Blizzard has said that the ability for World of Warcraft players to switch between two concurrent character builds, or "talent specs", could arrive in the next major content update.

A Blizzard poster on the official forums said: "We hope to have this done for the next major content patch, but it's a big feature and takes some time."

In WOW, talents are a layer of character customisation that typically takes every character class down one of three paths. For instance, a Druid can be configured for healing, magical damage, or physical damage and tanking.

At present, you can only have one talent build at a time, and changing builds by reallocating all your talent points is time-consuming and expensive in in-game currency.

The new feature will allow players to create two builds to switch between. The post reveals that this will be possible away from cities as well as in them, but that this will be more difficult.

"It will be trivial to do in town. You will also be able to do it out of towns, but not as trivially," said the Blizzard poster.

It will also allow the player to switch between pre-set action bars and Glyphs (spell customisations) automatically when switching between specs.

It's a major change to WOW that will greatly increase the flexibility of all character classes, and make it much easier to compose balanced groups for taking on the game's dungeons.

Also coming in the next content patch will be a new raid dungeon for 10 or 25 players, called Ulduar. The post says it "will be more difficult" than the current raids, which have been criticised for not challenging the most dedicated raiding guilds.