WoW dev talks Cataclysm talent changes

Recently on the World of Warcraft official forums, Blizzard Community Team member Vaneras offered more insight as to how the company will be revamping talent trees to coincide with the launch of Cataclysm, World of Warcraft’s third expansion:

I think this thread is a good place to highlight a few things in regards to our plans on changing the talent trees in Cataclysm.

All talent trees will be changed in Cataclysm so that there will be less emphasis on valuable but boring talents that only provides passive increases to damage or healing. Basically we want to make the fun niche and utility talents more available and attractive by making them feel less expensive. We will most surely still see “cookie cutter” builds in cataclysm, but there should be fewer “mandatory” talents in those builds, which will allow you to spend more points elsewhere.

Some talent trees will see considerable changes, whereas others will see fewer changes, but it is not our intent to remove old favourites or completely change the focus of the trees. You will have to rethink your builds for sure, but you should still be able to easily identify the purpose of the different trees just like you can today.

We will also be looking into streamlining the trees a little more in order to avoid things like for an example Warlocks having two conflicting range increasing talents, and some trees will as a result of this get completely new abilities. These new abilities are of course in addition to the new level 81+ abilities.

We have no plans to deepen the talent trees though, so the 5 additional talent points you will get for the new levels will instead provide some interesting opportunities for previously unseen builds, such as being able to place 51 points in one talent tree and 21 points in another.

The conceptual outcome of these changes are interesting to contemplate. With more “cookie cutter” builds and less mandatory talents, it begs the question: What do you think the talent trees will look like without bland talents?  Will Blizzard integrate the passive bonuses into active talents? Let us know what you think by registering or posting below.