Posts with tag Draenor-Perks

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

The Warlords of Draenor patch 6.0 notes have revealed the latest changes to WoW's ever-evolving talent system. Talents have remained a core system in WoW since its earliest days, the primary method that allows players to make their characters distinct.

In the beta for WoW and throughout vanilla, talent trees were a bit of a mess, as Archivist covered. Today, we'll examine how those early trees came to be expanded, refined, and then scrapped for a very different system. We'll also look at how Warlords is bringing back the earliest version of talent trees in a brand new way.

The golden age of hybrids

Talent possibilities exploded during The Burning Crusade. Ten more levels granted players ten more points to assign. Players could now combine abilities in ways that vanilla's trees had never allowed, opening up exciting new gameplay paths.

Players didn't choose a specialization like they do today. Instead, they assigned points to three different "trees." Each tree represented a spec, but each also had talents that helped the other two specs as well. So players could pick and choose just how far down they wanted to go in a given tree, and thus how much to commit their character to one spec. "Hybrid" builds were not ideal from a min/max perspective, but they were popular. And TBC was the golden age of such builds.

Given the release of the Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes yesterday, today's Breakfast Topic writes itself. If you haven't read them, you should. They're huge. If you have read them, what do you think?

The Draenor Perks are intriguing, and as someone who plays a rogue, they made me take a long look at what they meant for the class as a whole. Between Draenor Perks, spell changes, and the spells being removed, it appears combat rogues are moving further into dealing immediate, direct damage, with a lower focus on DoT abilities. Combat rogues no longer have Rupture and Draenor Perks turn a combat rogue's Deadly Poison into Instant Poison. There's an active effort to differentiate class specs that have lost their unique flavor over the years. I'm interested to see how changes like this play out.

This is, of course, only the beginning of an alpha -- everything we've seen so far still has plenty of time to change.

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Leveling has always been a major focus for any expansion and Warlords of Draenor is no exception. But this time it's a bit different, thanks to the introduction of Draenor Perks. What are those?

Draenor Perks is a new feature that adds rewards for leveling. Over levels 91 to 99, you will earn these 9 new Draenor Perk in a random order. Each class and specialization has a different set of 9 Draenor Perks.

Draenor Perks have been added for all classes, earned from levels 91 to 99.

These perks will serve to help distinguish various specs from each other within a class as well as making them more distinct from other classes. How this will work in actual practice has yet to be seen, but it's definitely an interesting new wrinkle on leveling that we haven't seen before in WoW.