Yeah, see? This guy gets it. More points = more fun.
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Oh right. I forgot how it worked, I just looked it up to refresh.
I pretty much just used Templar, so I guess it’s not surprising I forgot how Herald worked.
Yup, 100% agree.
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What are you even talking about?
He basically saying that DF talents are just needlessly complicated versions of mops talents because ultimately they keep you from having specific combos despite having them all in the tree.
That’s what they did between all the pathways and gates.
It’s just MoP with a million extra steps
We’ll take a very direct example in the DF Enhancement tree. The devs do not want us to have both Primordial Wave and Ascandance at the same time, so they have structured our final tier in such a way that we can technically spec into both, but we never should, because they are also placed in competition with the Feral Spirit line, which they also made absolutely crucial to all builds of the spec by adding damage amplification effects to them in DF. This means that while we have the appearance of 3 capstone lines that we can spec into any 2 of, what we really have is one point tax line in the Feral Spirit line (and the Elemental Assault leaf), with just enough points left over to fill out one of the remaining lines.
We have the appearance of a 2 out of 3 choice, but only actually have a 1 out of 2 choice.
In the MoP system, they could have just directly placed Primoridal Wave and Ascendance in the same mutually exclusive row with a real 3rd choice.
Essentially DF talents are just more patronizing and condescending MoP talents.
This is just objectively false, though. I can have whatever combo I want, given the points to support it. That means that the deeper I go into the tree, the less I can spread out. Spriest can have three of their four capstones at once.
At least interact with the system you’re condemning before doing so, eh?
You absolutely can, and one of our builds did.
He said this…
But he also emphasized that it’s not optimal…
There is only ever one optimal build for any given situation, so this isn’t relevant.
This is an immutable truth.
Some builds are NEVER optimal…
I mean, if we’re gonna go down this line of logic WoW should adopt FFXIV’s style of customization and just not have any because only one thing will ever be optimal, so just make everybody automatically have that.
Which I think is worse for the game, but that’s where this line of thinking leads.
Correct. However, the catch that you’re avoiding is that you don’t need to play optimally. Something I understand you’re hung up on, I’ll spare you quoting the original post again.
You can play suboptimal builds and even have success into M+ mid and even high ranges, and into Heroic raid bare minimum.
There are obviously degrees to what you can get away with, but this idea that only optimal is functional is completely misguided.
But MoP style does give customization. Just not as much as DF does.
If anything we’d have plenty of choice with a MoP style class and spec tree AND two hero specs with choice nodes thrown in.
Okay but why would you ever want player to have non optimal builds, especially if not on purpose??
In the strictest sense that you can literally put those points there, yes. We have very extensive ways to build our trees.
In the actually functional sense, no, we have much, much more limited options that the trees pretend we do, because not every build is built equally, with most ways you can build a spec being woefully behind the power curve set by the standard builds, which is what the game’s difficulty is balanced around us playing.
To clarify, I was using Pwave and Asc as shorthand for taking their full talent lines. While S3/4 Storm does take PWave’s initial talent strictly for tier set activation, they do not spec past that because it would take too many points out of absolutely crucial nodes to making the build function at all.
For fun? To experiment? To limit test?
I ran Phys/Deeply Rooted for AA early on because of the pull sizes, and had both fun and moderately higher success in a time where my Mastery was quite low.
No two builds are ever going to be built equally, this is why my responses seem so brisk. It isn’t worth entertaining the idea that MoP talents are better at this because it’s objectively and immutably false. There is no argument to change this, they will have the same pitfalls as any choice based player progression. The only way to fix that issue is to remove talents entirely and have button bloat. This IS the situation FFXIV has, as was mentioned above by another poster.
My keybinds on even a simpler melee, RPR, are 50% more than Enhancement, a more complex melee spec in WoW.
It is not easier to design around a simpler talent system. It gives developers less room to breathe, and less space to deal with minutia that can be a bandaid until larger reworks are applied. A chance to get away from these garbage aura buffs that MoP talent simplicity caused.
Granted, but this is still a lot more breadth than you got with MoP talents.
That’s a very VERY niche sense of fun my dude…
That not worth the longevity of the game and the majority of the playerbase.
I’m sure most players want to always be optimal at all times.
I guess this is my biggest problem.
“Does this mean it’s possible to make very ‘bad’ builds?”
In short, yes. There are limits and guardrails here, such as those abilities that are automatically given. And furthermore, our goal in designing the trees is not to trap players in complicated choices in order to make a functional build; in fact, it’s the opposite—it’s to set up the trees with intuitive paths that lead you to reasonable builds. But a key philosophy of this rework is to keep the player in the driver’s seat of their character’s growth within their class.
They wanted players to be able to fall into traps and create bad builds. This was a lesser case from MoP to SL.
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Freaking thank you…
“In short yes”
What a freaking joke of a design philosophy.
It should be never
Yes, but suboptimal is a matter of degrees, and those degrees are a matter of balance. The MoP system made balancing different builds much easier for the devs, which could greatly reduce the gap between the most and least optimal builds for a situation. The DF system, meanwhile, gives us cases like Storm Enhancement where you are either fully committed to ST or AoE, and useless at whichever you’re not, and that’s for a build that’s actually recognized as viable in the first place.
but the same argument can be leveled at MoP talents: One of them will be optimal, making the other choice not competitive for the people who want to optimize.
Once you have any set of choices that affect performance, there will be a mathematically superior option and we can do some math to figure out which one it is.
See, THIS is the line of thinking that leads us to just not having talents at all because why would you ever want the player to have a non-optimal build?
There can only be one mathematically optimal build, so why not just force every player to have it?
If you want customization, any customization, you have to accept that players might do unoptimal things and for new players it’s probably not going to be on purpose.
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