Unleash the full potential of your World of Warcraft characters with the latest game-changer: hero talents! As you join us at the Pick and Whistle Inn, you'll get the inside scoop on how these new, self-contained talent trees, accessible at level 71, are shaking up Azeroth. We're not just talking minor tweaks—think strategic depth, gameplay impacts, and aesthetic enhancements that respect the essence of your class. With every talent choice, you're crafting a legend, tailoring abilities to fit your unique combat style. From the careful creation to the feedback-fueled development, you'll learn how these talents are set to add a new dimension to your adventures without overshadowing the tried-and-true skills you know and love.
Are you ready to embrace the rich class fantasy that WoW is famous for? This episode doesn't just introduce you to the hero talents; we explore them through the lore-filled lenses of iconic character archetypes. Take the Elune's Chosen talent for Druids—where guardian strength meets balance wisdom, opening whole new synergies for your toolkit. And let's not forget the inclusivity factor, ensuring that these powerful archetypes are available to every race and faction. Plus, as we gear up for the War Within alpha, we'll dive into the Season of Discovery in classic WoW, analyzing leveling changes and the big debate on raid sizes. Whether you're clashing in PvP or conquering in PvE, this episode is your all-access pass to mastering these transformative innovations in the World of Warcraft universe.
Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!
You, hello and welcome to the Pick and Whistle Towers from Azeroth. As always here at the Pick and Whistle Inn in Stormwind, I'll go through a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft. A grammar bottle or a pint? Sit back and enjoy this episode. We'll be going over a few of the newer things to come into WoW, like later on within the War of Inn and SOD and stuff like that. This includes hero talents. So all of the SOD changes. We'll be going into more detail and actually going through the actual post about it and maybe a few bits and bobs at the forums. But, as always, we have the weekly news, which is Liskinoff, zacali, Elders and Aerostar are your world bosses for the week, located in Thaldrasus, zarelakhaven and Emerald Dream Arena. Skirmishes are your bonus event for this week. This means that you get more honour for competing in the arena skirmishes. This is good if you're an up and coming PvP player. It's good to learn in these skirmishes and you're gearing and making gold now. Actually, whilst you're doing so, gravity Lapse is your brawl for the week. This is eye of the storm and essentially every 30 seconds everyone is flung up into the air and you can direct yourself to another part of the map if you wish to do so, and it's just a very quick way of traversing the map and essentially, keeping things spicy is the best way to put it. Incomporal, spikefall and Terranical are your mythical fixes for the week. Incomporal there are stuff that spawns. You simply need to CC it, whether it be a clone, polymorph, blind, you know anything like that. Spikefall when you kill mobs, a spikefall shade will spawn. Make sure to kite this or kill it. It will die off by itself, but it will fixate a random target. Just don't get hit by it. They're not friendly. Your healer will hate you and you'll get some healer rage. Terranical is the final affix. This is where the bosses and the mobs that they spawn have increased health and damage, so bring a talent build that can accommodate for that. With all that being said, what I will start off with is hero talents. Now, for those that don't know what hero talents are, they are a new feature that is coming from War Within. I'll allow this to do the explanation. Hero talents are new self-contained talent trees that play as access at level 71, so you are currently level 17. Dragonflight 71 is 70 to 80 is the next light expansion. Hero talents build on the abilities and talents of current classes and specializations. Those can choose a single hero talent tree to activate on a character and these talents can be changed. In the same way, class talents can be currently changed in the game there are three hero talent trees for each class, excluding Druids and Demon Hunters. Demon Hunters have two, druids have four. Each specialization has two hero talent trees they can choose between and each of these trees is available as an option for two specializations. For example, warriors have three hero talent trees Slayer, colossus and Mountain Thane. Security has access to Mountain Thane and Slayer. Protection has access to Mountain Thane and Colossus and Arms has access to Colossus and Slayer. So it's very much. If you're a Fury Warrior you can be a bit more tanky and go into the Protection like tree. So you're a Fury Protection Warrior and that is a Mountain Thane. Or you can go for more damage, which is a Slayer, which is Fury and Arms Warrior, if that makes sense. So it's kind of a talent tree in between your specializations. There are 11 nodes in these talent trees. The first of these Unlocks the system. Unlocks with the system at level 71 and you earn one talent point per level from level 71 to 80. So you get every talent in the tree by 80 hero talents. So it will have starter builds available and your saved builds will save your hero talent choices as well, which is pretty good. What to expect from hero talents. Each hero talent tree has a keystone talent that introduces a core mechanic within the tree. This could be a new ability or enhancing an existing ability or cooldown, or a new buff that you can trigger. The bottom talent of each tree is a capstone, as they call it, talent that builds on the core themes of the tree or adds new power to the keystone. Each tree will offer or modify some class utility and include defensive bonuses that are useful to each specialization. We are aiming for all trees to be about equal in the amount of utility and defensive Defensiveness. They provide trees that, for characters that they can take on a tanking role, may have some additional Defense bonuses that will be less valuable to healers or damage dealers, such as bonuses to tank talents or cooldowns. Three or four nodes in each of the trees. That will be choice nodes, but you can choose between two options, which makes sense because you don't really want, you know, if you want to be less tanky and do more damage. You know you obviously aren't going to take the tanky option. Hero talents are meant to add enough damage or healing throughput to be significant, without being so important that these 10 new talents Overshadow your current class and spec talent trees. Most hero talent trees add new visual effects to classes, both to communicate what they're doing and bring their class fantasies to life. However, these are not complete visual reworks. Your class and spec are still same at their core and will continue to come through, which is really really good. I like that they're adding new visual effects. I think new visual effects are always one of the better things that they can add him. Well, because it being a 20 year old game, at this point it's some of the effects are still lacking and some of them are really really good or Could be definitely improved upon. How we chose hero talent concepts. Since we announced hero talents at blizzcon, it's been great to see all the conversation and speculation surrounding the 39 hero talent title. We'd like to share some of the thinking behind Choosing these concepts. Each hero talent must be appropriate for both the spec that can use it. Some concepts build on overlaps in abilities or favors between Flavors, between the two specs that can use, like Colossus warrior, which is as mighty as arms warriors and as imposing as protection warriors, others that create themes that are appropriate for both specs, like fate-bound rogues. Hero talents also restrain your combat role or retain your combat role and the gear that you use, so you're not competing for new types of gear for iconic world of warcraft. A character archetype, archetypes, archetypes oh my god, that word doesn't sound right to me anymore. We wanted to be sure that we could deliver the fantasy with World of Warcraft classes. Blade masters Just wouldn't be blade masters without the ability to wind, walk and mirror image. That's really cool, actually. So what a blade master is essentially, if you think of old warcraft, there was a orc, I think I forget his name, but he was a orc with like a polearm and he had like a what would you call it? Like the cursed vision of Sargeras Mog? It's. It's a blindfold, that's the word, holy shit, a Blindfold. And what he could do was essentially make mirror images and strike people with these mirror images, not like a mage does, but just a melee version, which is really cool, but those abilities don't fit in a warrior's toolkit which makes sense. Lastly, there are several iconic character archetypes that are strongly tied to specific races and factions. Let's just keep up the grove or mountain thing. It's exciting to embody these storied archetypes, but we want to ensure that characters of every race and faction can see themselves as those archetypes. We're open to feedback on what feels good for your character versus what is frustrating. So the talents that they have given us now and these are the eight new talents is elunes chosen, windstalker druid, scale commander, evoker, herald of the sun paladin, Templar paladin, fixture rogue, diabolist warlock and colossus warrior. Now, a lot of the. The chosen of elune or elunes chosen one will be based around your Fury of elune or your full moons. Essentially your windstalker druid is essentially giving you more healing and sustain and just more sort of damage buffs overall With feral and rest. I dread I should be saying that elunes chosen is between Guardian druid and a balanced druid. So that's what it's in between essentially. Okay, that's what it's. A hybrid of Windstalker druid is restoration druid and ferrule druid. A scale commander, evoker is augmentation and devastation, evoker. So the two dps ones. The Herald of the Sun Paladin is Retribution and Holy. So this one's actually kind of cool. It sounds so cool. Herald of the Sun Paladin Sounds so cool. Templar Paladin is Retribution and Protection Paladin. You have Trickster Rogue, which is Outlaw and Subtlety Rogue. You have Diabolist Warlock Demonology and Destruction Warlock, and then you finally have Colossus Warrior, which is Arms and Protection. Now, all of these are obviously going to have their own niche picks. In certain situations, Some of them are going to be better than others. But ultimately, all of these hero talents aren't meant to change the way that you play your class. They are meant to enhance it. They are meant to make it look good. So I will give Elune's Chosen as a good example, because I play a Druid myself. I play Balanced Druid and this is the one that I know the most about at the moment because it's the one that I've really gone into today. I've really gone into depth with and had a look. So Boundless Moonlight, full Moon Calls down two minor moons that deal Astral Damage and generate three Astral Power. Bull Guardian Lunar Beam now causes you to Leech Life equal to 10% of all damage dealt to enemies. And then, for both specializations, bureau of Elune now ends up with a Flash of Energy Blasting nearby enemies for Astral Damage, which is really good. This is your core ability at the very top, and then it splits into three, so you have three different ways of going about this. So you have Moon Guardian for Balanced Moonfire, and Sunfire generate two additional Astral Power For Guardian three. Automatic Moonfire from Galactic Guardians generate five Rage Okay, very good. Lunar Insight Moonfire deals 10% more damage. Okay, that's just simple. And then Glistening Fur, bareform and Moonkinform reduce Arcane Damage taken by 6% and all other Magical Damage by 3%, okay. So this is a bit more of a tanky option. The middle one is very much. You know it can be good, it can be bad. And then the left one is very much. If you want to go into more of a class specific or spec specific, I should say, choice the lines below this Lunar Amplification each non-Arcane Damaging Ability that you use increases the damage of your next Arcane Damaging Ability by 3%. This stacks up to three times Okay. So if you have something that you can ramp up damage with, maybe in a PvE scenario for this one is what I'm thinking because PvP it's tough to be able to get the most out of this Atmospheric Exposure enemies damaged by Full Moon, fury of a Lune or Lunar Beam take 4% increased damage from you for six seconds. This one's very much more PvP based, because Fury of a Lune is very good for a burst and essentially what you want to do is send all your burst when you've got the most modifiers up to increase your damage. So this one is very, very good. And then Moon Dust and Elune's Grace. These are a choice node. Moon Dust enemies affected by Moonfire are slowed by 30%. Now I cannot stress how good this is in PvP scenario. And then Elune's Grace, using Wild Charge in Bear Form or Moon Kim Form, incurs a three-second shorter cooldown, so you have a 12-second leap essentially is the best way to go about it. Below these talents are Stellar Command and Lunar Cooling. This is a choice node. So Stellar Command, increase the damage of your Full Moon by 15%. For balance Guardian, increase the damage of Lunar Beam by 30% and for both, increase the damage of Fury of a Lune by 15%. Or you can go for Lunar Cooling, which is Starfire, deals 40% increased damage to its primary target but no longer triggers Solar Eclipse, which is a really weird one. I'm very curious to see how that one plays out as a balance druid, because a lot of the times you are procking a Solar Eclipse as a boomkin in PvP because you get your free Starfires. So very curious. And if that's going to be taken by PvPs and then for Guardian Thrashernail deals, arcane damage and its damage is increased by 12%. That's really really good and I think that's really cool. To be honest, you have like an Arcane Bear almost. Then you have Light of a Lune. Moonfire damage has a chance to cool down a Fury of a Lune, to follow your target for three seconds. This is really good, although in PvP you have the risk of it breaking. 6c Generates 18 Astral Power or Rage over its duration as well, which is obviously really good because Astral Power is your power bar that you use to build up and then send a lot of damage into. And then you have Astral Insight. This is all choice nodes. By the way, incarn Chosen of a Lune and Incarn Chosen of Ersoc increase Arcane damage from spells and abilities by 10% while active and Convoke the Spirit's duration and number of spells cast increased by 25%. So I think it's the duration is currently one second, if I remember correctly. No, it's two seconds and it's every point four seconds you cast a spell, so by that mass I think you get an extra three baby spells, something like that, something along them lines. I think this isn't bad. This might be very good, depending on if it increases my star surge damage, which it should do because star surge is astral. So I think it takes inspiration from both arcane and nature damage when I'm in Incarn. So we'll see. Next one is arcane affinity, or arcane damage from your spells and abilities is increased by 3%, and your arcane abilities reduce the cooldown of fury of a loon by two seconds and the cooldown of new moon by new moon, half moon and full moon by one second, which is very, very good. And this is that's actually kind of crazy, now that I'm thinking about it, because you're spamming moonfire on a lot of things. Oh my God, yeah, this is crazy. You're gonna have fury of a loon just like every 10 seconds. Oh my God, I'm in love with this, like hero talent stuff already it's gonna be great. And then the guardian version is your arcane abilities reduce the cooldown of your lunar beam by three seconds. And then the bottom talent, which is the one that kind of rounds it all out and encapsulates it. Eternal moon further increases the power of boundless moonlight. So new moon and half moon now cool down one minor moon I have no idea what minor moons are and stuff. We'll just have to wait and see. With it for guarding your lunar beam increases mastery by an additional 8%. It was 30% increased damage and last three seconds longer, which is really good. And then for both specializations, the flash of energy now generates six astral power or six rage, and its damage is increased by 50%. So you can kind of see that it's very much going on the basis of arcane damage and you're being just an absolute nuisance and throwing moons down on people and using these lunar like spells and looks to base it, basically blind people in arenas and PvE content. It's really really cool. I absolutely love the idea of hero talents, especially with the boomkin ones looking so good. All of the others look amazing as well, by the way, the sun palladin one looks incredible and we really do have to test these. I can't wait for the alpha to come out. I think the alpha is very soon. There was a 10.2.6 patch that was theorized, you know, with that little pirate flag, and then it's the war within alpha. So I think we are a month or two away from the alpha. If that, I would love to see it at the end of this month. I think it will be amazing to see and I need to try out these hero talents. Blizzard, if you are listening at all, please can I just get a little bit of a sneak peek on that alpha? I would love it. It's absolutely amazing. But they are what hero talents sort of are looking forward to or we're looking forward to in the war within. I think they're going to be a massive game changer and it's absolutely incredible. But let's hop back in time to season of discovery and classic World of Warcraft. So with classic, I said that there are a few things that they are changing and here are the few things. So you have the XP buff and leveling. When we first concepted, this always bugged me concepted, I think it's conceived, yeah, conceived. Season of discovery we knew we wanted Outs to be a major fixture of the experience, which is really good, and so we decided to add an XP buff discoveries delight into previous level bands at the beginning of each phase. This is great for existing characters that that were not yet at the current level cap or were new characters created after the phase changes. But if you went into phase two with several characters at level 25 already, it will be a little daunting to level them right now. We've been considering ways to help this over the past several days and we've made adjustments to our existing plans. This is where they have up to the level of this. So, starting next week, march 5, the discovery delight XP buff will be enabled on all realms, increasing XP gains from level one to 39 by 100%. It's up from 50%, which is an immaculate buff. Alongside discoveries delight, adjustments will also be reducing the cost of normal racial mounts and mount training by roughly half at level 40. These are not changes that are planned for level 60, by the way. Lastly, we'll also be increasing the base gold rewards from all quest rewards while players are level one to 39. This is impeccable from the season of discovery team. A lot of people might not like this, because a lot of people are very much oh, but the journey's the whole point of classic. This isn't classic. If you want classic, go to classic era. That's classic. This is season of discovery. This is a sandbox mode where they can test stuff out and play around with everything, and I think that they are doing a very good job with it. I personally have not been playing season of discovery, but I think that it's a very good part of Wow. I think it's a very healthy part of Wow and I think it's a very popular part because it's taking classic but giving it a twist, and that twist is the runes, is the XP buff, is the old, friendlier version of classic, and I think if classic had made given us this buff back in 2020 or whenever we were going into burning crusade, I think we would have been fine. I think people would have been a bit more open to the idea of leveling out and a bit more open to the idea of keeping it alive. Nax Rammus and you know classic open a little bit longer before heading into Burning Crusade, maybe by like a few months even, because that XP buff is huge for leveling and some people got fed up with the leveling in classic. That's all it is. I level two characters. I had one that was level 50 as well and it was just a drag. I couldn't keep up with Leveling them characters because it was such a time sink that it was almost impossible to do so, and that's with me playing. Quite often, people who are very much casual classic didn't have that opportunity. So whatever they're doing here, it's amazing to see because it's the right choice in my opinion Raid size at level 60. Recently, a hot topic of debate is the raid size level 60 and we've been watching the comment commentary on this closely. Help quell confusion is a look at exactly what to expect in the next few phases or in term of raid size, yet to be announced. Level 50 raid will be a 20 player experience. Mountain Corps will also be a 20 player experience. In season of discovery. Past that, we are still discussing exactly what raiding in the later tears of season discovery will look like in terms of raid size. For a bit of background, when we first can see accepted using a discovery, we felt that it was perfectly natural of a version of original World of Warcraft have 40 player raids. This is partially because the development time scale needed was not planned within the scope of what we set out to accomplish on the aggressive schedule we have, but mostly because 40 player raids felt like such a defining characteristic of original Wow and we, and utterly unique to this version of the game. It wasn't really even a consideration to shoe. Shoe them entirely. Esch, ew, that is not a word, right, I don't know. Gut them entirely is what I say when we sell our character, create our level upgrades. However, we did feel that asking people to field 40 players would be a tool. Ask a level 25, which it's good thing to see. We wanted these first few rates to be somewhat easy to form a pickup group for as well. As a result, we decided on 10 player experiences instead of the first two level upgrades. As we've played the game ourselves and watched how other players have approached community building, we realized that we've set some communities up to potentially struggle a bit by asking them to recruit up from one or two 10 player raid groups to a full 40. Did they choose to? As a result, we wanted to make clear now that our plans are to start bridging from 10 player raids to higher raid sizes, which is really good that they're communicating this. You know what? The season discovery people, people, the people who are working on season of discovery are communicating stuff really really well, and I wish that retail did this a bit more. I get that there's a lot to do in retail, but having people Just figure out like, oh, here are talents are out, that great is, yeah, nice, but we need some sort of clarity on with aiming around this sort of time frame, and I know people don't like to be given a time frame for Alphas, beta stuff like that. But to have that sort of time frame it gives the player base like, okay, maybe in a month's time will have an alpha. If they delay it, they want to lay it by long, and I get that they would want to be delaying it because they want everything to be like right or something. Some people don't think like that. Some people are like well, you said this day and you know you need to stand by that and other people that ruin it. I would very much like a little bit more communication, though, and just on this sort of game plan and what's going on currently. But you know it is what it is. We can't really ask for much more. They are bringing out hero talents are bringing out a bit more, but that little bit of communication is what's needed in my opinion. While overhauling all 40 man raids down to 20 would be theoretically possible, this may be prohibitively difficult and direct significantly from the other features content we have planned to implement in the post 60 season of discovery. We are doing some investigation now to help us understand what will be needed and what framework of the original while data can support in this regard. There are some features that cannot currently exist in original, while as well, such as flex raiding, we are constrained in. Exactly what we are able to do here On court is definitely unique here and it is simple enough mechanically and under the hood, there will be relatively easy to par down to a 20 player experience, which is really good. The examples that I was going to give with this and I gave on Wednesday is Moncourt is very simple. You are correct, because a lot of the mechanics are someone's got living bomb, go stand over there and blow up yourself. You know that kind of deal where is in next Ramas. If you have four horsemen, you had 40 people in next Ramas. You needed eight tanks and eight healers for one boss fight, and this is because you get certain marks and when you get a certain amount of marks, the next tank who doesn't have that mark runs in, taunts off and the other players, and that goes and stand in the middle and waits till the marks fall off and the healers rotate, you know, so that there's always one healer still standing there like healing the tank, but the other is running to the next mark to make sure that, like there's, you know, a constant rotation and stuff. So them sort of bosses. I do understand that will need a bit of a adjusting, to say the least, and I don't, as an changes at level 60 are changing drastically and this is because, essentially, a lot of the niche aspects I want to be playable. So they have plans to make adjustments and difficulties to all raids, as well as a power level of rewards available. This does not mean making raids harder or easier across the board relative to player power, but looking individually at each experience and finding what those experiences are about and what their purpose is. Theoretical example, a raid that may be traditionally considered a catch up raid, such as Zul'Gorub, could see adjustments that bring their challenge level up slightly but also greatly increase the quality and diversity of the rewards so that they feel like a viable progression path alongside other current content in that phase, such as Blackwing Lair. That's really good. So you aren't bottlenecked to go to Zul'Gorub and then you can go to Blackwing Lair. You can pick and choose. So I prefer doing Zul'Gorub over Blackwing Lair. Okay, do that instead. You'll get the same amount of gear. You'll get the same quality and how good the gear is. You might need one or two things from Blackwing Lair like a trinket specifically, but that's always classic for you, isn't it? But that's really really good. On the flip side, we also always wanted to make sure that any 40 player raids that exist remain approachable, able to complete in pick up groups, and they maintain that so-done pretzels feel of 2019, classic raiding not sure what that saying is where you could bring almost any group composition or experience level and have success, which is really really good. Now they just go on to say we want your feedback and people who play Season of Discovery. If you do want your feedback, simply go onto the WoW forums and there are the posts from Season of Discovery there and Hero Talents, etc. But this is really good communication from Season of Discovery For those that want to try it. I think that it's actually a very good version of the game to try at the moment. I think it's a very fun version of the game and it's definitely something a bit different. But, honestly, try it out. If you don't like it, you don't like it, but I think it's one of the best versions of WoW at the moment. To be honest with you, I definitely am standing by that and I don't even play that version. But that is it for this episode. Thank you all very much for listening. As always, do check out all of the socials down below constant stuff happening over there. But thank you all very much once again and come over, fellow friend, till next time. Bye Of.