So now that I am able to log into the Beta I was able to play with talent trees.
I copied this character, my Shaman since 2004 over and found myself with a less spells and skills than I’ve had since I first leveled to 60 in Vanilla.
I no longer know how to interrupt a spell, unless I talent into it.
I no longer know how to chain heal, unless I talent into it.
Lava Lash? talent
Windfury Weapon?! Talent!??!?!
Windfury Totem
Healing Stream totem, Purge, Tremor totem, Hex, frost shock, Earth Elemental, Cleanse Spirit(baseline friendly dispel).
All of these spells and skills are talents after being baseline for Shaman for basically forever.
It feels like they did this to make the trees look more impressive but after poking it for a couple of days in Beta it just feels stupid to have forgotten all my spells I’ve had for so long.
Talents should be about improving our toolkit, enhancing existing stuff and maybe adding a few active skills to focus on our choice of aoe/single target/support/pvp.
Instead it’s a buyback of everything I paid trainers to learn over a decade ago before I get to the actually meat of the tree.
Its amazing that is a complaint but then again, its a opinion. To some regards of some abilities now turned into talents. That’s actually how it was before. I used to main Marksmanship Hunter back in Vanilla and they HAD to learn Aimed Shot via Talent Tree. No exceptions.
Sure, it sucks, at first… Then you realize, some of these abilities can be tossed aside. Chain Heal can be throw away for Enhancement, it is useless to us ultimately, especially when we use the ability that enhances only Healing Surge. We can forget Frost Shock if that isn’t a focus in a build we want, I sure didn’t use it majority of the time… I haven’t gotten the chance to get a beta invite (Or at least I don’t think I got it, been checking…) but I already saw potential in variety of ways I can play Enhancement while having a few awesome talents together. I can make use of Primal Lava Acquators, Legacy of the Frost Witch, and Witch Doctor’s Wolf bones at ONCE. That is utterly insane and powerful.
This whole revised system of the original classic we’re used to back when Vanilla was a thing may not be for everyone but I am more excited of the potential combinations I can choose now.
You’ll notice I listed things that were learned from trainers. Directly in the spell book. I intentionally omitted things that were originally talents going as far back as Vanilla to the best of my recollection.
Losing those and having to buy them back feels wrong. It makes no sense to have our basics stripped out and repackaged as “talents” under the guise of choice.
This shaman has been my main character, first to level cap in every expansion since the beginning.
Why did I forget my spells? I’ve been able to Frost Shock for as long as I can remember.
I’ve had a ranged interrupt(first earth shock then wind shear) for forever.
Now I log in and have to buy back these basic skills.
Half the talent tree is just buying back my old spells to get to the repackaged legendary and covenant skills.
It’s been three years between shadowlands and dragonflight so maybe your shaman had taken a long break from being a shaman and has to relearn a few things
Classic was like owning a library, you had 100000000000000 books(spells) but you only ever read like 5 of them
If the game operated in the way you want then all the characters would be gods with how strong they are if you are looking at it from a lore perspective. Now if you look at it from a game perspective then you see that if you keep adding to your cake, it eventually becomes unappetizing. But if you bring out different flavors you don’t get tired of the cake quite as fast.
You make it sound like we are “Forced” to “Buy” them. We’re not buying anything, we’re reestablishing what we can be, again how it used to be but now we have much more to work with. We’re no longer just the same Enhancement Shamans. We can be entirely different focused types for once. Well…until Blizzard can somehow give us back Two-handed Weapon Enhancement Shamans for complete difference but the point being, we have variety of ways to decide how we wanna be now.
Another thing to also point out for the Covenant and Legendary abilities, its stupid to take away something we’ve only ever gotten to use for one whole expansion. I’m still griping over how Feral/Guardian Druids act like they have arthritis in their left hands after dual wielding their daggers and fist weapons from Legion.
While all of this may seem like a bad thing to you, its a relief for a lot of us that we’re given a chance to keep using things, and change what we want and don’t want. And guess what? It doesn’t cost us a thing to change it all out. We can do proper “Loadouts” to make sure we can be dedicated to single target, multi target, or something else…
I doubt this is how everyone feels about talents but you’re sure the first to think like its going to cost you 500k gold with how you’re wording it.
Its a total system overhaul, not a piece of new endgame Dragonflight content, my man.
It was ALWAYS going to be a thing in which you put points into it to unlock things you already had. It couldn’t have existed as a leveling talent tree unless they did this.
As far as having otherwise baseline abilities on the tree goes? Im totally fine with it. It feels nice to actually choose things, even if they’re obvious choices. But I also just straight up miss ability trainers too, so idk.
In practice, regardless of how you feel about that, you’re not paying anything. You’re still unlocking the abilities as if you normally would through leveling, you just have to put a point into it instead of it happening automatically.
Also worth noting that the early “core” spec abilities are technically “choices”, but you’re really just choosing the order in which you get them, because none of the trees let you get enough points to move on from the “core” section of the tree without grabbing every key ability.
I guess I expected that my Shaman could still do the basic Shaman stuff by default and was really hoping more stuff would go baseline after the initial reveal.
Now I have to relearn totems I did quests for back in Vanilla.
I did my totem quests, it was bad enough when they gutted them once but now they are almost all in the talent tree. I have just 1 totem in my base kit. Not even one from each element, just 1.
This is also a huge noob trap with a lot of essentials easily missed in the class trees.
I can entirely skip Hex, Purge, Wind Shear and Astral Shift.
CC, interrupt, dispel, and defensive CD.
That seems like bad design.
Yeah but that consists of clicking a button, bud. You understand that the natural progression would mean that you would be learning these abilities as you level up, right?
CC is totally irrelevant for large swathes of the game, even into raiding and mid-high M+.
Dispel is less irrelevant, but NEVER necessary. Healers exist for the ones that matter (magic). If Resto can avoid the dispel, then there might be a problem.
Defensive CD, similar to CC, is never a necessity in large swathes of the game. It’s definitely helpful to have, but until VERY high content, you’re using it because you screwed up and are trying to recover, rather than because you can’t get by without it. You can use it pre-emptively but you never need to.
Interrupt is the only one I think needs to be either baseline or unavoidable in the tree. For DPS and Tank specs. If Wind Shear is avoidable for Resto Shaman, that’s fine, people don’t rely on healers for interrupts.
It seems like you forgot to mention your best talent: picking out every little bad thing to complain about even though your class has arguably the best, most fun, most creative talent trees in the game.
Could simply just, talent intoo them…
You have a class tree and a spec tree, with these you can achieve way more then what you can right now. Aswell as build more so for specific situations.
Heres an example, as a druid i have hibernate and sooth baseline, there are raid bossess and dungeons that will never require either one of those soo in those situations they are useless which means with this talent tree i now get 2 extra point a to put elsewhere.
I think part of the idea here is in part to reduce clutter. With less clutter and more choice you can focus on what you want on your hotbar. In addition, with fewer spells you can spec into you can also buff them how you want and create interesting interactions. Or I believe that is the intention here.
So in short, fewer abilities cluttering your hotbar but are more powerful based on spec choices.
It used to be like that when trees were a thing. I wanted a hybrid tree, this tree set up is OK I guess if even for the ever green possibilities instead of tearing down specs each expansion.
It’s a bit of a ‘shock’ but that’ll pass. Some valid complaints of where certain talents are positioned is great and should be sent to Blizzard.
The baseline argument though just doesn’t work anymore within the confines of a talent ‘tree’ instead of a 3 by X row talent thing.
