Having recently stumbled across a couple of very nifty addons, I thought I’d give some of them a plug here. First off the block is Talented, an ACE mod that helps with picking a talent spec, planning future specs, and respeccing. It’s particularly useful if you respec between a couple of ‘standard’ specs fairly regularly – for instance, if you spec tank or healer for raids and then back to DPS for your weekday soloing.

Talented is invoked by bringing up your normal talent window; it enhances and replaces it. Here it is in Normal mode:

In Normal mode it acts just like the normal Talent window, except that you can see all three of your trees side-by-side.

From the Mode menu, you can select Template mode to work with the other features of Talented:

Here you have the ability to create multiple talent templates; they don’t actually change your character in any way, they’re just a preset talent spec that lets you play around with your options. You can save each spec as a template (and for convenience’s sake, you can just copy your current spec to a template as well). For instance, I have a saved template called “40/21 Healer/OT” (which is my standard raid spec) and another called “49/12 Tankadin” (which is the spec I use on those rare occasions when I’m needed to change to Protection spec). The templates are available across multiple characters (and are coloured in the menu by class color, so they’re easy to tell apart), so you can see all your characters’ specs from any character.

In addition, you can set Talented to automatically spend all your talent points on a spec when you respec at a trainer, which is really handy for respeccing in a hurry. Ten minutes before the raid and one of our tanks hasn’t shown up? I can grab an benched healer to fill my raid slot and go respec to Protection with a minimum of fuss and bother. Not to mention it solves all those nasty problems where you lag or misclick, mis-assign a point and have to blow anywhere from 15 to 50 gold resetting everything back to zero again so you can get it right this time.

The Mode menu also allows you to export your template: to a chat window, worldofwarcraft.com talent calculator URL, or WoWhead talent calculator URL.

All very handy! I haven’t been using Talented long, but I am expecting it’s going to be rather useful, especially for characters I’m still levelling. Thumbs up.