One has often wondered about the large amount of gold it takes for higher level characters in WOW to respec into new talent trees. Here, a Blizzard rep allows us to see inside the thoughts of why they chose the path they did concerning talents.

When we were first implementing talents, there were many people who wanted no ability to respec, similar to Diablo II. People claimed that this gave their characters uniqueness and definition.

The ability to spec your character is one of the ways a player has to differentiate their character from others of the same class. Choosing talents also creates hard decisions for players. Sure you could be doing more DPS but did you just give up survivablity? Decisions like that.

We realized that the Diablo system of no respeccing was far too punishing and permanent for World of Warcraft yet at the same time we wanted your talent decisions to carry weight.

It's a very difficult balancing act. We know some players would be able to respec on the fly, nightly. But that's not really character definition at that point. Our goal is not for Talent Respecs to serve as a gold sink. The price is simply there to make you think twice before changing your character on a whim. ~ Tigole