August 28th, 2012 by Bill Noddin
It’s that time again where Blizzard is preparing to release is next World of Warcraft expansion and patch 5.0.4 goes live today. As with any World of Warcraft expansion the method for doing things will be changing for some processes and lots of new features will be added This is part one of a series looking at these changes for Mists of Pandaria expansion.
Today we look at the new talent and specialization system that went live in patch 5.0.4. No longer are your talents tied to your specialization. Also your talents are no longer part of trees. Looking at specializations these are now used to dictate what skills you have access to when that spec is active. Talents now carry across your character regardless of what specialization you have active, so you will want to take more time deciding which ones to choose, as you will select 6 total talents over the 90 levels of your character. Every 15 levels you will have the opportunity to choose from one of 3 talents for that level. That means that if you want 2 of the talents that they give you at level 15 sorry you have to choose 1 and no you can’t go back and pick it at say level 30.
Blizzard has said they were making these changes as people were still not able to access all of the core functionality of a given spec but still wanted to allow the player control over how their character “grows” as it levels. While I see the thought process behind this and completely agree with it I’ll be anxious to see what classes become over powered now. There is no way that you can give all of the skills designed for each spec to a class an not have at least one of them be OP. I’m also curious as to how much harder the game play will become and how similar characters will become. That was one nice thing with the old tree system you could have 10 feral druid and in theory have 10 different make ups. The new system definitely reduces the customization outside of how Blizzard thinks a class should be played.
With 5.0.4 now live I encourage you to check out the new talent calculator on the Blizzard site and start planning since when you log in your talents will have been reset. You can reach the calculator at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/mists-of-pandaria/feature/talent-specification
Stay tuned for part 2 where we will look at the new challenge mode and pet battle systems.
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