Inner Fire: Spec-ial Spec-ializations for Spec-ial People in 4.0.1

WoW Blogs - Inner Fire Priest Blog

Inner Fire: Bringing you weekly doses of Spiritual Goodness. Mmm, tasty.

IS THIS YOU? Still confused after Patch 4.0.1? You don’t know what the hell’s going on? Your fashion sense is rapidly declining, your knowledge of your class drifting away? FEAR NOT!

Inner Fire has returned, to help this strapping young fellow and others around the world cope with one of the most confusing issues (especially at this time of WoW) Warcraft has to offer us.

Mummy, what talent tree do I pick? Where do I click the buttons?

Inner Fire will show you how. Inner Fire is your Mother. Your caring, wondrous, guardian spirit, Inner Fire will point you in the right direction and will help bring you back to where you should be – Number 1. You’re always welcome here, you’re always number 1. Never gonna give you up.

Firstly, welcome back to Inner Fire! After a week off school I’ve been nipping around the UK visiting relatives and chasing those damned trick-or-treaters down the road for throwing various confectionary at me. Bags of sweets I just generously relinquished to them after their sodden attempts to inject fear into my heart with poorly applied white face paint, lashing of tomato ketchup to supposedly give the frightening illusion of blood and other various doodad’s including bin-lid mask’s and your sister’s old dressing gown turned into a cape or robe… or something. I still haven’t got back on WoW, since I got a new computer and re-installed WoW, I can’t actually log-in. Something about an Error 132. I sent a ticket off to Blizzard in the hope that they would live up to their standards of ticket answering; I quote: “Our usual response time to submitted issues is under 24 hours.” It’s now been 5 days. Ugh, wonderful, just wonderful.

It’s been a busy, hectic week. Expect the catch-up of Focus Magic tomorrow.  For now though however, I’ll jump straight into it. You may be wondering why the title is so strangely laid out; well, there’s subliminal messaging in that. Over pronounce the title as it comes, and you will (hopefully) work out, using common sense and that rare thing they call ‘a brain’, this issue of Inner Fire is all about specs!

Patch 4.0.1 has messed us up badly, and it’s time for Inner Fire to sort that out. Throughout this article we’ll be discussing the various potential specs for each Priest Talent Tree in different environments, which will hopefully increase your knowledge of this new patch further and give you a guideline on how you should spec to suit your playstyle.

Shadow

Beginning with Shadow PvE, it seems to be a pretty basic cookie cutter spec, with various tweaks lying about which can suit your play style. Just like the old talent trees, Shadow’s PvE spec is straightforward, and as the link will show, the mandatory talents are pretty obvious and all taken.

PvE Shadow - http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bcGoZZGbGdMzrd0fo 9/0/31 (+1)

+/- Psychic Horror,

+/- Phantasm

+/- Inner Sanctum

Choose between any of the 3 aforementioned choices to fill in your last talent point. Personally, I’d stick in a Psychic Horror, purely because I’m lazy and it would at least provide a little PvP utility and dueling prowess.

PvP Shadow - http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bZZhrGkrkMzdfo 0/0/32 (+9)

I’ve never been good with PvP specs, but this seems to be a good way to start you off. With a massive 9 points available for customization and preference after, what seems, the mandatory talents have been selected, this tree offers a lot of uniqueness to the player and can be very malleable to each player. Almost any common sense combination of the 9 remaining talents will be useful for your adventures within the battlegrounds and arenas.

Holy

Moving onto Holy, it seems that there is only one way to go with the PvE spec, not even leaving room for customizations branching off from the general tree. Follow the link and check out the tree for yourself, and of course if you have any suggestions, feel free to submit your own talent trees to me via the comments or the Kuurg contact page.

PvE Holy -  http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bcGoZfzrrRkrkcdo 9/32/0

Varying from the simpleness of the PvE Holy tree, the PvP tree, just like Shadow, holds a lot of room for tailoring to your needs. With 8 points to throw around after the mandatory talents have been placed, this spec could also single you out from other Holy Priests, and may really help flourish your play style in the heat of battle.

PvP Holy - http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bZrubrRkRkfdo 0/33/0 (+8)

Discipline

Discipline seems to be the most varied of the 3 PvE specs, since the last few points can be placed in such ways that Discipline will benefit from them depending on the player’s style of healing. Whether you prefer to spam your shield, renew or whatever, Discipline provides a lot of customization within the last few points. Of course, the importance of stats will play a big part and until Cataclysm hits, it’s hard to judge whether certain stats will be useful for certain specs.

PvE Disc - http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bfGorosbforofz: 33/6/0 (+2)

+/- Surge of Light (2)

+/- Inspiration (2)

+/- Surge of Light (1) & Inspiration (1)

+/- Darkness (2)

It seems all of our PvP specs are following a pattern. With 7 points up for grabs after the initial insertion of the mandatory talents, the Discipline tree within PvP seems much to be desired for certain playstyles. Whether you are an aggressive or defensive Disco PvP’er, the baseline of this spec along with the 7 points for you to spend as you will, should be able to separate you from the other Priests wandering around the battlegrounds. Show them how it’s done. It’s a known fact, those who read Inner Fire, win. Those who read Focus Magic, win. Those who actually LISTEN to what I say… well, I prefer not to speak about them. Check out the spec below.

PvP Disc - http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bbGsrRorfRbo 34/0/0 (+7)

Next week, or until I can find a talent calculator fulfilling my desires, we’ll look into leveling specs to suit the new patch, and the various glyphs kicking around for Priests. Apologies for the delay of this article, Inner Fire is back on track. Continued thanks to the readers, Thaesha out.

TL;DR – Priests are awesome.

Last Updated on Wednesday, 03 November 2010 00:41 Written by Thaesha Wednesday, 03 November 2010 00:28