i like the new ones as it offers some new builds but it’s still incredibly restrictive so you can’t really play around with it too much so people are still kinda playing cookie cutter builds. vanilla to wrath had the best talents imo. i spent so much gold on priest alone lol.
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The loadout addons seem to say otherwise. Me, personally, I don’t change loadouts often. But some have so many that they need an addon. Those downloads are half a million.
I love the new system and it’s exactly what the game needed— and exactly what I asked for. They did what we mentioned: put back old abilities that were already balanced in the game previously, use base abilities as lowbie talents and add a few new things.
It’s rewarding, there’s a lot of different ways to have fun with it and it feels good to me. I love playing with talents.
Granted, some trees need work. But overall, it was a net positive for the game.
Old Republic went to that Mists style of crap talents and saw a mass exodus again— on their 10 year anniversary. It was a travesty to the game.
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I think that’s a part of the problem. The talent trees in DF have a hodgepodge of basically everything added from Legion onwards. Artifact abilities, the class unpruning of BfA, and access to multiple covenant abilities has created some classes and specs with some crazy button bloat.
Most specs that have gotten reworks over the course of DF have had a number of CDs combined or made passive, and I suspect this trend will continue through TWW.
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yeah blizzard made it way too complex… there was not one class who had a talent tree that worked properly at the start of the expansion.
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Actual Arcane gameplay from 6.0… take me back lol
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There’s nothing they can’t do without it becoming cookie-cutter.
Players will always flock towards what’s “the best” so choice is really an illusion.
I prefer these larger talent trees that allow us to play and experiment, at least. Even if it’s a wonky build, it still allows you to do that.
MoP/WoD trees, everyone was more or less the same.
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Maybe RPGs just aren’t the type of game you enjoy playing, OP. It’s ok to accept that a game genre is not for you and move on, instead of trying to change it into something it isn’t.
I mean I don’t like racing games, and would prefer to play puzzle games instead, but no one would take me seriously if I went and said something like “y’know, racing games would be better if you took out car customization and instead added a Myst-like scavenger hunt across multiple static screens where solving obscure puzzles determines your rank and position in Forza”.
That’s how ridiculous it was when WoW went from talent trees to the non-choices of the mid-expansions.
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I think there is an issue with so many nodes being a choice between a passive ability and a button you have to press. It gives people freedom to play how they want, but on a lot of specs the passive talent does less damage. So it leads to button bloat and unnecessarily complicated rotations.
I used to like Demon hunter because it was simple. Some people will say boring, and maybe that was the case, but it felt like it had a pretty solid core of abilities and a unique playstyle. I tried to play some havoc this expac and it felt like hot garbage.
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If people wanna be able to make a nearly-fully passive version of their spec for their class, they should have the choice.
Even if it doesn’t perform as well, the option should still be there.
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Feel like I have been saying this for years here.
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The main drawback of the old trees was that you got one little bump every 15 levels instead of something every level.
There were also talents that were a DPS loss to take over having no talent at all.
The last point being that there was no player agency whatsoever, there was no real decision-making on which talent to pick because in most cases you’d just use one set of talents forever for ST or AoE.
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While I’m sympathetic to other people having different opinions, please Blizzard, disregard OP’s post completely. I love the talent trees and would HATE to go back to MoP-style trees.
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I geek out pretty hard on variable passive bonuses. Like Heroes of the Storm talents, Path of Exile’s/Skyrim’s talent trees, etc. But I just feel like balance is failing us and as a result, optimizing talents to get the most actives possible seems to be the superior/meta choice for most classes and specs.
I think I really just preferred Legion’s passive power. Where your artifact weapon talent tree made your already existing abilities have a second or even third effect that enriched fantasy and power without adding a power-creep of complexity.
Like I look at Survival Hunter rn and see that they current have 3 charge attacks (maybe 4, I’m forgetting). Harpoon, Coordinated Assault, & Flanking Strike. It just seems so superfluous to have 3 separate “charge” abilities when they could’ve been a single talent tier where you just choose what secondary effect you make your Harpoon have. Same goes for Warriors having Charge, Shield Charge, Intervene, and Intercept lol.
But I digress. You could give me 100 passive talents to pick and choose from to empower my character and I’m all for it. But when having a commercial aircraft control deck UI + an MMO mouse becomes a necessity rather than a luxury, I think the design is getting ahead of itself imo.
I’m actually a semi-retired game designer and would love to figure out the perfect middle ground. Getting some sort of power every time you level up feels really satisfying, couldn’t agree more. Having nothing every other 14 levels was lame. I feel it in my jellies that the perfect medium between MoP’s and Dragonflight’s talent system can exist, but I don’t think we’ll get it until the bloat becomes unbearable around Midnight or The Last Titan expansions, where some level of hedge-trimming is an unavoidable reality.
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I don’t see it as all that big a deal. You set your hearthstone near where you are questing. Then you go to a flight master and from there you can get to a class trainer pretty quickly then use the hearthstone to get back.
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It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t get major changes basically every patch and how there’s a whole ton of stuff that works completely differently in PvP or in other pieces of content, and now with hero talents… ._.
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Now go 10 years as a spec where Blizzard put so little effort into it that there were no options.
'cuz that was me for MoP through Shadowlands.
“We want player agency! We want choices!”
“We don’t want choices! We don’t want player agency!”
This is why it’s a mistake for Blizzard to listen to players.
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This is why it’s a mistake for Blizzard to listen to anybody who’s silly enough to think it was the same people saying both things. (Like you.)
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Just do what nearly everyone else does and copy a talent build from Wowhead or some content creator.
The vast majority of players (in any game) ask for complex talent trees, but then leave the theorycrafting to someone else and just blindly copy the talent trees. It makes zero practical difference for those players, but the perception of having choice “feels good”.
That said, I like the current skill trees as they let me tweak my character for specific situations or preferences (particularly for M+), but there is almost always one single best choice for any boss or situation.
But button bloat is definitely a thing with some specs. There is a fair number of CDs that all do roughly the same and could be combined. Some skills also overlap and create bloat, making some rotations needlessly complex (for the sake of complexity).
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Don’t worry, as soon as they are released someone will sim them and come up with the talent tree build that simulates the most output, and everyone will just pick that build (usually without understanding the talents they picked, since they can learn what to press using Hekili, or if they are brave, they can look at the Sample Ability Log in Raidbots and look at the 20-step opener for whatever class they are playing) and never think about the talent trees again. Then Archon.gg or Icy Veins will rank the simmed output in descending order to create a class tier list, so everyone will know what class to play and what to avoid.
Such is the game we have now - World of Simcraft.
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