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Blizzard Overhauling World Of Warcraft Talent System In Cataclysm
Last week marked the beginning of the closed beta for World of Warcraft's third expansion, Cataclysm. Yesterday, Blizzard announced a controversial new policy requiring users posting on the World of Warcraft forums to use their real names. Those two stories provide plenty of drama, but the WoW news train doesn't seem to be slowing, as today Blizzard has revealed a total overhaul of the talent system that their MMO has used from the beginning.
Each class in World of Warcraft has three different talent trees. Previously, players would gain one talent point per level and generally end up specializing (or "speccing") in one of those three talent trees. In the second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, players gained the ability to have two different builds for their characters (called dual speccing) that they can switch between at will.
Blizzard community manager Zarhym put up two long posts on the World of Warcraft forums explaining the change. The developer wanted to clean up the talent trees to make each talent you choose more exciting and interesting. They also wanted to make it so players don't necessarily need to have separate specs for PvE (player-versus-environment) and PvP (player-versus-player).
In the new system, players will choose a specialization at level 10, right when talents are first unlocked. Once they make this decision, they will be locked into that path and unable to put points into other trees until level 70. Rather than getting a talent point every level, players will only receive a talent point for levels where they don't learn a new skill, ending in 41 total talent points at the new level cap of 85.
Essentially this means the talent system will be a lot more straightforward and focused, but with less room for experimentation. If it really allows users to create specs that work in both PvE and PvP situations, it could be a fantastic change, but I'm guessing there will still end up being separate builds used by "serious" PvPers that are different from the builds a raider might use.
At first glance, this seems like yet another Cataclysm change that will make World of Warcraft vastly more approachable to new players, but it's difficult to tell how it will work by the time players are exploring the new level 80 to 85 content. Hopefully the new talent system will be implemented in the Cataclysm beta soon so that we can test it out for ourselves.
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