Spell ranks are still a thing, but you really just don’t need to downrank anymore except to maybe have that Rank 1 version of Frostbolt or w/e for utility purposes.
Talents just get bigger and longer, with ever increasingly powerful must-have talents deeper in the tree. Classes are generally forced to go to the bottom of a given tree to be a proper spec, but a few oddball exceptions exist here and there to utilize a new Wrath skill or a new combination of talents.
Just as TBC saw every class getting new spells and abilities baseline, that happens again in Wrath, and just like in TBC, the new skills fill gaps. Wrath was the first big attempt to get roles settled into specific sets of skills, that way if you had a choice of Feral Druid, Enhancement Shaman, or Fury Warrior, you should be able to pick whoever was your favorite because the fight didn’t call for a specific class/spec, but a Melee DPS. Examples:
- More Melee had AoE skills, like Rogues gaining Fan of Knives
- Healers got more tools to let them do multiple jobs better, like Druids getting Nourish for single target direct healing
- Tanks were intended to be more balanced against each other, so all the Tanks got a Thunderclap/Demo Shout debuff in their kit, and they were all normalized to do the same thing
We get Dual Spec in Wrath (assuming it isn’t added earlier) which just let you swap specs with a consumable, and swapping had to be out of combat and would reduce your resource bar to zero. With how many weird oddities you could come up with with the talent trees, Dual Spec let people do a lot of fun things more freely.
Barbershop becomes a thing in Wrath, giving you some customization to your character, and access to a few things you couldn’t get at character creation, such as hairstyles that normally were reserved for particular races only.
The new profession is Inscription, which comes with a new power system called Glyphs. You get three major and three minor, the major glyphs are big game changer boosts like “Fireball does 20% more damage” or “Icy Veins has a 10% faster CD”, whereas the minor glyphs were mostly convenience/fun stuff like “Gift of the Wild no longer costs a reagent” or “Aquatic Form is now a killer whale”. Inscription also crafts the shoulder enchants that we currently get from Aldor/Scryer.
Professions in general are normalized in their bonuses, such that crafting professions all offer personal stat boosts that are MOSTLY equal to each other. LW get specialized fur-lining enchants for their bracers that are just insane gobs of Stamina or Agility, JC get to socket three custom gems that are huge chunks of stats that match any color, etc. Essentially everyone who was serious about PvE/PvP went double crafting, typically Engineering+WhateverYouFavored. I was LW/JC in original Wrath as a Feral Tank.
Reputation is much easier to build since you can purchase a tabard from the faction you want to build with and just wear it while doing high level Normal dungeons and any Heroic. This lets you focus on the loot drops you want/need without having to run dungeons you don’t need just because of the rep. Reputations are still your gateway to key head enchants, patterns, a few pre-raid epics, and a few other goodies.
Dailies are more fleshed out, especially once we get to the Argent Tournament, but you can largely skip a lot of them still since they mostly help with side factions that aren’t critical or don’t have insane goods you desperately need.
Heroics are substantially easier this time around, like way way way easier. If you have any measure of T6 or Sunwell gear, you can more or less not upgrade any of it other than replace your gems (the green and blue quality gems in Wrath are better than epic gems in TBC) and roll right into Heroics the moment you ding 80.
The first tier is almost insultingly easy. Naxx 2.0 is the first raid and its is everything you remember from original Naxx, except way less deadly, and Four Horsemen is an outright joke. The other two entry raids, Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity, aren’t too much better but they’re dragon raids so that’s always fun. Obsidian Sanctum also offers the first attempt at a hardmode encounter where specific loot and rewards were locked behind killing the boss the hard way.
Raids are split between 10 and 25m versions. 10m is easier with weaker and different loot than 25m, which means you sometimes have an awkward situation where a trinket has some uniquely powerful proc that only appears on 10m but not 25m, or vice versa. The hardmodes that kick into high gear starting with Ulduar are also fairly challenging, and significantly harder than anything TBC can offer. People will really feel the difference in skill and effort when Ulduar releases and people can’t beat Heartbreaker or Firefighter.
Badge vendors are basically on steroids in Wrath, where everything gives badges, and raids have their own tier of badges, and every new tier we get a new set of badges with new gear that can only be bought by the new badges. Some tier gear is available through badges, along with 3-4 other epics that are actually quite good, so everyone is more or less guaranteed to have 3-4 upgrades in the first month even if you aren’t killing many bosses or your loot luck sucks.
Achievements!
I’m sure there’s more but that’s it for now…