WoW Dragonflight Talent Tree – New Talent System Preview

Gain talent points with each level-up and spend them in two distinct talent trees. Class talent trees feature utility skills for your class, while Specialization trees boost your offensive or healing powers.

New Talent System

Dragonflight contains major updates to World of Warcraft classes, centering on the re-introduction of talent trees. The new talent system empowers players to make creative and meaningful talent choices without compromising their effectiveness—and most importantly, it gives them meaningful options at every level.

Talent Updates

Another UI intensive project we’ve been working on is an update to the Talent system. We wanted to look at it once more and find ways to provide players with more choice in shaping their character’s abilities. Currently, as you level up, you receive new spells and skills, but that progression and ordering is entirely predetermined. So, we started looking at creating a system that would provide players with a wider set of options.

One of these ideas that we returned to was that of trees. In this case, it’s actually two trees. One tree focuses on class utility while the other focuses on specialization and the expression of your role whether that’s doing damage, tanking, or healing. We want choosing your specialization to be important and want to make sure that when you choose it, it affects the tree in some way.

When you look at the new tree, you’ll notice the class side will have some abilities filled out for free to get you started off in the spec you’ve chosen, but then you’ll have your first point to spend in the class tree which could be something related to that spec or it could be something from elsewhere in the class.

We wanted to make sure that the new system allows players to take combinations of spells and abilities that may not have been possible in the game before. This opportunity also allowed us to inject more art and fantasy into the actual Talent UI itself.

We want players to be able to tinker with the trees and make a lot of changes while not necessarily feeling like you must fully commit. The power really is coming back to the player. It’s not something we want people to feel locked into and so one of the things we’ll be preserving is the ability to change talents at the same kind of frequency as they do now. Players should easily be able to go from their raid night to playing arena matches by taking advantage of a new feature that allows them to save and load their build. They’ll be able to name it, save it, then load it up very quickly.

Talents really are about having a breadth of options and we wanted to give players the ability to hold the building blocks of what make up their class and spec and put them together in a way that works for them.

This is only a first preview of what we are working on, and we are looking forward to hearing more about your thoughts.