I have decided to keep the information I receive about Cataclysm to minimum, but the new talent change thing penetrated my shields. The system changes considerably, and as far as I understood the amount of talents is going down as well as the selection of optional ones, too.
In a way I see this as a step back from the 'freedom' players have had so far. EQ2 took a step back from character archetypes and switched to more open system of AA's in the early days. Now it seems to me at least that Blizzard is taking the opposite direction: moving from freedom to archetypes.
The change reflects the same ideals as the proposed and withdrawn RealID issue: to make the game more non-gamer, social friendly. By making the original character development decision the player commits to the character (which I like, because people are really making a mess of the game by playing tens of alts and not learning even one of them properly), but at the same time it urges people to make more characters to experience all of the classes out there. From 10 classes to 30 archetypes.
Make no mistake, I'm not a min-maxer type, but doesn't this sound like Blizzard is trying to make that min-maxing more a curiosity than a viable metagame within the game?
Or am I just paranoid in thinking that WoW is getting a wee bit more dumbed down to the direction of Free Realms and Facebook integration?
