Starting out

I always find it difficult to figure out how to spend my talent points on a new character. In most cases I have a good idea which tree I want to go down, but for some classes there just isn't a clear cut path down the list of talents. This has most recently come up on my new paladin. When I hit level 10 I knew I wanted to go with retribution for leveling, but looking at the two first tier talents, I had no idea which one to take. Unfortuanately I'm at work and pretty much every WoW site is blocked so I can't see what the talents actually are, but I do remember looking at them and just having no idea which talent would be the better one to take in the long run. I've actually been having the same problem with most of my newer characters, but for some reason it was a lot easier with my older characters. I'm not sure if it's because I just didn't think it was as big a deal before, or if maybe some classes just have talents that are obviously better but some don't. Lets go over some of my choices and you can judge them as you see fit.

For my rogue I went pretty much all combat from the start, and while I've respecced a few times, I am still combat with some points in other trees for various must have talents. The rogue was my first character ever, I picked where to put my talents based on nothing other than what I thought looked cool, never really looking ahead to where I would end up, and I actually didn't do too badly my first time, but I did streamline it a bit later on.

The druid started out feral, and still is, but I put points into other trees too early and I'm level 63 with no mangle. I know, shame on me, but I really don't want to spend the money to respec so I'm just gonna get mangle when I get there. His other talents are a few in resto and then a bunch in balance. What I was really trying for was insect swarm for some reason, but now I don't really think it was such a great idea. Looks like I'll have to respec at some point no matter what.

I started a priest solely for the purpose of getting shadowform, and thats what I did. Everything went into shadow, and when I got shadowform I put the next five points into wand specialization, then went all into shadow again until I was satisfied. I have put a few more points in discipline since then, but not much, and overall I'm pretty happy with my build.

The hunter I really wasn't sure about at first. The marksman tree looked good at first, so I went that way at first until I got Aimed Shot. Then I took a look at beast mastery and decided my pet could use some buffing and went that route. Somewhere in there I made a detour to survival for Hawk Eye to get a little more range, but that's all I have in that tree. At this point you might notice a trend of not being able to stick with one tree all the way to the top tier talents without switching to another, but I think the final outcome is more important than how you get there.

My last Alliance character is my shaman, and she took some though, but I decided to go enhancement, and this time I stuck with my choice and have yet to stray from that tree. I just really wanted a melee character that could dish out a lot of damage and take a beating, and the shaman fits that role quite well. Not much more to say about this one.

On to the Horde characters, and these guys aren't as far along so I'll just mention the plans I have for them. The mage is definitely going all out frost in the intention of getting a water elemental that I can summon at the end, and also because I just really want to throw balls of ice at enemies and keep them from hitting me, plus I'm on a PVP server. The warrior will be going all out fury. I thought about arms at first, but I love being able to dual wield, and I've been reading that fury gets you the most rage generation when soloing. I mentioned the paladin earlier, so those are my Horde characters that I have definitive plans for already.

There is one class however, that I'm not really sure which talent tree I even want to go down, and that would be the warlock. At this point I have one at level 12 and I put my first few points into destruction for now, but I'm still not sure if that's what I really want to do with her. What I really want to do eventually is get a Felguard. Yeah, I know, I need to go all the way down the demonology tree to get that and I already went the wrong way, but from what I've read, that tree isn't the best for leveling until you get a Felguard. So I decided to look at other options and I will respec to demonology when I get to level 50. What I was really looking for was the fastest way to kill things, and while affliction focuses mainly on the DoT and debuff abilities, destruction seems to boost your burst damage and make you more like a mage. I'm actually considering putting 5 points into Improved Corruption right off the bat to get the instant cast, then going all into destruction for the rest of my talents. It might not be the most effictient distribution of my points, but since I'm not boosting any of my other DoT abilities, I figure I may as well try to save time casting them so I have more time to throw other spells. That's my plan so far anyway.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated for any of the classes, so if you few people that may actually read this have something to contribute to help me make some of these decisions then feel free to leave a comment. Armory links are at the top right of the page if you want to check out the builds I have so far and I don't mind if you critique them, just keep in mind that I am not so much focused on where I am currently as where I will end up at the top level, but if there are some obvious bad decisions I want to know about it.