Here's a question for you: Have you changed your talents drastically in Wrath? With 10 new talent points to spend and a couple new tiers to spend them on, there's a lot of temptations to keep a player guessing as to the exact perfect spec, and I know some people have spent a lot of money picking out and testing specs.

It's even easier to do with Hybrids. I know a lot of Protection Paladins are taking the opportunity to try Retribution for a while, and horror of horrors, I've even known a couple Feral Druids who have actually tried Moonkin form, if you can believe it. I find myself strangely unwilling to respec, so I'm sticking with my Unholy Death Knight, Feral Druid, and Beastmastery Hunter for now.

How are you doing on talents in Wrath? Have you decided on a build? Are you throwing money at constant respecs? Have you changed your spec 180 degrees from what it was in Burning Crusade?

Welcome to Scattered Shots, where Daniel Whitcomb is doing a special happy dance over that whole Aspect global cooldown removal thing.

Before we get into the meat of this week's column, I have a confession to make. I was tempted to make a very short column that consisted primarily of a recording of me making squealing noises that you would generally only expect to come from a giddy schoolgirl, punctuated by a bit of gibberish that might sound something like "Aspect of the Dragonhawk."

But that said, there's a lot of other things I could talk about, and I won't leave you hanging. It's a busy time in WoW, and Hunters have a lot of stuff to do now that 3.0.2 is out. By now, hopefully, your server has calmed down enough for you to get on, play around with learning all your companions and mounts, and start trying to figure out talent specs. Hopefully by now, you've seen some of our articles on the subject, such as Big Red Kitty's Hunter and Pet Talent overviews, and David Bowers' guide to exotic pets currently available in game. They're great resources, so I'm not going to attempt to replicate them here. Instead, I'm gonna focus on a quick and pertinent question:

You've finally found some time to play WoW, your server's stable enough to let you play WoW, and you've just logged on your Beastmastery Hunter for the first time since 3.0.2 went live. What do you do?

Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

We didn't make 80.

Nope, we were much more focused on obtaining a Spirit Beast for a hunter-guide movie. We failed.

But we spent hours patrolling in Sholazar Basin, playing with Gorilladin, making leatherworking gear, and trying out all the hunter talent trees while not leveling as fast as we could have. Actually, we leveled from 77 to 78 without doing any quests at all.

We also haven't run any dungeons or raids. OK, we did one Utgard Keep, but it didn't count. The entire party, except the healer, was was way over-geared for the place.

We also haven't done DPS-testing with Recount or Training Dummies in sufficient quantities to provide factual evidence of one hunter-tree's superiority over another.

We also haven't done hours of arena, battlegrounds, or PvP-zones. We've done a little, killed and been killed, but nothing that would give us a serious insight into the solutions that Blizzard has come up with to make our class more amenable to PvP.

But!

We have played all three trees, full 51-points each, for at least one entire level. We have tried just about every tree/pet-class combination at least once. Except Spirit Beast, natch.

And we've cranked our leatherworking to 432! /win!

So when we discuss the new hunter talent trees, keep in mind that your opinion of our opinion my vary. We may have some seriously beta-PvP-experienced hunters who disagree with some of our assessments of the new talents. We may have some Naxx-raiding hunters who disagree with some of our conclusions.

But that's OK! The major purpose of this column is to give you, the WoW Insider reader, a point of reference. You know our writing, you know our play-style. You should know our limitations and the areas at which we're not too shabby.

Read, absorb, analyze, and prepare to test to it all yourself on Tuesday.

Remember a little while ago on Ask a Beta Tester, someone asked if Jaina Proudmoore has any role in Wrath? And I said no, she has no new story involvement? Well, a recent beta patch made a fool out of me. She has a role, it's epic, and no she doesn't make out with Arthas you horrible, horrible people.

And with that out of the way, let's get on with the questions. Shadgalaul asked...

What about the whole dual-spec situation? Was this implemented, or did it just fade out and get scrapped?

This hasn't been implemented yet, and nobody is sure whether it's on hold or been scrapped. It seems like instead of giving dual specs, they're trying to make one spec be able to hold its own. For example, tanks are getting higher DPS so they can go off and do their quests without wanting to hang themselves. It's not a perfect solution and there are still a few balance issues, but I bet that if they shelved the dual spec thing, this is what they tried instead.

We may still see dual specs in the future, but we haven't so far.

Does Lake Wintergrasp seem dominated by only one class, or is it pretty even among the 80s?

Unholy Death Knights are the current "overpowered spec of the day" (formerly the role of Ret Paladins) so there's tons of those rocking face right now. Beyond that it's pretty difficult to judge, since Blizzard hasn't balanced all of the numbers yet and few people are in Resilience gear. The only really memorable thing are the absolutely enormous Scourge Strike crits. By enormous I'm talking numbers anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000, and since it's Shadow damage, your armor isn't going to do a darn thing to help. Luckily, I was healbotting one of those Unholy Death Knights rather than being on the receiving end. Death Knights are bloody fantastic at keeping people off of Healers, by the way.

yazah asked a couple of questions...

Why does the Scarlet Crusade employ Death Knights in Northrend? Doesn't that seem unlikely since they were slaughtered by them back in Tyr's Hand?

For some of you, it may strike you as a little early to be thinking about your level 80 talent builds - especially given that Wrath is still in alpha and everything we think we know about it may change - but I say, it's never too early to theorycraft. That is why I'm pleased to report that Wowhead, having gotten a chance to play some Wrath at WWI, made talent calculators for the Wrath alpha talents, including Death Knights. Now we can play with our shiny new builds to our hearts' content. Paladins and Hunters have not had their talents implemented in the beta yet, so you won't find them there, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Inveterate priest fan that I am, the first thing I did when I got my hands on this was make a build for my holy priest, and this is what I came up with: 14/57/0. Yes, I'm finally excited enough about Holy to spec away from Improved Divine Spirit; Guardian Spirit just looks too good to pass up, at least in its current form. As far as my Rogue goes, it depends on how Murder Spree ends up working, but I'm thinking either 21/50/0 (Cold Blood combat, yay!) or 20/51/0. Death Knights I still can't quite get my head around, but it sure is fun to play with their talents.