What I Love, and the Quest for Perfection

I am so giddy! The patch is slated to come out tomorrow! I haven't been this excited about a patch before since...ever. Tonight in my guild's Vent we spent a lot of time just talking about talents, about the Pally class and what just the 2.0 patch brings overall (stacking HoTs! 40 debuff slots! ZOMG!).

One of my favorite things in World of Warcraft is talking about talent builds. Sharing talent builds is such an extraordinary process that I find a lot of joy in. How someone spent their talent points is a reflection upon that person's persona in so many aspects.

Depending on where the talents are you can tell so many things: if they want to go healing or tanking or DPS, if they raid or if they PVP, if they know the class very well, if they know the synergy of the trees or if they know the power and weakness of specific talents, or perhaps even if they simply are experimental and make you go "damn, I've never thought about that before!". It makes you able to draw general assumptions and kind of go through their character and in to the player's mind.

Personally, I love it. You know why this is so fun? Because there truly is ever no "wrong" build. There certainly are ones that are unanimously can be considered weaker or stronger than others - but still, if you analyze what that person was thinking you might go "Oh yeah, that's right". Finding the perfect build that suits your needs to the max is a constant struggle and process. We all are individuals with different goals and needs, and that's why there can't be a perfect build that fits everyone. Not only because this game is so dynamic in the sense of where and how we use are characters, but because what we do and what philosophy we have might change over time.

So, that is what I thought about tonight as we were talking. One of the guys who is a really great fellow (you just know when he's talking that he's a sweet guy) shared with us his planned build for his Pally. He would probably considered to be a relatively casual player (my guild encompasses all different kind of people). And tonight he told us to check his planned build out. So after looking at it, me and a Sulfuras Pally were in a bit of awe at how he could spend the points in the way he did. The Sulfuras Pally tried to be as constructive and as in a compassionate way possible convene the message that maybe he could redirect his some of his points elsewhere to make complete it and make it more well-rounded.

As we were going through we kind of realized that, despite the fact that what we thought looked like a pretty bad build, was something that was he was perfectly striving for with his character. We let him reason with us and he gave us his arguments. For example he had picked Improved Seal of Righteousness plus Seal of Command. An experienced player would probably consider that to be a bad move as most of the time you always end up using one specific Seal any way, plus that SoR kinda stinks in its current conception. But he reasoned with us that he wanted to improve SoR so he got get a more constant stream of Holy damage to make better use of Improved Righteous Fury to aid his tanking, whereas he went up to pick SoC so he could use that Seal when he feels like DPS:ing. I mean, here's a guy who wants to be able to tank, heal and do DPS when he wants to - so he specs for it.

Argue against it all you want, but he's not wrong: Imp SoR will aid his tanking and SoC will aid his DPS. He got what he wanted. Is it optimal for what he wants to do? Arguably not. Are the other solutions? Definitely. But to him it made perfect sense because it suits his needs. When it comes to the point where he feels it doesn't, he'll learn from it, respec, and construct a build that's more fluid to his developing playstyle.

So in conclusion: where we spend our points reflects who we are what we want. All of us think differently and have different goals and objectives. What I learned from this experience tonight was that there are people out there who play the Paladin in such a different way from me. When that guy looked at the Pally talent tree he didn't go like I do and ask myself "should I tank, heal or DPS?". He went "I want to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that!". I ended up giving him some tips and as a suggestion to him made my own tri-spec build, which was fun to create.

Now it's way late at night and I'm dirt-tired. I've slept only seven hours in the last three days. Can't wait to wake up tomorrow and try out the new patch.