This week, we shift gears a little. We have to talk about the constant evolution of the talent trees and class design in the beta test. The first thing we must keep in mind when we discuss the beta or PTR patches or anything like that is that the design is always evolving, and what’s currently on test may or may not make it to live. We saw a new patch with a whole host of abilities drop or change. We’ll see more of them. The purpose of looking at these patches is never “look, here’s what you will look like when you play in Cataclysm” but rather “look, here’s what they’ve done so far to the class and what we can learn from it.”

What we can see from the new talents is that more variety in terms of rage consumption and conservation is being worked into the system. As an example, Unbridled Wrath (never a particularly popular talent in the past couple of years) is gone, replaced by Battle Trance. This is indicative of the continuing paradigm shift on how rage should work for DPS players away from a simplistic “do anything you can to get more” design and towards a more nuanced, perhaps even complicated, way to look at rage, rage generation and rage consumption.

The arms talent Deadly Calm is an example of a talent designed around the oft-mentioned “disciplined, soldiery feel of arms,” one that seeks to give the spec that cool-under-fire sense, to contrast it from fury’s barbaric direction. With Deadly Calm, I see the beginning of strategy in terms of how and when to use rage as an arms warrior. If you’re close to activating Inner Rage, using Deadly Calm will let you still unleash that flurry of Mortal Strike, Overpower and Executes without preventing you from gaining the 50% damage increase for your special attacks.