I know most people hated row talents, but I always thought there was beauty in their simplicity and practicality. Every row mattered, and every build felt more situational and fluid.
Checking my assigned talents before every dungeon/raid was like a little ritual. It was part of gameplay. And more often than not, I’d find myself actually switching a talent or two before engaging in an encounter. Despite their simplicity, they somehow felt more “meaningful,” if that makes sense.
totally does, while the current trees are full of talents and points, most of them are just auto-locks for every situation, it’s very rare for an encounter to cause me to move around talents in my current tree
so while it seems like i have tons of choices, i already know that the choices i’ve made are the cookie cutter best choices for almost every situation
I personally prefer Pandaria talents, but I can see the perception of them shifting depending on which class you play. Some classes do have some pretty wet fart choices here and there, like Warriors who don’t PvP might as well not even have a level 45 talent
Although if I really had a choice, the current talent system on retail I think is the best of both worlds, but that’s not really an option for Pandaria
It gives theorycrafters more things to test since different talents in the same row can have very different DPS numbers, and change your stat priorities.
It lets arena players pick different setups to counter the opposing comp. Same logic for pve players, but you pick whatever is needed for the fight.
True, there will be MoP talent choices that are gonna be locked in the whole expansion, but pre-MoP you were still locked in to a tree. My only complaint was the strange mix-and-matching of rows in MoP where you’d have like two utility/movespeed talents then one defensive. In WoD this was ironed out to the “Defensive row”, “Utility row”, “Damage row” etc that lasted all the way until Dragonflight
MoP talents are mostly better for endgame imo as they let you get more utility. For leveling older talent trees pre-cata are better. Cata talents are somewhat in between with not every level offering something. My problem with mop talent system is it became mostly single target vs aoe options after some time which feels pretty bad when it shined more with the utility it gave. But, combined with the glyph system still expanding it did give you a lot of versatility for different raid fights and that felt great and even better than the new retail talent trees imo in term of utility.
EXACTLY!
I hate how bloated the new talent trees are. I literally have 2 permanent presents, single-target and aoe, and I almost never modify them. On a rare occasion, I might reinvest a few talent points here and there, but for the most part - they’re set in stone and there’s no reason for me to check them ever.
Eh, it’s not that bad of a selection. If you look across the board, every class has a row of “CC talents”
Just like Hunter’s binding shot or DK’s desecrated ground, Warrior’s AoE root is very useful and the AoE interrupt can also be helpful on specific bosses with dangerous adds.
A good example of wanting AoE snares would be Galakras on heroic, where you fight waves of elites, killing them before they kill your NPC army in the back.
AoE interrupts are very good to have in CM dungeons as well, you do very big pulls and don’t have the gear to just tank every hit.
I personally think that leveling, the Cataclysm trees are the most impactful. Vanilla trees are pretty bad. It’s a lot of stuff like 1% chance to hit and fluff just to path down to your one or two strong talents.
While I prefer the retail/dragonflight class/spec dual trees, I have always felt that Cata trees were the most rewarding and impactful for leveling.
However, the MoP trees give you bigger things, less frequently and as you level, you passively gain things that would have been in your talent tree. Blizzard just gives you the talents by default now and your new talent tree is more like a small but powerful toolbox.
Even if less powerful a lot of people simply want something each level, if you don’t do this then leveling feels more empty. Personally I hate that retail has so many core abilities in the tree which is also why I prefer the mop talent tree as classes felt “fully” equipped in mop and I hate that they kept pushing for single target vs aoe talents the more it went on and the new talent trees still have that big problem of making your class feel naked time to time.
This is a common misconception with MoP. The way the classes are designed, you aren’t losing anything. Blizzard just stream-lined the talent trees and gave you the things you were already going to take by default. The only difference is you aren’t allocating the travel points, but that’s a fair trade for the big talents you get every 15 levels.
Retail is the only version of WoW where talent selections are truly impactful and meaningful, where you have 4-5 different unique talent builds that all play differently and you can experiment.
Every prior iteration has never offered that experience. Vanilla/Cata/MoP talents are standard, cookie-cutter setups. If you’ve seen one Hunter’s build, you’ve seen all Hunter’s builds because there is only one good setup for each situation.
My Unholy Deathknight in retail has a different talent preset for every dungeon, one for delves, one for world content and two loadouts for raid, depending on the boss. I don’t PvP but if I did I’d have a different setup as well.
Also, these “core abilities” in the talent tree you are talking about, are in the top rows of the talent tree. You never have to choose between a major class ability, they are pathing nodes that unlock synergetic passives.
90% of the retail talent trees are just passives. For mythic+; the art of making a good build is balancing between AoE and ST priority damage and sometimes going all in into AoE if that’s your classes strengths and building a dungeon comp around you doing the most AoE.
In retail they made specs for specs which means you have to choose different kits of the same spec and even as a class and this ended making class either feel naked or having to specialize single target or aoe. Yes there are better talents for most situations and some classes are more stuck with some talents but most classes with mop talents have talents they will move around depending of fights.
I’m not trying to be rude, but do you actually play retail actively? I have 6 geared characters that I rotate between in mythic+ and don’t particularly agree with this.
Hero talents have been heavily refined at this point and they’re all passive bonuses that have synergy with your class. There’s a case for using them all and I switch between them depending on if I’m doing the raid or dungeons. Sometimes I need better mobility than I do damage, so I play Rider of the Apocalypse.
While it’s true, some specs have to choose between AoE and ST, you aren’t drastically losing one or the other. My ST build might do 10% more dps on dungeon bosses than my cleave build, but in mythic+ what matters is your overall damage in timing a key.
You have to keep in mind that there really aren’t pure ST scenarios in retail that matter, no many at least. Most of the dungeon bosses have cleave phases as do most of the raid bosses. There is only a handful of scenarios where we play pure ST builds in retail and it’s never in mythic+
Most classes in retail can take 3-4 talent points and efficiently cleave off of their ST rotation (that’s what made Windwalker Monk the best class in this season’s raid)
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that there is never one “correct” build for any content because there are too many variables.
Difficulty and items are the biggest ones. Your build looks different if you’re doing high keys than low keys and before/after you have your tier set.
Often based on your comp as well. You bringing a fury warrior, boomkin or ret paladin? They do the highest burst damage so your build needs to be more “fast” damage than sustained. This is more of an issue with DoT classes like warlocks, dks and priests
You’re free to look at my profile if you have questions about my experience. I disagree that retail offers that much more complexity (in term of talent choice) or that it is good complexity in term of gameplay.
You may not think so but that’s likely because you aren’t the one doing the problem solving. If you are simply copying and pasting a wow-head build and do not experiment or do a wide range of content, sure. But my 8 talent loadouts contradicts your claim that there is no complexity.
But the Unholy build I played last season is drastically different than the one I’m playing this season. Same with my Ret Paladin, BM Hunter especially.
Hunter probably has the most room for experimenting. I recently switched to the NoCD build for mythic+ and it’s been fantastic. Something that really didn’t pop up until this all season because of smarter people than us.
Good complexity in terms of gameplay is high subjective. I think they nailed it with dungeon and raid mechanics this season. They are overall fun and challenging but not too much of a pain if you have a competent group.
Which is the point, that it can still be cookie cutter. I’m pretty sure a lot of people do that for classic too.
That’s the exact opposite of cookie-cutter, though. That label is given to games where everyone is walking around in the same gear, talents etc. AKA Classic WoW.
That has never been the case for retail, by design. There are 20+ trinkets available to every class each season and with how complex and choice-driven the talent trees are, you will walk around inspecting players and often see different talent loadouts.
It’s something I’ve done a lot this season. If I see another Hunter in my delve group, I’d check out his loadout and compare it with mine at the end of the dungeon.
If you keep up with retail, there’s always mid season discoveries like obscure trinket interactions or random OP talents that people didn’t foresee. It happened last season when every ret Paladin was running a veteran track trinket that got added mid season and was beating out mythic ilvl trinkets.
You can look at the stats for talents which we can get from archon or even warcraftlogs you’ll see most people run the same thing. Gear or trinkets is simply something you sim to know which is best or even use the same websites for that info. For M+ we also have murlok.io