Hero Talents will add a new layer of character customization in WoW: The War Within expansion

A new system called Hero Talents will bring all new class customization options to World of Warcraft: The War Within. This new type of talent system gives players a means to take their characters down a certain path within their class, a kind of capstone talent system that builds upon your current class. We don’t know exactly what types of Hero Talents are available, but specific mention was made of becoming a Dark Ranger or Farseer. I’m really curious about Hero Talents, and how they’re integrated into The War Within, the tenth expansion for World of Warcraft. 

Here’s what we’ve learned about Hero Talents so far.

Become the Hero you always wanted to be

Hero Talents are class specific and intended as evergreen content — this is not a system that will stop existing at the end of the expansion the way Artifacts and their descendants did. For most classes, there will be three Hero Talent specializations and each base specialization can choose two of the three. There are two classes for whom this is not the case — Druids and Demon Hunters have four and two specializations and thus will be different than the rest of the classes, but we don’t know any details as yet.

Blizzard used a Warrior to explain this further so I actually understand it — I’m not sure if someone told Associate Game Director Morgan Day to keep it simple for the bearded guy, but I respect him for it. In this case, we see that Protection Warriors gain access to the Mountain Thane and Colossus Hero Talent trees, Fury Warriors gain access to Mountain Thane and Slayer, and finally Arms Warriors will be able to pick out Colossus and Slayer.

For now, we know that Hero Talents are coming, they will automatically unlock at level 71, there are talent choice nodes that you’ll aim for similar to the Artifact talents and the current Dragonflight talent system. They’re intended to allow players to customize their character so that your Hunter and my Hunter can have distinctive gameplay elements. There’s still a lot we don’t know — we only know the three Warrior Hero Talent specializations and one Keeper of the Grove for Druids from a blurry mock up, and there’s a lot of time between now and next year.

I mean, I have no idea what the Slayer will be all about. I like the name, but that’s all. So we have a lot of time to wait and speculate about what we might be getting and I’m not counting on being able to dual wield two weapons in each hand any time soon.