Mandatory Talent Bloat

Hi there. Welcome to Critical QQ. This is a blog written by streams of QQ pouring down the face of a very sad person who plays WoW.

Prepare for QQ.

There will be a LOT of it in the following days.

First, a couple things Ghostcrawler has stated.

One. A tree is considered “bloated” if, after taking all of it’s mandatory DPS talents, it only has 2-3 points left to spend on random stuff, like utility and so forth.

Two. Any player can sacrifice small amounts of DPS in order to gain some utility. For instance, a frost mage can drop a point in Arctic Winds to pick up Deep Freeze.

These points are important, please remember them. There will be a test.

So then. Let’s take a look at some numbers, just tree by tree for now.

Arcane needs to spend a minimum of 53 talents in it’s home tree to pick up all the important DPS talents.

Fire needs to spend a minimum of 51 talent points, and you can make a very strong argument for 54.

Frost, too, needs to spend a minimum of 53 talent points.

So far, so good.

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WTB Discourse: Leveling Arcane

Leveling frost is what most mages do. Some still level fire, preferring superior damage output to the control frost offers.

Does anyone level arcane?

I’ve scoffed at the arcane tree as a viable leveling spec for a long, long time. Mostly because it was extremely bad.

But there’s a couple new talents and synergies kicking around that could very well make arcane a perfectly reasonable leveling tree.

Torment the Weak, for instance, can give arcane access to very powerful nukes early on, and later Arcane Barrage, Slow and a 2 minute Evocate result in excellent efficiency and very powerful kiting power.

Anyone out there leveling/leveled arcane? Share your thoughts, I want to know.

Here are my ideas:

Arcane seems to me like it would need to rely very heavily on frostbolt for quite a few levels. Torment the Weak is extremely powerful, providing a huge damage boost as long as the target is snared or slowed.

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Jumpatron 3000

Have you ever jumped into a shield on Malygos and died anyway?

Jumped into a safe zone on Heigan and still died?

Tried to jump away from Frogger and died?

Well, now I can tell you why!

Simply put, the WoW engine doesn’t update your position until you hit the ground. When you are airborne, as in jumping, the game engine doesn’t know where you are anymore.

Say you walk from point A to point B. Because your feet are always on the ground, the game can accurately map out where you are. But when you jump… it can’t.

So when you jump from point A to point B, the game considers you at point A until you land at point B.

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