Why can’t we have classics talent system in retail?
The one we have now is just so one sided. If you don’t have a specific talent your heals or dps suffer as a result. No amount of reworking those talents will stop this. You do more dps or hps with one talent vs the others.
The old system (classic basically) has it to where you can personalize your toon to feel unique. Yes there will always be a top hps or dps way to build your talents, but what if I want to be able to do some DMG while being a healer, or what if I want to heal more as a dps? You can’t really do that currently.
The current system is to minimalist and just doesn’t feel like mmo quality. With the version in classic you could specifically make your toon how you wanted to play it.
I don’t think we need specific talent reworks, I think we need to remove how the current talent system is. You won’t see oh this (insert class spec here) sucks. It will be a personalized version of how you want to play the game.
I have played classic, and vanilla (same thing but still). If you want to min max everything like I mentioned you can still do that. Which wasn’t hidden btw.
But for casual people they can make it unique not forced to take specific talents because some m+ junkie, or mythic raider, or pvp nut said to.
The Classic talent system still had “best” choices and if you wanted to do challenging content you pretty much had to take those - no different than retail.
I did kind of like the Classic system better, but in the end the result is the same.
I have less of a gripe against the Talent system, and more against Mastery.
80% of all specs Masteries are uninspired, bland, unexciting and just plain bad. They have done zero effort to revisit them, with the very few exceptions and it’s a unfun stat all around.
Mastery could have been beautifully synergized with Talent choices and class/spec identity to really make it a desirable stat. Alas, it was not to be.
EDIT: I will say this… It would be incredibly interesting if you could swap talent choices. Say choose two in row one, but then I got no choices in row two? That would completely allow for more fun things to happen.
Which is better then choosing from the 2- 3 things in a talent row on classic, as the ones in classic are not nearly as impactful.
You got to choose talents that had no new gameplay value for the majority of the tree, acting as minor 1% here and there increases. Increases that should have been baked into the spec.
What I liked about the old trees wasn’t the cookie cutter builds or the increase stats, rather, it was the off the wall builds that ended up being amazing until blizz nerfed them. Succasunna 2 handed enhance, wielding 2 intellect weapons as eley, the Shad builds as locks, the split builds of hunters and frost do tanks.
These new trees take out all the fun experimentation out of builds. Sure, you always had the cookie cutter builds, and you still do, but at least back then you could play around more.
There are things I like about it, sure, but it’s not something I want to stick with forever. It’s well worth exploring other models.
I mean like… wow, I just spend 20 hours gaining one level (since we’re talking about classic here)… now I get to spend my talent point on… making one skill 0.5% better. Oh joy.
Just because something has more options, doesn’t mean it’s instantly better. Vanilla’s talents were notorious for being one way or no way. Despite it sounding counterintuitive, we have more options now that we have less options.
