fire-talents
A Tree Grows in Beta – 31 Point Talents and Specializations
An image of the new 31 point talent trees for mages from beta.
On Tuesday, the latest beta build (build 12479) got rolled out along with some major changes – not only did Deepholm get opened up for level testing, but the new 31 point talent trees that the boards have been buzzing about since Zarhym dropped the bomb a week ago. My first thought on seeing the new trees was, “Oh my god, is that it?” (Insert “That’s what she said” joke here.) They really are very small, very concentrated. But are they enough? It looks like Blizzard really does want to pare down most of the passivity and go straight for novelty, fun stuff and power. But most people, like me, are definitely questioning how useful some of these talents will be.
At first glance, it looks like there are still a very straight division between “PVP” and “PVE” talents, with the exception being that you have to take some of the fun (or PVP-oriented) talents to flesh out a PVE/raiding build. While this might provide slight utility or benefits to raiders, it makes me wonder how useful they truly will be over the long run. Things like Improved Blink definitely have a place considering how high movement fights are right now in ICC, but will that change in Cataclysm?
MMO-Champion has provided a talent calculator for the new builds here, if you want to look for yourself: http://wowtal.com.
Let’s take a look at some of the talents and specialization aspects of the new trees.
Cataclysm Class Preview for Mages: Let’s do the Time Warp Again!
Aislinana: For those of us who were up late Friday night (at least in the US) to catch it, the mage class preview for Cataclysm is out and boy is it interesting. Already there’s been some boos as well as some resounding cheering coming from mages and other classes alike. Additionally, Ghostcrawler has posted more information from Blizzard Saturday in order to clarify some of the more vague notes from the preview. We will be including that with our own thoughts and concerns with the changes that might be implemented in the expansion.
Metaneira: Yeah, yeah, I know we’re late. Ais and I spent Friday night drunk and in ICC, so we didn’t get the jump on it like we wanted to. 
Preview located here; Ghostcrawler’s follow-up comments can be found here.
Ding! 80! …Now What? (The Guide)
- Updated for 3.3. Changes have been made to Gear and Spec sections to reflect content in-game.
So you have decided to roll a mage and fate has allowed you to hit level 80. Congratulations!
You made it to the big-time…and now you’re scratching your head. What do you do now? You’ve had fun levelling but now you have all sorts of things to worry about as a new 80 – do you just do heroics? Raid? Run circles around Dalaran? There’s lots of things to consider and all of it is confusing. Sure, you could just ask your guild, but a lot of times people who have been level 80 for a while just point you at Elitist Jerks. This is not always very helpful because it’s tailored for progression raiding and min-maxing. That’s why we’re here to give you some information specifically for the new-to-80 mage (who is interested in PVE). Some of this info has an overlap with Meta’s raiding guide, but I will be explaining some basic things with a little more detail. If you are looking to jump right into raiding, her guide might be more beneficial.
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