Talent Chic

Now that 3.0.2 is out and about, a lot of you are likely struggling to find a build that works for you. Sure, the talent calculators have been out and about for a while, but people are finally getting an opportunity to (outside of the beta, of course) test out the builds and the abilities and see if they’re yielding the results that everyone thought they would and see what kind of performance they get.

The trouble for those of us who have been dissapointed with the results or are looking for some guidance from folks who have more time, energy, and effort to put into theorycrafting than we do (or are just plain lazy), there’s TalentChic!

To get the most out of TalentChic, select your class from the menu on the left side, select the spec you want to go, and you’ll immediately be taken to the most popular talent builds for the various classes and specs in the game. The site pulls its information from the Armory, so you’re not necessarily seeing what’s best, just what’s most popular.

The most popular builds are at the top of the page and shown with the most stars, and you can click on any of the particular builds to go to the talent calculator and see how they play out and where everyone has been putting their talent points. You can also filter based on what you plan to do with the build – as in if you’re looking for a build that’s specifically good for PvP, PvE, questing, grinding, raiding, or more.

The information is good, and I used it to help validate my selections for my ret pally and my BM hunter. Again, the service doesn’t tell you whether or not the build is good – just whether or not it’s popular; and it’s fair to mention that just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it worth doing – so take all of the builds with a grain of salt; maybe the most popular ones aren’t the ones for you, but they’re great starting off points where you can make your own choices. Enjoy!

Inscription

Remember that patch we talked about? Yup – you’ve probably noticed that it hit last week, and some of the realms are still a little wobbly after all that movin’ and shakin’.

My preferred server was down most of the day yesterday for hotfixes and emergency maintenance; others are reporting issues with their character lists as well as not being able to log in. Even so, once most people have managed to log in, the experience has been fabulous. Just about every class has seen some improvements in just about all of their skills and the game seems to be a bit more balanced, even if everyone’s QQ-ing about the massive buff that Ret Pallies picked up. There’s plenty of QQ to go around, and there’s plenty of work left to be done (Shadow Priests kind of got hit with the nerf bat, and Mages deserve a little love for how broken Arcane is right now), but all in all, I’ve seen more people flocking back to the game in the last week than I’d seen leaving it in the past couple of months.

It’s actually really impressive seeing the beginning of the tide rolling back in for Wrath, with people re-upping their accounts and patching up just to get in on the goodness. Even my humble guild, where I was the only person in the guild on at like 7pm on a Saturday evening, has exploded with new life.

How have you taken the new content patch? Have you inscribed your spellbook with glyphs yet? Picked up Inscription? Maybe you’re a hunter and you’ve tamed yourself a Devilsaur? Let us know in the comments how the new patch is working out for you, or whether you’re just going to hold out until Wrath when it all really is new again!

See, this is the reason WoWhead has surpassed others like Thottbot and Alla in usefulness to me. I still do most of my searches over at WoWwiki, but when I need item information or quest information, it’s WoWhead all the way.

Now the fine folks at WoWhead have released something I’ve been dying for for a long time now, an easy way to compare two items that isn’t somewhat busted like Blizzard’s own “Find an Upgrade” feature on the Armory is. WoWhead’s Item Comparison Tool allows you to distinctly compare two items, multiple items, or even item sets against one another to see which is superior in the areas that matter to you.

See above? That’s where I’m comparing the Season 2 hunter PVP set against the Tier 4 hunter PvE set to see the differences. The tool couldn’t be easier to use – simply click to add an item and type in the name of the item or the item set to add it to the tool and get instant results. Never again will you have to go wondering if a specific item is an upgrade or not…unless that is, unless you’re in-game and have to make a snap decision once it’s dropped. Roll on it and decide later, I say! It’d be cool though if a tool like this came in the form of an add-on (are you listening, add-on developers?)!

Thanks much to one of my favorite WoW bloggers, Big Red Kitty for breaking the story!