World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Talent Preview - Priest

news.blizzard.com:

Dragonflight contains major updates to World of Warcraft classes, centering on the re-introduction of talent trees. In this preview, we take a first look at the prototype trees for the Priest class. These and all the other trees still have a lot of work to be done, but we want to share what we can to start collecting detailed feedback at this early stage.

Some of our biggest goals in a class and talent revamp are to increase player agency over your character’s progression and build, provide meaningful rewards while leveling, and reinforce your character’s connection to both their class and their spec. In addition, we felt we had to retain many features of modern World of Warcraft specializations. Specializations have many unique abilities, some of which might be central to the identity of the spec. They have a wide variety of optional bonuses that have been created at various times over the years. This all led us back to talent trees— a concept familiar to people who played WoW before the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Visually, trees are still an intuitive way to represent the different paths one could follow while making many choices about a character. Trees also communicate dependencies and magnitude intuitively, without a lot of added rules. For example, talents higher in the tree are expected to be more commonly chosen, while talents lower in the tree are more optional and more geared towards shaping max-level builds.

Dragonflight talent trees have some significant differences from previous versions of talent trees in World of Warcraft. First, you have not one tree, but two. This is due to the combined importance of class wide and specialization-specific themes for current WoW characters. The class tree contains a core