Spell Upgrades: Power without the Bloat

Two problems present themselves when you have a game that lets you rise in power to level 100:

One is that you're going to have to give people a lot of abilities. Going through five, ten levels, without getting any new powers is pretty underwhelming. We want those levels to mean something.

The other is that we have too many goddamned abilities. You ever try to set up the action bars for a hunter? It's the stuff of nightmares.

Obviously, these two issues have the really deadly problem of directly contradicting each other. You can't solve one without making the other worse.

Or can you?

In Warlords of Draenor, we won't be getting any new baseline abilities. We'll get a new talent at level 100 (many, or even most of which are either passives or replace an existing ability) and that's it.

But you'd think that would feel kind of lame. I mean, going from 90 to 99, you'll be sitting with the exact same toolkit.

Ah! But it won't be exactly the same.

Many of your existing abilities will get buffs, or change the way they work. For example, the damage of Fireball may increase by 45% at one level. Or there might be more exciting changes. Assassination Rogues (as an example they gave) will get a pretty cool change to Slice and Dice: it becomes a passive. See, that's not only giving you more power without filling up your bars - it's taking something off your bars! (And something that was always kind of annoying to begin with.)

These are all certainly going to go through rigorous tuning before and after the expansion comes out, but it's an exciting prospect. (Fingers crossed for turning Backstab into just "Stab.")

While new abilities are shiny, our poor action bars are as crowded as our bank space.

Plus, the implementation of the talents means I get to use DEFILE.

DEFILE!