World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion is over a year old now, and Mists of Pandaria is looming just over the horizon, which means that it's time for a Cataclysm post-mortem. The infamous pony-promiser Greg "Ghostcrawler" Streets took some time out of his day to set aside the nerf bat and answer some questions regarding World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. What worked? What didn't? Where the hell is the dance studio, anyway? Just kidding, we still don't know that last one.

One topic that's frequently revisited throughout the post-mortem is the talent system revamp. In a nutshell, Ghostcrawler says that the team (and the players) were largely pleased with the ability to choose a spec and gain powerful, useful skills right at level 10. What didn't work out as planned? "Everything else!" says Ghostcrawler. The team realized that "the talent tree model where you pick up tiny performance increases here and there (and where there's, mathematically, nearly always a 'right' answer and a 'wrong' answer) is not a great model." He goes on to add that Mists of Pandaria's talent system "should fix this problem once and for all." Well, third time's the charm, right guys?

At any rate, there's more on the discussion table than just talents, so head over to the full article and see what lessons Cataclysm has taught the devs.

To many people, character customization is an incredibly important part of MMORPGs. We're not just talking about cosmetic customization, though; many of those players also want the freedom to customize how their characters play. The Guild Wars 2 team is well aware of this, and in fact the devs have released a new dev diary detailing just how players will be able to tweak their characters through the use of traits and attributes.

Players who have been following GW2 up until this point may already be familiar with the game's four primary attributes: power, vitality, precision, and toughness. But the team decided that four wasn't quite good enough, so five more attributes were thrown into the mix. While these five new attributes (three for offense, two for support) offer new and exciting ways to customize your playstyle, the catch is that players can only gain points in these attributes through trait lines or gear. Each profession also gets a profession-specific attribute. For instance, Rangers get the empathy attribute, which increases the attributes of the hunter's pet.

Traits, on the other hand, operate more like traditional MMO talent trees. Each class is given access to five different trait progression lines; each of these trait lines matches up to a pair of attributes that will be improved each time the player puts points in the corresponding tree. The trait lines also unlock major trait slots that can be filled with -- you guessed it -- a major trait to further customize the character's playstyle. But there's a lot more to the system than we can fit here, so click on through the link to the ArenaNet dev blog below and give the full blog a read.

Today's First Impressions could use a little bit of external reading before you go too deeply into it. So I'm going to start by linking an article that's nearly seven years old but still excellent -- Fantasy Heartbreakers.