World of Warcraft Newbie Guide 17: The "Problem" Is Choice - Talents

While the Dungeon Finder is a great feature that will probably encompass a good chunk of your group play time, there is another feature available starting at level 15. This feature is known as talents, which are a group of active and passive effects available to your class, regardless of specialization. Talents are available every 15 levels, totaling three choices of talents per tier for six tiers. While there's not much to go over regarding talents, this brief article will cover how to choose talents (there is no advice on optimization, as many choices are roughly equal in strength) and unlearn them.

Learning Talents and the Talent Window

When you reach level 15, you can access your talents by pressing N (or clicking on Specializations and Talents in the menu) by default and navigating there using the tabs below the window (click on "Talents"). You should see something like this (varies based on class):

These are the talents available to a Priest.

From here you can use any unspent talent points. You can spend one talent point per tier. Each tier is independent in the sense that you are not required to spend talent points in previous tiers to access following tiers as long as you meet the level requirement and thus received the talent point for that tier. When you choose your talent(s), you can lock in to confirm your talent choices, causing them to become greyed out like this, showing you your selected talents:

After locking in you can use your talents immediately. You can drag talents by clicking and holding specific abilities that you've learned and dragging them onto your action bars (or you can use the Spellbook).

Unlearning Talents

Keep in mind that talents generally share a similar trait (modifies an existing ability, has similar mechanics, etc) and thus each talent may have some situation where it is more useful than the others. In some cases, it is something of a stylistic difference. In any case, talents are worth experimenting with at all stages of the game, but how does one unlearn talents?

There are two ways to unlearn your talents. The former is to use your class trainer to reset all your talents. However, the option is there partially as "convenience" and also because it's an old dialogue option back when talents were tied directly to specializations and talent points were given starting at level 10. Also one other thing to note is this method is extremely cost-inefficient (Example: At level 90, it costs 23 gold to unlearn all your Talents through your class trainer, using the latter method which I will mention right after this, it costs about 3 gold.)

Thus, I recommend using the latter method, which is using one of the following items to unlearn talents. You can check which material you need by checking the window here:

Until you reach level 80, you use Vanishing Powder to remove talents.

If you have the material available, you can Shift-Right Click one of the talents you have learned to unlearn it. Confirming the prompt unlearns the talent and uses one piece of the aforementioned material. You can also cause the prompt to pop up by clicking another talent you are able to use, but cannot because you already have a talent set for that tier. This method is great because the materials are very inexpensive and you can unlearn talents anywhere as long as you're not in combat.

Not Much Else To Say But...

Now that you have all the general information you could need on talents, go forth and experiment with your new-found powers. Just remember to learn your new talents every 15 levels.