More On Spell Rank Removal in Cataclysm

One of the items I remember seeing when the Cataclysm expansion was announced was the removal of spell ranks. Nothing much was really said about it except just that. With the announcement of the simplification of stats for the expansion, it’s no surprise that they are going to simplify spells by removing the ranks.

spellbook

The thing that looked like an obvious advantage of the removal of spell ranks was that you’ll only need to learn the spell once and you’re set for life. The accumulated savings a player will have by not having to spend for so many ranks, especially on a character starting from scratch, should really help in the leveling process.

It’s quite obvious that by having spell ranks removed, the spell grows on its own somehow. At first I thought it would like how pets automatically learn spells and spell ranks at certain levels as they grow up. I thought that while spell ranks are gone from a training perspective, they would still exist as they are as the character grows like learning rank X of spell Y at level Z. Apparently it’s a lot cooler than that!

According to Ghostcrawler, there really won’t be ranks as we know them today. He said that a spell will just grow a bit every time you level up so that you’re getting a wee bit better every time as you journey towards the level cap. He said though that while it’s a better situation, it’s not that much better than what we currently have. The concept is great though since at least by the time this is implemented, you won’t have players feeling gimped using a certain spell because it’s been a while since new rank was trained for it, making it weak.