Why does it seem like the number of Enhancement talent tree points of “passives-turned-talents” is on the upper end of spectrum?
I’m talking about previous class baseline abilities or level based upgrades that are now talents rather than legendaries or existing talent choices (e.g. sundering, crashing storms, molten assault, windfury totem, storm blast, improved / raging maelstrom, gathering storms, etc.). From a rough comparison of a few other classes I see:
Arcane is up there as well, but somehow seems more cohesive probably because it’s all arcane damage. While I appreciate the flexibility to opt out of some talents for certain content, is this number / flexibility common for other specs or maybe locked behind otherwise uninteresting % increase talents?
I dont see the big deal with “buying back abilities” that everyone’s complaining about. We are transitioning to a talent tree layout, with more freedom, instead of everything being baked in with a few limited options of abilities. When everything is meant to come from the new talent trees as you level, of course you are gonna have to use the talent points to pick up those abilities…?
Its not complicated or unreasonable. In fact, it makes complete sense considering the entire talent system is being rebuilt from the ground up.
What do you people want? Everything you currently have baked in, with 60 new abilities and passives to use all those talents on?
Feels like a lot of specs do simply get more for free at least for those I’ve had time to look over. Enhancement seems to be 5 talent points behind the average. While there are a couple of new buffs like Crashing Storms, the ascendance path, and the potential for a third legendary effect, a very large portion of the first two sections is basically just the current Shadowlands content.
I’m not saying it’s an unworkable tree (mostly because there are fewer +5% damage nodes blocking paths and a lot of connections in general), but it does lose some diversity when you have to spend 13/20 points to achieve the current content mechanically.
As usual, Enhancement seems to be a little bit of everything in the tree with old baseline abilities filling in the gaps / connections instead of something that focuses on a particular mechanic with significantly separated branches as in some specs. That may be the intent, but it still feels overtuned in cost as a result.
Illusion of freedom, sure. Be real. We all know these things are going to crystalize into rigid meta builds immediately. Talent trees can work for customization in single player games where the efficacy of your build can act as something more like a difficulty setting, but in MMOs, all they do is broaden the power gap between optimized and unoptimized players.
Choosing between being good and being bad isn’t a real choice. That’s why we rightly ditched tree-style talents years ago; the freedom to pick almost anything you want paradoxically results in less freedom to build your character. When you can pick anything, you can – and therefore have to – pick only the strongest combinations, because that’s what the class and spec have to be balanced around in order not to trivialize content.
This is true to an extent i the current system, too, but the more limited nature of the current system makes it much easier to reduce the power gap between the best and worst possible builds, which in turn gives more freedom to play off-meta without totally gimping yourself.
It’s like dropping a person in the middle of the wilderness. Sure, they have freedom in the sense that they have no structural barriers stopping them from doing whatever they want, but actual survival demands that all their time and energy be sunk into foraging for food and shelter. There’s nothing literally stopping them from doing something else, but they will die if they don’t put all of their focus into a narrow range of survival activities to the exclusion of all those theoretical freedoms.
To stick with the current system. The current talent system has much greater potential for true freedom, and has delivered it in the past. Its current failures to do so are down to two factors: borrowed power, and developer apathy.
The devs have gotten so ludicrously lazy about balancing the current system that crap like the current Ice Strike has been allowed to exist for the full length of multiple expansions, and Outlaws rogues spent all of BfA with a talent that was an actual dps loss from not having a talent in that row. That is not a problem that going back to talent trees is going to solve, it’s one that talent trees are going to magnify because trees are much harder to balance individual talents for.
Borrowed power systems then amplify talent imbalances or even invent new ones by virtue of synergies between systems massively favoring specific talents in combination with various borrowed powers, such as Primordial Wave and Primal Lava Actuators tipping Enhancement’s scales heavily into Lava Lash and Flame Shock talents. For all the different buttons you clicked to get there, you really only made one or two choices, and then everything else was just calculated by what best supported those one or two picks.
Both of those problems are eminently solvable. Talent balance is far easier in the current system by virtue of any individual talent only being in direct competition against two others, and not using borrowed power systems does not necessitate dumping the current talent system. We had the current system without borrowed power through both MoP and WoD. We can absolutely go back to just having the talent system, and no covenants, or Azerite powers, or artifact weapons tacked on top to create and exacerbate talent imbalances.
“Everyone” isn’t complaining about it, only people that still can’t wrap their heads around what the rest of the community has understood and moved on from.
It’s also been seen as a huge win and only a loud minority still harp on it and use stupid self fulfilling nonsense like
Classes arent a 1:1 comparison and that’s pretty braindead obvious
The talent trees are not the problem exactly so much as it seems like there is an imbalance or curious departure from the norm of the designs across specs to me. What should be obvious is that the specs should be competitive. If this means Enhancement talents are significantly buffed at the cost of buying back abilities in the tree relative to others that have several smaller stacking modifiers to baseline abilities, then so be it, but I’m skeptical when this seems to be the exception to the norm.
I don’t see specs like Feral or Ret having to buy back Shred or Judgement among several other core abilities for example. In the original list, I was even being a bit generous by counting some things like Hand of Hindrance in Ret which are not exactly DPS abilities.
Shamans generally had a large number of utility talents simply moved to the class tree resulting a relatively small pool of DPS talents. This is an indirect buff in that some talents that were mutually exclusive can be picked up, but now you have this weird tradeoff like losing the built in storm blast so you can pick up Lashing Flames alongside Elemental Blast for example. This isn’t really exclusive to Enhancement however as many other specs are also doubling up on previously exclusive talents.
At this point, I am mostly I am just hoping they fix the pathing on the right and reduce the cost of Molten Assault, Hot Hand, and / or Improved Maelstrom Weapon during this last round of tuning.
It is not buying back abilities as you are given talent points instead of the static abilities. So if an ability is no interesting for you, you can just get another one instead, or even a passive. The idea is allowing you to personalize your skill set.
You can make a variety of builds, but being able to spec out of sundering and crash lighting for single target content to free points when those abilities would not have been a substantial factor in the first place is not my idea of flexible design. Most specs are going to start off similar to the following in all cases before deciding on specific content (M+, PvP, single target raid, etc.)
Thanks for your well reasoned argument and ad-hominem attacks. What is your justification for not having Crash Lightning baseline with Gathering Storms in its place, Doomwinds built into baseline Windfury, and instead 5 points (3 in AoE talents) for Hot Hands, 3 points for Hailstorm in single target, etc.?
You have to spend talent points on abilities that have been baseline for 18 years. I call that buying back.
Things that were talents recently and are talents now don’t feel bad, but having to spend points on things like frost shock and earthquake feel awful, especially since there’s literally no avoiding them
The fact that you still have to explain this to them shows it isn’t worth the effort. The good news is, their lack of understanding isn’t stopping this from happening
Talent tress that really focus on fleshing out windfury at the expense of Lava Lash or vise-versa with new interesting talents while at least starting from the current state of the class would have been preferred, but that much will not change this late.
I’d prefer the cost reduction or streamlining of the talents to continue to include a couple (not necessarily all) baseline effects similar to what I mentioned in examples above. Those talent points would actually promote more flexibility.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m against the talent trees in general. I’m not, but my feedback is that the current tree still needs some adjustment. Do you have nothing else to say on that topic?
The current system is just as cookie cutter if not more than the original version of talents. In the original version you had at least a few points you could change while the majority is cookie cutter.
I’m the current system, you never change talents in PvP except for Nature’s Guardian. And the only reason you change it isn’t because feral lunge or the other talent no one ever plays is better, it’s because you’re going against a priest you suspect is playing mind games and mind games procs off NG, essentially throwing the game.
Please don’t say the current talent system makes it easier to balance. It doesn’t. It hasn’t. Mage and rogue have been overturned for 2 xpacs now. The current talent system fails because it’s not cohesive across all specs. There aren’t defined roles for each row. The execution of this talent system, couples with the balancing of talents, has made this current system a total failure. Ironically the current system is exactly what you say the old system does… pick only the strongest combinations, because that’s what the class and spec have to be balanced around in order not to trivialize content. When was the last time you saw a patch where they buffed Earthen Spike where it was not only viable but also the preferred talent?
In the old trees a few talents can change the play style completely. Look at UH DK in WotLK for example. You can play reaping (3 points) and then you become a rune based or not and become disease based play style.
The devs have their work cut out for them in balancing, but if they are up for it, so am I. I’m literally asking for like 1-2 talent points freed in the tree in some fashion such as either cost reduction, changing layout, or streamlining some previously baseline abilities since it still seems too expensive with points spent on things core to the spec.
No, I would prefer that we keep our baseline abilities and the talents instead enhance what those abilities do.
For example, the frost shock talent could increase the slow duration, and the earthquake talent could allow it to knock targets down with the baseline version just giving damage