Leveling isn’t rewarding anymore, talent points like they had in the game from Classic, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were the best. Why ruin something that’s a MAIN part of the gameplay experience?
Leveling is when you are experiencing your character and class for the first time and finding out how to play it in different scenarios you encounter in the world as you climb your way up the latter to max level. All the while learning your character, facing challenges and growing to be a better Paladin, Warlock, Mage or whatever you might be. And with every foe you faced and quest you completed you grew closer to hitting a new level and obtaining another talent point! Adding THAT much more Damage/HP/Armor to yourself or giving yourself a new ability entirely and making you that much stronger on your future quests!
From the very start of World of Warcraft, the base game, the talent system was in and working. WOW grew in popularity and the game was on its way to become the top MMO. Burning Crusade came, more people came, then Wrath of the Lich King came and even MORE people! Sure there were problems! But people LOVED the game! WOTLK was they’re top selling expansion with the most amount of people! Things were great! The leveling and and talent system was still kicking and people like me were altoholics! Then out of nowhere, Blizzard is like “you know what? lets [Removed] this all up next expansion”. the talent system was gutted. It’s not as rewarding or satisfying at all. It sucks.
BUT with Shadowlands bringing back the max level to 60, THEY CAN BRING IT BACK! Please Blizzard, please bring back the old talent system! It was so much better! It had so much player choice! Players could be hybrids if they wanted! The player agency was there! Your guild/raid have a problem with your build? Well, either change or leave. THE CHOICE IS YOURS! It’s YOUR character!
People will argue and say “The old talent system just made everything cookie cutter!” but there will ALWAYS be a “best/optimized” build to play and that’s your choice on whether you use it. This CURRENT talent system is WAY more cookie cutter than the old one! Your FORCED to choose only 1 specs talent, you can’t have a hybrid or a fun build like you choose because “why not, lets try it”.
So please Blizzard, please bring back the old talent system or some version of it in Shadowlands so we can have our rewarding leveling system and player choice back.
Thank you.
Sincerely, a loving player
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You might wanna separate some of those clustered sentences on your first paragraph into mini paragraphs to make things easier to read.
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Eh I’ve been saying it for years. All they need to do is go back to TBC and replicate that again and boom another good expac.
- K.I.S.S.
KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID
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Nah I’m good. I like the new talent system, the old one was a mess.
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Thank you for the reply, i fixed it 
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It will never happen as long as they keep making borrowed power every expansion, shadowlands is number 3 and I really hope the last but it seems Blizzard kinda got themselves stuck in a corner now by doing this so much they will probably keep doing it over and over.
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In before the “illusion of choice” arguments.
Well they did say every level will be rewarding but I am welcoming the idea of bringing it back. It felt much better and more builds rather then building your class on one spec. You can build it to where you can be for example, a feral and Restro Druid. I’m playing classic Druid for the first time and I love the idea of being both feral, and Restro.
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I never look at the talent tree while leveling. I only care about the talent tree at max level, make my selection and then never consider them again.
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You can play the spec your way, or you can be a part of a raid.
But if you are going hybrid, you can’t be both.
Talents trees are a choice, cookie cutter or bad.
I don’t mind basing my character off one style of play, most RPG’s I play have a way to push you into some sort of spec. My Torg Eternity character is apparently going to be the mage of the group. Not what I was expecting, but will be rather fun.
There definitely were cookie cutter builds in the old talent system, however there were more to choose from that were viable in whatever content you wanted to do with that specific spec. Pretty much if most of your points were in the spec you billed yourself as you were free to put the rest wherever you thought they needed to go for extra damage, utility, or damage mitigation.
Now however you have one decent talent on a row and if you don’t take that one it screws up your ability to do your job as whatever spec you are in group content. Gone are the days of ooh I play x spec but I’d really like to get y ability because I think it would be really cool/useful in the content I enjoy, and the game has suffered for it.
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In order to do so, are you willing to have them prune a bunch of your passive abilities / mastery and make them talents you have to select?
The whole reason they revised the talent system is because a Mage having to spend 15 points for 5/5 hit chance, 3/3 critical strike, 5/5 cast time reduction, and 2/2 cast pushback just to get to something interesting like Blast Wave was really an empty system.
They took most of those talents / perks and baked them into classes, designing actual specs instead of pages on the talent tree. The old trees had some interesting stuff but I remember how endlessly annoying they were to build specs, respec, and copy/paste my talent points into the cookie cutter internet builds that were pretty mandatory for endgame content.
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Yeah, but they sucked because they didn’t scale well.
Could you imagine trying to balance the trees out to 120 and adding two new classes?
Yikes.
In fact, they probably looked at getting rid of them BECAUSE of Death Knights being added and the nightmare they had trying to get those shoe horned into the game in those trees.
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Not to necrolord this post, but god I so agree. 51-61 talents in retail aren’t hard. I mean , counting to 71 is pretty early on in human brain development and education.
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Remember, the first iteration had nothing to do with difficulty
some talents were just pointless (+1/2/3/4/5% stam).
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Wrath had 71 and they could literally switch up some talents as they do artifacts and such. Not rely so much on systems.
I mean in counting, brother, not difficulty as far as the big trees. I felt these trees were more rewarding. I had different builds that still worked just fine because I knew my guy.
That’s what I mean about reworking for today’s game.
I’m with you on just about all that. You didn’t have to constantly swap and that was nice. You had the dungeon and raid setup right there. At least for me, it worked.
Glyphs were also a great way for scribes to make money and chewing some of that stuff out kinda sucked as well. That’s not an argument against you as that would be some straw man crap. Happy to have a genial and collegial conversation.
Proceeds to Necrolord the post.
lol
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Yeah, that’s me… I was a space cadet and didn’t look at the date.
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