I was there in WoD, but I don’t remember anyone saying talents are why they left. It was a wealth of other reasons.
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Were you not here for the mass exodus of players leaving the game in WoD
You mean the mass influx of players from one of the most popular expansion releases of all time?
Gee I wonder if it’s success had anything to do with them focusing on the returning player experience. They limited flying, pruned abilities, and gave returning players a free boost.
Just because people stopped playing WoD doesn’t mean they hated WoD.
Brother I don’t have a main. I don’t have TWW.
OK, what’s your argument here, exactly?
“My girlfriend’s dad said I had to have her home by curfew, or there’d be a bullet with my name on it waiting for me. Joke’s on him, cause I know he only owns a shotgun.” 
Without using the words “borrowed power”:
- What’s the difference between Primoridal Wave, the Shaman Convenant Ability, and Primordial Wave, the Shaman class talent?
- What’s the difference between Wake of Ashes, the Paladin Ashbringer Ability, and Wake of Ashes, the Retribution Paladin class talent?
You’re responding to the same post; you have to give me time to respond to your previous comment before you start getting upset. 
Probably / possibly.
But I think that’s largely due to most players not having really thought about it.
Some players do not even want to think about it, as it clearly evidenced in this thread. 
So is your “players quit WoW because restrictions were lifted”.
Would now be a good time to bring up the WoW subs graph Blizzard showed recently that showed playerbase decline almost as soon as SL released? https://images.app.goo.gl/5YpJhscMf5yw8oTs6
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Not in this case it isn’t. You don’t need a talent list the size of War And Peace, but you also need more than 3 choices where only 1 of said choices actually does anything. While I enjoyed the expac itself, I hated the Pandaria talent system because it wasn’t a talent system at all, merely the illusion of it. There was no choice, there was no customization, no individuality or anything at all. It was 100% cookie cutter builds. They may give you 3 so called choices per tier, but in actuality only 1 of them was worth anything, the second was a novelty, and the 3rd was just objectively bad.
If I want mind numbingly simple I’ll go play Diablo or a similar game where there’s only 3 or 4 buttons you ever press and 3 or 4 “talents” you actually pick and call it good. With today’s talent system as of TWW, most of the talents are passives that modify existing abilities with a few active powers sprinkled in. If you can’t be bothered to read a couple sentences to determine if a passive ability is worth anything or not then that’s a you problem and just you being lazy. Again I don’t expect talent trees or spell books to be the size of War And Peace, but I do expect there to be enough there that I’m not just some carbon copy of the guy next to me or a one trick pony. And if you want to just plug a build and go, you can get them from places like wowhead, icyveins, or gasp by asking more experienced players of your class.
If new players can’t be bothered to read 2 or 3 sentences if that to find out what a passive does, they’re not the kind of players we want anyways because they won’t read 2 or 3 sentences of an NPC to know “hey stay out of big red circle of dumb on the floor” or similar.
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I’m sure WoW could get by with a simpler loadout.
But that would kind of resemble the MoP tree I think. Because really the MoP tree aint all that different from a CoD loadout.
Yea I feel like the MoP talent tree really losts it’s way when it started giving every row a passive ability.
You keep saying I’m missing your points, but this is starting to feel like projection, since you keep missing mine. 
I did not say you had no choice, just that you have fewer choices than what may be perceived.
True. I didn’t hate the MoP style talents nearly as much. But Clearly people wanted the much more complicated trees. I prefer simple but engaging
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It’s one of the main reasons. Sure it wasn’t the only reason but it was one of the main ones.
I feel like people left WoD because they did all the content…
What do you want?
When DF came out people were all like “omg this is so great I’m free to play other games.” But WoD didn’t get that same grace…even tho it had basicalyl as much content as DF did.
please no.
I’m pretty sure it was pretty straightforward saying you don’t know the difference.
The covenant ability was a SL exclusive ability that was determined to be such a good idea that they incorporated it into a talent.
When it was a covenant ability it was borrowed power and exclusive to SL as it wasn’t in the shaman tree.
Not it has been added to the shaman tree.
Same answer as above.
When wakenof ashes was on the legion weapon it wasn’t a talent tree. The devs decided to turn it into a talent after that expansion.
The fact they brought old talents back is proof you’re a minority.
I never said that as a fact. I said it’s likely a factor for a lot of people.
Try to keep up.
I don’t click suspect links
And why your opinion on retail is worthless.
If I had the game you would just say “if you hate the game so much why do you keep playing it?”
You people just don’t like when WoW is criticized.
That’s irrelevant as you don’t. So you’re commenting on something you haven’t even played.
And you don’t like credibility. I don’t care if wow is criticized. I just find people that don’t even have the expansion and hide their main characters opinions worthless.
Okay fine, so all talents + spellbook gets you to over the 5,000 words you mentioned when talking about just the talents. Perhaps that is too many words, especially for a new person.
But again I ask, should the target be solely players unfamiliar with a given class? Should I not be rewarded for having spent 2 decades maining the same class to the point where I actually can hand roll a talent tree and come within 3 nodes of what a guide writer whose job it is to come up with the best option? At what point can we say that if someone is overwhelmed by the talent and spell system, that perhaps a 20 year old game in this genre isn’t for them (or they will have to rely on guides to get started with a new class)?
That doesn’t answer the question. Were there not guides for players to follow for their talent trees for either the OG or MoP style?
But even beyond that point, could the average player determine whether it was better to put 2 points into Primal Madness, 2 points into Endless Carnage, spend 0 points on either, or put all 4 points into both during Cataclysm? Was it obvious to feral players that Master Shapeshifter was better than a solid half the cat talents in the feral tree despite being a restoration talent?
I won’t argue that the game isn’t more complex today than it has been in the past, including the talent systems. I just feel like you’re letting nostalgia and/or confirmation bias drive your arguments here. WoW has never done a good job educating players how the game or their class works. That was true in 2004 and remains true in 2024. The level of complexity to understand the talent system was not some cakewalk for a new player in vanilla nor is does it require a PhD to understand today.
You want a simple system, that’s fine. But by your own admission, a good portion of players are going to copy/paste from some website anyway, regardless how simple it might be. They certainly did that from MoP through SL when we had 7 talent nodes to choose from. So you want a player like me, who understands a couple classes very well, to be reduced to the WoW version of Candy Land level of complexity so the players who want to pick up druid quickly will copy the code from wowhead?
I’m sorry, what? WoD is called the ultimate raid logging expansion for a reason. The only thing WoD provided for players to do at endgame that didn’t exist in previous expansions was working on your Garrison; which was timegated. M+ alone provides more replayability week to week than working on your Garrison. But then we have world quests, the world boss, dragon races, special events in each zone that were added in DF.
That’s fine if you disliked the things DF added and think Garrisons were better in WoD. That’s fine if you preferred being able to raid log without feeling like you were missing out. But to claim there was just as much to engage with in DF as there was in WoD is objectively untrue.
That’s irrelevant as you don’t.
And the other half would be irrelavent if I did. Very convenient, you always have an unfalsifiable way to dismiss peoples criticisms.
And you don’t like credibility.
I find the opinion of people playing the game worthless. Because they are obviously just justifying their poor purchase.
The worst is when a talent addressed 3 other talents and has to be affected by another talent that builds on another talent. Or the Arcane hero talents, when you have a talent that turns into 2-3 different buffs, and talents, etc.
Just over it