I’ve got a secret to let you in on: Just because you *can* go all the way through to the bottom of Classic talent trees for any given spec doesn’t mean you *should*!
Over the years, talents and builds have become increasingly simplified. But during Vanilla, players regularly customized their builds based on how they planned to spend their time, with a goal of not having to pay their hard-earned gold to respec constantly.
That’s why even though I raid healed, my druid never put more than 31 points in her restoration build. Never. Ever. Yet I was pretty much always at the top of the druid healing charts, and never ran out of mana. And I was a menace in PvP too. And that was all thanks to the way I spent my talent points.
Find and Enhance Your Classic Play Style
While there are some healers who loved the challenge of keeping their tanks alive, I wanted to keep *everyone* alive. That meant I needed a quickly replenished mana pool, and to downrank and heavily rely upon my HoTs. And that’s where the Balance talent tree came in.
In addition to buffing druid pew pew pew lazers, the Balance talent tree also provides crits for your healing spells and buffs your mana regen. Because all that moonfire spam comes at a high mana price.
My preferred talent build for early on in Vanilla was a variation on the “Moonglow” build. As my gear improves, I’ll shift things around and put more points into buffing my regrowth in the restoration tree. But at absolutely no time will you ever see me filling out one of the talent trees all the way down.
While it may take you some time to get into the groove with your Classic build, I encourage you to spend some time theorycrafting and trying out different talent builds until you find one that helps you get into the zone with how *you* want to play your class.