Draenor Perks Now Every Other Level

With the giant ability-purge going on in Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard obviously had to address the problem of new abilities. Traditionally, each expansion's additional levels has added a few new abilities and talents. Stuff like Bloodlust/Heroism, Colossus Smash, Shield of the Righteous, and Fan of Knives were all new abilities that were gained in the higher levels of their debut expansions, though many of these abilities went through big changes and were readjusted to come at earlier levels.

Anyway, the problem of giving every spec a few new abilities and talents is that, after four expansions, you get the situation that exists today - with huge, bloated spell books. So while the main focus of the ability purge has been to cull the books - significantly cutting back on a lot of redundancies (like having two damage cool downs you're just going to macro together) and crowd control abilities (something they just generally want to reduce - though not get rid of them completely,) they also wanted a way to make people feel cool as they leveled up through Draenor. It's always a little unsatisfying when you hit a new level and nothing really happens. The talent system that existed through Wrath of the Lich King ameliorated this by giving you a talent point every level, but then of course you had to spend several points into certain talents before they really had a noticeable effect (if then.) But of course, after Cataclysm tweaked and then Mists of Pandaria completely rebuilt the way that talents worked, you don't have that incremental power increase except with the standard "you have more attack power now." Hitting 87 and getting your new ability is pretty cool, but of course if you kept doing things that way - even with only two really new abilities per expansion - you'd still wind up eventually bloating out the spell books.

So the perks, being passive, were meant to give you cool stuff as you climbed to 100 without making you find another spot for a button. Indeed, in some cases, it allows you to take a button off your action bar (Assassination gets Slice and Dice as a passive.)

Now, cutting the number of perks so that they only come every other level does, in a sense, defeat the point. You'll still have "empty levels."

That said: some of the perks were just really, really boring.

I don't know if there is a fixed order (that is just hidden from you) or if it's meant to be random, but leveling up a death knight from 90-91 (which I did at least twice, thanks to character wipes,) the first perk I got was Improved Diseases. It made my Frost Fever and Blood Plague do 20% more damage. Now, diseases are not an insignificant part of a DK's damage, but those are definitely not the numbers you're watching. Basically, it was hard to tell a difference.

Many of the perks are of this "20% higher" variety, which is frankly pretty dull, and really amounts to nothing at all, because once all your key abilities have those perks, it's as if none of them do. Because of its need for balance, WoW is kind of a zero-sum game. If everyone deals more damage, then the enemies are going to have to have more health.

The plan, as I understand, is to cut these out (baking them into the baseline abilities so that they don't have to rebalance the world) and instead focus on the more interesting perks. For example, Frost Mages get "Empowered Water Elemental," which gives the Water Elemental a cool new rotational ability that will really change things up for the rotation (long story short, it gives you some on-demand Fingers of Frost charges.) Arcane Mages get Enhanced Blink, which gives them a little speed-boost after using Blink. DKs get Enhanced Soul Reaper, which lets it deal damage at 45% or lower, rather than 35%, which makes it a much bigger part of the core rotation.

I haven't looked at a comprehensive list of what perks made the cut, but I think this probably will work out. What I hope is that these will always come on odd-numbered levels, as each even-numbered level will unlock quests for a new zone - give you a reason to get excited for every level!

And of course, the level 100 talents remain, so we will get that slight bump in bloat (though there are definitely some passive options or spells that replace other spells for just about every class.)