If by “viable” you mean “I played meme builds and got carried”. Sure, I guess.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for meme builds. I played Feral with HoTW in MoP CMs. But I’d be fooling myself to think I shouldn’t have just played Balance instead.
1 Like
no, they weren’t
2 Likes
The original game was built around 25 people being competent with good builds/classes. The remaining 15 slots were for people to assist in some form or capacity. You can use the term ‘carry’ but if they came in and did their part and the boss ended up dying nothing else mattered. That design was what made WoW successful and even still in today’s world that version has a big following
4 Likes
I suppose you are not familiar with the definition of ‘viable’.
1 Like
First, What we have is NOT a talent tree. A tree has branches. Please stop confusing what we have today in WoW with the great system many of us miss and would like to see brought back to the current game.
Yes are current talent ROW system needs to die in a fire. Everyone defends the change but in the end every time with these talent rows or the old talent trees. There was always the right choices and the wrong choices.
Old talent trees made you feel like your character progressed and earned something every level. Going back to level 50 for me would make old talent trees a welcomed addition. Too bad we will never see it.
Just another aspect of Classic that is better then current.
7 Likes
Bring back TBC-Cata talent trees, enough of this garbage MoP crap that gives you 1 useful ability out of three choices or like 3 tiers of mediocre utility talents.
5 Likes
Yeah well Paladin had always 1 to 2 row that made use chose between stuff we have baseline or a different power.
It’s been only smooth to play in Legion due to legendaries. BFA Talents are worse in three row, the only inflation comes from burrowed powers.
1 Like
If we were to head back to the old talent system, it’d need a massive rework on how it performed.
Objectively, it only gave the illusion of choice, and a lot of the upgrades were just stepping stones to get abilities anyway. Is 1% bonus damage with wands even that exciting? Or used?
I personally would love a talent tree like a sort of Sphere Grid or the like, but really I know that’s not gonna happen. I like the present talent system, and any problems with it can be addressed with ability changes, whether it’s baking in ones that feel mandatory into the class as a passive or updating underperforming perks.
1 Like
All for this, if they give me back Exorcism, and Seal of Blood.
2 Likes
Yes that’s the entire point… if you just got everything at max level then there would be 0 reason to have talents.
1 Like
I agree, though some specs struggled a ton more than others if doing non cookie cutter builds. Some struggled so much without the cookie cutter build that they basically weren’t viable. But again, it did work on some.
I loved my DK during WotLK because of her hybrid Blood and Frost talent setup. Delving deep enough into Blood’s tree to get Veteran of the Third War, Blood Worms, Mark of Blood and…something else, I forget, been so long. While also delving into Frost being able to get Icy Talons for attack speed, Unbreakable Armor(which was an INSANE defensive cd) and Howling Blast. The end result was a tank with insane damage and insane cooldowns, I also dual wielded Slayer of the Lifeless until I got Betrayer of Humanity.
It wasn’t optimal. But it was extremely viable. And fun.
On topic. I’m torn. The older talent tree felt nicer to me, felt way more RPG like. Though I also acknowledge the new tree is nice because we don’t have to put points into X to gain 0.2% of Y stat 5 times, multiple times, to get to Z which is the juicy ability or passive we actually want.
I’d be thrilled if Blizzard could find a way to combine the two, that’d be nifty if they could pull it off.
1 Like
You could argue that most of the original ‘choices’ should have just been built in to the skill and not included in a ‘tree’ seeing as basically everyone picked many of the same options. That does not change the fact for me that making a spell have a larger radius, healing for 15% more, regenerating more mana, etc felt good. I would rather talents be spent on improving spells and in the rare cases giving access to a new spell rather than just pick 1 of 3 seven different times.
1 Like
Those are objective good perks.
A lot of fluff talents in the old system, like 1% bonus wand damage, isn’t. So make talents feel, as a whole, impactful across the board as increasing the radius of your healing spells or even reducing mana costs.
Which is… kind of what we have right now, if we want to be realistic here.
2 Likes
I know some specs have nice talent trees, and I’m sure a lot of the defenders of the current system play specs that do.
As somebody with a trash talent tree, many of which are NEVER taken by anybody because they’re completely useless, it would be neat if Blizzard looked into doing them like the PvP talents.
As in “Here are 21 choices, pick 7.”
Garbage talents suddenly become a non-issue.
1 Like
Depends on how much of a total squish across the board but I would also argue to get hit and expertise back because a lot of those old talent trees had talents designed for those stats.
I liked working on my hit and expertise cap. Made me feel like I was working toward something and it was rewarding to finally achieve both. But I also liked good old weapon skill and the weapon trainer. Shows you how off my rocker I am.
2 Likes
I grew up on games like Dragon Quest. I’m no stranger to long-term grinds, so we’re kindred spirits there. 
I’m personally torn on hit and expertise. On one hand I love how I don’t need to actively worry about it anymore, but on the other I get nostalgic for when they were there. If we were to ever get hit/expertise back, I’d push hard for having reforging return as well.
i kind of like the way they are now. just balance them better if there are problems there
We’ve been waiting 7 years for that, it’s never going to happen.
There are 2 problems with the current system:
- Blizzard MUST give everyone 21 talents, but they don’t have 21 good ideas. Therefore, garbage talents exist, and will always exist.
- Bad row design leaves some rows with no good choices, while locking the player out of other rows. Some specs have talents nicely spaced so you can pick 7 good ones, many others do not, and you have to pick garbage.
Also:
3. Blizzard is terrible at class balancing, in general.
4 Likes
or they could fix the useless ones (though looking at the guardian talent tree, there are only like… 2 or 3 maybe, that I never use, so idk that I can agree that many are useless. I think I’d lean towards calling some highly situational…maybe I’m splitting hairs).
I mean, sure, I wouldn’t care if they made more of them baseline and not choices, or even went the pvp system route.
but that old talent system… meh. no. I hope we never go back in that direction.
Both features were definitely interesting. I think the idea was good and it definitely made the races with weapon type perks feel good. I main’d a caster for the duration of the weapon skill feature though so it had limited impact on me.