Did they change talents like WoW did?

[(*'-')]

I heard they had followed WoW in suit of some extremely watered down talent tree. You pick one talent from a choice of 3 every certain amount of levels. I was thinking about playing again but I dropped WoW within 10 seconds when I realized what they had did to the talents. And now it's sounding like SWTOR did the same thing but all the posts I see are from many years ago so I can't tell if it's still like that.

[old.school]

Yes the talent system is different from the way it used to be. You get your regular spells and abilities from the trainer which are now free and dont cost credits. Then in your talent system as you go up in levels you gain new abilities or passives and sometimes you get a talent point. The other part of the talent system is where you spend those talent points. It's situational or preference where you want to spend your talent points. You only get 9 talent points and you have tier 1 talents, tier 2 talents and tier 3 'heroic' talents with 8 options in each tier.

[your.sheepy]

If you only hated they forcing you pick one out of three, swtor offers more freedom as described above.

Also note that Swtor talents ("Utilities" here) does not give you new active abilities. They only enhances the abilities you get from your class and your spec, which are fixed.

You can respec and repick Utilities anytime out of combat, after you purchased the respec perk. Cost is virtually free if you are f2p, or literally free for subs.

In addition to Utilities, you also have Tactical and Set which grants new passives and/or synergies, and can be swapped like Utilities.

The only sad part is swtor does not have any presets. You must manually repick your 9 utilities everytime and swap every single piece yourself.

[Thander]

They pretty much did the same thing, but SWTOR currently has 3 tiers of 8 talents and you have to pick 3 in one tier before you can pick any in the next tier. Because of this most people will pick 3 in each tier, but some classes prefer only 2 in the last tier and 4 in tier 1 or 2. The talents are called Utilities because they mostly only offer utility value. Some of them can increase damage like one that gives +25% damage to the spammable AOE ability for the class, but most of them are things like faster movement speed in combat or reduced damage taken from DoTs or +5% healing received. There is a reason to swap them to different ones depending on the content. There are clearly ones good for operations (raiding) and others good for warzones (PvP) plus some that are best for soloing mobs out in the world. Since I mostly do solo stuff, I usually never change them after I pick the best solo utilities.

[Fly]

It's a bit more "complicated" in SWTOR where you get to pick one of 3 skill trees (for classes that can be healer or tank, one of them is for healer or tank and the other two for dd, while for pure dd classes all 3 are for dd with one usually being the direct-damage tree, one being a dot/dotspread tree and the last one for dd classes being a hybrid thereof). They each grant you a bunch of passive changes to your existing skills (like adding some direct bonuses or "if this happens and you use that ability this bonus applies"), give you 3 additional skills and replace one skill with one that "fits" the kind of skill tree you chose.

Additionally, you get to choose 9 perks out of 3 tiers (low/mid/high, needing 3 perks distributed to be allowed to buy medium and 6 to be allowed ot buy from the high, essentially letting you buy 3 each or buy more from a lower tier) which are purely passive changes to existing skills, e.g. your aoe skill does more damage, you take less damage from area effects, your def-cd X has a lower cooldown ...). These 9 perks are the same, no matter what skill tree you decided for, which means that certain perks don't really make a lot of sense if your class is capable of being tank/dd (if you choose dd, the perks that clearly have written TANK all over of course don't make too much sense to pick).