One of the marquee features of World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion The War Within is its hero talent trees, an extra layer of icing to Dragonflight’s talent rework cake. They’re flavourful, themed additions to your core abilities that are meant to be “an evergreen form of character progression”.
Blizzard’s been harvesting feedback in the run-up to the system’s debut, letting players discuss four trees in December last year. Now there’s eight more for build-heads to get into forum arguments over—and thank the light they are. Somebody’s gotta care about the numbers. Druids, Evokers, Paladins, Rogues, Warlocks and Warriors are all getting previews this time around. You can read the full trees on Blizzard’s official post, but here’s the cliffnotes.
For Druids, we’ve got the Elune’s Chosen (Balance, Guardian) and the Wildstalker (Feral, Restoration) trees. One’s themed around all things moon-related, while the other gives you better healing, big bleeds, and creepy parasitic vines to torment your enemies with—you know, in case getting mauled by a big cat wasn’t awful enough.
The Scalecommander Evoker is open for Augmentation and Devastation evokers, turning you into a walking mortar sentry. Mass Eruption/Disintegrate spreads your blasts to enemies, while also marking them for explosive bombardments which can trigger whenever you or your friends deal damage.
Paladins get the Herald of the Sun (Holy, Retribution) and the Templar (Protection, Retribution) trees. The former’s all about creating sunspots that scathe your foes and heal your allies, while the latter’s all about hitting people very hard with hammers. All of them. You have a hammer that then calls down other hammers from the sky: Once you cast it, and then every two seconds for eight seconds. Hammer time is 24/7 now, baby.
(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)
The Trickster Rogue is offered for the Outlaw and Subtlety specialisations, and it’s very funny for one specific reason—it’s all about using Feint, a damage mitigation tool. Using Feint strikes your enemies with “Unseen Blades”, which deal damage, reduce the damage you take from them, increase your finishing move’s crit chance, and so on. It’s like Blizzard’s just tied a carrot to the end of a stick begging the parsing masses to please maybe hit a mitigation and help their healers out.
Over in Warlock land, the Diabolist spreads a little Demonology flavour to Destruction Warlocks, though it’s available for both specialisations. Diabolic Ritual makes every soul shard you spend have a chance to huck a smorgasbord of demons (in sequence, so metre-watchers can build rotations around it), as well as even more meteors carrying Wild Imps.
My personal favourite, though, is the Colossus Warrior, which is open to Arms and Protection players. This thing’s built around the Shockwave ability, which Blizzard promises will be easier to get via your class talents in The War Within. While there’s a lot of fun flavourful stuff (like hurling your enemies up in the air when you hit them with a shockwave), my top pick is “Mountain of Muscle and Scars”, which is an otherwise very boring node that makes you deal more and take less damage. Crucially, it also makes you 5% taller than everybody else. Forever.
(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment.)
It’s such a petty increase that I doubt most players will even notice it at a glance, but you get to know that you are 5% taller than the average population, and isn’t that what matters?
