The new talent system sounds great, especially with the 40-point talents being moved to the start of the tier. Frost mages getting water elemental at 10 is awesome, if they go ahead with that.
For anyone who doesn’t have a clue what Palooka is talking about here’s the blue post.
It feels like they’re really redesigning the talent system from the ground up this time, and not just adding stuff to the old designs(which date back to vanilla).
I can’t wait to see the actual talent trees.
This is the key.
I recently created a Shaman, planning to level Enhancement. Knock out the first 10 levels quick, think “woo-hoo, go go talent points”, and see my options are a passive 2% INT bonus or passive buffs to a few totems. The first real “Enhancement Shaman” talent is probably Dual-Wield at level 40.
Putting real style-changing spells at the top of the tree and pruning those silly 2/4/6% INT buff talents is a huge improvement (or things like the 5-point 1% per point flat damage boost hunters have in the first level of the SV tree).
Imagine a Druid that gets Moonkin or Tree form very early? Or a Shaman dual-wielding at level 10? A hunter with Readiness or Wyvern Sting? Suddenly your choices mean something from the very beginning.
The only caveat I have is that I’m not sure I like the 31-points requirement before getting anything in an off-tree. I understand it (you can’t really let a level 12 druid have Boomkin and Tree form, for example), and it will help new players understand the significance of specialization, but it will reduce some interesting options while leveling (perhaps).
Also couldn’t really tell from the description how many talents they expect to be present in each tree. I’m assuming there will still be choices to be made, as picking a tree and just watching it fill in would be rather crap, IMO.
ETA: Nevermind, I see now that they are expecting something like 20 talents per tree (with of course multiple points required to fill some of them). Hopefully there will still be plenty of room for customization.
ETA2: More info from GhostCrawler here: World of Warcraft Forums
I like the new talent proposals. I recently leveled a new druid from 1 to 30, and I remember when I hit level 10, and looked at what my spec might be, it didn’t really seem to me that it would make any difference at all until at least my 40s or 50s. Especially those first 10 points when I was leveling via WSG in the 10-19 bracket. I could sit on unspent talent points the entire time and not have any significant change in gameplay. It made me really not want to go through the whole rigamorole of leveling up another alt. So, yah, thumbs up.
Anybody curious about talent trees can see the currently proposed ones at MMO Champion. Note that they may be slightly out of date with what’s currently live in the beta, but they’re still worth poking around in.
Yeah, but all the ones up on MMO-Champion or WoWHead are going to be completely re-done with this change. It is very exciting, IMO, though I do feel like this announcement coming right after the RealID debacle for the forums is a smokescreen. Really putting my continued playing of this game into question, as I’m excited about a lot of the beta info I have seen, but am very worried about playing Activision-Blizzard games.
SFG, the only talent trees I can find on mmo-champion right now are the “old” ones, Blizzard just announced(I’m assuming you’re at work and can’t read the announcement) that they will make major changes to the talent system so those old trees are irrelevant now.
Regarding the RealID issue, I just saw this linked on the Blizzard forums, if this is accurate then it would explain the new policy: Blame the South Koreans, they have some law that requires users on large internet communities to use their real names and since SK is such a large market for Blizzard they can’t do what Google did and ban the South Koreans from posting. 
It’s like light dawning. Blizzard’s actions suddenly make a lot of sense.
How is this going to work for China, where there are what, five last names? 20,000 posters named Wu Ming? It will be worse than the John Smiths in English-speaking countries.
With all the racist and homophobic crap that that some players spew out in trade chat, Blizzard can’t understand why one may not want to have a real name out there?
If SK is the problem, how about specific servers and forums just for those chumps?
SK does have its own realms, which makes this intriguing.
It doesn’t make it intriguing. People on the Blizzard forums are just retarded. If you read the very article that the Harvard guy links, it doesn’t match the new forum system much at all. Plus Blizzard posted the same message in Korean on the Korean battle.net forum. Plus Blizzard already collects Korean i-PIN numbers for Battle.net accounts, so they’re already in compliance with the law. If anything is behind the change besides the anti-trolling measures Blizzard stated, it’s the stuff the CEO of Blizzard’s parent company Bob Kotick said about wanting to move in on the Facebook market. Even that is pretty weak.
Reading the Blizzard forums is bad for your brain.
I hate it when I try to be nice and get trolled. Dude was saying all through the dungeon he needed to go to a certain place for a quest, and people kept on dropping and then we went through the dungeon without going to the place he needed and when we finished everyone left but I said I’d hang around and try to help even though I didn’t know where we were going.
Of course he draws a massive mob to us and then leaves the party. 
The BRD corpse run sucks enough without being deliberately pushed into it, TYVM.
At this point I need about 50 quests for Loremaster of Kalimdor. I’m just starting my Loremaster of EK phase, with the understanding that there are a few EK quests that lead up to more Kalimdor quests (like the Fallen Hero of the Horde outside the Blasted Lands who sends you to Azshara after you finish his BL questline).
Of course, I spent most of tonight finishing the “Test of…” quests in 1K Needles as prereqs for the book quest in Scarlet Monastery, too, so that was four more for Kalimdor.
I really want to try to get Loremaster (at least of K and EK) before Blizzard blows the whole thing to smithereens.
Heh. I’m stuck one stinking quest short in Blade’s Edge - the only quests I can find that I haven’t done don’t become available until I’m at least Honored with Ogri’la, so I’m doing a couple of the dailies there (the bombing and the nether ray wrangling) every time I can remember. Once I get that, I’ll just need to finish off Netherstorm for the title.
I just completed Loremaster last month. What really worked for me was going methodologically by level so I wouldn’t miss out on any chains (instead of by zones that were connected to get it done quicker). There are a few instances where unknowingly completing a quest chain mid-way through made you ineligible for the bread-crumb quests leading up to it, thus screwing you out of a couple of easy quests (Mulgore/TB – having leveled up my toon in classic, before achievements were even a gleam in Blizzard’s eye – I had completed quests in the Barrens that made me unable to pick up to two or three quests in TB that were basically “Hey, go the Barrens to start this quest chain!”). I also installed the wowhead client so I could download my toon’s quest completion data and compare it to wowhead’s quest database zone by zone to see what I had done while leveling up and what I was missing, as well as look up the prereqs. Invaluable. This was also helpful in finding quests that began from looted items in the zone. There may be some in-game addons that do this for you too, but I found the comments section for the quests on wowhead invaluable anyway. Some dungeon quests count, and some do not – I did them all anyway just to be sure, and to pick up the dungeon achievements while I was at it – comments usually will tell you if they count, as well. Also, don’t forget the cloth turn-ins for each city. That’s an easy 8 quests per continent just on cloth alone.
My venomhide raptor finally grew up and became a mount. I’m gonna miss having the little bugger following me around begging for snacks – he was cute!
Man, we’ve got some chickenshit Horde players on Lightbringer. They can’t win Wintergrasp, so they sit in WG Fortress between battles camping the teleporter and the spot you materialize when you take the portal from Dalaran, killing people as soon as they materialize and then vamoosing as soon as there are enough Alliance players to give them a fight :mad:
Hey, that’s exactly what the Alliance does on Moon Guard! 
(PS – Wintergrasp is horribly broken. A faction not being able to win, it’s not really their fault)
No and no but I do think this is more prevalent than I realised (one problem of being at the same firm for so long is being in the comfort zone regarding such issues) so again I concede the point.
As long as it gets us drunk. Bring a lot.
Ok so the new talent tree changes are interesting but I’m not sure about limiting us to only one tree until level 70. No more Spirit Tap for my low level Disc priest?
Count me in as another person who is disgusted with the Real ID change. I’m really disappointed with Blizzard. They make their game so deep and polished, but they can’t recognize this shitstorm for what it is?
I will never accept Real ID friend invites, because I don’t want my real name and my Email address being shared with others and all their ‘friends’. That is info that should stay strictly with billing (cuz you know, this is a friggin video game). Probably won’t matter though, because their will be some other security compromise in the system. Just imagine, if add-ons were able to exploit that information. Oh wait. http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/security-flaw-allows-addons-to-expose-full-real-life-names-witho/
I think the move to have real names exposed when posting on the forums is also a slap in the face. Yes, the forums are doubtless a cesspit in many places, but you can find some real gems of information and discussion if you know where to look (the stickies, the class role forums). They could also handle trolls easily if they wanted to (by requiring one handle, suspending the entire account if someone is trolling). It seems like they’re taking it for granted that they will always have a vibrant fan base that gives huge amounts of feedback.