Well, there's really not much to talk about, to be perfectly honest. Path of Titans idea is scrapped, Guild Talents are gone. There's going to be even more competition and name calling among guilds now, especially with Guild RSS feed, Guild Achievements, etc. This, I really don't like. I enjoyed "We did X!" over the recent "You noobs haven't done X!" elitism of WotLK. An ex-member of our guild didn't stop bitching about to a rival guild after we killed Freya Knock x3, rubbed it all over their faces.
Accomplishments in WoW is for personal satisfaction, and while it's fun to race server firsts and have some friendly rivalry, to the point of progress is the norm and thus lack of it is a cause of booing -that doesn't really suit me.
I'm going to high-light some changes that are relevant for high-end guilds:
Guilds: A lot of crappy fluff, which, if I don't have to exactly go out and grind ZG outside of my guild's weekly content farm for, I won't mind cool rewards like mounts with guild tabard and such. But most important point is Guild Reputation, you're going to need these to buy the rewards that your guild has unlocked.
Now again, from what I've understood, rewards are fluff only. If you can earn Guild Rep in only raids or trading with guildies or such, then I'm a happy fella that now has a metric source to measure my members' contributions.
Raids: There's a few changes, most of them I support. A quick glance over them:
Different raids, same bosses: Say, you went to Naxx this week and killed up to Patchwerk. Now, once your guild's raid catches up to Patchwerk, you both can join the same instance now. Sounds fun.
More Algalon: Heroic raids will have exclusive Algalon raids with half a tier above loot. More bosses = Fun! But, even now the casual crowd (Who has been given access to all the raids without even attunements just so they can see the content they complained that they were unable to see) complain how Algalon was for hardmode raiders only. I hope Blizzard won't listen to them for this one instance now.
Splitting it up: You can 'downrank' a 25-Men raid lockout to 10 men, for cases like it's Tuesday night, some assholes blew you up and you've got only 20 people, so you downrank your ID, and go with 2 x 10 groups. It only can do good.
Path of the Titans scrapped over: Personally, I've got mixed feelings. It was going to be another gold sinker that forced the raiders to put more effort into (Which already is a lot in the beginning, with insanely high prices for flasks, foods, enchantments and crafted epics). Also given the slow nature of its explained progression, either the raids would be balanced around the premise that guilds had max Acheology already, or not at all. In first case, it would take a fresh recruit months to get him in proper position to raid among the others, in the second case, the profession would make any half-decent raider just way over the top (even if it was just a simple %5 damage/health/healing increase).
Matt at World of Matticus said Cataclysm lost one of its selling point probably because of release rush, but I disagree. Path would make either characters overpowered, or the ones without it miserable. Neither are profitable for a raider guild, who's always looking out for bright talents on their side even if it's a fresh re-roll. I think it's nice that it's gone.
