It’s time to talk about the second of my 5 chosen specs.

To be fair, the cleric specs are the ones I’ve spent the most time considering and the others are just being thrown in for completeness – and because they hopefully show some of the cool things that should be possible in this game. I’ve already shared my tanking cleric spec, and it is proving to be quite successful. I am level 27 now and have tanked invasion bosses with it – but will admit that I’ve not done any instances with this build since I’m uncomfortable tanking pugs in unfamiliar content.

One thing with which I am comfortable in unfamiliar content, however, is healing. At 18, I successfully healed an IT run with a Warden build that I kind of slapped together on my way to the instance. It was not pleasant. Warden healing is very effective solo or on trash pulls, but its lack of mitigation and burst heals make for very stressful boss fights. I found myself depending heavily on my Sentinel off-spec spells to keep the tank standing.

Last night, my guild ran DSM 4 times in succession – after a failed clear attempt the night before where we did not bring enough dps. For three of those four clears, I main healed the group – which shifted membership slightly between each run so it was a unique experience every time. The build I used was level 26 Purifier/Sentinel/Warden containing most of the purifier points planned for the larger level 50 build discussed here and a handful of the sentinel ones. Overall, it went very well and with the exception of the final boss fight, I didn’t have any problems – but even then, I was able to keep everyone standing and had zero problems with threat generation, mana efficiency, or self preservation.

The other thing that last night taught me is that I don’t think I’m going to play any alt very seriously any time soon. With three roles (Tank, Healer, DPS) that I can switch between with impunity on my cleric main, I am getting that variation without having to replay the same content twice. And I like it.

Healing Cleric (Sentinel/Purifier/Warden)

My current impression of the three healing souls is:

• Sentinel – Best general purpose soul. Probably suitable as a primary spec for soloing. Good for group and tank healing. Appropriate as a primary or secondary spec. Lousy as zero-point third spec, passable as 3rd if you can spare 4 points to get the endurance buff and some +healing or +spell power.
• Purifier – Best single-target healing soul. Completely unsuited as a primary for soloing. Good for tank healing, difficult for groups who take a lot of splash damage. Appropriate as a primary or zero-point spec. Unimpressive as second unless at least 20 or so points can be invested.
• Warden – Best at… I’m not sure what, keeping the whole group topped off through aoe and bad pulls? Great when added to anything else. Good for group healing, bad for tank healing, good for self healing. Appropriate as a secondary or tertiary spec. Crazy as primary unless at least 20 points are invested.

The healing build that I’d put together before head-start and am still planning on is 38/24/4 Sentinel/Purifier/Warden:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00Gej.vxoxMzz.L.E0Ebfotco

I’m not planning on solo leveling with this build, so I’m not going to break it down like I did with the Justicar. Let’s walk through it backward, from least to most invested.

warden

With this build, I’m not really getting anything very interesting out of Warden. It might be possible to swap out Druid for the faerie’s passive heals to similar effect. But what 4 points in Warden does buy me is +8% mana to work with and a mana efficient instant cast HoT.

I find this much more useful than what 4 extra points can buy me in either Purifier or Sentinel. I would really want 6 more points in either one to want to invest in them further.

purifier

The reason for dropping points into Purifier is damage prevention. I want to harden my tank from damage and give myself more breathing room in case the rest of the group needs a bit of topping off.

At tier 1, I am taking +5% to heal crit and am then coming back to drop 3 more points in +wisdom because the 5 point tier 3 talent fails to impress me. I could probably swap the allocation of these 8 points any different way with similar results.

At tier 2, I am taking a full five points in Protection of the Ancestors – +50% to bubble strength because that’s the point of my subbing Purifier in the first place. The other two talents are more soloing oriented – both of them harden the caster from incoming damage. Since the zero point ability is already a better bubble than either of these, and I’m already improving it with the other 5 points at this tier, AND I trust my tank to pull things off of me after too long… I see no point in sinking 3 more here.

Tier 3 has one really cool talent, Caregiver’s Blessing. If I keep this buff up, every single-target heal I drop (including that cheap instant HoT) also procs a small bubble on the target as well. This makes it much less stressful to deal with mages who AoE before the tank has aggro, etc… The other tier 3 talent does not strike me as terribly cost effective – 5 points for a 10% chance of increasing my next single-target heal by 30%? Or in other words, +3% to sustained single target healing for 5 skill points.

Tier 4 is nice, I want it all. Well, except for the improvement to the reactive self-heal that I ignored at tier 2.

Healing Flare is a spammable instant-cast direct heal. It is inefficient and smallish when compared to the zero point Sentinel instant heal, but it has no cooldown. And there are a lot of times when mana efficiency matters less than the ability to float someone for a couple more seconds until the cooldown on something more permanent finishes, or the boss does.

Caregiver’s Grace just buffs the blessing by 2 more charges – meaning 5 single target heals proccing these bubbles. Combined with the spammable nature of the aforementioned Flare spell, this should make it much easier to create breathing room to drop that bigger spell/shield/whatever we’re waiting for. I could have dropped a 3rd point here, but it is a choice between leaving this talent one point short and leaving Ancestral Flame one point short… and the latter is more important.

Ancestral Flame is one of the main reasons I’m in the tree. 60% of spell power into a bubble whenever I drop my big single-target heal (90% after Protection of the Ancestors).

My final point in Purifier goes to the tier 5 talent Latent Blaze. This is basically just a weaker version of the Sentinel 44 point Vigilance but for only 21 points, it ought to be. Latent Blaze drops a single reactive heal charge on the target that lasts until they either drop below 30% health (bad) or the 5 minute buff expires (good). The downside is that it only has one charge and can only be used once per target per 2 minutes. The upside is that it is yet one more buffer between my group and death and I could easily maintain this on two or three party members at once if necessary.

As an aside, Latent Blaze -did- save my group the other night during the final boss of DSM. Three of the party got hit by a fire crystal and while I was busy taking care of them, the tank dropped to 50%. This isn’t terrible by itself, but the boss kept critting him or something and my heals were having a hard time keeping up. He probably hit 10% and popped his Latent Blaze charge before I was able to start catching back up again, so… yeah. I like the spell. It’s not awesome, but it does the trick.

The interesting root abilities I pick up from Purifier are of course the awesome zero point Shield of the Ancestors, which I use instead of healing myself immediately if caught in AoE or while waiting for the tank to pull aggro off of me.

At 4 points, I get a 1.5s cast direct heal. At 8 (and again at 20), I get a party endurance buff. At 10, I get a rez. At 12, I can remove curse, disease, and poison.

At 14 points in Purifier, I get Restorative Flame, the big 3 second heal that works with Ancestral Flame to bubble my target as well as heal them. 16 points gives me Ward of the Ancestors, a straight up shield for those situations where the passive shielding isn’t enough.

Searing Transfusion is available at 18, and is an interesting sort of instant direct heal. It increases the target’s max hp by 25% of my own for 10 seconds while also healing them for that same amount. This is potentially either very cool or exceptionally useless. I’ve yet to see it in action to determine which.

Flashover is the other 20 point root ability and it simply guarantees that my next heal will be a crit. This is just generally happy.

sentinel

With 38 points dropped in a tree, it’s one of those times where the omissions are more interesting than the inclusions. I’ll discuss both here.

I am starting off with 10 points in tier 1. This gives +5% spell power and +5% to healing. What I am not taking are 2 points to add a snare to the zero point sentinel nuke…

Tier 2 is similar, with another 10 points. These increase the crit bonus of my heals by 20% and reduce the mana cost of my heals by 10%. I am not dropping a point in getting a damage over time spell – which might actually go very well with a Justicar healing build, but that’s a different animal

For tier 3, I am not taking Luminous Gaze, a debuff that increases the crit chance against an affected enemy by 5%. Again, this one would probably play nicely with other builds, just not a back row healer spec. I am spending 3 points to increase the radius of my AoE heals by 3 meters and 2 more to increase their effectiveness by 2%.

I’m not in love with either of these, but I don’t have a lot of other choices that directly increase my healing output. The odds that +2% to an AoE heal will make a difference in a fight are only slightly more than the odds that a 3 meter radius increase will catch the party member who actually needed the heal in the first place… so shrug.

Tier 4 is nicer. Two points in Protect the Flock turns my AoE heals into small defensive buffs, reducing incoming damage to all affected by 5% for 6 seconds. That is nice because if I am ever dropping AoE healing… well, stuff has either gone poorly or we’re facing a boss that drops AoE damage. So hardening the whole group makes dealing with this easier.

Healing Invocation is one point to provide a 3 second direct heal for slightly more than Restorative Flame. By itself, it is nice (a tree ability that is slightly better than a lower level root one seems to be standard). But just like Restorative Flame’s main benefit is the upgrade to proccing a bubble, Healing Invocation’s main benefit is that with 5 points on tier 5′s Lasting Invocation, it also drops an additional 30% healing over 8 seconds. Alternating between these two spells means a steady influx of direct healing plus the shield and HoT to buffer any crits or whatever.

I like the other tier 5 spell as well. Empowering Light is just a PBAoE cleanse. It costs the same as the root cleanses. The only reason not to use it is a 10 second cooldown and the inability to target someone who might be out of range. So it is more than worth one point.

Tier 6 is kind of hard as well. 3 points into Serendipity to make my crit heals reduce the cast time of my next heal by 1.5s means that Flashover not only guarantees that one heal will be big but that the one following it will be either fast or instant. Good enough.

I am not taking the other ability from this tier, a 2 second heal that affects both the target and the caster, upgradeable to 1.5 second cast time. This isn’t my style, and while I used the equivalent WoW spell quite a bit, I’m intentionally avoiding abilities that primarily benefit the caster in the hopes that the Purifier’s bubble and failing that, the instant cast heals this build also provides are sufficient for cases where the healer is taking damage.

The tier 7, 31 point ability makes me happy. Healer’s Haste is a 30 second buff to increase healing speed by 30% for up to 5 spells.

The roots of Sentinel give me a number of goodies, even though several are wasted on offensive abilities. At zero points, we get the instant direct heal with the 8 second cooldown.

At 4 (and 20), we get endurance buffs identical to those provided by Purifier. At 10 points, we get another rez identical to the one provided by Purifier; at 16, we get a duplicate cleanse. But that’s it for dupes. The buffs, unfortunately, do not stack, so pick the ones whose icons you like best I guess.

At 6 points, we get Healing Grace, the 2 second cast direct heal and at 12 points, we get Healing Communion, the AoE version.

We get Touch the Light at 14, a cooldown to make the next spell instant. Always a good button to have around. This build winds up with several similar button.

At 18, we get a silence, which shouldn’t really be the healer’s responsibility, but you never know…

Divine Call costs 26 points and is an instant PBAoE heal with a 1 minute cooldown. So while not chainable like Healing Communion, it is good as a big panic button right before/after an AoE bomb or similar.

At 32 points, we get the only combat rez available to healing spec clerics. It’s not as good as that available to Justicars, but it’s better than what mages get.

At 36 points, we get a passive improvement to Healing Invocation of +5% of spell power bonus. Then, we get +3% per additional point, for a total of +11% of spell power applied to this spell. It’s not as good as it could be, but we’re taking other abilities instead.

Finally, at 38 points, we get Marked by the Light. This buff makes single-target heals cascade to other nearby party members… and makes AoE heals cascade even more It is only usable on the primary target but should do nicely for my concerns of keeping others topped off without having to really think about it too hard.

alternate form

After a bit of consideration, and thinking about how cool Latent Blaze really is… I came up with a slight modification to the build that would allow you to carry both Latent Blaze and Vigilance.

This requires a change to 44/22/0 Sentinel/Purifier/Warden:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00Gej.vxox0zz..E0Exfstco

The points we lose from the original build are the two charges in Caregiver’s Grace from Sentinel and 8% max mana from Warden. The bubble charges aren’t that enormous of a loss, they basically equate to two free small heals every couple of minutes. The real loss here is 8% of max mana, which may or may not be an issue depending on your use of consumables and your group’s pace.

In exchange, we gain Vigilance as well as +3% to AoE healing and turn our zero point Sentinel instant heal into a small AoE instant heal. It’s not a lot of difference, and +3% to AoE heals doesn’t impress me much… but I’m not really sure where else to sink the points. The improvement to the instant heal is actually kind of nice. I’ve found myself using the Purifier’s instant heal a lot – even to the exclusion of this one, despite its being bigger and more efficient. The 8 second cooldown is a deterrent to inclusion in my standard rotation. BUT by specializing the ability as a small group heal? I know I would have used it more, even if the resulting heals are relatively small.

In that time period, I wrote 5 articles that haven’t made it here. Hopefully the time will present itself to re-evaluate 2 or 3 of them in the next month.

But for now, something more current

RIFT is gearing up for what feels to me like it might be the most successful western-style fantasy mmorpg release in 5 years. I am going to play it. And I am going to write a lot about it.

I find this humorous because the game practically blindsided me. I hadn’t read a thing about it until a friend had informed me that she’d pre-ordered it. One does not pre-order something like this lightly and I respect her opinions so… I decided to take a look.

What I found was a lot of incomprehensible nonsense The verbiage around the game’s setting and systems was about as thick as FF13′s at first glance. I tried three or four times to puzzle things out and finally gave up.

Then, more friends started talking about the beta and I tried to read things again – and people had improved wiki’s in the interim. So with the faintest grasp that I might actually be interested in the class system, I signed up for the beta. And didn’t get into that wave.

But the next one I did

And my jaw dropped in a vain attempt to carry the sheer weight of the class system into words. Or some other better metaphor. I like it. But boy is it thick.

rift classes 101

See, the class system is the bog standard skill point allocation tree setup that (to the best of my knowledge) Blizzard pioneered about 10 years ago in Diablo 2 – except it is both simpler and more complex than that.

RIFT subscribes to my favorite school of thought when it comes to character classes. There are really only four classes: fighter, thief, cleric, mage. One of my unfinished drafts is actually on this subject…

At character creation, you select one of these four core archetypes for your new avatar. And other than race, gender, name, and appearance… that’s it. You get into the game and start walking around.

They then use the in-game lore to slowly explain their system of subclasses. Every class has about 8 of these available right now, and it would be easy to add more in the future. By about level 6 or so, the player is gradually given the opportunity to select a total of three subclasses (or “souls” as the lore would have it). These are effectively your skill trees.

In WoW parlance, this translates roughly to RIFT Clerics being able to construct their ability set from any three of: resto druid, beast hunter, enhancement shaman, holy priest, disc priest, shadow priest, prot paladin, ret paladin. It’s like a candy store. Way more options than you can comfortably eat at once, but in a good way.

The game’s level cap is 50, and you receive slightly more than one skill point every level. Abilities are unlocked in two ways. First, there are the abilities you choose to place your skill points in. These are mostly stat bonuses and upgrades to other abilities, but there also a good number of abilities that you have to actively opt into by spending a point directly. Second, you are given access to new abilities based on the number of skill points you put in a given tree, regardless of their individual allocation. These are the class’s core abilities (everyone gets them) and are most liable to be modified by specific talents.

Players aren’t locked into the 3 souls they choose during newbiedom. It is a simple enough manner to unlock access to each of the others – you do this by way of a number of quick quests that available in the capital city starting at level 13. And then, once you’ve got a variety of builds you want to try, buying a second spec slot is downright inexpensive from the skill trainer. A third spec is cheap enough that I anticipate many level 20′s will have them (the cap is 50).

The one thing, however, that isn’t immediately clear is just precisely WHAT the different subclasses can do. I mean really, what can they do? When you’ve got 8 colors of mage, they can’t all just be nukromancers, can they? Well, RIFT made sure that they aren’t. The differences between the souls are sufficient as to stretch the boundaries of what might be expected of given classes in a fantasy rpg.

An oversimplified breakdown in subclass roles looks kind of like this:

Of course, this is an entirely inaccurate and unfair comparison of the classes because everyone has -some- degree of damage output capability (as near as I can tell, only one of the subclasses really suffers in this respect where most of the others are at least mix of support and dps). Every class has various degrees of crowd control, group buffing, and other utility. Because they are so complex, I am planning on doing separate write-ups discussing the actual details on the individual souls. There are some real gems in the mix.

But I’m rambling.

When this game launches, I am going to play a cleric because that is what I do. Specifically, I want to play a cleric who walks up and hits things with a hammer until they fall down, because it has been about 17 years since I’ve done so in any serious way.

So without further sidetracking, I will hereby investigate the Justicar soul and explain my plans for advancement with it.

soul analysis: justicar

The justicar is the cleric’s tank soul. Their basic operating procedure is the combination of four things:

1. a stance wherein they generate 4x threat and double their hp and armor
2. big plusses to shield use to push avoidance
3. an ability that causes all of their attacks to heal them for a percentage of damage done
4. extra bonus abilities (primarily instant cast heals) that are charged by hitting stuff

I played a Justicar/Purifier/Druid for about half of my time in the beta and really enjoyed it. Even with a tanking spec, I could contribute some healing to the group if I wanted by switching stances and through the use of one ability that makes my melee attacks radiate small aoe heals to the whole group and another that transfers my all of my self overhealing over to a designated target.

My second class for that build was Purifier – the big single target heal class with lots and lots of shields. Shields are good, they let my slow passive heals catch up and they give me a chance to overheal and keep the group topped off. However, Purifier wound up being otherwise useless to this build as I leveled up. I believe they are the worst DPS class in the game and didn’t have much that was really suitable for use in melee outside of their basic shield (which is earned at 0 skill points). So, the Purifier has to go. I’ll visit them later when I want to hand out some dedicated heals.

My third class for much of beta was Druid – a melee class with a pet faerie that I thought would be a good mix. And it was, but not quiiite good enough. The faerie provided me with some nice passive heals and could occasionally offtank an annoying add for me if I returned the favor and was in a hurry to drop something for a quest (not that I actually needed an offtank, I could still solo handle about 3 mobs at once quite comfortably). The best thing that the Druid provided was actually a second shield spell (separate cooldown, shared buff slot) that meant I could be invulnerable twice as often… except the druid shield only protects against physical damage, and there is a preponderance of elemental damaging melee attacks in this game.

When I finally decided that something needed shaking up in the build, I tried throwing out purifier entirely in favor of Cabalist – the death magic aoe cleric subtype. Unfortunately, this wound up completely clashing with Justicar MO. First and most obviously, the Cabalist abilities are death magic while the Justicar’s are life, and some basic abilities depend on my doing a continuous stream of life damage to fuel them. Second and more importantly, the Cabalist abilities have casting times while the Justicar’s are primarily instant. This meant less spells per GCD meant less procs for my self healing meant much hairier experiences as I watched my health drop in the absence of the Purifier shield button. The faerie got the bulk of her tanking experience here.

NB: The Druid’s faerie pet is NOT intended as a tank. It generates miserable aggro and is squishy like grape. However, it is a regenerating sack of HP and is able to absorb a few hits while in single-targetted down my primary opponent. The management cannot take any responsibility for terrible horrible faerie dismemberment that may occur by following my example.

My wishlist for leveling and soloing as a cleric tank are thus:

1. instant cast heals
2. a shield spell
3. ways to improve my melee dps

For the job of instant heals, the choice was clear. Wardens are water-themed healing clerics who specialize in heals over time. This meshes well with my Justicar’s natural gradual heals, and their ability to help keep myself topped off without taking my attention away from killing things and holding aggro is a big win. They also have some instant cast ranged attacks and other niceties that should prove convenient.

The other two jobs are both hopefully solved by the Shaman. Shamans are frost-themed melee dps types who get a lot of defensive bonuses early on – including a better shield than Druids. This one requires 6 points in the tree but works against all damage types and reflects a bit of damage to attackers – great for tanking.

With all of this baggage in tow, I planned my spec in 3 phases: where I want to be at levels 9, 17, and 50. Level 9 because it is just a bit after newbiedom and is when the content starts requiring a bit of consideration. Level 17 because it is the minimum requirement for entry into the game’s first group instance, and I want to give that a whirl.

level 9 justicar/shaman/warden (6/6/0)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vo.Mcz

So this layout earns me the foundation of the build. I have all of my most important pieces for soloing.

First, the easy bit. Zero points in warden. This is one of the things I love about the class system. It is possible to cherry pick the starter abilities from a soul if you’re spending all of your skill points elsewhere – and these abilities rank up with levels as long as you visit the trainer, just like anything else.

Wardens start with a dead cheap instant cast heal over time and an equally inexpensive instant cast water nuke. The nuke doesn’t hit hard (not hard at all), but it can tap a mob to get its attention, and I want the ability to do that on the run and without having to wait for the 8s cooldown on my taunt.

thick skinned and glacial shield

Shaman zero point abilities give me a weak melee attack that doesn’t hit as hard as my Justicar zero point attack and doesn’t synergize with my other abilities… and they give me a weapon enchant that adds water damage to all of my melee attacks, which thing I will not actually complain about

The other zero point ability Shamans provide is called Faith in Action and is actually also provided for zero points in both Justicar and Druid – the other melee types. It is a passive buff that translates caster stats (spell power, spell crit, and spell focus) into their physical counterparts (attack power, physical crit, melee hit) at a 1:1 rate so you can wear caster gear and still hit clobber things with authority.

My first tier points in Shaman are going to be allocated thusly:

• 3/3 – Thick Skinned – Reduces the damage you receive by 3%
• 2/5 – Unyielding – Increases your Melee Critical Hit chance by 2%

The Thick Skinned is a no-brainer. So even while it doesn’t do anything meaningful now, I’ll always have that on this character and may as well get used to leaving it on. The two points in unyielding are largely there to make way for my 6th point:

• Glacial Shield – Summons a shield of ice around the cleric that absorbs the next 160 damage in addition to dealing 7 water damage to attackers when hit. Lasts 30 seconds.

This gets me the shield I would otherwise have had to taken Purifier for – and it has the reactive damage component which I adore.

My reasons for choosing Unyielding for the two dump points is dead simple. My alternative was 2 points to increase my physical damage dealt by 2%. So when small numbers are involved, 2% crit is always better than 2% damage. Why? Well, when I’m hitting for 30 damage, what is 102% of 30 damage? 30.6. Which they might be kind enough to round up to 31. Against a mob with 100 hp, this… doesn’t make a difference at all. I still have to hit it 4 times to kill it.

OR I can crit one more time out of 50 attacks, dealing enough extra damage that it will make a difference and probably save me an entire attack. So that one fight where I do crit, I drop the 4 hit mob in 3 swings and can move on.

Of course, the most important point is simply that my only consistent source of “physical” damage is actually my autoattack. And I am going to use the slowest hammer I can find for now. My real damage is all light elemental (or water from the warden pull), and doesn’t depend on my big slow hammer that doesn’t autoattack but once a minute.

These Shaman points unlock the following abilities:

• Courage of the Jaguar – +5 dex to the whole party/raid
• Lightning Hammer – Physical attack that procs an air (lightning) damage over time effect for 6 seconds, which is conveniently the ability’s cooldown.
• Fated Blow – Guaranteed physical attack activated after an attack has been dodged or parried. No GCD. 6s cooldown.

I’m not going to turn my nose up at free stats. The lightning attack is nice because Justicar doesn’t have any DoT’s and anything else to break up my attack rotation is nice. The free attack is a free attack, but I have no idea how useful it will be in PvE and don’t really plan on it making a difference.

life’s devotion and bolt of radiance

Tier one of Justicar talents is kind of a similar choice to Shaman. I can either spend 5 points to increase my melee ability damage by 5%, which suffers from the math I just discussed; or, I can increase my armor value by 15%. This isn’t going to make my chainmail sparkle like plate. But it is a 1/6 improvement in my basic mitigation and is another ability I’ll have for the life of the character.

My sixth Justicar point is going into:

• 1/3 – Life’s Devotion – Increases the chance of your Salvation healing you by 20%. Increases your Salvation’s healing by 5% of the damage done using Justicar abilities, 2% using other abilities.

That’s a mouthful, especially since I’ve not explained what Salvation is yet… Salvation is one of the Justicar’s zero point abilities and is one of the aforementioned bread and butter components. It reads:

Salvation
Infuses the Cleric’s weapon with healing light, causing their damaging abilities to have a 40% chance of healing the Cleric. Justicar abilities heal for 10% of the damage done, all other abilities heal for 5% of the damage done. Lasts 1 hour.

Anything and everything I can do to feed this ability keeps me going longer and eventually feeds my overheal spillover. And, I suspect as a side effect, the self-healing has to add at least some aggro.

Justicar’s other zero point ability is just the spammable melee life damage attack that will be used to feed Salvation every free GCD.

The other abilities unlocked by these points are:

• Cavalier – All life-based attacks grant a ‘Conviction’ for 30s.
• Bolt of Radiance – Ranged life attack. In tanking mode, this becomes an actual taunt (forces the target to attack me). 8s cooldown.
• Doctrine of Loyalty – Burn one ‘Conviction’ to heal party for 51 damage.

Conviction is a buff that stacks to 4 and doesn’t do anything but go away after 30 seconds unless you proc another one to reset the timer. Doctrines are abilities that consume convictions as part of their casting cost. There shouldn’t be much need for this doctrine while soloing (since it is much less mana efficient than the HoT I am already packing) but it will be convenient in groups and mana efficiency isn’t really much of a concern at this point – I won’t be able to burn it quite fast enough to run out yet.

Bolt of radiance is awesome and acted for my primary pull and as a major part of my attack rotation in beta. I was, however, frequently staggered when it was still on cooldown at the end of a fight so I am going to enjoy the water pull (which I don’t really plan on integrating into the rotation).

level 17 justicar/shaman/warden (12/6/4)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vuko.Mcz.m

Okay, ten more points to allocate. First off, nothing changes in Shaman. I needed the shield and I got it asap. At this point, actual tanking is going to be more important since I plan on trying it out in the level 17 instance.

nothing to see here

Four points will go into Warden and give me three things:

• 4/5 – Destructive Tide – +8% instant cast spell damage
• Healing Current – 2s cast direct heal + 14s hot component
• Crushing Wave – instant cast water nuke + knockback, 15s cooldown

The knockback gives me a bit of a panic button in case I need it and the heal lets me attempt to save someone in a pinch faster than my little HoT can manage. I can’t depend on my doctrine for this sort of thing because it only works if I have been in combat for a while recently and if the target is in my party, and besides, it doesn’t heal as much anyway.

I am hoping that my melee abilities count as “instant cast spells” but won’t hold my breath if they don’t. Regardless, my taunt had better count as a spell and making it just that much stickier will be nice.

My alternative here was to spend points to increase my max mana, but my experience tanking rift events didn’t seem to stress my mana, so I’m not concerned about it yet. Besides, I get a better fix for this in the Justicar tree.

precept of refuge and mien of leadership

First priority in finishing out tier two of Justicar talents is Life’s Devotion. Two more points mean my Salvation now has a 100% chance to proc and heals for 25% of my justicar damage and 11% of my warden/shaman damage. That’s way nice.

Second priority is Doctrine of Bliss, which burns a conviction to heal me. This is what I spent the vast majority of my convictions on in beta – spamming self-heals as I ran away from a hairy situation

This leaves one point left that I spend to drop the mana cost of doctrines by 15%. They’re the most expensive thing I have yet, so this can only help.

These four points also unlock two new abilities:

• Censure – Melee attack, increases magic damage taken by the enemy by 3% for 15s
• Mien of Honor – Healing stance, decreases threat generation by 50% and increases healing done by justicar abilities by 50%

Censure is the new start to my rotation, and since it both hits harder than Strike of Judgment (the zero point attack) and debuffs the enemy, it is win-win.

Mien of Honor is interesting. It lets me switch into healing mode if a group needs that more than my tankly awesomeness. I used it two or three times during rift events in beta (when a warrior larger than me was there to tank) and felt like it did actually have a meaningful impact.

Tier three is made out of love. This is where the Justicar really starts to shine.

• 1/1 – Reparation – Attacks heal nearby party/raid members for 25% of justicar damage done and 10% of other damage done.
• 1/1 – Precept of Refuge – Shield bash, burns a conviction. Deals nice (physical) damage and increases my block chance by 15% for 8s. Always hits.

These are amazing. Reparation basically means my Salvation effect now affects up to 10 other party members every time it procs – which is every GCD in combat

Precept of Refuge starts making my attack rotation more interesting. I need to swing it once every 8 seconds to maintain 15% damage avoidance. I can do that. I don’t blame them for making it deal physical damage since that avoids the issue of costing a conviction and then generating it right back. I also applaud the silly name (precept == doctrine).

These two points unlock the two remaining pieces to the lowbie justicar tanking magic.

• Mien of Leadership – Tank mode. +300% threat generation. +90% endurance. +100% armour + 1% per point spent in justicar (so 112% minimum). -40% healing and damage from non-justicar abilities.
• Purpose – Mana regen button. All melee attacks for 10s restore 10% mana. No GCD. 1m cooldown.

Purpose pretty much equals free mana potions and Mien of Leadership is what it’s all about. The downside is that it nerfs non-justicar abilities so heavily. But honestly, I’m not going to be depending on them actively for health and dps while tanking, and it’s a small price to pay for upgrading my chain to plate and doubling my hp pool.

level 50 justicar/warden/shaman (39/16/11)

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00rne.Vuksqee0oo.mcdz.Vgbzo

Ahaha! See what I did there? Shaman tops off its usefulness to me pretty early on, but Warden has some cool stuff deeper in. I would really like to drop two more points into it from somewhere, but don’t know where I’ll find it just yet.

I’m going to go a bit quicker here and only pick out the highlights of each tree now because you’re already bored and I’d like to go to bed tonight myself.

vengeance of the frozen earth and favored of the valnir

First, let’s discuss the 5 more points that I’m dumping into Shaman.

• 2/2 – Favored of the Valnir – +10% incoming healing
• 1/5 – Unyielding – (1 more point) for a new total of +4% melee crit chance

The reason for the first point in unyielding is to unlock tier 3, where I pick up:

• 1/1 – Vengeance of the Frozen Earth – All melee attacks now proc a 50% snare for 6s

An automatic snare that’s always on to prevent runners or to control things better when the mage drops a string of crits and steals something enormous from me? Yes please.

This unlocks two more abilities in the roots of the Shaman tree:

• Massive Blow – Melee attack, 15s cooldown
• Courage of the Bear – +5 strength to entire raid/party

Shamans can upgrade Massive Blow to give it +30% crit chance and make the target bleed, so it rules for them… but it is largely useless in this build. There’s already no room in my single target rotation for it without the long cooldown and damage type mismatch.

Courage of the Bear is great. I can always use another buff.

It is worth noting that one more point in Shaman would unlock a high efficiency self-heal that is activated after receiving a critical blow. However, we actually pick up an automatic version of this later on in the Justicar tree.

restorative tide and orbs of the stream

My remaining points in Warden are similarly focused on unlocking tier 3 and then grabbing the tier 4 ability after that. The lower tier points:

• 5/5 – Destructive Tide – (1 more point) for a total of +10% instant cast damage
• 5/5 – Surging Rapids – +15% to instant cast heals
• 2/5 – Fluidity – +4% heal over time

Surging Rapids can only help since my main heals are all going to be instant. Fluidity isn’t as important but it’s better than the alternatives and can’t hurt.

The three abilities that I am digging this deep into Warden for are:

• 1/1 – Dissolution – Break snare/root effects, immune for 8s
• 2/2 – Restorative Tide – When you are Critically Hit, you heal 150% of your Wisdom over 12 seconds
• 1/1 – Orbs of the Stream – Buff with 3 charges. When the target takes damage, orb pops and heals them

This gives me critical mobility on the battlefield in case I need to save my healer from being eaten by a dragon and I’ve got my foot in a trap. It also gives me two more sources of passive healing that I don’t have to think very much about.

These 12 points unlock several new abilities:

• Tidal Surge – +50% to next heal spell
• Cleansing Waters – Remove curse/disease/poison from target
• Healing Flood – Proc a HoT on the entire group
• Deluge – Big direct heal that gains bonuses with active HoTs
• Drown – Water DoT + silence

The only one I’m not really excited about is Deluge. While amazing as a dedicated healer, it is useless while tanking and isn’t that spectacular while doing the Justicar aoe melee healing thing – Healing Flood plays much better into that and probably will be used aggressively in those cases.

Two more points in Warden would have unlocked two more excellent abilities, and if I have to, I will steal two points from Shaman in order to get them – water breathing and a basic rez spell. However, by stealing those points, I would have to lose the snare enchant and the strength aura… so I’m sticking with this plan.

so many toys…

And now to the pudding of the matter. Twenty seven more points in Justicar. Every soul’s skill tree has exactly 51 slots, and particularly large abilities become available starting at 31. I am putting enough into the tree for the 38 point ability (which I really want) and for one more to acquire all of the extra happy abilities remaining in the point allocation matrix portion.

Allocated points:

• 3/3 – Stalwart Citadel – Increases Block Rating by 30% of Spell Power
• 5/5 – Shield of Faith – -15% damage taken
• 5/5 – Safe Haven – +5% block from Precept of Refuge
• 1/1 – Doctrine of Valiance – Melee attack, burns all convictions, heals cleric for 200% of damage dealt
• 3/3 – Vengeful Justice – Even Justice (see below) hits 3 additional targets
• 5/5 – Commitment – Regain 5% mana when you Block
• 3/3 – Devout Deflection – Increases Parry Rating by 195% of Spell Power
• 1/1 – Reprieve – Heals the cleric and the target of Righteous Mandate (below) for >2k
• 1/1 – Absolution – Combat rez

The only talents that I did not pick up are a snare+root and a stun, and the 5 points in tier 1 to increase melee damage by 5%. The snare is already handled more effectively by the Shaman’s Vengeance buff and a stun is nice… but I am guessing that it won’t really be vital considering I will have an interrupt (below) and a silence (above).

Shield of Faith, Safe Haven, Stalwart Citadel and Devout Deflection are kind of no-brainers. They provide flat % damage mitigation and give me a massive increase in avoidance.

Commitment means I can keep ignoring my mana bar while tanking. Vengeful Justice means I can hold aggro on multiple targets more easily. Doctrine of Valiance and Reprieve are good self heals.

Absolution, the 31 point talent, is without contest the best combat rez in the game. There are a handful of others available but none of them heal the target to full and some of them have longer cooldowns. It would be criminally irresponsible of me not to pick this one up – especially since I am kind of ignoring the Warden’s non-combat rez ability in this build.

The 27 points also unlock 7 new root abilities:

• Righteous Mandate – Buff a target. Salvation overheals are transferred to them.
• Doctrine of Righteousness – Heal the target of Righteous Mandate, costs 1 conviction.
• Even Justice – Melee life damage to up to 2 enemies (5 with the talent above).
• Sovereignty – Ranged life damage, 20s cooldown.
• Righteous Imperative – AoE taunt.
• Interdict – AoE interrupt, no GCD.
• Just Defense – Shield for 1840 damage for 10 seconds.

Righteous Mandate is a great way to help keep the healer alive, I think. And in healing mode, it’s a way to help the tank – everybody wins. Mostly I used it in beta to keep my faerie alive while I let skeletons chew on it, but I did use it on a real player once when he took over tanking crazy invasion bosses that I couldn’t hit – I ran around beating up adds

Even Justice is the Justicar’s first answer to group tanking. It does not have a cooldown and doesn’t look too heinously expensive and has the nice side effect of potentially healing the user for quite a bit of damage.

Sovereignty is the aforementioned stun that I am not turning into a stun. As it stands, it is just a big instant-cast life nuke with a long cooldown, so I’m not sure if i’ll be using it at all.

Righteous Imperative. Nothing to say here, AoE taunt is the other answer to group tanking. Interdict will also help.

Just Defense is the panic button and extra bubble I’ve been waiting for. It’s also the primary reason I’m spending 38 points in Justicar instead of stopping at 32 and taking the other 6-7 points to another tree perhaps.

insufficient bang coefficient

The two Justicar root abilities that I did not pick up are the 44 and 51 point monsters. It could be that I decide that I really need to move 12 points out of my other trees to get these… but for now I don’t expect I will.

The 44 point Justicar ability, Resplendent Embrace, is a panic button for when your healer just isn’t keeping up with the pain. It increases his ability to do his job for 10 seconds every 2 minutes. This is the kind of thing that I suspect needs coordination to make really worthwhile… especially considering that Just Defense arrives 6 levels sooner and can be used twice as often. Besides, if you have a good healer that you can coordinate this sort of cooldown with, I imagine that he won’t really need this kind of help to keep your group standing. And hey, even if he dies, you can always combat rez him

Doctrine of Authority is the 51 point Justicar ability and is really quite sweet as far as 51 point abilities go. Some are downright disappointing. But this one… is just too expensive for now. It is an attack on a 15s cooldown that burns a conviction to heal 5 party members for 300% of the damage done. This would make Mien of Honor much more appealing as a viable group healing solution but if you’re going to that much trouble to heal a party, why not just respec Sentinel and be done with it?

checklist

If this build can’t tank casual instance content, then I will be quite surprised and even more disappointed.

Passive bonuses include:

• -18% damage taken
• +10% healing received
• +15% armour (before mien of tankitude)
• 30% of spell power to block rating, and 195% to parry rating
• +4% melee crit chance
• +10% instant cast damage
• +15% instant cast healing, +4% healing over time
• +5 dex or +5 str to raid

Healing options includes:

• all attacks heal cleric and nearby raid members for 25% of damage done with justicar abilities and for 11/10% of damage done with other abilities
• overheals from attacks transfer over to a designated party member
• two different bubbles help guarantee some degree of overhealing occurs regularly
• critical hits received heal cleric for 150% of wisdom over 12s
• two buttons to heal righteous mandate target
• mien of honor
• a short cooldown to increase the next heal cast
• remove one curse/disease/poison
• two combat self heals, and one combat party heal
• one single-target hot, one single-target heal + hot, one party aoe hot, one big single target heal that scales off of hots
• the best combat rez in the game

Mana management options include:

• regen mode once a minute to regen 10% of mana per melee ability attack over 10s (probably translates to 50% of a mana bar)
• blocking regains 5% mana
• -15% casting cost of doctrines

Crowd control options include:

• knockback
• silence
• interrupt
• snare

Tanking options include:

• mien of leadership (+300% threat, +90% endurance, +139% armour)
• precept of refuge (+20% block)
• break snare/root
• taunt
• aoe taunt
• aoe melee

And there you have it. This class system is deep and full of interesting synergies that will take a lot of getting used to. I can’t wait to slog my way through crowded newbie zones with the rest of the preorders as I put this to the test… and as I find out what rugs they have pulled out from under me since last weekend

Today, I am going to try to confine my ramblings to the subject of the hunter talent tree upgrades. Pet changes, new spells, and upgrades to old spells will have to wait until a future post or two. And of course, I’ve also got to write about the priest changes. Hmm… And I’m trying to get my warlock to 70 before the expansion as well… Anyway. Hunters. Talents. Go.

Beastier Mastery

At present, my hunter is a pretty heavy beast mastery spec. If things remain largely unchanged, he will likely become even heavier beast spec immediately upon getting the expansion. Of course… there is so much goodness in the pending changes that I might not actually stick with beast spec much past 70, but this is my current plan for day one in Northrend.

First, let’s discuss what I’m planning on giving up (initially). In order to get 53 points in beast mastery, I will have to give up 11 points from marksmanship and survival. The talents that are going byebye:

• Humanoid Slaying (3 points, T1 survival) – No real pain here. This reduces my damage & crit damage caused to Humanoids by +3% each. Of course… this talent is gone in the expansion anyway. It’s being replaced by the 5 point Improved Tracking ability which gives you +5% base damage to whatever you’re tracking. It’s nominally an upgrade, but it’s not worth the points.
• Improved Hunter’s Mark (5 points, T2 marks) – Shrug. This talent causes my mark’s +AP bonus to apply to melee damage as well (ie, my pet’s). That means -110 AP that my pet would normally enjoy against a target I’ve marked. That’s roughly 8 dps + whatever specials might gain from AP. In the expansion… the talent gets a major buff. Cost is reduced to 3 points and it also gains +30% to resist dispel. I like the improvement, but it’s still not earthshaking.
• Go for the Throat (2 points, T3 marks) – This one makes me cry. Go for the Throat causes my pet to regenerate 50 focus every time I score a ranged critical hit. Getting this talent back will probably be my first major focus – with the planned build, I’ll be able to get this back at level 77.
• Aimed Shot (1 point, T3 marks) – This one also makes me cry. I refuse to explain aimed shot. Anyone who’s read this far knows exactly what it does. I might pick this back up, but it will take some careful juggling.

But oh… oh what am I going to get in exchange It’s gonna rock.

Aspect Mastery is a new T3 beast talent. For one point, it buffs your 3 basic aspects. Viper gets +10% to its mana regen rate. Monkey gets 10% damage reduction – that’s right, flat out absorption when the dodge fails. This also means monkey now helps when you’re getting hit by spells. Hawk gets +50% to its AP bonus. At level 70, hawk is worth +155 AP, so this talent is worth +77 AP. At level 80, hawk will be worth +300 AP…

While I’m going this deep in the tree (and since I don’t need the point for Aimed Shot any more), I’ll also be picking up a 3rd point in Catlike Reflexes for an additional +1% to my dodge and +3% to my pet’s dodge.

Invigoration is a new T8 beast talent that for two points causes you to instantly regenerate 2% of your mana every time your pet scores a crit with a special. My pre-existing talents already give my pet +10% crit chance and double focus regen. I’m losing the focus regen from Go for the Throat but am also picking up both of the new T9 talents…

Longevity costs 3 points at T9 beast and reduces cooldowns on Bestial Wrath, Intimidation, and all pet special abilities by 30%. Intimidate’s cooldown goes down from 60 seconds to 40; Bestial Wrath is down from 120 seconds to 84. These cooldowns were already short enough that I have macros that ensure I am able to burn them almost every time they’re up. The buff makes me giddy.

Reducing the cooldown on pet specials by 30% means I don’t have to rely on my pet’s focus dump ability any more. 30% more frequent crits from specials means 30% more frequent procs of Invigoration and happy joyful mana regeneration.

Cobra Strikes costs 3 points at T9 beast and gives me a 60% chance when I crit with Arcane, Steady, or Kill shot to cause my pet’s next 3 specials to crit… In conjunction with Invigoration, this effectively reduces the mana cost for my Steady shots into the realm of the microscopic.

And of course, then there’s Beast Mastery, the new T11 talent. This will allow me to tame exotic pets (devilsaur, chimera, silithid, etc…) and effectively gives all of my pets +20 levels worth of talent points.

The only new beast talents that I’m not actually picking up with this build are:

• Animal Handler (T6, 2 points), which gives my pet +4% to hit (that’s never been a problem) and reduces the cooldown on the new Master’s Call ability by 10 seconds (from 60 to 50). I don’t think I’ll be using Master’s Call much. I’ve already got 84 second Bestial Wrath.
• Separation Anxiety (T10, 5 points), which is quite probably very cool, really. Fully trained, it gives your pet +10% movement speed when <=20 yards from you and then turns the speed bonus into +10% dps once it gets 20 yards away. This makes interception time even faster and generally translates into an almost permanent +10% pet damage (since 20+ yards is a quite normal range for hunters to shoot from).

I’m vaguely torn by Separation Anxiety. Insert pun here. To pick it up immediately upon WotLK launch would mean foregoing +5% crit chance, and my crits already give my pet huge bonuses that I wouldn’t want to go without.

Of course… the other two talent trees have gotten an even bigger upgrade. Beast was already terribly overpowered, so it is only fair. If it weren’t for the lure of exotic pets, I’d be all over the other trees. As it is, I’m having a hard time deciding what I want out of their first 3 tiers.

Marksmanship

The changes to the marks tree mean major improvements to hunter shots, reliable improvements to baseline DPS, and absolute gobs of bonus mana efficiency.

One of my longstanding gripes has been Improved Concussive Shot. In BC, it was a 5 point talent that gave the dubious benefit of a 20% chance of proccing a 3 second stun in addition to the daze effect. There are numerous problems with this that I really don’t want to get into since the bad talent is finally going away. In return, we get a sleek new 2 point talent that increases the duration of the daze by 2 seconds. This is pure awesome. If I were leveling a newbie hunter, this would be my first talent, hands down.

T1 marks also gets the 3 point Focused Aim talent, which gives hunters the same sort of 70% interruption resistance (while charging Aimed & Steady) that other mana-using classes have traditionally been able to buy for low tier talents. I find this to be of questionable usefulness, however – especially since it’s a T1 talent that buffs abilities that aren’t available at level 10. Aimed shot is a T3 talent, so it is first available at level 20. Steady shot rank 1 is level 62…

T2 marks gets some amazing changes, I’ve already mentioned the buff to Improved Mark.

Careful Aim makes an appearance at T2. All the way down from T7. Yup. They moved a tier seven talent down to tier two. And then they buffed it 3x. In stead of a puny +45% of your int converted into RAP, it now gives a full +100%. Epic win.

They have also switched the locations of Mortal Shots (+crit damage) and Efficiency (-mana cost). Mortal Shots is now T2 and becomes Aimed Shot’s pre-req (in stead of the other way around). Efficiency wasn’t very important at low levels, so moving it up to T4 makes more sense (when it’s saving you more than 1 or 2 mana per spell).

In stead of Careful Aim at T7, marks hunters now get Piercing Shots for 3 points. This gives Steady and Aimed shots the ability to ignore 6% of target armour. Very unshabby.

Rapid Recuperation is a new 3 point T8 ability that helps mana efficiency. While using Rapid Fire, both the hunter’s and pet’s abilities are 60% cheaper. This makes for a lot of focus dump happiness for your pet. Additionally, Rapid Killing (which already reduces Rapid Fire’s cooldown) is improved by giving you a mana regen tick that heals you for 150% of the damage dealt by the +20% damage shot you fire to use the Rapid Killing charge. This is quite probably enough to keep high level hunters at full mana forever, so long as things keep dying.

Wild Quiver is a new T9 (3 point) talent that gives you a 10% chance to fire an additional auto shot at 60% damage. Combine this with the fact that heavy marks hunters will likely be using Improved Hawk in stead of Viper (since the marks tree is really taking care of the hunter’s mana needs without it now)… and you have a LOT of extra arrows flying.

T9 also gets Improved Steady Shot (3 points). This gives your steady shots 15% chance to increase the damage of your next aimed/arcane/kill shot by 15% while reducing its mana cost by 40%. See? I told you. Mana efficiency.

The new T10 marks talent is Marked for Death (5 points). It gives your already improved hunter’s mark an additional +10% damage dealt by the hunter & pet and increases your critical strike damage bonus of all shot spells by a further 10%. This really encourages the hunter to mark their targets but I wonder how it plays out with multiple hunters firing on the same target. Do they all get the bonus, or does only the hunter who placed the mark?

And Chimera Shot is the new T11 talent. It’s a 10 second cooldown shot for 125% damage that refreshes your current sting and procs an additional bonus depending on which sting was active. Serpent deals 40% of the sting’s normal damage instantly. Viper heals you for 60% of the amount it drains (mana efficiency). Scorpid procs a 10 second disarm attempt that can only occur once a minute. All told, way cool.

Survival

The big change at T1 for the survival tree is that the former pair of 3 point talents Monster Slaying and Humanoid Slaying have been replaced with the 5 point Improved Tracking. I’ve already discussed this above, but just to reiterate:

• Only costs 5 talent points in stead of 6.
• +5% damage in stead of +3% damage and +3% crit damage.
• Works on whatever you’re tracking in stead of just 4 different creature types.

T2 gets a new talent called T.N.T.. Hehe. This gives your fire traps 15% chance to deal a 2 second stun when they do damage (I assume this means 15% each time the dot procs…). It also increases the crit chance of your explosive trap by 15%. And… the talent also extends these bonuses to your Explosive Shot (which is the new T11 talent that effectively acts as a ranged explosive trap). I could live with this.

Tier 2 also gets Survival Instincts. Yup, another high tier talent moving down into cherry picking range. They didn’t even nerf it in the process (but they didn’t buff it like they did Careful Aim). This formerly 5th tier talent gives you a whopping 4% damage reduction and 4% AP for 2 points.

T3 sees an upgraded version of Deflection. This talent previously cost 5 T2 points for +5% parry bonus. Now it costs 3 T4 points for +6% bonus. Deflection also becomes Counterattack’s new pre-req (since the old pre-req, Deterrence is becoming a baseline ability now). Win.

T3 also gets Trap Mastery, which is currently unimplemented. But I believe it is supposed to be a combination of the previous T3 Clever Traps talent and the previous T4 Trap Mastery talent.

And… T3 also gets an improved version of the formerly T4 Improved Feign Death. Survival Tactics (2 points) is Improved Feign Death (+4% to difficulty to resist feign) plus a 4 second reduction to Disengage’s cooldown.

At T4, Surefooted is slightly changed to cut the duration of snares in half. Previously it supposedly gave you a +15% chance to resist them, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a lot of CC/snare/etc… type effects are, well, simply irresistible. So this is a nice improvement. They’re actually doing this sort of thing all across the board (changing chance to resist effects that weren’t ever actually resistible to a reduction in that effect’s duration).

Lock and Load is a new 3 point T4 survival talent that gives you a crazy weird clearcasting type effect that procs whenever you trap a target or 15% of the time you sting something. The proc is that your next 3 arcane and explosive shots are free to cast and have no cooldown (they normally both have a 6 second cooldown). I really wonder if successive explosive shot dots stack… because explosive trap + 3x explosive shot = actual big boy aoe dps. This would actually make hunters vaguely useful in situations where previously only mages & warlocks would do.

Hunter vs Wild is a new T5 talent for 3 points that increases you and your pet’s AP by 30% of your total stamina. 5 points in Survivalist are the nominal pre-req, but when considering taking a talent like this, who’d pass up a +10% stamina bonus anyway?

Noxious Stings is new at T8 and has Wyvern as a pre-req and gives your wyvern sting a backlash effect that hits the dispeller for 50% of the remaining sting duration. In addition, it also increases all damage dealt to victims of your serpent sting by 3%. This really improves the usefulness of wyvern in pvp and makes serpent a nice addition to an improved mark in group situations. I don’t think this should be a T8 talent with a pre-req… but there really isn’t room to put it anywhere else

Point of No Escape is a new T9 survival talent that costs 3 points and increases the crit chance of all attacks on victims of your ice traps (and possibly bear trap, but I think they’re doing away with that one). This is very nice for frost trap and potentially very very fun with the rumored changes to freeze trap (it won’t break on any old damage now). This means you might get to cycle off two big crit shots into something when breaking its freeze now.

Sniper Training is another new T9 talent (3 points). This increases the damage dealt by steady, aimed, and explosive shots by 6% when you are >30 yards away from the target. It also (possibly more importantly) improves your chance to crit by 15% when executing with Kill Shot. It’s kind of a shame this is so mutually exclusive with Separation Anxiety (+pet dps at long range).

The new T10 survival talent is Hunting Party (5 points) and serves as an awesome hunter version of Vampiric Touch (shadow priest spell that dots an enemy and turns the damage into mana for the party). Hunting Party has Thrill of the Hunt as a pre-req (regen 40% of shot costs when you crit) and heals your whole party’s mana/energy/rage/runic power slightly whenever you crit with an arcane/explosive/steady shot. Hehehe. Oh, and remember, TNT gives explosive shots +15% to crit while Lock and Load makes them subject to chain clearcasting

And of course then there’s Explosive Shot at T11. We’ve already seen numerous other talents that improve it, but what is it? It’s a ranged explosive trap on a 6 second cooldown. It hits the primary target for a good chunk of fire damage and then splashes everything within 5 yards with a dot for half of the base damage again over 2 seconds.

And so… with so many wonderful options, I am really starting to wish for the first time that they will let us dual spec somehow. It would mean I can keep my insanely heavy beast spec for soloing and take something from marks and/or survival for groups/pvp. Mmm. Happy ideas.

Anyhow, I’ve spent entirely too long on this, and now I’m less sure than ever of what I’ll be doing with my 10 shiny new lvl 71-80 talent points. Oh well. Respecs aren’t really that expensive after all.

With the advent of Burning Crusade, I was pretty torn on how to respec my hunter. I’d played up into my 50′s as a heavy marksmanship build before switching to heavy survival. I’d meant to post my build ideas before the expansion landed, but I was otherwise occupied.

Currently, I am back to a very heavy marksmanship build (43 points). I’d planned on spending the remaining 18 in survival, but decided against it when I dinged 61. At present, I have a 1/43/9 build and am planning on spending my remaining points in the recently upgraded low tier beast talents in an attempt to increase my general durability.

== current build – 9/43/9 ==

The general thought behind my current build is reliable damage. I don’t crit nearly as much as I used to, but I hit hard and I hit consistently, and I can continue doing damage even when low on mana.

Beast Mastery (9 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    1/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide

There’s not a whole lot to say about these talents except that they’re much better than they used to be. Endurance Training and Thick Hide together give me +5% hp and +10% armour from eq and give my pet +10% hp and +20% armour.

The point in Focused Fire is planned as my my lvl 70 talent. It gives +1% damage output and +10% crit to kill command. It might almost be worth getting two points in Focused Fire for the additional +1% damage in exchange for a small loss in defense.

Marksmanship (43 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman
    1/1 Silencing Shot

Not a lot to say here. My goal here was to get Silencing Shot. It’s nice. I like it. I wish the cooldown were a bit shorter, but it does still work well as a ranged interrupt (the only reliable ranged spell interrupt in the game, I believe). More importantly, it allows you to pull casters. This has always been a pain, LoS pulls not generally being possible in wide open places

Efficiency is critical. Every build should have it. 10% reduction in mana costs to shots and stings (where 99% of your mana is going in the first place…) are not to be underestimated. Especially for a hybrid class that gets way less mana than full caster types.

Rapid Killing is nice. It’s only two points and it gives you a 20 second buff when you kill something that gives you +20% damage to your next hit. This encourages opening combat with Aimed Shot. In addition, these two points also reduce your Rapid Fire cooldown by 40%.

Rapid Fire is amazing. +40% ranged attack speed for 15 seconds in exchange for 100 mana. So… in stead of firing one arrow every 2.5 seconds, you wind up firing every 1.8 seconds. What that really translates to is an extra 2 shots for 100 mana. The single most mana efficient attack ability hunters ever get.

Concussive Barrage isn’t that impressive initially. Woo hoo. It dazes your opponents. Occasionally. This sort of thing would be nice while kiting… but you’re prolly already using concussive shot and frost traps already… No, what Concussive Barrage is really all about is the new shot that hunters get at lvl 62.

Steady Shot costs 110 mana and can be fired off once a second. It does (RAP * 0.3) + 150 damage and an additional 175 damage to dazed targets. Thus, if you pay attention and spam steady whenever your concussive daze goes off… you can get 3 or 4 hits in on the dazed target for some happy bonus damage.

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

The nine points in survival go well with any build.

Hawk Eye is absolutely critical, however. With it, hunters have the longest attack range of any class in the game. Without it… shrug.

Monster and Humanoid Slaying give +3% to all damage dealt to beasts, humanoids, dragons, and giants and an additional +3% to crit damage against them. These mobs make up the vast majority of the killable things in the game. You can do a lot worse than to spend points here.

== heavy crit – 0/20/41 ==

The general idea behind this build is to crit hard and to crit often.

Beast Mastery (0 points)
    None

Marksmanship (20 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    2/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    5/5 Efficiency
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots

Survival (41 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    3/3 Surefooted
    3/3 Killer Instinct
    5/5 Lightning Reflexes
    3/3 Thrill of the Hunt
    1/1 Wyvern Sting
    3/3 Expose Weakness
    4/5 Master Tactician

Wyvern Sting is great (12 sec crowd control, 2 minute cooldown). Now that you can use it in combat, it’s even better. It’s awesomely fun in PvP, and is one of the only ways I know of to reliably take people down as they fly past you on their epic mounts. If you go anywhere near this deep into Survival, it’d be a crime not to pick up Wyvern.

Killer Instinct is an additional +3% to crit rate on top of the +5% you pick up from Lethal Shots. With the +3% to hit from Surefooted, you will be scoring dramatically more crits with just these few talents alone. Add in +15% agility from Lightning Reflexes, and that crit chance goes up even higher.

Thrill of the Hunt means that any time one of your shots (aimed, arcane, steady) crits, you get 40% of the mana back.

Expose Weakness means that 30% of your crits cause everyone attacking your victim to get a heavy bonus to their attack power for 7 seconds.

Master Tactician means that every time you land a ranged hit, you have a 6% chance of getting a +8% buff to your crit chance for 8 seconds. I’m only grabbing 4 points here because I think the 5th point in Mortal Shots is worth slightly more than it would be here. Ie, that is a +2% to crit chance that is effective for 8 seconds after every 6% of your hits versus +6% to crit damage every time you crit.

== chainmail tank – 11/27/23 ==

This build is meant for hunters who somehow manage to keep taking damage. It’s not enough to make you tank better than, oh, say… a shaman… But it gives you some incredible survivability when you do wind up getting hit. The goal here is to avoid dying long enough to either kill your enemy or to run away.

Beast Mastery (11 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    3/3 Improved Aspect of the Monkey
    3/3 Thick Hide

Marksmanship (27 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    1/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience

Survival (23 points)
    1/3 Monster Slaying
    1/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    1/1 Deterrence
    3/3 Surefooted
    2/2 Improved Feign Death
    2/2 Survival Instincts

4% damage reduction from Survival Instincts is not to be underestimated. That’s four percent of every hit from every source you ever take. This is better than getting +4% max hp. Much, much better.

Deflection is a very nice toy. +25% to both parry and dodge sounds like +50% to avoid getting hit to me. It only lasts 10 seconds, and is on a 5 minute cooldown, but 50% damage avoidance for 10 seconds can make an enormous difference. Throw improved monkey and deflection into the mix and you are now dodging at +39% and parrying at +30%.

Add do this the numbers I’ve already talked about from the other low tier beast talents and +10% more hp from Survivalist… it’s still not always enough.

There’s nothing shameful about running into a corner and playing dead.

Feign rarely fails against stuff of your own level or lower, but it frequently fails vs stuff that’s bigger than you. Improved Feign Death pretty much reduces your chance of failure to zero versus mobs of your own level, and gives you a very good chance against things 1 or 2 levels higher.

Scatter Shot is a great stalling tactic when running away. It works within the dead zone and as an instant cast, you can fire it while jumping around a corner.

Finally, the +15% chance to resist movement impairing effects (snares – daze?) from Surefooted can’t hurt when trying to get out of a crowd of uglies in order to find a safer place to fall over.

== machinegun dps – 7/45/9 ==

With the death of the old 10 second cycle and the improvements to arcane shot, I like the idea of a hunter build that can not only keep up with a rogue for burst dps, but can make the rogue look like a paladin by comparison. This is the closest I’ve come up with. Of course, it makes an OOMkin druid look like a Dark Pact warlock, but shrug

As long as you keep yourself well hydrated, load up on mana regen eq and take advantage of Aspect of the Viper between fights and when low on juice, it can work.

Beast Mastery (7 points)
    5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk
    2/2 Focused Fire

Marksmanship (45 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    5/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    3/3 Careful Aim
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

We’ve seen most of these talents before in the other heavy marks builds. But the philosophy behind this build is a bit different.

Improved Arcane Shot means a 16.7% increase in the rate at which you can bombard things with arcane damage. In addition to loading up on mana/5 eq, a healthy smattering of +spell/arcane damage eq would not be entirely wasted either. You’re still doing a mix of physical and arcane damage and should be switching over to Steady Shot whenever you daze an enemy, but the arcane shot damage is pretty impressive when you speed it up.

Rapid Killing is also still important in this build, much more so because of the 2 minute cooldown reduction on Rapid Fire. The extra 2 or 3 shots you get from Rapid Fire are two or three chances for physical damage crits on top of whatever you’re getting with arcane. When you have the Rapid Killing buff in place, consider opening fights with arcane in stead of aimed shots, a crit with magical damage can be a lot more impressive than with physical. And it’s faster.

In addition to spamming Rapid Fire and Arcane Shot, the other important part of this build concept is Improved Hawk. I’ve talked about this talent before (in basically every other post I’ve ever made on hunters), but it bears repeating here in context.

Improved Aspect of the Hawk gives you a 10% chance with every normal ranged attack of getting a +15% attack speed buff for 12 seconds. The 10% chance means that this effect should proc roughly once every 25 seconds of combat if you’ve got a 2.55 normal ranged attack rate (that’s a 3.0 second weapon and a +15% speed quiver). 12 second buffs proccing every 25 seconds = 50% of the time Plus, of course, there’s also the slightly increased chance while the buff is active that the effect will proc again.

With a +15% speed quiver and a 1.8 speed weapon, you get a normal attack rate of 1.53 seconds. Improved hawk should proc roughly once every 15 seconds in this case, ie, it should be an almost constant effect that gives you an attack speed of closer to 1 second. Throw Rapid Fires off whenever you’re under the influence of the improve hawk effect and … your attack speed number suddenly becomes something closer to 0.36 for 15 seconds. That’s 41 arrows.

War Master Voone drops a lvl 55 green 1.6 speed bow. It’s only 36 dps, but…

== animal trainer – 46/12/3 ==

I am strongly tempted to play with this build, and I’m probably going to at least give it a whirl when I hit 63 and catch myself a warp stalker…

The goal is to stand back and let your pet do all of the work. Fire normal shots with a fast bow and concentrate your mana on keeping your furry little assassin friend alive.

This is the only beast spec I’m going to discuss, so pay attention

Beast Mastery (46 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    2/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide
    2/2 Improved Revive Pet
    5/5 Unleashed Fury
    2/2 Improved Mend Pet
    5/5 Ferocity
    2/2 Spirit Bond
    2/2 Bestial Discipline
    2/2 Animal Handler
    5/5 Frenzy
    3/3 Ferocious Inspiration
    3/3 Catlike Reflexes
    5/5 Serpent's Swiftness

Marksmanship (12 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    2/2 Go for the Throat

Survival (3 points)
    3/3 Hawk Eye

First off, the things I’m not picking up. I’m not grabbing Efficiency, I’m not grabing Rapid Killing, and I’m not grabbing the Human/Beast Slaying talents. You don’t need these as much here. You’re relying on your pet to do all of the work. Firing your own weapon (ideally something fast) is just a way of scoring crits in order to proc the 50 point focus regen bonus from Go for the Throat.

I’m also ignoring the whole Beast Within chain because I see it as primarily useful in PvP. The goal with this build is not to send a pet charging through fear spells to eat mages, it’s to let the pet eat mobs for you.

Ok, grabbing Improved Revive and Mend should be a no brainer for any beast spec hunter. Keeping your pet alive and getting rid of nasty debuffs is essential… Spirit Bond is also incredibly nice, 2% max hp regen every 10 seconds for both you and the pet equates to +40/5 hp regen if you have 4000 hp. This regen continues during combat.

Unleashed Fury means +20% dps. Ferocity means +10% crit rate. Bestial Discipline means 2x the focus regen (+whatever you’re giving your pet from ranged crits). Animal Handler means +4%. Catlike Reflexes means +9% dodge (on top of the +10% hp and +20% armour already mentioned). Improved Hunter’s Mark means your Mark is suddenly quite useful to your pet (increases their damage).

Serpent’s Swiftness means +20% to attack speed for both you and your pet. More attack speed for you means more frequent crits and more +50 focus heals to your pet means more often your pet can use its own attacks.

+20% attack speed for your pet means a vicious feedback circle of destruction. With Frenzy, your pet gets an additional +30% buff to attack speed that lasts for 8 seconds after every crit the pet lands. By giving your pet +10% to crit from Ferocity… the faster attacks are much more likely to crit, which procs more faster attacks, which are likely to crit and maintain the maniac attack speed…

To top it all off, Ferocious Inspiration gives your entire party (self and pet included) an additional +3% to damage done for 10 seconds after the pet scores a crit. This is phenomenally better than Trueshot Aura’s +100 AP (~7 DPS), especially when you consider you don’t have to actively cast it, and that it improves damage for casters as well as physical types.

update – Feb 4th, 2007

I was sick most of this weekend, so naturally I had to do something silly when not curled up in bed. That something silly was a respec to the beast mastery build above. I’m lvl 63 at this point, and have only purchased the one point in Serpent’s Swiftness (so am missing the 4 points in swiftness and 3 points in Catlike Reflexes). And… the build is useful.

I feel much more durable in general than the other build (I’ve got about 5000 hp and 50/5 hp regen). However, not having Aimed Shot or Wyvern or Silence is weird… In fact, I don’t have any abilities gained from talents. My personal DPS (ie, that achieved by shooting arrows into things) has decreased by about 20-30 since the rebuild. However, my pet’s DPS has increased by 40-50 points. Plus the pet’s inspiration buff is almost always active… for +3% DPS to the entire party.

The beast build kills slightly more quickly than my “reliable” build. But it feels VERY different, and takes a very different mindset to play effectively. I am also basically guaranteed to die when my pet dies. I’m planning on trying to stick with this build until 66 or 70, depending on my mood. I suspect that the final 4 points in swiftness will make an enormous difference in my attitude, but I’ll have to wait and see.

Allaryin

Al is my main. He’s a lvl 60 dwarven hunter who spent most of his life as a marksmanship spec before they rebalanced the talent trees and I switched to a mostly survival (think trap and crit) spec. I lose trueshot aura, but I gain +15% agi and numerous other goodies. I’ve got like 18% crit now.

Since Blizzard hates hunters (or at least always saves them for an afterthought), they’re the only class w/o BC talents announced. So, I won’t comment on my plans for Al at this time. Chances are high that I’ll be grabbing a few more marksmanship talents and dropping a few points from survival. I might possibly dip 5-10 points into beast spec for some improved base aspects, depending on what happens.

Chokuretsu

Choku is my primary alt. She’s lvl 39 gnomish warlock at the moment with heavy affliction and some destruction tendancies. I’m gonna continue working with her up until 50 before resuming the quest for exalted Gnomeregan and Stormpike faction on Al. Once Al has his rep toys, Choku makes the final push for 60.

I am giddy about the new chances to warlock talents in the expansion. They’re making affliction spec even happier – throwing out lots of junk ranks and generally happifying the tree. Choku becomes the imp-draining, dot-happy font of infinite mana.

Affliction Talents – 41 point(s)

• Suppression – 5/5
• Improved Corruption – 5/5
• Improved Drain Soul – 2/2
• Improved Curse of Agony – 2/2
• Fel Concentration – 5/5
• Amplify Curse – 1/1
• Grim Reach – 2/2
• Empowered Corruption – 3/3
• Siphon Life – 1/1
• Curse of Exhaustion – 1/1
• Shadow Mastery – 5/5
• Contagion – 5/5
• Dark Pact – 1/1
• Improved Howl of Terror – 2/2
• Unstable Affliction – 1/1

More DOTs. When I’m not dotting, I’m draining something. When I’m neither dotting or draining, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing. I might be spamming destruction spells for extra DPS or something.

Drain Soul is amazing in the expansion. Not only does the spell (which is already a fairly cheap form of damage output in addition to the whole shard production thing) become resistant to interruption with Fel Concentration, it gets Improved Drain Soul which turns it into a huge mana heal (as if I need more of those ) as well as reducing threat generation from Affliction spells – which never hurts.

I’m utterly addicted to Siphon Life. I can’t imagine playing a warlock without it It’s like a hunter w/o Aimed Shot. Plus, it adds a fourth dot to my cycle.

Amplify Curse didn’t wow me very much at low levels when I got it on my way to acquiring Siphon for the first time. But at high levels, it should be pretty nice – especially when combined with Improved Curse of Agony.

Curse of Exhaustion is horrible right now. But, by turning it into a single talent spell (in stead of the 3 or 4 talents required to make it useful at present)… I think I like adding it to my fear chain.

The new tier 9 talent, Unstable Affliction is just one more DOT on the pile. It also carries with it the benefit inherent in many of the new BC spells in that it backfires when dispelled. I’m all for that.

Dark Pact is the real reason I’m going heavy affliction spec, however. It turns my pets into mana batteries…

Demonology Talents – 17 point(s)

• Improved Imp – 3/3
• Demonic Embrace – 5/5
• Fel Intellect – 3/3
• Fel Domination – 1/1
• Demonic Aegis – 3/3
• Master Summoner – 2/2

Ok, general idea here is to always have a maxxed out and above all passive Imp on hand. They get buckets of mana. Fel Intellect gives them more. With the imp on passive, they just sit and regenerate mana for me to Dark Pact away.

Demonic Embrace and the imp’s Blood Pact (with +30% bonus) give me tons more hp to power spells when the Dark Pact cycle proves insufficient. Throw some heavy runecloth bandages into the mix and I’m regenerating an additional 2000 mana every minute.

Master Summoner and Fel Domination make it easy for me to get my imp back in the odd event that it somehow gets into combat and dies.

Destruction Talents – 3 point(s)

• Cataclysm – 3/5

Spell cost reduction is spell cost reduction. And I figure the major reason I don’t always use destruction spells (aside from their being possible to interrupt forever) is their cost. If I’m generating tons of mana, I figure it can’t hurt to decrease the cost of my spamming spells just a bit more.

Kyaneos

Kyan used to be my primary alt until I rolled Choku. She’s the other char that transferred with me from Sargeras -> Detheroc -> Terenas. Been around for a while. Never gonna purge char, but don’t play her very seriously either. Human paladin. Currently lvl 27 or so and built for retribution with a big enchanted hammer of kaboomitude.

I expect to resume work on Kyan once Choku hits 60 and concentrate on grinding her to at least 40 (A paladin w/o a free horse is hardly a paladin at all, don’tcha know).

Once she hits 40, however, I’m planning on shifting gears from a solo sort of zombie slaughterhouse on legs build to a a very balanced sort of unkillable healer build.

Holy Talents – 35 point(s)

• Divine Intellect – 5/5
• Spiritual Focus – 5/5
• Healing Light – 3/3
• Aura Mastery – 1/1
• Unyielding Faith – 2/2
• Illumination – 5/5
• Pure of Heart – 3/3
• Divine Favor – 1/1
• Holy Power – 5/5
• Blessed Life – 5/5

Aura Mastery is kind of neat, it’s a +10 yard bonus to aura radius. That means I’m more likely to be covering my hunter if he’s off in a corner away from me, but more importantly, it means that I can stand back and heal from full range and still benefit my melee party members with my aura.

Illumination means that critical heals are free, Divine Favor and Holy Power increase the odds of my getting those free heals by a great deal. Since paladins get so little mana compared to other healing classes, free heals are a good idea.

Blessed Life is the big talent for my whole ‘indestructable’ theme to the healing paladin. It’s essentially a permanent 5% reduction to all damage taken. Ever. From any source. Yay!

Protection Talents – 16 point(s)

• Improved Devotion Aura – 5/5
• Toughness – 5/5
• Blessing of Kings – 1/1
• Anticipation – 5/5

Redoubt is nice, but Improved Devotion translates into more reliable damage reduction – and it helps my party when I’m using it. At level 60, Devotion is worth 735 AC before the talent. That makes this talent worth 294 additional AC to everyone in your party.

Toughness is a no brainer if I want not to take damage, as is Anticipation.

And Blessing of Kings is great to have on hand since I’m already taking Anticipation.

Retribution Talents – 10 point(s)

• Improved Blessing of Might – 5/5
• Deflection – 5/5

Deflection means 5% more parryable attacks that don’t hit me. If you’re keeping score… I’m really not taking any damage by this point.

Llamedos

Llammy is my NE druid. He was created with the intention of giving my wife somebody to party with w/o powerleveling her. What actually happened was that I managed to maintain the character for a while – until she got a day off from work and ground 4 or 5 levels in my absence. She’s lvl 28 now. Llammy is still 12

So, he’s absolute last priority for me. If I manage to hit all of my other targets before BC comes out, he’s planned as a hardcore balance spec nuke. Think mage in platemail to go along with my paladin.

Balance Talents – 47 point(s)

• Improved Wrath – 5/5
• Improved Moonfire – 5/5
• Natural Weapons – 5/5
• Omen of Clarity – 1/1
• Nature’s Reach – 2/2
• Vengeance – 5/5
• Lunar Guidance – 3/3
• Nature’s Grace – 1/1
• Moonglow – 3/3
• Moonfury – 5/5
• Balance of Power – 2/2
• Dreamstate – 3/3
• Moonkin Form – 1/1
• Twilight’s Wrath – 5/5
• Force of Nature – 1/1

The whole point of this char is Moonkin Form. And in the expansion, they’re buffing it way up. The biggest happiness here is that the form now gives a bonus of 150% to attack power and gives melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana. Combine with the 5 point Natural Weapons pre-req for Omen of Clarity… and OoC suddenly becomes very viable and useful.

The rest of the balance talents are pretty self-explanatory. I want mana, and I want to cast lots of hard hitting spells with that mana. And, of course, Force of Nature plays right into my whole summon addiction.

Restoration Talents – 14 point(s)

• Improved Mark of the Wild – 5/5
• Nature’s Focus – 5/5
• Reflection – 3/3
• Insect Swarm – 1/1

The real reason I’m taking any resto talents at all is for the Reflection mana regen increase. Nature’s Focus is kind of a no-brainer since I’d probably be caned for not taking it, and Insect Swarm is a nice cheap DOT to use while I’m healing people in caster form.

Omnia

When BC launches, my family is planning on making an army of blood elf priests. I’m still very torn on the subject, but will most probably be building a horde priest (either BE or undead who just levels in BE territory with them, not sure yet) to join them (my current largest horde char is Arbor, the lvl 18 cow warrior).

Since we’re gonna be 4 or 5 priests in a little war party of infinite healing, I’m planning on making the char 100% with support of other priests in mind. That said, we’re looking at the disciplined feedback priest, subject to tuning based on experiences in the group.

Discipline Talents – 38 point(s)

• Unbreakable Will – 5/5
• Improved Power Word: Fortitude – 2/2
• Improved Power Word: Shield – 3/3
• Martyrdom – 2/2
• Inner Focus – 1/1
• Meditation – 3/3
• Improved Inner Fire – 3/3
• Mental Agility – 5/5
• Mental Strength – 5/5
• Divine Spirit – 1/1
• Improved Divine Spirit – 2/2
• Power Infusion – 1/1
• Reflective Shield – 5/5

Divine Spirit is the big one here. I figure if we’re gonna have a full gang of priests, somebody may as well grab this. A 30 minute guaranteed +Spirit buff to everyone in the group means tons more mana. I’ll be rushing for this talent at level 30. That’s right, it trumps Healing Focus (since others will be able to heal me).

That’s the other thing, I figure if some priest has got to tank, it may as well be the one who’s already going deep into Discipline. So, I’m avoiding some of the more obvious threat reduction talents in favor of making myself slightly more able to stand still and survive getting hit a bunch.

Holy Talents – 23 point(s)

• Healing Focus – 2/2
• Improved Renew – 3/3
• Spell Warding – 5/5
• Holy Nova – 1/1
• Blessed Recovery – 3/3
• Inspiration – 3/3
• Holy Reach – 2/2
• Improved Healing – 1/3
• Spirit of Redemption – 1/1
• Spiritual Guidance – 2/5

And when I DO wind up dying, I get to play Spirit of Redemption to keep the other priests alive so at least one of them is left to rez me

Adryn

When BC lands, I’ve always planned on rolling a Draenei. I’ve been ranting about this one for like a year now And I’ve finally decided that I need a draenei mage. Because, well, nothing says lovin like 7 feet of electric blue death with a free heal over time self-buff

I’ve always said that mages need summons, and since they’re finally getting water elementals in the expansion… (even if they are only temporary summons ) AND since big blue frost mage really works for me on an aesthetic level, the choice here is pretty obvious.

Since mages are probably the class with which I am least conversant, this build idea is extremely tentative here. I was actually thinking about going heavy arcane spec, just because nobody ever really does… but I’m addicted to summons.

Frost Talents – 42 point(s)

• Improved Frostbolt – 5/5
• Elemental Precision – 3/3
• Ice Shards – 5/5
• Improved Frost Nova – 2/2
• Piercing Ice – 3/3
• Cold Snap – 1/1
• Arctic Reach – 2/2
• Frost Channeling – 3/3
• Shatter – 5/5
• Ice Block – 1/1
• Winter’s Chill – 5/5
• Ice Barrier – 1/1
• Arctic Winds – 5/5
• Summon Water Elemental – 1/1

My only thought with the frost talents right now is getting criticals, and lots of them. And, since I’m gonna be generating tons of crits, I need to mitigate my threat production as much as possible while still doing obscene damage… and need to be able to survive when I do wind up pulling aggro.

And it has a summon. Have I mentioned that I really like summons?

Arcane Talents – 19 point(s)

• Arcane Subtlety – 2/2
• Arcane Focus – 3/5
• Magic Absorption – 5/5
• Arcane Concentration – 5/5
• Arcane Fortitude – 1/1
• Arcane Meditation – 3/3

I had to choose between 20 points in arcane or in fire. Since I was already planning on going arcane spec, that helped sway my decision. But really, the few cheap arcane talents really make for a happy mage. Fire is just more dps

Arcane Subtlety and Arcane Focus mean more of my spells hit when I cast them, and that I have the option of using arcane nukes in stead of ice when I need to tone down the aggro production.

Magic Absorption and Arcane Fortitude increase my general survivability (along the same vein of the protective frost spells) and I’m not gonna complain about the mana healed when I resist a spell.

Arcane Concentration means clearcasting for 10% of my nukes. Which really means 10% overall reduction in mana cost for all damage spells. Add Arcane Meditation for the continued regen while casting, and I’ve got enough juice to hammer on things for a good while (and with as many ice crits as they’re liable to suffer, it doesn’t actually have to be all that long).

Other Chars

I’ve mentioned that I have a tauren warrior. I don’t see much point in discussing his spec, if he ever really advances much further. He’s a cow, with armour. He’s gonna be a tank (which would be kind of fun with 3 BE priests for backup).

I’ve also got a low level shaman, but I don’t feel any compulsion to advance the char further and will gladly saccrifice him in order to make room for my priest or mage