The levelling experience is there to teach you your spells and talents, as well as tech you the kind of enemies and enemy abilities you will come up against in the game.
Mobs outside instances hint at the capabilities of the mobs in the instances. You can test your talents and specialisation in this area, and this is what people did first time around before comprehensive guides and videos.
When levelling your character you would choose talents that gave you immediate benefit, and in many cases these would be talents you may not use if you choose end game PVE or PVP.
The respec option allowed you to tune your character to these end game options, so you weren’t stuck with choices made as your character progressed.
The only problem in modern game is that the guides teach you optimal ways to level, and it’s so quick that you are not learning what your talents do as it was perhaps envisioned.
Boosts have created a raft of players who may know the game, but just don’t understand their class beyond the Guide Says This and that’s a shame for them really, the need for speed once again having a negative effect on the game.
The need for speed is what eventually led to the choice from 3 talents every 15 levels, and free insta respecs as needed for the encounter, and for many the downfall of WoW.
Making a decision is supposed to be part of the game, should I roll on this gear, will it be an upgrade or side grade. What is the best enchant to place on it, the best gem? You should know by the time you are hitting the end levels from playing the class.
These choices have mostly been taken away in a real sense - people just search [class] BiS and use that as the gospel. It’s like playing a game using a walkthrough - whats the point?
TLDR: talent specialisations teach us about or class strength and weaknesses as we level the character. Speeds and free stuff don’t help the player know his class.
