design. I know how I would spend my time on Loatheb
Placement of Holy Reach and Surge of Light is a bit awkward. I guess you would still have to decide if you want to be an all-out Smiter
or a bubbly Disc priest with some offensive capabilities.

Reflective Shield seems to have been fixed so it can also work when cast on other players. If this also works for AoE it would have its
uses.

All in all I like how they are thinking. The new Disc tree reflects my playstyle where I do Smite/Holy Fire whenever I don't have to heal
somebody. Let's see how this works out when mana is at a premium. But I really, really like how they are thinking.

[Bashal]

...[some of these talents] are all boring, across the board increases to damage (or healing) without any interesting conditions or effects. In other words, exactly the kinds of talents Blizz said they'd be removing. So why are they still here?

Yes, I was disappointed to see this as well. I thought the whole point was to relegate all the "more damage/more crit/more healing" to Mastery, and leave it out of the tree?

Although to be honest, I couldn't imagine them being able to come up with enough replacement talents to make that happen. I had figured if they were going to do that successfully at all, they'd have to make the trees smaller (and award fewer talent points as a player levels up).

[Maèl]

Those trees don't look very finished. And I THINK(pure speculation) they want to keep talents, that increase crit/damage for specific spells/weapons.
Twin Disciplines for instance looks like a keeper. But this talent is a no-brainer for any priest. Which again does speak against it.

Also there will be changes to the classes that are not reflected in the talent trees(e.g. Ambush with a Sword), influence of stats...
And we don't yet know how gearing, stats and encounters work out. So I'm very relaxed and will not throw my hands up in the air and start running in circles. I'm waiting for the first nerf before I do that.

[Synistah]

Twin Discplines is a hell of a talent, I can easily say. BEST 5 POINTS INVESTED EVER!

I cant wait till some Talents and Trees are set in stone so some real planning can be done, I know it will be a while.. But its worth the wait.

Oh and Leap of Faith FTW.. How well do you trust me not to pull you into fire? =P *evil laugh*

[Bashal]

Those trees don't look very finished. And I THINK(pure speculation) they want to keep talents, that increase crit/damage for specific spells/weapons....I'm very relaxed and will not throw my hands up in the air and start running in circles. I'm waiting for the first nerf before I do that.

Oh, it's hardly anything to ragequit over. It's just not terribly exciting (and perhaps a bit disappointing) to see the new trees for me, since I was expecting a little more in the way of changes.

[Maèl]

Those trees still need some work. The top 3 tiers in all rogue specs are awfully crowded.
Also I thought they went on record saying they wanted to keep sword spec but extend it to all weapon types since it was interesting. But I guess it could also have been just an example.
I like what they did to the subtlety tree. The other two look boring as ever.

[Clementine]

Slightly annoyed by how the priests Evangelism and Arch Angel having to function like that together.

[Quinafoi]

Right now I'd be looking at this build for a Balance Druid at level 80 with 2 points to spare (7 points to spare at 85).
http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#0tMfo...dbZbxczb:irfzm
Allocation of the remaining 7 points would go into some combination of Genesis, Moonglow, Brambles, and Owlkin Frenzy depending on the need for additional efficiency or not and the type of encounter mechanics faced. I'll assume that changes to Moonfire will make Glyph of Moonfire less viable and the prefered glyphs would be Starfall, Starfire, and Insect Swarm though haven't seen any new glyphs yet so don't know for sure. I do not think a balance druid will have either Celestial Focus or Nature's Focus talents in their build, and Blizzard's decision to remove the haste bonus on Celestial Focus will in effect kill the talent.

[Caric]

For my priest holy tree I think Chakra is my biggest problem. On one hand the benefits from it are pretty nice, on the other hand I think the mechanic behind it is a poor one that flies in the face of what the holy priest really is ... a multi tool healer whose biggest strength is their flexibility, not their spammability.

I am thoroughly disgusted with the "Twig of Life" form. What is the point? Yeah I understand it is a nice idea to have a major boost to healing for a pre planned situation such as a soft enrage timer but the whole point of being a druid is getting to play as something different. Unless they take it off the global cooldown it won't even be something you can use reactively and the movement impairment is just a solid wall of fail.

Actually think the feral tree looks pretty nice though. The whole no new tier thing does leave the talent trees on the whole feeling ... meh for me though. Been there seen that.

[Ion]

Should be didn't* not did (edit button wasn't there?)

The only question I have left is how the new Hunter focus fits into their talent trees and into loot. I have a feeling enhance shaman loots are going to turn into another holy pally-type loot.

By the way, GO BLACKHAWKS

Heh, no...they'll never itemize for enhance shaman, it'll just be hunter loot (no int, no expertise, not enough hit, etc). Shaman will end up wearing rogue leather and missing out on the "wear your own armor" mastery bonus. Which is probably fine since the enhance mastery bonus is stupid anyway (woo more nature damage...oh wait that's like 15% to MAYBE 20% of our damage).

[Bashal]

Heh, no...they'll never itemize for enhance shaman, it'll just be hunter loot (no int, no expertise, not enough hit, etc). Shaman will end up wearing rogue leather and missing out on the "wear your own armor" mastery bonus. Which is probably fine since the enhance mastery bonus is stupid anyway (woo more nature damage...oh wait that's like 15% to MAYBE 20% of our damage).

They might be able to find some way for the hunter loot to work for an enhance shammy, though.

[Darksend]

My main is a rogue, and I'm really sad to see the trees rearranged in such a way that there seem to be a LOT of wasted talent points. Perhaps Blizzard is relying on Rogues to use Recouperate more actively (similar to what Lore mentioned in one of his weekly marmot videos), but there seem to be quite a few times when building talent trees that I find myself throwing away points to get further into the tree (simple example, try getting past tier 2 talents in Assassination - Malice -> Ruthlessness -> ???).

does mut not use evis?

but looking at combat http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#fZE0xVbu0b at least here there are a lot of interesting choices

edit: wow

looking at the bottom of the tree there are so many wasted points you HAVE TO go back and pick up all the utility talents (imp kick, endurance, imp sprint) in order to get to the bottom. And even at the bottom the talents suck, tier 9 is terrible

this is what I came up with for combat (no sub spec) http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#fZE0gVruMbu0czdeo (is relentless blades even that good ? 2 rotations for 15 seconds off, how long does 2 rotations take?) and the 1 point in tier 9 can really go anywhere just to get the tier 10

edit 2:

if they are trying to make sub pve viable they are doing a terrible job (unless there is something further in the tree that lets ambush be used out of stealth) because the first 15 or so points are completely wasted in pve

edit 3:

even with shadow dance and picking up the ambush talents the tree is still a mess, all the pve talents are in the final 3 tiers, making you spend almost 20 points in just those 3 tiers

I guess with a 4 second cooldown you only need 1 point in HoT

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#fZE0gVruMbu0czdeo

[NewfieDave]

Nevertheless, the whole concept of Grace is ludicrous. The buff is too small to make us serious tank healers.

I don't see why Grace has to do the heavy lifting in this regard. The concept is a good one: if you are focusing on a single target, you gain a scaling throughput increase. If the problem is that the heals are still too weak, you can address that through other talents (like how they moved Empowered Healing to the lower tiers of Holy so Disc specs can grab it). Making Grace too big of a factor in tank healing would further penalize Disc in situations where you need to heal more than one target.

[Rift]

What is the original source of all this information? The different talent builders offer different views, and there are quite a few mistakes in the text TankSpot just posted.

[Predakhan]

My main is a rogue, and I'm really sad to see the trees rearranged in such a way that there seem to be a LOT of wasted talent points.

From what I have read of Blizzards plan is they wanted to free up more points for utility choices for all classes rather than having everything be "mandatory".

I know as a feral cat if things stay the way they are now I will have a lot of extra talents that do nothing to boost dps but offer some utility instead. Here is my build with 5 points left over http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#0ZiThfRcbx0bub0dMxobGctb

There are still gonna be changes so it is kinda earlier to worry to much about it.

[Quinafoi]

What is the original source of all this information? The different talent builders offer different views, and there are quite a few mistakes in the text TankSpot just posted.

GhostCrawler has a comment about it here saying that they aren't finalized but released the information themselves to get feedback. Alpha content is still under the NDA but if they release the information themselves it is free game.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...pageNo=1&sid=1
As for the actual source of the information, it seems that the information was directly released to certain fansites / communities.
To quote mmo-champion "Blizzard sent a preview of the talents of 4 classes in Cataclysm: the Druid, Priest, Rogue, and Shaman". This would seem to indicate it was released directly to them. There is not an actual forum blue post with the changes themselves listed.

[Mhoram]

Nom Nom Nom is an awesome talent name.