The new “protection from your own stupidity” archetype system system is for greater control of your optimum play experience.

Comrade Blizzard cares for you, in the best MMO evar. Be happy and… you are still playing WoW?

That being said, I’ll make a partial retraction to what I stated…since I don’t know much about the new system well enough to comment. And I have to wait till the polishing and second passes are done with before I become informed. There’s some stuff about it I found interesting and positive as well…so I’ll keep an open mind….

…so my apologies with shoot from the hip views I posted.

Still, as you said, it does present the isue of pigeon holing people pretty badly. I can only hope they drop the dual spec facility down to level 20 and make it dirt cheap.

It’s probably a good choice for WoW, but not something I personally like.

I’m trying to not say too much about that yet since I figure talents will change a lot in beta.

Gone are the days of spending 5 levels to get +10% armor, and then the next five levels to get +10% one-handed weapon damage, then the next five levels to get +5% dodge, and then the next five levels to get +5% parry. It was ridiculous, and I think it was unnecessary. Very, very few trees in the current game let you make many cool decisions until you hit max level. Even fewer trees offer you any abilities to teach you more about the spec you’re working in until 40 or 50. Sure, it felt kinda cool to build up to “Finally, I learned MS!” But until that point, I was stuck with what, rend and HS? lame.

As for off-specs of greater than 10 points, I can honestly see Blizzard’s argument. If you look at the trees now, there are a lot of really powerful talents at tier3, and Blizzard can take advantage of the fact that no one can ever pick up both that and most of another tree: if you want to go past tier2 in a tree, you need to spec into that tree. Given that, there’s still lots of off-spec talents in the trees to allow for versatility (druids still get their healing boost from agility, plus offspec for a huge boost to Rejuv), but I think it’s a sound argument that “if your bottom talent doesn’t attract you to the tree, then Blizzard hasn’t done its job.” It may not be my first useful attack, like MS, at the bottom of a tree, but it still should be a goal for anyone playing that tree.

But, as I said, there’s iteration yet to be done. More choice needs to be added, and many of the talents are still in their old formats – they need to be updated to reflect that they’re worth two levels of progression. -1maul and swipe cost every other level? Yeah, that won’t stay around. But if you want some good examples, check out Elemental Shamans or Protection Warriors: those trees seem fairly well-designed, with a good amount of choice while still encouraging players to max out the tree. The last few points are also very interesting: do you take Deep Wounds or Blood Craze for Prot, now that the latter can be activated by any of that incoming damage?

Lastly – Blood and Thunder. Are you serious, I can use Rend again? Holy crap. I’ll probably break tons of CC by putting a physical bleed on every target for 18seconds, but damn that will be fun.