Patch soon

Next week the long awaited patch 3.0.2 will be here, and I'm looking forward to having some fun with it. I know this is not exactly a good thing for some people, but I think it's going to make my leveling a little easier from here on out.

First, my shammy gets to summon ghost wolves. How sweet is that? I never got to similar talents with other classes. In order for a druid to summon trees he has to go down the balance tree, but I stuck with feral. I never got a mage up to a high enough level to summon a water elemental and the shaman won't be high enough to summon her elementals for a while either.

I was a little worried about leveling a pally with the only good leveling tree being retribution, and even that wasn't that good. Well from what I've read it looks like it might not be so bad now. I'm not sure if it will still be boring compared to other classes, but I'm hoping it will at least make things go a little faster.

The warlock being able to turn into a demon sounds pretty cool. Only problem for me is my warlock hasn't graduated from the Ghostlands, and with the death knight coming soon it may be a while before I even get close to the level I need to get that talent.

First order of business for my hunter is to get a new pet. I will keep the cat around still, but it looks like I have some much better options now. I always wanted to try out a turtle, but I really do like killing things fast more than being able to outlast them.

I was sort of hoping that more pet families would be made available, but with each family having its own special skill, I think it leaves hunters more able to set themselves apart from other hunters.

I'm not too excited about the rest of the class changes. I really don't see anything jump out at me from them. I guess the mage getting Frostfire Bolt is interesting, and the druids getting specific feral talents for cats and bears will change things up a bit. Those seem like pretty small changes compared to some of the others though.

I guess it just seems like the rest of the class changes and talents are meant to streamline the classes and their corresponding builds. Blizzard knows what the most popular talents are, and it looks like they are starting to figure out which talents are really useless and are looking to change that to get some more unique builds.

For anyone who has done any research into talents and which ones to choose we come across many different reasons why a talent looks good, but may not be worth getting over others.

Many times they require too many points. A talent can be good in theory, but if it requires 5 points you really have to think about whether it's actually worth using 5 points on. In some of these cases the new talents have been lowered to only 2 or 3 points, maybe making them more viable.

Other talents would be very good except that they just don't give enough of a boost. In this case there are a lot of talents that have had their numbers increased, usually the ones that have to do with increasing by a certain percentage.

Some of the current talents just aren't good. They may have started out as a good idea when the game was made, but given how we have come to play the game, there are talents that just don't apply. Sometimes they would try to improve these talents by making them do what they do better, but given that they were useless in the first place it didn't really matter.

I'm noticing some changes to these talents again in the upcoming patch, but this time they are changing them altogether, and they might actually be worth taking now.

I'm being pretty vague here, but that's mainly because I am blocked from most WoW sites here at work and I can't think of the names of any specific talents, otherwise I would give some examples. Either way I'm looking forward to seeing what these new talents can do.