For tool makers

Talent trees and statistics from WoW Forever, https://wow-forever.gg (CC BY 4.0)

Copy the credit line

talents.json 212 KB, 33 KB over the wire

Not in this file. Costs, cooldowns and anything a talent record carries beyond the tree. Those belong to the ability, they move faster than anything here, and a stale copy of them in somebody’s spreadsheet is worse than no copy.

How a code is spelled

• v2_ names the layout. What follows it is <ranks>, and after a second underscore an optional <order>.
• <ranks> is one segment per tree that has points in it, joined with -. Trees with no points are left out.
• A segment is <tree id>.<digits>. The tree id is the id of a tree in talents.json.
• <digits> is one base 32 digit per talent of that tree, in the order that file lists them. The digit is the rank spent, from the alphabet 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv. Trailing zeros are trimmed, so a segment is often shorter than the tree, and a missing digit means no points.
• <order> is the click order, oldest point first: one character per point naming the talent’s position across every tree of the class, in the 62 character alphabet 0-9a-zA-Z. It is written only when the class has 62 talents or fewer and the reader clicked the order themselves, and it is advisory: the ranks decide what the build is.
• Only 0-9 a-z A-Z . _ - ever appear in a code, which is why it can also be a path segment.

What stays true

A v2 code keeps opening. The version marker is the whole point of the marker: if the layout ever changes, the new one takes a new prefix, and every link already shared goes on opening the build it was shared for. Codes written before the marker existed carry no prefix at all, and those still open too; the calculator rewrites them as v2 on the way in. Nothing else about a code is promised: which builds have a page of their own changes with what people make.

A decoder to copy

Plain JavaScript, no dependency. It reads a code against one class from talents.json and hands back a rank per talent id. It reads a code; it does not judge a build, so a code edited by hand can decode to more points than the calculator will show you.

// Read a WoW Forever build code against one class from talents.json.
// Returns { "<talent id>": rank }. It reads a code; it does not judge a build:
// the calculator replays every point through the rules, so a hand-edited code
// can decode to more points than the calculator will show.
const B32 = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv';

function decodeBuild(code, cls) {
  // 'v2_26.0503-27.5_a1b' and '#26.0503-27.5' and '26.0503' all read the same.
  const body = String(code).replace(/^#/, '').replace(/^v\d+_/, '').split('_')[0];
  const ranks = {};
  for (const segment of body.split('-')) {
    const dot = segment.indexOf('.');
    if (dot <= 0) continue;
    const tree = cls.trees.find((t) => t.id === Number(segment.slice(0, dot)));
    if (!tree) continue;
    const digits = segment.slice(dot + 1);
    tree.talents.forEach((talent, i) => {
      const rank = i < digits.length ? B32.indexOf(digits[i]) : 0;
      if (rank > 0) ranks[talent.id] = Math.min(rank, talent.max_ranks);
    });
  }
  return ranks;
}

Copy the decoder

<a href="https://wow-forever.gg/talents/druid/b/v2_574.050022-134.0523232123131210551/">
  <img src="https://wow-forever.gg/og/forever/build/druid-d5042425a178e94b.jpg"
       alt="Feral 9/42/0: a Druid talent build on WoW Forever"
       width="1200" height="630" loading="lazy">
</a>
<p><a href="https://wow-forever.gg/talents/druid/#v2_574.050022-134.0523232123131210551">Open in the WoW Forever talent calculator</a></p>

<a href="https://wow-forever.gg/talents/druid/#v2_26.35">
  <img src="https://wow-forever.gg/og/forever/calc/druid.jpg"
       alt="A druid talent build on WoW Forever"
       width="1200" height="630" loading="lazy">
</a>
<p><a href="https://wow-forever.gg/talents/druid/#v2_26.35">Open in the WoW Forever talent calculator</a></p>

The calculator’s own share sheet is unchanged. It follows the build on screen, and the build on screen usually has no card of its own, so a Copy embed button there would hand out the class card most of the time and look like it had failed.

stats.json 3 KB

Not in this file. Anybody else’s counting, whatever it says. The talent builds the community published before launch are counted separately, are never added to a live count, and are not here: they are not ours to hand on.

The database is the site itself: items, spells, quests, zones, routes and what changed since Classic are pages, with a tooltip, a picture and a sentence around every number, and they are not offered as files. Anything a reader shared with us is counted and never handed on as rows.

A field you need that is not here, a number that looks wrong, or something you built with these and want us to see: the Contact card on the home page reaches us, and we read everything.

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