MMO Champion is reporting that new talent tree system has been released on the Cataclysm beta realm. This is the one where you lock yourself into a single talent tree at level 10 and work your way up to the 31-point talent before unlocking supporting trees. The number of points you get to spend has been halved.
The interface screens show that, for opting to go shadow, you are rewarded with mind flay instantly, plus threat reduction and pushback protection on shadow spells. Some of the other classes have a bit more meat on their UIs (shaman for example), so I'm hoping there may be more bonuses for shadow in a later build.
I'm unable while at work to fully check MMO's talent calculators, but from the priest class page I can say the new talents look... awfully familiar. If I was confident that these were accurate and thought-out by Blizzard, I would be disappointed to say the least. In a world where talent points had been halved to allow more interesting and dynamic talents, I would not expect to have to spend two of them on improved shadow word: pain, for example, which was never much of an improvement to start with. And I am rather alarmed to see that our crit bonus looks like it's been slashed to 40 per cent.
But I'm not going to panic. I'll just assume that these are placeholder talents while the Blizzard boffins crack their heads together and come up with something inspiring. Please. Pretty please.
Edit: home now. Here's the build Leigh talks about in the comment below. Everyone seems to be in agreement that they haven't 'done' shadow yet, so I'm just gonna chill...
Not just one Overton window
16 hours ago
4 comments:
I know it is early beta but looking at it:
If we don't take Spirit Tap we are forced to take Imp MB to advance down the tree, both are optional in todays build. Tier 3 onwards are mandatory pretty much. For a PVE focused shadow priest there are 34 mandatory talent points for us with 3 of those enforced to move down the tree. It means we have 7 points left which can only net us 2/3 improved inner fire.
So in the shadow tree the only untouched points are Spirit Tap, Psychic Scream, Silence, Psychic Horror. Comparing that to the Ele Shammy (An alt I play!) and it is clear the trees have more work. The Shammy tree looks a lot more complete, I can get a viable build with 31 points in Elemental and have actual choices which would effect playstyle rather then a straight PVE or PVP choice. Even their secondary tree has a lot of synnergy with the main tree, they get a 15% movement speed buff for their 7 points as well as their equiv of inner fire at T1.
I'm hoping that they move Imp. Inner Fire further up the Disc tree to remedy the 2/3 issue. However, that currently being the case, I've considered opting out of the mana efficiency of 2/3 Mental Agility for a more bitchin' 2/2 Power Word: Shield for survivability.
We are shadow priests, after all. Mana typically isn't a real issue, and we don't have many instant casts for it to affect. This will of course be dependent on how much they retool Shadow Word: Death. Then again, survivability was never an issue for us, either.
The impression a fellow guild shadow priest and I got from the new tree was that shadow was a tad bloated-- which was what caused the issue with where to put the disc talents.
From reading another blog and seeing the blue post about it, shadow priests and priests in general aren't listed as one of the classes that are not far along. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24702229998&sid=2000
I was considering improving shields but with VE still at 15% and shadowform knocking 15% off it is looking ok. Shields are great for when you are on the move but it is a long time since one saved me, glyphing dispersion would probably save me more and save me two talent points :P You are right though about Mental Agility, it will boil down to how much SW:D comes back into play. The only 2 instants you cast are SW:P (ideally once a fight) and DP every 24 seconds now that haste won't effect the timing.
P.S. Why is imp shadowform still reading crit instead of haste? I thought blues confirmed it was haste a while back!
thank you
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