New Idea: Devotions

Blizzard seems to be aiming to have higher levels of individual character customization, so characters can be more different from each other, like the new skills attached to the gathering professions.

I imagine these as something like professions, which you learn, but instead of gathering or making thing, they improve your characters stats or abilities in some way, kind of like glyphs. Unlike glyphs, you level your Devotion in combat, so fighting specific mobs would raise the Devotion level. I have a couple ideas for Devotion choices for examples.

Combat Tactician – with this Devotion the player would gain bonuses against different creature classes, like Beasts, Dragonkin, and Humanoids. In the process of fighting them they would gain levels and experience in the Devotion and the bonuses would increase. For example, it could be increased damage or critical strike chance, and/or reduced damage from or increased dodge chance from Undead, or Giant characters. It would be like the Troll racial passive Beast Slaying, or the Anatomy crit bonus you get with Skinning. There could be quests, say for the humanoid bonuses, to take a certain amount of damage and kill a certain number of different humanoids, like 10 ogres, 10 humans, 10 gnolls, 10 trolls, and ten dark iron dwarves if the character is around level 45.

Magic Hardened – For this Devotion a character would get exposed to different magic groups, i.e. shadow, fire, ice, etc. Eventually the character would build a tolerance and take reduced damage from those magic schools and/or gaining permanent resistance points. In addition, magical effects, like the DoTs Warlock Corruption and Druid's Starfire would eventually have a reduced time of effect, along with other magical though non-damaging effects.

Endurance – For this one I imagine a character developing the ability to better endure diseases, poisons, curses, and bleed effects. These effects would have reduced durations, or do reduced damage. In addition the character might learn a passive ability called Tolerance, or something, which would remove a curse, bleed, disease, or poison effect that would be deadly to the character, on a cooldown of, say, 5 minutes.

Athleticism – for this, characters would gain levels by running, jumping, swimming, riding, etc. The payoff would be the ability to jump higher; run, ride, and swim faster. In addition it might raise spell and/or melee haste, for a good combat reward.

Stalwart – For this characters would expose themselves to Fears, Stuns, and other Incapacitating effects to develop a resistance to these effects. Instead of just reducing the effect time, instead have the Devotion give the character a higher chance to resistance and therefore be unaffected by Stuns, Fears, and other Incapacitating effects.