Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Top 5 Worst Talents

In a sort of tribute to the fact that our talent trees are about to become completely revamped, and with that alot of our talents will be gone forever (?), I thought I'd rank my top 5 worst talents we've had so far in Wrath. It's not as easy as it might sound. Some talents are quite situational. They might suck badly for pve, but be ok for pvp, like Safeguard or Earth's Grasp. Other talents are good for leveling, but less good for endgame, like Improved Ghost Wolf or Master of Deception. I've tried to find talents that aren't especially good for any situation, or that are just to costly for what they do. Some talents used to be insanely bad, but have since become fairly ok, like Master Conjuror or Ancestral Knowledge (actually Ancestral Knowledge still is a pretty bad talent for all those talent points). In some cases I've had to dismiss what I thought sounded like a bad talent just because I don't know enough about the class, like with Improved Searing Pain (good for pvp, perhaps?). And ranking the talents I did find wasn't easy either, since they're all about equally bad. So let's get to it and we'll see if you agree on me on which talents are the worst 5 talents in WoW right now.

5. Improved Demoralizing Shout - Warrior (Fury tree) Removed in Cataclysm
Finding five talents that were really bad was quite difficult (see above). I found four fairly fast (see below) but the fifth one was tricky. For many talents I could at least some kind of use. So I can with Imp Demo Shout. The reason it gets on this list is because it requires 5 tp to get. Alot of other classes (and even pets) have some sort of attack power reduction skill, and as far as I know none of them have to talent 5 talent point to get it to max efficiency. Improved Curse of Weakness for warlocks costs only 2 tp, same thing with ret paladins Vindication, for instance. One could argue that warriors would be more interested in reducing the enemies attack power than a warlock or paladin, and therefore would want to spend more talent points into doing that. Haha no, that would be idiotic... Forcing warriors to spend 5 tp to get something others only have to spend 2 tp in is just stupid.

4. Arcane Fortitude - Mage (Arcane tree) Removed in Cataclysm
For 3 talent points you get the insanely bad opportunity to increase your armor by 150% of your intellect. Say you have a really, really well geared fully raid buffed mage. He'd have about 2500 intellect or so. Arcane Fortitude would then give him 3750 extra armor. That is coincidentally just about as much as an Improved Inner Fire does, so I was able to check how much physical damage reduction that would make. About 15%. That means each tp in Arcane Fortitude gives 5% reduced physical damage taken (and that is if you're insanely well geared). It might sound ok, but it only means you'll live a half second longer than otherwise. Would you place talent points into that for any reason? Even when pvping? I strongly doubt it.

3. Improved Tranquility - Druid (Restoration tree) Removed in Cataclysm
Tranquility isn't an awesome spell to begin with. First of all it only heals your own party members, which makes it quite situational. Even when things go shitty and you want to use your oh shit button, tranquility rarely is the button to press. The first part of Improving it reduces the threat generated from it by 100%. That would be totally awesome, if only healers had any issues what so ever with healing aggro nowadays! Too bad they don't. Ever. Not even when lowbies. The second part reduces its cooldown by 60%. That would also be ok, if you ever had a reason to want to use Tranquility often. You rarely do in lowbie instances, because hopefully the entire group won't take massive damage every 3 minutes, and besides all you do is oom. You wouldn't want to do that in raids either because you'll only heal the wrong targets anyway and besides, you'll only oom. If the talent made it work like Divine Hymn, i.e healing any target within 40 range with the lowest hp, it would be completely awesome. But unfortunately that isn't so.

2. Concussion - Shaman (Elemental tree) Revamped in Cataclysm
Yet another talent that is insanely weak for the amount of talent points you have to put into it. 5 tp to improve the damage of some skills by 5%? We only take it because we have to. And this is an issue Blizzard have had to deal with ever since the beginning of Wrath, and the reason talents like these exist in the first place. Because we have so many talent points at our disposal, they must put in talents that make us "waste" some points here and there. This is definitely one of them. The reason I place this higher on the list than the similar Imp. Demo Shout is simply because we're forced to take this talent to get to other stuff (or the equally bad Convection). At least warriors don't have to spec into something bad to get to something good. In cataclysm Blizzard have changed this to give 10% extra damage for 3 tp instead. That's more like it.

1. Anger Management - Warrior (Arms tree) Removed in Cataclysm
Listen to this. A talent that gives you 1 rage. Every 3 seconds. Ok, it only costs 1 tp, but Blizzard could hardly have asked for more for such a weak talent. When I first started out playing a warrior I thought rage was something of an issue. So I specced into this. And didn't notice any difference whatsoever. Back then this talent might, maybe have been somewhat useful. Today, rage isn't an issue - at all. There is no reason whatsoever to ever want to take this talent. 1 rage. Every 3 seconds. That just makes my irl rage rise, not my game rage.

Can you think of any more more or less useless talents? What would your top 5 worst talents be?

2 comments:

  1. Hmm, I actually found Tranquility useful on my druid.

    I can imagine plenty of uses starting from Anub'arak in 5-man with poisons and adds all over the party..

    Ending up with raiding examples. Can work for both catching up (bad Anub'arak normal pug? got caught in Hodir ice block? failing on spores for Festergut?) or organized scheduled healing (Firefighter with a healer for each party?).

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  2. Yeah unlike some spells we've had (aka Sentry Totem...) Tranquility is far from useless. But I still think as aoe-heals go, it's the worst. I'm not even sure it's better than Rejuv/Wild Growth blanketting in the situations you propose :S In 5-man instances slightly better, on AN you've filled the criterias for this to be useful for example - you've only got 5 targets and they're forced to stand close together ^^ My favorite is when druids are using the skill over there---> while people are dying over on the other side.

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