The Art of War(craft): Sub-speccing for PvP in the current Cataclysm beta

Zach sees everything through the PvP perspective of The Art of War(craft), including eating homemade brownies baked by his supremely awesome and sexy baker wife. He sees the brownies as opponents that need to be devoured in a methodical, strategic and soul-crushing manner. He advises everyone to look at all things (especially food) as adversaries that must be defeated and guarantees that success in life will follow. Probably.

A new, exciting build of the Cataclysm beta has been released, implementing the promised overhaul to the talent trees. It’s still raw at this point, but we get a glimpse of the direction the developers want to take. The basic or starter abilities have been defined and although some of these may change, such as Divine Storm for retribution paladins (Ghostcrawler, lead systems designer, mentioned that it would probably go back into the talent tree), the changes feel solid and refreshing. One of the ideas the developers have is that “both the 31-point and the 10(-point) ability need to have more single-target use,” which means we should get very good one-on-one abilities early on as well as at higher levels. As we mentioned, the trees are a long way off from being done, but that shouldn’t stop us from taking a look at them and picturing the possibilities.

One of the cooler, less noticeable things to come out of this build are the one-liner descriptions about each of the talent specs, allowing players to quickly grasp the concept of each spec. Blizzard seems committed to keeping this model, complete with talent tree lock-outs to prevent players from straying into other trees early on. As you might have suspected, the real culprit (or at least the most notable one) behind this change is PvP:

Ghostcrawler

Whenever a popular hybrid spec comes up, it’s usually because of some sneaky build that is broken for PvP by snaking down to pick up key talents in two trees. It’s not because the player really wants to play as say two specs — they are just cherry picking the talents. Since those builds almost always feel broken (as in breaking the rules) we don’t want to design around them.

source

Continue reading The Art of War(craft): Sub-speccing for PvP in the current Cataclysm beta

Filed under: PvP, The Art of War(craft) (PvP), Cataclysm