Which begs the question whether they plan to do this for other talent trees because god knows they all need it, mages probably most of all. This Kaivax fellow is apparently the only community outreach person on payroll at Blizzard so please join me is asking him about these things!
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Congrats Warriors!
I suspect mages are somewhere on the bottom of the list to do reworks for, somewhere after all melee classes and tanks and healers.
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Kaivax isnât the only one but he canât convey messages from devs that donât give him info to share.
We already know for a fact that any talents that Hero trees might call to will be moved to more accessible locations in their respective trees, thatâs not news.
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Iâd assume mages are near the bottom of the list, but not because of âgeneric âBlizz hates my classâ conspiracyâ that most classes seem to think they suffer from, but because they had a significant refresh in 10.1.5
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Shhh, donât debunk the basis of two thirds of the threads here. What will we talk about then?
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They usually work on everybody at least a bit for a new expansion so hopefully we donât have to worry about this. Warriors also had substantial changes in their class tree iirc in the middle of the expansion and will get âreworkedâ again.
I just hope when they do look at the mage trees, they tackle all the problems weâve been complaining about since forever like Time Anomaly/Temporal Warp and some others.
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The main problem that I (and I think a fair number of other players) will take with that is that weâve always had âa little bitâ every expansion. The problem is that those little bits have been adding up consistently over the years.
There arenât many (if any) major fundamental issue with most of mage. The problem is that there are so many small problems that have been adding up that make life difficult. Mage is completely and 100% playable and viable in all 3 specs, but all those leftovers from the biennial âexpansion updatesâ have left us a bit lacking (especially in the Quality of Life department).
Maybe every other class feels the same way, but I canât speak for them (Iâm a one-trick pony). I can only speak for what I play. It took over a decade of complaints about Rune of Power for Blizzard to finally address it. I donât want every mage problem to take 10 years to resolve - and most of them could probably be resolved by adjusting our talents.
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I know what you mean but for my part I have never once said anything to that effect. Blizzard donât hate mages, that would imply they care enough about them. I have no idea what the development process looks like over at Blizzard but I can tell you that the people making the decisions very obviously donât play the classes in any capacity because if they had they would have no doubt encountered the plethora of nuisances players have had to put up with for years now. I have to believe if they knew about them they would have done something about it by now⌠just for the sake of my own sanity.
That didnât go nearly far enough for any of the 3 specs, as any mage player can attest.
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This is entirely opinion, and despite my forum avatar, I am a mage player. I play every class. Every class and spec has their pet peeves regarding their talent tree; this has always been the case, and this will continue to be the case no matter how they are designed.
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Donât forget the fact that at least as far back as MoP, that âwe fixed thingsâ patch doesnât come until halfway through the expansion for Mages. For Mists it was ToT, for WoD it was BrF, for Legion it was between Tomb and Antorus, for BFA, SL and DF it was the x.15 patches. Based on that, Mages have for the most part been relatively garbage to play for virtually half the expansion.
To me that just indicates that the ânewâ talent trees are a failure then. There was no real reason for them, other than to promote them as a new feature of the expansion. They didnât really bring anything new to any spec that didnât exist previously, and if there are that many players with complaints (big or small) then it didnât work as a concept. With their track record, the trees might not be awful in another 3 expansions - just in time for them to announce the next ânewâ thing.
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Exactly! And itâs even worse than that because not only did they not introduce anything new they even actively took things away that were previously baseline just to be able to break them down into more talent nodes to fill out the tree interface. The trees were half baked there is no two ways about it.
Nah, there are always going to be issues that people have with the talent trees, no matter how well or poorly designed they are (and lest we forget, people have had pet peeves with their talent trees in every single iteration of them, so this isnât even a new problem). Since they have become a lot more of the focus point for how classes function, many issues people have with their class are more likely pointed at their talent trees than they wouldâve been before, e.g: âI think Iâm too squishy? Blame the talent tree because I canât pick up (x) and (y) survivability talent without having to give up throughput talents.â Sometimes itâs more a matter of the vision for a spec rather than the design or layout of the talent tree: see DPS DK, for example.
Also, you just canât please everybody: people have vastly differing ideas about what their class/spec should look like, how it should play, what abilities they like, etc, and often the ideas/preferences that people bring to the table directly contradict othersâ ideas/preferences. I mean, you try and build a talent tree that a) supports multiple playstyles that people have enjoyed over the history of the spec, while still having a well defined vision for what the spec is supposed to be, that b) encourages build diversity so there arenât a bunch of âdead talentsâ but also you donât have to give up too much performance switching talents between (x) scenario and (y) or (z) scenario, that c) doesnât have too many âboring passive talentsâ but also isnât so complex with all of the modifiers and impactful playstyle-defining talents that interact in complex ways, and you have to read a novel to understand them all, that d) that has âinteresting and meaningful choicesâ, but also you donât have to âgive up anything too important,â when switching builds, that e) puts important survivability talents in a node where they need to be taken, but also doesnât âforce you to waste pointsâ on defensives over throughput, that f) balances everything well so that people can play how they want, but also the best build doesnât change with every tier and you have to relearn your rotation, where g) the talents at the bottom of the tree are âimpactful,â but also you have enough spare floating talents in the middle, and etc, etc, etcâŚ
Also also: players donât actually prefer choice nearly as much as they say they do.
Now I will be clear that there are certainly significant issues with some trees (Druid class tree comes immediately to mind), but to my mind, there is a lot of it that comes down to personal preferences, tuning problems, and other issues that arenât necessarily issues with the trees but get deflected to them anyway.
This isnât entirely true. While most of the talents themselves were based on existing effects that have been seen throughout the expansions, there are plenty of new and interesting combinations that had never been possible before. I think youâre partially right, though, and it seems clear that it was a conscious decision that while the system would have a major overhaul, the classes/specs would remain quite familiar. I donât think it wouldâve been wise to try and sell the player base on a revamped talent system on top of major new across the board class changes.
I will point out that:
- despite âlosing baseline abilities,â I still had to come up with new keybinds for basically every single spec when the new talent trees dropped. We arenât lacking for active abilities, and Iâve been through enough expansions of class changes, talent changes, design changes, etc, that I donât really care where abilities come from, so long as it feels enough like a complete package when itâs all put together
- in the revamps/refreshes theyâve done so far, there has been a trend of reverting abilities/effects back to being baseline, so they have already been dialing some of this back a bit.
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I think they specifically mentioned this because the Hero tree focused on Shockwave, and Shockwave is inaccessible.
If they posted the hero tree as it was w/o that spec, it would have been considered bad because Shockwave competes with Championâs Spear, Avatar and Dragonâs roar
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