Without the support of the old glyph system, the current talent trees just feel too cookie cutter and limited: with talents you will figuratively never use even once for any reason going months without buffs or changes, to talents that are so good that you will always take them for certain specs, even if you hate them (Hi, rune of power.)
Few classes in the game are fortunate enough to actually have diverse builds for different situations.
Most are stuck with the one that’s just better for everything.
While I don’t have any exact solutions right now, I figured I would vomit this post out and get a discussion going.
Get your popcorn ready, folks.
There’s always going to be a cookie cutter build. In any system of any game, there’s going to be a best build for each specific scenario. The WoW community is just really good at finding them.
Personally, I think making each row offer talents that don’t compete for the same niche is the best. The Affliction T30 row is a great example: cleave vs AoE vs single target. Each selection has a niche and a completely different playstyle.
Meanwhile, the Aff T60 row is awful. All 3 talents are competing for the AoE slot, so one of them will always just be better and the other 2 will just never get taken under any circumstances.
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At that point, why even have the MoP talent system and not the linear Pre-MoP ones?
It doesn’t solve any problems, and only introduces more pitfalls for players to fall into. Survival overall has a good layout, but why would I ever take Butchery over GT? Pretty much no reason to do that.
They should put more thought into these things, and preferably not wait half a year to buff them.
EDIT: I would personally rather have a complete class with pre-defined passives and abilities, than a broken mess that doesn’t even work, but you have a certain set of choices that make it good.
I think their intent was to have talents that are niche for specific situations.
A perfect example of this would be protection warrior’s level 75 talents: Menace, Shockwave, and Storm Bolt. Execution of this idea is sorely lacking and change usually takes an entire expansion (and there still may be under performing talents).
I think that this topic is best addressed on a class by class basis in the appropriate sub-forum.
TBH they had a LOT of options to add as new talents, they just disabled the our legendary items and artifact weapons, why they didn’t even try to create a new talent row with their effects?
I prefer the GW2 specialization system. Having a way to choose from seven specializations that each had 3 sets of 3 traits to choose from. On top of that, you were able to pull from 3 specializations that you picked. However, what this system lacked was impact. The traits did not dramatically change how you played.
However, a hybrid of these two systems that I think would look like this:
- Every class/spec would have a talent tier for the following: Resource generation, Mobility, Crowd Control, Cooldown Reduction, Defensive Cooldown, and Offensive Cooldown. These would in a way represent the “specializations” as in GW2.
- Each talent choice is used in a different situation: Lots of Mobs, 2-3 target cleave, and single target. Mobility choices would be similar to: Large party, 2-3 allies, and for yourself. Defensive cooldowns would be similar to: protect the group, protect a target, protect yourself.
- Effectiveness based on class niche. It seems class niches are important to the developers, so the talents should reflect that. For example, a group movement speed buff for a guardian druid should be stronger than a monk because it is what they are good for. No class should be strong at everything, so a Single target offense ability may be much stronger for a class that specializes in it and the MT and cleave talents may be passed over.
Unfortunately, tuning is all over the place and we have classes that are strong at most everything and only have a few counters in pvp.
Or more to the fact that there really just isn’t any god-honest option for Raiding or PvP as to which talent is the best choice.
The “fun” talents don’t have the same kick.
Hell, if I chose Stampede i’d have to shoot myself. They entirely gutted the damage of it when it first came out. Then they nerfed the duration of it massively. Then they gutted the damage once again. Now they removed it as a core ability and added it as a talent some time ago, then they further ‘revamped’ it a little bit to be some kind of crappy Murky ‘ultimate’ from HotS that does mediocre damage output and barely lasts longer than I can blink my eyes.
That’s the option that exists for certain abilities that would have otherwise been “fun” versus the more obvious talent options. That’s just one example I can think of, from the Hunter’s talent pool no less.
Because linear trees lend themselves to even less freedom. At least with MoP trees each choice is independent of the others. With linear trees it wasn’t uncommon to skip over abilities in favor of “1% more shadow damage” because you needed 5/5 shadow damage to get to “100% more critical strike damage.”
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Obviously, linearity leads to restricted freedom - a railroad, that’s just the nature of being linear.
Additionally: The warlock trees were fairly janky and full of potential wrong-picks, true. Of course everyone and their mother did the SL/SL thing eventually and that was fairly cookie cutter, but the issue with that is that the MoP system was supposed to solve that and give us choices, it does not, and in many cases limits said choices.
The difference is, then - if you were a mage, you were a mage, if you were a hunter, you were a hunter. The talents are what decided your specialty.
Now it’s ‘you are a frost a mage’ ‘you are a destro lock’ the talents are specifically crafted for the base spec, and yet still fail to do anything notable at times.
Hell, I’m sure every fire mage would rather be playing the ‘elemental’ spec from way back than the ‘pure’ version they have now.
EDIT: In the current model, talents should feel like a bonus, or a playstyle change. Right now it just feels like a chore they threw in to make broken baseline toolkits somewhat workable.
I agree that it seems like they failed to complete the toolkit for some classes and they stuck talents in there to patch the holes in it. For instance, Anger Management for warriors.
Tbph, i’d cry with tears of joy if WoW had a talent system like RIFT’s. It’s why I frequently revisit RIFT. Having truly Hybrid class builds is epic fun. I can be half/half, 1//3rd specialist (and still succeed to a degree), or full on Pyromancer (for example) and then just talent passives in other trees that make Pyro’s abilities all hit like nuclear bombs.
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