"We're stepping away from borrowed power this expansion to work on our evergreen systems, but also letting players express themselves how they want," says Wiley. The concept of "borrowed power" comes up often in the Warcraft community, which references systems like Legion's artifact weapons, Azerite armor from Battle for Azeroth, and the Covenant abilities and Soul Binds from Shadowlands, which all gave players new stat boosts, spells, and skills not inherent to the core class progression and talents system. At the start of recent expansions, large swaths of your character's power were wiped away, leaving significant holes in class rotations and utilities left to be filled by whatever the next borrowed power mechanic would be in the new expansion. According to Wiley's statement, Dragonflight won't have a system like that, with Blizzard instead opting instead to learn from those borrowed power systems to rebuild a more classic take on Talents.
Currently, WoW players gain a majority of their spells and abilities automatically when they level up, with only a handful of choices given to them regarding their preferred playstyle for their class specialization. Every 15 levels or so, you can choose one of three talents from a specific tier; some offer modifications to existing abilities, while others grant new skills altogether. However, with only six real choices to make per character at a given time, there's not a lot in the way of player expression and customization for a given class. That all changes in Dragonflight.
Talent trees are coming back to World of Warcraft in a big way, giving players a chance to pour precious talent points into their chosen skill upon every level up. The earliest iterations of the WoW Talent system provided a tree for each specialization in which players could spread their points across all available trees, enhancing specific class abilities. Dragonflight, however, will have two trees: one for the overall class utility and identity and another for that character's chosen specialization. You won't be able to necessarily build a Mage into a Frost/Fire hybrid spellcaster, but the new system should offer much greater granularity in how players want to min/max their talents and customize how their character plays.
Every level-up, players will earn either a Class Talent Point or a Specialization Talent Point, which can be spent to activate talents on that particular tree. The concept isn't new, but it is a refreshing return to form and a big step closer to what players like me craved in the lead-up to World of Warcraft Classic. Having that choice each level – that tiny reward and semblance that I'm building my character – in theory, makes the leveling experience more fulfilling and less like a chore while powering through old content to get to the current expansion's zones.
We've taken a lot of lessons from all of the systems we had the past few expansions that are dear to our hearts like Azerite armor, Conduits, Soul Binds, legendaries and taking inspiration from those," says Wiley. "So you might see a few friendly things that you remember speckled, dispersed throughout your talent trees."
Those friendly things being various Covenant abilities possibly becoming a permanent fixture for a class, though nothing specific is being promised. An example given was Druid's Full Moon spell making its way from a Legion artifact weapon power to joining the active roster of spells for that class.
"For example, after Legion, Balance Druids were like, 'I still want to drop a moon on things, though.' And so, luckily, they can still drop a moon on things," explains Wiley. "It's really taking inspiration from those changes we want to make the class, but also just stuff that players love, or even some players love that we want to give them the option for again."
It should be noted that the addition of these fleshed-out talent trees will not represent complete reworks of each class' central identity. Wiley describes, "We're not looking to overhaul classes/specs/rotations like we did in Legion; if you like how your spec plays today we want you to be able to largely recreate that in 10.0, but with more customization via talents."
