I was looking to see people’s opinions on this, since after watching many videos by different content creators, it seems that the current talent trees which we have been using since MoP are creating some issues with dead talents/mandatory feeling picks which fill out your spec/rotation due to the loss of abilities after every expansion due to borrowed power.
In the old days, your class had access to a bunch of abilities/utility baseline and your spec double-downed on a particular aspect of your class. By following the talent trees, at max level you had access to EVERY ability relevant to your spec. With the new MoP talent trees, you HAVE to make choices which lock you out of others. As we’ve seen for years now, Blizzard seems to be unwilling to revive/change dead talents for long periods of time, and even with some changes to talent rows on Alpha of shadowlands, a lot of talents seem to be mandatory to pick due to numbers or just feel of play.
I don’t think they actually can balance the talents out in a good way that make all talents viable/fun to choose. The fault of the system, fundamentally, is that all talents either have to be passive/uninteresting to achieve balance, OR they have to introduce SOME of those and some other active/interesting abilities to add some choice, at which point a lot of talents feel mandatory. For example, on Alpha right now, Whirling Dragon Punch feels mandatory to choose because it’s so damn cool and fun to play with, and combos with your mastery well.
We’ve obviously seen a lot of feedback over the years of “give us back the talent trees from pre-MoP”, and at this point with the level being reduced to 60 and all the other changes in shadowlands, I feel like this might be a good time to do something about the talent tree. Whatever the ideal solution, I feel like it may be time to do something about this.
With every expansion we are gaining, and losing, powers given through artifacts/essences/azerite gear/etc, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the new talent system may not be a great tool to give us back some of those powers.
I mean everyone wants it but its not gonna happen lol. bliz was done making fundamental changes to shadowlands before alpha even launched so what you see is what you get.
I personally liked them and they do have nice flavour. Looking back at the Ret tree from Cataclysm it’s hard not to miss it.
There is the whole issue with cookie cutter builds with passive damage increases but it does feel nice simply to fill something out rather than having very few but constantly interchangeable talents.
I honestly don’t think they would ever go back to it because the talents seem mostly superfluous so it’s entirely a feel thing, but there is the potential for new players to make grave mistakes with their builds which is a big negative.
I wonder if an option would be branched versions of the current design which causes people to think about the full build and how things interact instead of simply picking the best one from each row.
The talent Tree was actually really useless. There was one optimum build and all those other talents never got used.
Blizz tried to have fewer but more meaningful choices when they created the current system.
You can argue that there is still just one right, optimum build.
So, I don’t see the point of re-introducing a tree of talents nobody will use. If they can’t get the current tree right adding more back in surely won’t help.
Idk, at least there’s some talent swapping now. Most people didn’t bother switching from cookie cutter builds at all with the old system. Why bother moving 1 point from X to Y for all the work it required?
the old one was just… you looked up the best spec and ran it. Or you had that guy who had some bizarre layout cause “Mah Playstyle!” who was just… subpar.
with the new talent system, I’ll use one talent for one fight, another for the next one, etc. I can swap between roots or typhoon based on the affixes, or use wild charge for drest or ursols for ilgy, etc.
idk. I’d not like to see the pre-mists talent trees come back.
I quite like the current talent tree - for certain classes. There’s definitely a few where it feels like there’s not much of a real choice, but in general, the fact that it provides choice at all is a huge upgrade to the old one.
I do miss parts of the old talent tree system, however - particularly while leveling up - and would love to see something of a hybrid system in the future. Those little, incremental improvements, while “boring”, do add a surprising amount to the leveling process as a whole.
The current talent trees are crap. They have been since their introduction. The original trees felt the best. Yes there was a best spec always but that did not stop people from doing what they wanted within reason and all specs/builds were viable for raiding.
At level 60 you had access to 51 points to assign to your tree. You never put every single one of those points into the one spec - if you did you would miss out on other important abilities from the other specs. I never saw a suggested build that had you assign points to every single Beast Master talent - you’d be nuts to do that.
Did you have access? I guess you did. But no one in their right mind would select every talent and leave all the other preferable abilities unused.
Not really. Viable does not mean optimal. Viable means it would work and every boss could be killed while having part of your raid using specs or builds that were not the excelling types.
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.
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
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.
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.
