I really liked the new talents that came out with Mists of Pandaria. For those of you who are not old fogies (World of Warcraft came out half my life ago, which I'm sure would make older players think I'm very young, but more just makes me feel crazy that this game has been around so long,) and who also haven't checked out Classic (which I imagine is quite useful as a time machine,) originally WoW's "specializations" were nothing but the points you put into different talents. Every Paladin, for example, got certain abilities up through level 9 (which you had to pay for at a class trainer, and sometimes that training was expensive so you'd skip some abilities you didn't use!) and then got a single talent point at every level from 1 onward, investing those in one of three trees that corresponded to what we now know as specializations.
This continued through Burning Crusade and Wrath, with the trees getting deeper to account for more levels, but in Cataclysm, they made their first significant change to the system - at 10, you'd pick a specialization, which would come with certain bonuses and abilities immediately (Demonology Warlocks got their Felguard, for example,) and then there were smaller trees for each of them, and you'd only get a talent point every other level. You also could not put points into another tree until you had put enough into your primary tree to get the capstone talent (though you didn't need to take it - you just had to put in the 51 or whatever the number was points that would be required to get it). This did break a few things - one popular Mage build in Wrath was the Frostfire build, which centered around a new spell called Frostfire Bolt (which more or less got replaced with Flurry) and invested heavily in both the Frost and Fire talent trees, not putting enough in either to get all the way to the capstone talents. With Catalcysm's system, one could no longer do this.
And so, Mists blew that all away, creating more interesting choices (as opposed to things like "you do X% more damage" that were there to fill up space). This coincided with a pretty major rework of the specs - now that you simply learned spells and abilities appropriate to your spec, rather than having to find them on a talent tree and then get the "baseline abilities" from a class trainer, the specs started to diverge significantly. For example, all Warlocks used to use both Immolate and Corruption, and Destruction Warlocks only replaced Shadow Bolt when they got Incinerate on their trees.
And the Mists system has more or less been in place for ten years. Starting in Legion, we began to get other, complex systems that stacked on top of it to determine player power, like artifact weapons, Azerite armor, and covenant conduits. On one hand, the system was far simpler to switch out than the big, complex talent trees, but there was an issue: with only six or seven rows of talents, you were only getting a new talent to try out every fifteen levels or so. This created a ton of "dead levels" where you didn't really get anything new, and especially with level scaling introduced, the notion that these levels had any meaning was pretty lost.
The level squish helped with this a bit, but players and developers were reminded of the fun of that incremental progress one felt when gaining talent points under the old system. And I think that's why we've arrived here.
Now, back in the old days (like, pre-3.1,) you couldn't change your talents or your spec unless you paid your class trainer gold, and the amount that this cost grew each time you did it, seriously disincentivizing you from experimenting with different builds, and forcing you to commit to a role. I leveled my Paladin from 1-80 as Protection because of this (well, I guess 10-80 as you didn't really have a spec until level 10).
The first cracks in this rather draconian system came with 3.1, when "dual spec" could be unlocked at your trainer for 1000g (which used to be a fair amount).
Now, with the new system, you can swap talents any time you're not in combat. The complexity of the old trees remains, though the system is a little more free-form. I think there will be a kind of inertia that encourages players to look up online what the best theory-crafted build is, but the system is very flexible.
One thing that's interesting is that, much like your transmog outfits, you can save several builds to quickly swap between them. I think putting together a single-target build, an AoE build (possibly with a secondary "cleave" build) and a soloing build for your specs is probably a good way to use those.
I'm eager to see how these feel in the midst of the new expansion. Right now, we're missing ten talent points, after all.
Another thing of note is that there are now two trees you use at a time - the class tree and the specialization tree, which you get points for at alternating levels. I don't think I'd write one off as the "utility tree" and the other as the "performance tree," but this might serve to preserve a little mental bandwidth when switching specs.
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