Wellington said:
Shaman users, I have not assigned any talent points yet because I am worried about being able to reach the bottom of one of the chains. What do you suggest, focos on elemental, enhancement, or restoration? Shamanistic rage is at the bottom of enhancement.
Most of the starting talents for each tree are useful no matter what builds you end up with. Convection, Ancestral Knowledge and Tidal Focus are all good even if you're not sure what you want to be from the get go. After that, you should have at least a direction you want to focus in. If you see yourself as an offensive caster at all, should aim for Elemental Focus. If you know you want Nature's Swiftness, then you need to put some points into Restoration.
It really depends on your playstyle. I duoed my way to 60 with a friend that plays a warrior, and I know I'm more comfortable as a support character (I was a white mage in FFXI, a healing controller in CoH), so I went Restoration since the very beginning. If you find yourself playing alone mostly, Enhacement or Elemental will make your life easier. Not saying you can't solo as Restoration, but it requires patience, since everything will take probably twice as long to do.
Ferrio said:
-Can't decide which alchemy spec to go into. Transmute sounds like it might make a lot of money... but that's only if everyone doesn't go transmute (which sounds like they are). Not only that but I've been reading people have made up to 5 primal mights in one transmute (which will drive prices down). On top of that, who knows how widely transmutes will be needed. Other option is elixirs ... which I really love. Finally potions which don't sound good, but elemental protection potions were hot sellers for raiding guilds. If you went potion spec you might be able to make quite a bit of change when raiding starts up.
My thoughts on this is every (competent) raiding guild will/should have at least one potion and one elixir master, and with the reduced raid size to 25 (therefore, less people to supply consumables to), those players will probably not be purchasing many, if any, outside of the guild. Especially with the new mastery option, I'd imagine herbalism would make more money, since for the price of the materials, you have now a higher chance to walk away with more of the end products than you paid for, who besides those that have too much gold to spend would in their right mind buy the pots? I'm also expecting the market to be flooded with them, and historically on my server the pots never sell as often or as fast as the herbs to make them.
In regards to transmutes, well, it seems that all high level crafting requires some kind of primal, more so than the essences of the past (even the protection pots need them now). However, the motes for all intents and purposes seem a lot easier to farm than the essences, even if you do need 10 to make one primal. Then there's the fact that you can only do it once every 24 hours, so the chance of producing more than one primal is pretty small compared to the other two mastery.
Anyway, I'm not approaching my decision as to which one will make the most money, because personally, I don't think the profession itself will produce much profit, unless you are among the first to discover the rare recipes (like transmute fire to mana) to control the market, but the fact is that no matter what mastery you choose, everyone has the same chance of discovering them. I'll be choosing transmute to make my life (and my friend's) life easier, I don't mind harvesting, but I really hate farming mobs for drops. Hopefully it will aslo save us money in the long run.