Talent specializations can be really confusing; especially to the relatively new player. Even for those of us who have been around a while, there doesn’t seem to be any right answer for “what’s the best build for _____?” So we’re going to talk about talents in general terms and then we’ll draw some conclusions.

Every character has three talent tabs. Each one of these tabs has around 20-25 buttons. Each of these buttons represents an active or passive skill for your character. You are given 1 point for every level starting at 2 points for level 10, for a total of 61 points to spend in these talent trees. Where you put those points will make a huge difference in how you should play your character. With virtually unlimited variations to choose from it can be really tough to choose how to spend your talent points. We’ll help shed a little light on that right now.

It all boils down to this: how do you like to play? That one factor should be the ultimate decision-maker for you when it comes to choosing your talent tree, as well as how you allocate the individual points. Do you prefer healing or fighting? Do you like crowd control or a ton of DPS? Ranged attacks or melee? Once you get to know your character and class, you’ll have a much better idea how it all fits together.

In my opinion there are really only two ways to go to get the very most out of any build. This may be a little controversial, but here goes. You should either go all-in on a single tree and super-specialize with 41+ points, or go 30/31 in two trees. It really depends on what the people you play with need you to contribute to regular instance runs, PVP battles, or raid groups. Let’s look at those two options.

In order to really have the best heals or be a fabulous tank, you simply must go at least to 41 points in those trees. If your guild needs an uber tank, you’re going to have to really go for it, or decide to let someone else play that role. For maximum healing, the 41st point is usually a “can’t live without skill.” Do a little looking on wowhead and Thottbot as well as a google search and see what build others are using in that tree. Alakhazam has a list at that shows the breakdowns of what its members use at http://wow.allakhazam.com/dyn/talfreq.html you can see from this list most druids (2.43%) use a 0/0/61 build for restoration. This just proves my point that in order to do one tree well, you’re going to spend nearly all of your points there. This list is terrific because it lets you look at what hundreds of other players are choosing.

Another great resource for looking at builds if you are not an expert already is the WoW Wikki site. On the Class page here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Class there is a window on the right side of the screen where you can get very detailed information and comments on how thousands of other people play that class, the builds they use, and which builds are better suited for PVE, PVP and raids.

Now that you’ve seen the first theory, let’s take a peek at another one that might make you even more valuable overall, primarily for DPS classes and builds. On this page: http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=472 someone was doing an analysis of hunter DPS builds, and the end result was fascinating. In almost every case the builds with a 30/31 allocation did the most damage. This happened because of talent synergies. While those who played Blizzard’s other blockbuster, Diablo 2 are familiar with the term, it’s not used directly in WoW, but that doesn’t keep it from happening.

On this page we see that a 0/21/30 build was almost identical in DPS to a 0/31/20 build (this is a very old post on Allakhazam before the expansion so bear with me). Blizzard does a great job of trying to balance their games so that players never overpower each other, and that no single build ever lasts if it thoroughly outshines all the others. This leads to parity and variety, so that all players become fairly equal, and players can play the same toon in a variety of styles depending on the situation.

So you might experiment with a 31/30 build. From my testing it always turns out that any two trees end up with talent synergies in the 20 point level, meaning they make each other stronger. The hard part about this build is choosing the 61st point. There will be one really great skill in all three trees you’ll have to choose from with that last point. It can be a really tough choice to make, because it will have a great effect on your play style.

Hunters, for example can go with BM/MM with the last point in either bestial wrath (big red kitty) or true shot aura. If he goes MM/Survival he’ll have to choose between true shot aura and Wyvern Sting, and for BM/Surv the choice will be bestial wrath or Wyvern. All three of those skills are useful; it will just depend on how that player wants to play. I’ve said before that very few hunters go survival tree, not even 1%. But I’ve also seen a survival hunter make all the difference in a high level run with great dps because his crit chance was around 29% with lethal shots, mortal shots and lightening reflexes. He would put on rapid fire and crit almost every 1.5 seconds to the tune of 1,400 to 1,800; it was insane. Plus he could chain trap like crazy, and put a mob to sleep before the fight ever began with wyvern sting. That means from one toon you got double the CC.

That’s what you get from a 30/31 build, versatility. You can do three or four things really well for your group and not be pigeonholed into just one thing. A 31/30 build is going to be primarily used for DPS builds, while a 41+ specialization may be more for healers and tanks. A good raid group needs both kinds: the super-specialized and the versatile. I think maybe I’ll do something really weird and go 30 beast mastery/31 survival just for kicks with my next hunter and see how it goes. Put a rogue to sleep for a bit and then let my cat go frenzy on them. No more stealth for you Mr. rogue, and enjoy the dots! Next, we’ll rant about instances.

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10 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Can anybody tell me where I can find _____________?

You see this constantly in chat. It drives me nuts. I might be having a great conversation with guild mates only to have 47 people alternately flaming or giving 47 different kinds of advice to a guy who asked a very simple question in the general chat channel. Now, I’m not an elitist. I’m not against asking questions in chat. Heck even “pros” can’t know everything about Wow – there’s just too much to it and it changes with every patch. As a matter of fact, jut the other night our guild was doing an instance run that we had never done before, but it turned out fine. Why? Thottbot.

Thottbot is a massive database of World of Warcraft data. Hundreds and thousands of players upload their game statistics to Thottbot every day. Need to know where you can find the recipe for savory deviate delight? Thottbot can tell you that this recipe has dropped 148 times from Greater Plainstriders in the Barrens out of 341,943 times they have been looted. It will also tell you that this recipe will only drop off of mobs in the barrens, and that there is no particular mob that drops it much more than any other. It is a truly random and unique recipe, thus the normally high prices in the AH for this recipe and also for what it produces, savory deviate delight.

But Thotbott can be very confusing to deal with for the first-time user. So we’re going to talk a little bit today about using it for professions, and after that you’ll understand better how to use it for almost everything else. Now Thottbot isn’t the only resource out there, but it does have the biggest and most up-to-date information pool, which makes it the first place I visit when I really need to know something and don’t feel like rooting for it on Google.

Go to Thottbot and you will see five links under the search box. Hover your mouse over professions and then click cooking for our example. It’s under the dark blue header for secondary professions. You are now taken to a page where every cooking recipe in the game is listed in skill level order.

The first recipe listed is Spice Bread. The information is divided into five columns: skill, recipe, components, slot and source. Let’s go through these one at a time so that you know what each column is telling you.

Column one lists three numbers. The first and largest one is black – this is the skill level at which you can use the recipe. For spice bread you can use it at level 1. The second number is smaller and gold. This is the level at which you will stop getting automatic skill-ups for cooking this recipe. Spice Bread goes green (meaning you will only gain a skill-up every few times) at cooking skill level 30. The smallest number at the bottom is in gray and represents the skill level at which you will no longer receive skill-ups for this recipe; in this case 40. So now we know that we can start cooking spice bread as our very first cooking recipe. We also know that we can cook 30 of them to get to skill level 30 and that we will never get our cooking skill higher than 40 using this recipe.

The second column lists the Recipe name and icon as a hyperlink. Clicking this will take us to the Spiced Bread page. At the top is a screen shot of the finished product.

The next box shows what it takes to make it.

The next box down shows items with similar cooldown counts (this is absolutely useless information in this case, but come in handy at other times) And finally, is the comments section; very short in this case with only two comments showing.

We hit the back button on our browser to return to the recipes list for column 3 which will list the components, or materials (mats) required to make this recipe. Hovering over the icons will show the screen tool tip for simple flour and mild spices as well as a hyperlink to go to each of those pages. Let’s go to the page for simple flour.

This page is a little different than the page for spiced bread. It begins the same with the screenshot of the tool tip followed by the recipe that it is used in. But this page has a new information box that lists the vendors from whom you can buy simple flour.

No comments for this item. I might post one just for giggles. Click on the first vendor name “Cookie” Mc Weaksauce (a little WoW humor). This will tell you everything you never thought you wanted to know about Cookie. It starts with his tool tip, then a map of where he is located in the zone, the quests he can give (if any, in this case one) It will also list everything he sells (again, if any, 7 things can be purchased from cookie). It will list what he drops if you kill him and then any comments.

A word on comments, these will become you most valuable asset for things that are hard to find. Players post forum comments on how exactly to get or do or survive whatever is being discussed. Not much to talk about with most of this cooking information, so comments are limited, but some comment lists go on for pages and pages.

Now let’s go back 2 pages to the recipe list. The fourth column is not used here; recipes go IN a bag, they do not have a slot. So the fifth and final column is where to find the recipe, the source. Recently, sources seem to have dissapeared from thottbot, but if you want to know where to get a recipe for something just type it in the search box.

type in “recipe brilliant smallfish” and hit the “> ” This takes you to the page for the Brilliant Smallfish recipe. You can see that there are 12 vendors for this recipe scattered all over Azeroth. Clicking on the name of these folks will, of course show you everything about them specifically if you are having trouble finding them.

Ok, so now you can see that if you will get a little click happy, Thottbot has a TON of information about everything you could ever want to know. Our first article talked about how to make decent money as a lowbie using fishing and cooking. Now let’s see how what we’ve just learned can help us do that.

On the recipes page we now know that there are two different fish we can cook at level 1 cooking. We also know that the first 45 of either one will get us to level 45 cooking and that if we continue to cook these we can level cooking all the way to 85 without cooking anything else. Scroll down a bit to the next fish recipe – longjaw mudsnapper. We can cook this at cooking level 50, all the way to 130, but it goes green at cooking skill 90. Rainbow fin Albacore is exactly the same. Scroll down a bit more to bristle whisker catfish. It requires cooking 100 to cook, and will give points all the way to 180, going green at 140.

So how does this help us? Well, we know we don’t have to cook anything else before we learn brilliant smallfish. Since we checked the fishing page (well I did) we also know we can catch brilliant smallfish right in Stormwind city at fishing level 1. Catching these will level fishing up to 85, this also is true for slitherskin mackerel, although night elves would be fishing it in Auberdine. So by catching either of these fish to skill level 50 cooking, we can then move on to longjaw mudsnapper to level cooking to 100, and then bristle whisker catfish to 150 and so forth. By doing it his way we’ve only had to cook the very minimum of extra fish to get our cooking skill ups (only 15 skill points from green level recipes).

So now you can see how to use Thottbot as a guide to the really mundane stuff. This will save you mountains of time searching for recipes. Just check Thottbot to find out where to go to get it, or even find out if it’s available to find for your faction. Some things simply are not worth the trouble it will take to find them, so this can save you a ton of frustration.

If you will start to use Thottbot to help you with your professions, you will figure out more and more how to use it to find just about anything you need to know, without getting beat up in chat.

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2 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

For the new player, your first visit to one of the major cities can be pretty discouraging. You watch the chat roll by with people advertising items for sale with prices like “only 150 gold, cheaper than AH.” And you think to yourself, I only have 22 silver! How in the world do you ever get 150 gold? A couple weeks later you are in your first instance run and have saved up 3 gold and hear a guy in the party say how he’s saving up for his mount, only 70 more gold to go before level 40. It took you until level 20 to get 3 gold so at that rate you imagine should be able to get your mount at level bazillion.

Don’t let it get you down; it’s really not that bad. And what we’re going to show you today can make those first few levels a lot less painful. Anyone can buy their mount, even the epic and flying versions. If you bought all four mounts in the game the cost would be around 6000 gold! But lots of people do it, pretty much everyone has at least their level 40 mount, but there are certainly ways to make gold that are faster than others.

Now, this is not for the guy who has time to play WoW 8-10 hours a day. This will really cut into your raid runs. What this IS, is a great way for someone working on their first toon to make some decent cash without having to know the ins and outs of professions and the auction house. So let’s get to it.

There are several professions in the game that are freebies. Your character can only learn two professions at a time, but you can learn all three of the secondary skills: fishing, cooking and first aid. Personally, I always max out first aid on every toon I make just in case. But I will only max fishing and cooking on one character and leave the other toons to do the main professions without worrying about the secondary skills.

You may know some advanced players who ridicule fishing and cooking as a waste of time, but you will hardly ever find high level players who will go to a major raid without having a stack of crafted food items. This plays right into what we’re about to teach you. Because very few people will ever level cooking all the way to 375, and even fewer will take the time to get fishing to 375, you have a great way to make some extra cash with limited competition.

A great example of this is Spicy Crawdads. A main tank for a raid will need to take 5 or 10 of these into Kara, and they will run right to the AH to buy a few. It’s easy to see why from the +30 stamina buff:

Spicy Crawdad

As a new player, I recommend that you run right now and get fishing and cooking started. Here’s why: everybody has to eat. Even more specifically, hunters have pets to feed. And pets can eat piles of fish. Most pets will eat cooked fish, or at least most hunters will have at least one cat, bear, or pig.

Now you are not going to make a fortune this way, but even my level 70 hunter makes some decent change (about 100 gold every week) selling golden fish sticks. Above all that, there is probably a savings of about 10-15 gold a week from not having to buy food for me or my pets. The other nice thing is that all my characters always have that extra little stamina buff, or other nice things like agility and intelligence from the fish I can cook. So I sell what everybody else wants to eat, and keep the rest for myself and vendor the leftovers. Even though a stack of 5 Spicy Crawdad goes for about 6-8 gold on my server, you don’t have to be at level 65 to make money selling fish in the AH. Even at level 10, there are food issues people have to deal with.

This technique will get you up to skill level 225 very fast in both fishing and cooking with the least amount of time, effort and money for cooking supplies since most fish recipes do not require spices. The other nice thing is that you can level up your cooking all the way to 375 and never cook anything but fish. No running around trying to get mystery meat from buzzards or anything weird like that. Fish it, cook it, sell it - the only running you will do is to get new recipes if you can’t find them on the auction house.

Here’s how this works. Go fishing for an hour or two in your major city. The cool thing about fishing is that you could skill all the way up to 375 and never fish outside of your starter area. I know this isn’t precise, but the point is that you don’t have to fish in higher level ponds to level up. Fishing skill-ups are tied to the number of catches, not the level of fish you catch. It’s a great thing to do while you’re in line for a battleground. If you’re just waiting around with nothing else to do, throw a line a few times and get several skill-ups. Remember to use lures to make sure you never lose a fish.

Next, you can do the first cooking quest and then run straight to the cooking trainer in your major city and get the first fish cooking recipe. You don’t have to do the cooking quests, but if you only plan on having one toon do all of your cooking, it is certainly nice to have every recipe you can get your hands on. I simply mail everything used in cooking that drops from mobs to my cook, and decide later whether to fry it up and put it in the AH.

Just catching and then cooking with the brilliant smallfish and longjaw mudsnapper recipes will get you to over 100 in both fishing and cooking, and the next fish, bristle whisker catfish should easily bring you over 175 skill in cooking. You can catch all three of these fish in most low-level ponds, so you can see how easy this makes leveling up your cooking skill.

After that, take your stacks of cooked fish over to the auction house and put them up for sale. Very rarely will anyone be selling low-level food, so it may be a little tricky to get your pricing right at first (I highly recommend using auctioneer mod to make this MUCH easier). Lather, rinse and repeat all the way through the game into outlands.

You can see here that there are only 4 cooked catfish on the AH on a very well-established server. If you were to post 5 or six full stacks, they would easily be nabbed up in an hour or two by some level 15-25 hunters needing a little kitty food. On this server the catfish go for about 1 silver each, so those six stacks would net you 1 gold. Considering that it’s pretty tough to come by gold at level 5 or 10; that’s a nice bit of change for a lowbie toon to work with, all for about 20-30 minutes worth of just leveling your fishing skill up at the same time.

It would be a rather longer article to go through the specifics of when you need to train, where to fish for certain fish and where to do the fishing and cooking quests and we have guides for that, BUT you don’t really need an extensive guide for any profession, what you need is to learn to use Thottbot effectively. All you need to do for this is browse Thottbot for the recipes or fish that you need under fishing and cooking and you can find out everything you need to know; which is the subject of another article you can look forward to reading very soon at Dominate Your Server.

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4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Today, I’m going to share with you some overall tips and tricks. I don’t know what your exact situation is (whether you’re looking for ways to level faster or whether you’re trying to build up a huge stash of cash.)

First of all, let me put it to rest once and for all: questing will level you much faster than just grinding, as long as you quest the right way (and let’s face it, questing is SO much more enjoyable than grinding anyways!)

Don’t just do one quest and then go turn it in for the quest reward or money. Your goal is to go out and do 3,4, 5 or more quests all in one shot (I’ll be giving you some exact questing routes in later emails.)

Inventory management is key! DON’T go back to town when your bags are full - you’ll waste precious time traveling back and forth. Simply get rid of low value vendor trash to make room for more valuable (and stackable!) items.

Always favor stackable vendor trash over non-stackable trash if you’re going to be working on the same mobs for awhile. For example, at level 6-10 (when you don’t have a lot of bag space) [item]dry scorpid eye[/item]s in Durotar sell for 95 copper each, and you can fit 5 in one stack. All of the grey armor pieces you pick up in Durotar can’t be stacked, and only sell for 10-30 copper each. Why take up a valuable bag slot with a 20 copper [item]Worn Leather Pants[/item]?

Loot everything until your bags are full, and then systematically destroy items which are less valuable when you need more space.

If you’re just starting a new character, and don’t know what class to choose, go with a Hunter. Of all the classes, they have the absolute least amount of down time (time spent in-between killing and questing) and pack quite a punch.

If I’m starting on a brand new server, I’ll make a hunter first, level him up very quickly to 20 (which can be done in about 12 hours of play time), and take Tailoring. I can then feed my “real” character on that server with bags and cash, allowing me to level up my “real” character as fast as possible.

Well, that’s it for today - I’ll be back tomorrow with a lot more tips for you. As I said, if you start using my techniques, you’ll see for yourself how much faster you level, and how much more gold you start having.

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7 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post