How the TBC Talent Calculator works
Nine classes, three trees each, read from the game's own tables. No transcript, no video, no typing.
Where the trees come from
The Burning Crusade Classic anniversary client carries its talent trees in its own database tables: which tree a talent sits in, its row and column, one spell per rank, its prerequisites, and each rank's tooltip as a template with the numbers held in a second table. wago.tools publishes those tables for every client build, and a script of ours reads them and fills every template from the game's numbers. The page footer names the build the trees were read from.
Nothing here is typed by hand. A tooltip our script cannot fill does not ship: the file is refused until it can. One kind of value is written as the game's formula rather than a number: a talent whose damage is a share of your attack power says "45% of your attack power", because a calculator has no character to read attack power from.
The rules the calculator enforces
- One talent point a level from 10 to 70: 61 points.
- A tree's next row opens at five points in that tree; the 41-point talent sits in the ninth row.
- A talent that names a prerequisite needs it at the stated rank.
- A point comes back only when nothing above it still needs it.
Checking our work
There is no published transcript to check Burning Crusade's trees against, so the check is by hand: a dozen well-known values (Improved Corruption's 0.4 seconds, Endurance's 1.5 minutes, Deflection's 5%) read against the in-game tooltips before the file shipped, and every tooltip scanned for a zero where a number belongs.
What Simulate does
Under the trees is a Simulate button. Pick gear — a phase's best-in-slot list, exactly as it was simmed on the BiS page, or a raider's own, looked up the way the Raider Lookup looks one up — and it runs two combat simulations on that same gear: one with the points you have set, one with wowsims' published build for the spec. Both are run fresh, at 1,000 iterations each, so the only thing that differs between the two numbers is the talents. The result is three tiles — this build, the other, and the gap between them in the spec's own measure: damage per second, or damage taken for a tank, where less is the better number. Save build keeps the points and the level in your browser (nothing leaves it), and a saved build of the same class can stand in for wowsims' preset as the one this build is compared against.
Two things it is not. wowsims publishes one talent build per class, so seven specs are simulated against a neighbour's build rather than their own; where that happens the panel says so under the result, and the figures are then a comparison rather than a claim about what that spec does. And healing has no simulator at all, so the spec buttons only offer the specs that can be simmed. A thousand iterations is the interactive count this site uses everywhere — fast enough to press twice, and wide enough at the margins that two runs a fraction of a percent apart should be read as the same answer.
Sharing a build
The build is in the address. Copy it and the link reopens the same points; an old link against newer trees keeps whatever is still legal and drops the rest. The gear you picked to simulate against is not in the link: that is tonight's question, not a fact about the build.
Ads, and what they pay for
There are two ad slots: one in the side rail on wide screens, one below the results. They are never put between a raider and their data, they hold their space so nothing jumps under your cursor, and the side one disappears on narrow screens rather than squashing the table. All of that describes what happens once an ad unit is approved. None is, so today neither slot is filled and neither one takes up any space at all.
They pay the bills. Simulating a full raid is a couple of minutes of computing time per report, and that costs real money. There is no paywall and no account, and nothing about the audit changes depending on whether an ad loads — block them and the tool works exactly the same.
Credit where it is due
The audits, the checks, and every choice about how a number is read, labelled and shown are this site's own. The raw material underneath has earned its credit: every dps number here is produced by wowsims' simulator — their simulator, their rotations, their talent builds — and the item database comes from them too. It is open source under the MIT licence, which is what makes a tool like this possible at all.
The best-in-slot lists and item scores are wowtbc.gg's. Where their score and their own pick disagree, this tool goes with the pick — they chose that item knowing what it does.
Game data and item art come from Blizzard Entertainment's official API. World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade Classic are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard, wowsims or wowtbc.gg.
Privacy
No account and no user database; the server keeps one line per request for 14 days, plus a cache of the public Warcraft Logs responses it fetches. The privacy page spells out exactly what is recorded and what is not.