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.
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.
All for this, if they give me back Exorcism, and Seal of Blood.
Yes that’s the entire point… if you just got everything at max level then there would be 0 reason to have talents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Also:
3. Blizzard is terrible at class balancing, in general.
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.
No, it’s not time.
We’ve also seen a lot of other players respond to said feedback with no let’s not go back to those terrible trees.
Speak for yourself, the old talent trees were garbage 1% to wand damage wasn’t interesting nor fun.
Bristling Fur is almost never used since it went on the GCD.
How many bears use Tiger Dash?
The affinity row is a nightmare of game design, anybody who wants to read further can stroll over to the Druid forum, where it is regularly discussed at length (Druids hate it). That’s 3 talents right there.
Mighty Bash isn’t used as much as Typhoon/Mass Entangle. Oh and it’s getting nerfed in shadowlands, because of course it is.
I’m one of the few Druids who uses Soul of the Forest a lot, and then only when I’m in a gear set with the proper single-target Azerite trait.
Earthwarden dramatically outclipses Guardian of Elune, some use Survival of the Fittest in niche scenarios.
Pulverize is rarely used and is being GUTTED in shadowlands.
And then there’s Lunar Beam, which has been hot steaming garbage ever since it was first introduced.
The whole tree is a mess. Then you look at other specs who have a plethora of useful choices that Blizzard obviously had a lot of creative ideas for.
It is hard to balance classes when you are trying to balance around PvP, PvE, large groups, small groups, solo, etc. If you remember, balance was never really an issue until TBC with arenas. That is when they started making all kinds of changes to skills.
I like this idea, but have little faith in Blizzard balancing 21 talents to be equal. As it is now Talents are balanced around those in their rows, not all the choices. Some rows are just less impactful than others (to be fair druid has a number of those).
There was nothing like being a tank, finally getting a new weapon in a dungeon but not being able to use it because you didn’t have skill ranks in it.
Balance was an issue in vanilla, but most people spent 2 years leveling so never noticed.
Druids were brought for raids to (a) battle rez, and (b) innervate the real healers (priests). There was 1 tank. Balance? What balance?