Understanding Mists of Pandaria Talents

This year’s Blizzon brought the announcement of a new expansion and with it, new talent structure. As it stands now, talent trees will be completely removed in Patch 4.4 which is expected sometime in early 2012. Just like the talent changes before Cataclysm, players will have a short window to get used to using the new structure.

The plan is to give players a new talent every 15 levels. This talent will be a choice out of three talents that have the same sort of utility. For example, most classes will have a talent that helps their mobility at level 15, either providing a speed boost or offering some other means of transportation.

At this point, some talents have been repurposed. Everything else is being removed completely or rolled into the base class itself. All talents that are currently mandatory are just being combined with normal skills, like instant cast Ghost Wolf for shaman.

Wowhead currently has a talent calculator based off of the Blizzcon slides. To explain the new talent tiers I’m going to use the druid calculator. Almost every class has a similar structure, so you should be able to apply this information to whatever class you choose.

Level 15 – Movement

Level 15 is all about increasing movement speed in some way. This is obviously a way to help players level faster until they can get their mount at 20, but it has longterm use in raiding and PVP. For druids, all of these movement boosts apply to cat form which you get at level 8.

Level 30 – Healing

For most classes, level 30 brings some sort of survival talent. Druids choose one of three healing cooldowns. While these are most beneficial to resto druids, even ferals can benefit from cooldowns like Renewal that restores 30% of maximum health in any shapeshift form.

Level 45 – Crowd Control

This is where you might start needing crowd control if you’re out questing in a populated area, but for the most part these talents are structured to provide benefit at endgame. For druids, two of these are castable in all forms, so ferals finally have a chance to provide something without popping out.

Level 60 – Cooldowns

It gets muddled between classes at this talent level, but most classes will have the choice of a 1-2 minute cooldown or a 15-30s activated buff. For druids this is a chance for any spec to have treants as a cooldown if they wish, though bears will have to sacrifice the current talented ability to charge.

Level 75 – Utility

It’s hard to name this one universally, as there are many differences among the classes, but for the most part this bracket is about using an ability that causes something aside from DPS to happen. Many druids are disgruntled that for them, this is mostly a bear tier.  Only one ability – a force pull of mobs toward the caster – can be used in any form.

Level 90 – Class Definers

Level 90 is the cap in MoP, so all of these talents are focused on defining what the developers think the class should be. All level 90 druid talents involve the shapeshifting mechanic and quickly shifting from one form to another, allowing them to fill another role in a pinch.