The Huge Talent Overhaul

When Cataclysm came out, people cried bloody murder over the changed talent trees. Yet now, with the pre-Mists patch, the old talent system has been utterly obliterated. Some day, newer players will hear "talent spec" and assume you're just talking about two separate but related systems, rather than that single defining monstrosity that determined all of your characters non-baseline abilities and all of their passive effects.

Now, I've grumbled a whole hell of a lot about Active Mitigation (though playing Jarsus a bunch on live and having set up some new Weak Auras - the new version of Power Auras - has helped me get more comfortable with it,) but man do I like this new system.

The problem with the old talent trees was that you were kind of locked in to a certain progression. Talented abilities were typically granted one every ten levels (every two tiers,) which meant that while some specs would receive important abilities they needed, others that could function fine with the baseline stuff would get a whole bunch of utility or fluff. Not only that, but you also had to place the spec-defining talents high enough that other specs could not access them. Basically, the talents worked differently at low and high levels. If you were level 18, you just had to deal with being totally broken until you got to a high enough level that you could reach the tiers the other specs couldn't.

Then, of course, there was the problem that certain talents really were mandatory (think Fingers of Frost for Frost Mages,) which inevitably meant that you were just going to have to not take certain talents. The cookie cutter builds got a little less rigid in Cataclysm, but there was still a "right way" to spec.

Of course, nowadays there is a "right way," but because there's no real choice, the game makes it for you, and instead you get to choose between much more dynamic talents.

The other advantage of the new system is that specs can really, really go off the rails and act totally different from each other. Warlocks are a real showcase for this. Each of the three Warlock specs has a totally different secondary resource system (Destruction only nominally uses Mana anymore, in fact.) So while my Warlock will worry about building up Demonic Fury and making sure Corruption doesn't fall off while trying to get my Metamorphosis cycle to keep Doom up, yours will be building up Burning Embers to blast your foes away with gigantic Chaos Bolts.

One little thing I like is that Mages get to have a bit more of an elemental spread. When all of your talents come out of an element-aligned tree, you're really only going to be focused on Fire, Frost, or Arcane. Now, however, you can be a Frost Mage tossing Nether Tempests and Scorching around. In fact, if you're willing to use up the Major Glyph slot, Fire Mages can now use Frostfire Bolt as their main nuke (assuming the coefficient is the same. The tooltip with the glyph makes it appear identical to Fireball, except with the added slow.)

Now, we're in an odd time for the game, and we can't be sure all of this will be balanced at 90. Certain talents might become the obvious go-to ones. But even if that happens (and it may be inevitable) I still think that altogether, the freedom the designers have gotten out of these changes is worth it.