One subtle aspect of the modern talent tree change is that you are always in a spec.
And…the game knows it, and it knows if your spec is a tank, healer, melee dps, or ranged dps.
This information is now used extemsively in raids, and how bosses select targets for mechanics.
Many mechanics explicitly will not target melee.
Prior to the talent system change how would the game know if something like a paladin, druid or shaman is melee, ranged, or heals?
Almost every modern boss would need reworked if the game could not identify your role.
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This is an accurate statement.
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No. It’s not like we had a ton of melee mages in Vanilla or something.
You’d probably just flag them based on whatever tree they were “heaviest” into. You could then attempt to game said system, but a balance druid with more points in feral just to make the game think they were melee would…be pretty gimped. In cases of equality, then you would consider them both specs.
Wouldn’t really change much in the end honestly.
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They did it because they didn’t feel that talent trees had meaningful choices. For the most part, they were correct.
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They solved nothing though, considering we only typically have 1 90% MAYBE 2 options the other 10%. Talent tree’s by comparison to where we are now were, imo, better.
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Yeah they should take a look at talents and update them, maybe even add one for level 120.
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Some classes doesn’t even feel like we have talents because some of them are so good that they’re automatic picks outside of pure ST and AOE.
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What you mean? When you could get gargoyle AND DRW that was a huge choice
They didn’t solve their problem, no, but they did eliminate the fluff and baked most of that in.
But was it optimal?
The “one point per row” restriction should be removed.
Here’s 10 points, use whatever talents you want.
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Exactly. For example, BDK gets two choices. All other talents are set and forget.
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There were two talent changes - the talent reduction going from Wrath to Cata, and then the rework from Cata to MoP.
For discerning between tanks and non-tanks, you have threat metrics. A boss will only use abilities on the highest threat target (or, in other cases avoid casting them on that target). For the other classes, the game could look at things like heals done vs damage, and spells used. As far as targeting ranged or meelee goes, many mechanics will start targeting meelee if there’s not enough ranged players to choose from.
The game had solutions for it. Again, the swap to the current system didn’t happen until MoP.
As far as the debate for old vs new talent trees go, sure you technically had more flexibility, but there was usually a correct path for everyone in high-end content. You’d realistically have maybe 1-2 points to spend freely. The new system was meant to try and combat this by offering choices (say, shadowstep vs burst of speed) on tiers, but it hasn’t really panned out that well either.
Venruki put it best in his classic video. It doesn’t seem much, but those extra bits of bonuses that talents had gave you a sense of involvement and superiority over someone who didn’t spec similarly. Plus they were a nice steady reward during leveling. So they were not worthless at all.
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I wouldn’t say it’s why we lost them. The change was made and they realized they had something they could base mechanics off of.
They could go back, wouldn’t be that hard to figure out what role your performing, just computationally a lot more expensive.
I think it goes back to how bad leveling feel. You ding 120 levels and you get, what, 5-6 talent points total in all of that? It doesn’t feel like you’re progressing, it feels like you’re grinding for nothing. I don’t miss the Classic style of having a talent point per level go into a 1% increase to Wand damage, but I don’t think the current system is a good replacement.
Maybe some of this wouldn’t feel so bad if we didn’t go through expansions with certain traits or abilities only to lose them next expansion. Going from Legion to BfA felt horrific because not only did it feel like I lost my artifact (I don’t even feel like much if anything was baked in stat wise) on top of yet again losing spells, and getting nothing substantial in return. That definitely doesn’t help talents feeling like a non-choice other than ST vs. AoE.
A middle ground would be nice. And to no longer lose abilities between expansions.
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Sense of superiority is pretty lame to me.
The nice steady reward while leveling was really nice. I really wish they’d bring back something similar. Legion did it well with artifacts. They just need to tie that kind of system into leveling.
As for boss mechanics. The talent tree change came first, then the boss designers realized they had that tool in their arsenal to prevent certain roles from getting targeted etc.
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The game functioned just fine prior to them choosing not to target melee for example. I can think of tons of bosses via TBC that had mechanics that when targeted melee made it very hard or annoying but that was just a thing and an added level of challenge.
Talent tree were lost so grandma that cant find pvp vendor can’t feel bad that she does 30% less dps because she dont know what talent to pick.
Theyve had to explicitly nerf 2 encounters so far due to mechanical targetting issues and the guilds “solution” to just bench them all.