For tool makers

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

Copy the credit line

talents.json 213 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

• The marker names the talent trees the code was made on, because a digit means a different talent once a tree changes. v5_ is the trees of beta build 70291, today’s, and it is what a calculator link carries. v4_ is 70170’s trees (also those of 70245). v3_ is 70009’s trees (written until 1 October). v2_ was written from 20 September on and can be either 69913’s trees or 70009’s; a code with no marker is 69913’s. The calculator reads an older code on its own trees and says what changed. A build’s own page keeps v2_ in its path, read on today’s trees.
• What follows the marker 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/v6_574.050022-134.05232332120131012551/">
  <img src="https://wow-forever.gg/og/forever/build/druid-4b658e93d95610e5.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/#v6_574.050022-134.05232332120131012551">Open in the WoW Forever talent calculator</a></p>

<a href="https://wow-forever.gg/talents/druid/#v6_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/#v6_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.

<script src="https://wow-forever.gg/embed/tooltips.js" defer></script>

Copy the script tag 17 KB, 7 KB compressed

What it does

• It looks for ordinary links to https://wow-forever.gg/db/items/<id>-<name>/ and https://wow-forever.gg/db/spells/<id>-<name>/, for example https://wow-forever.gg/db/items/12640-lionheart-helm/. You write the link; the script never adds, moves or rewrites one.
• Hover shows the tooltip next to the pointer. Tabbing to the link shows it under the link, and Escape hides it. On a phone the first tap shows it and the second opens the page.
• Every tooltip ends in one line, wow-forever.gg, linking the record.
• Its look is sealed off from your page in both directions: your styles cannot change the tooltip, and its styles cannot touch anything of yours.
• A link you want left alone takes data-wf-tip="off", on the link or on anything around it.

What it does not do

• No cookies, no storage, no analytics, no tracking of any kind, of you or of your readers.
• Nothing is fetched when your page loads. The only request it ever makes is the tooltip of a link somebody pointed at, tabbed to or tapped, sent without cookies and without saying which page it came from.
• Nothing breaks when it cannot reach us. The link stays a plain link and your page carries on.

Try it

Point at these, or tab to them. They are plain links, handled by the same script tag as above.

• Lionheart Helm (item)
• Miner's Revenge (item)
• Red Linen Shirt (item)
• Fireball (spell)
• Heroic Strike (spell)
• Flash Heal (spell)

Free to use. On any site, commercial or not, with no key and no sign-up. The link itself is the credit: keep it pointing here and the tooltip does the rest.

A feed entry is the title, the date and the link, so the post in Discord opens the page here, where the figures and the pictures are. Nothing to credit: linking the page is the credit.

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.

What we publish · About this site