Friday, July 18, 2008

Just found the new talent trees myself

I'm apparently a bit behind the curve, here, but there was a link to the MMO Champion talent trees on the forum, so I went and had a look.

As Rilgon says, Marks has apparently been boosted substantially, which is fantastic. The filler talents such as Combat Experience and Concussive Barrage are still there, and Barrage and friends haven't been consolidated as hoped, but those are relatively minor nitpicks. These buffs however will probably also have the effect of decisively pushing Survival back down to third place as far as raw DPS is concerned, but I don't have a problem with that myself at all. I will be glad if my Marks friends are able to convince raiders to accept them as viable once again.

BM's tweaks look nice, too. Still, it's a shame Aspect Mastery is so far down in the tree; I'd be tempted to grab that myself if it wasn't. Could be something fun to play with during one of my weekend AB BM temp respecs. ;-)

As for the changes which I'm most interested in, they look great. Sniper Training will give me a nice boost for both battlegrounds and farming, and I expect Hunting Party will be appreciated in both 5 mans and raids alike. Point of No Escape, if taken in conjunction with Master Tac, could give a combined total of 16% extra crit against mobs affected by Frost Trap, too...I might need to blow the cobwebs off Frost and mix it in with Snake a little, post WoTLK, methinks. ;-)

Potent Venom and the buff to the DoT from Wyvern Sting also conclusively prove to me that, despite what the forum trolls might say, Blizzard still have a very sound understanding of exactly what it has been proven that Survival is for. Wyvern's damage output has been increased by one and a half fold, which in PvP against melee with high Resilience, puts us back in the game.

3/3 Potent Venom also reduces the mana cost of Serpent Sting by 30%, as well as buffing the damage of both Serpent and Wyvern by an additional 3%. A farming build incorporating that and Imp Stings is going to be utterly glorious, and will probably really start to give BM a run for its' money, certainly on threat and mana efficiency, even if not overall speed.

Explosive Shot could have some very interesting implications for instance soloing, as well; a 1500 point AoE Fire DoT; basically what Explosive Trap should have been all along.

Looks like Rilgon was right. Assuming this talent info is accurate, level 80 is looking good. ;-)

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