The new talent trees are out. Yay. Not much to say about them though, but before I do say anything, there is one single word that I wish to embed in your brain with a hammer:

CHILL!

Already, a lot of angry and confused posts are popping up around the web, from people who think these are the final verions of our talents. It’s not. It’s probably not. Chances are, we are most likely going to see many more changes – maybe. We are still in beta, and there is plenty of time for Blizzard to tweak the trees.

It would appear that my previous assumptions on the talent tree changes were correct. Most, if not all, passive talents have been stripped away, and we will get these as we spec into balance no problem there. No new talents were introduced, although some of the ones we did see was chanegd slightly. Lets take a look at the current status.

Build-a-spec

It is fairly simply to make a balance spec out of these talents. In fact, you can grab everything you want from balance with 31 points in balance, 5 points in resto and then you have 5 points to spend on Lunar Justice, Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy. You wanted customization? Well there you have it.

Should I really build a spec, the obvious choice for a PvE setting would be this: Wowtal.com. I would probably spend the last five on Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy for PvE, and maybe Lunar Justice for leveling.

I don’t know if Lunar Justice will ever be worth anything in PvE unless it automaticly generates the buff on you, or if it spawns the lunar beam on targets that you have helped kill but didn’t get the killing blow on. Everything else seems to be pretty straight forward choices, and in the current setup, even if you do take the wrong talents, you are not that far off.

Work in progress

I say “Chill”, because I know that people will be very quick to jump to conclutions. But if we take a closer look at some of the talents, you will notice that the tree is still far off from being done.

Nature’s Grace has gotten a spot at the top of the tree. But it is still marked with TBR – To Be Reworked / To Be Removed. In reality, they could keep the current implementation of Nature’s Grace, because with the increased cast time on Wrath, the haste cap seems far, far away. But alas, it will probably undergo some changes, and thats not all that bad either.

Blizzard also let it slip what we will be getting at level 10 when we spec into balance. Starsurge is on this list, yet it is still in the talent trees, which is a clear indicator that something needs to change.

A currious note was the full release from Blizzard, which reads:

Can take on the form of a powerful Moonkin, balancing the power of Arcane and Nature magic to destroy enemies at a distance.

• Starsurge
• Balance Druid (pushback reduction on balance spells)

Now, for some classes, namely those with tanking specs, their mastery is mentioned here. Ours isn’t. There could be several reasons for that. It immediately struck me that the wording they use for moonkin form is very similar to what they have written for restoration druids:

Uses heal-over-time Nature spells to keep allies alive, taking on the form of a tree when the need is most urgent.

• Restoration Druid (pushback reduction on healing spells)

Does this mean that we will have moonkin form as a pushback reducing ability, and not a permanent form, much like restoration druids tree being a use ability on a cooldown? Does it mean that we will get a permanent moonkin form which just has the ability (passive or active) to reduce pushback on spells? Or does this mean that Blizzard simply hasn’t decided yet?

I have previously stated – if not on this blog, then some forum – that I am actually fine with staying in caster form for the majority of the time, if my moonkin form is then worth using. The more special cooldowns we have, the better we can control our DPS together with Bloodlust, haste potions and the like. At the same time, though, I notice that Furor in the restoration tree still mentions Moonkin Form in its list, so this leads me to believe that we are probably still going to be perma-moonkin’ed, and that this is just a matter of wording.

There is no mention of when we will be getting the eclipse meter or the eclipse mastery. I would still venture to say that we will receive the eclipse meter at level 10, but that it just hasn’t made the list, and that we will probably be getting the mastery as we level up. For us 80′ers, it won’t make a difference, really. And for new moonkins, well, you are still much better off now than you were a year ago.

Notice that Omen of Clarity is not on the list at all. And if it were, we surely couldn’t reach it with only 10 points to spare. Omen of Clarity will probably be a trainable skill, which is fine. All druids like this spell. But even if its not, then that doesn’t mean its the end of the world. I mean, all it does is to serve as a mana regen talent, and if mana is covered elsewhere, it’s hardly a gamebreaker.

What I want

Now obviously, we still have to sit tight and wait for the trees to be tweaked. But I can still express my expectations – or demands, if you will – in the hopes that these will become reality:

• More info: This will come.
• More customization: I want to be given choices, even with only 41 point talents. I don’t want to just have to decide between Lunar Justice, Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy. I want some other talents that may or may not help me out in different settings, so that I can make a few decisions. Pie versus cake, you know?
• More creativity: Tied together with the bullet above, I really want a reason to spend my extra talent points in feral. Not because I want anything in feral, but because there should be something allowing me to, if I wish to do so. This could be PvP oriented talents for a balance druid for all I care. I am just tired of restoration being the only other tree to sink stuff into, when Feral could have some more “toughness” talents thrown into it, that would benefit a moonkin. I’m not saying I would want this for PvE, but there might be a lot of people that would want it for PvP.

In the end, there is not much news. We still have a ways to go before things are sorted out, and the trees still need a lot of love. So to recite my earlier statement: Chill!

- QQ