To me, it feels kind of awful to be required to take additional skills in the Talent trees. If you really want me to have those skills, then they should just be baseline.
What I do like are optional skills that are incredible useful in certain situations, but maybe have passives you can choose instead that are much, much weaker, but again, are passive.
My personal take is that complexity should be rewarded, but not required. If you want a super simple rotation, that should be fine; you’re just giving up a lot of effectiveness to do so. That way it sort of serves as your “training wheels”, so that once you have the basics down, you can gradually incorporate those more powerful, situational abilities.
That, or talents that modify or replace existing skills. In some ways, that can even be better, like "hey, we REALLY want you to use this particular cooldown, so much that it’s part of your baseline, but if you absolutely hate it, you can replace it or do something to turn it into a passive effect).
I agree with you. Some examples: MM hunter is not allowed to go without kill shot (I don’t care for this one as a dungeon player), resto sham is not allowed to go without healing rain (not enough points to pass checkpoint 1 if you don’t, and I don’t use in arenas), holy needs renew (I basically never use this), etc etc
Maybe these should be required, if so, just make them baseline. Otherwise give people other options.
A lot of skills are baseline. Mages get basically a full kit of abilities just from leveling. But some other classes and specs should have much more baseline. Enhancement in particular.
I take lots of stuff I don’t care about to get baseline druid abilities, losing out on other things. Right now as is, my talents are optimized for dps, but I also have 0 cc’s, knockbacks, stomps, dispels,…
But jeez thank goodness I get wild growth and I’m 3% easier to heal. Lol
And you don’t see talents working like that now? Say, on my feral drude alt, the talent tree allows me to build my kitty cat however I want. Do I want to focus on world questing and solo content? I’ll take some healing talents and magical dots that I can use while I run in before I kitty scratch. Do I want to PvP? Similar build but less focus on the healing talents and some more focus on AoE. Do I want to Raid/Mythic+ then I’ll look up the resto build that groups demand that last one was a joke but the point is, the talent trees are probably the most freedom we’ve had to create our own personalized heroes that play how we want, since MoP with the talent rows. And even some of those were active skills instead of passives.
It sounds like the issue is you’ve been given too many options and are listening to too many people about what build you should be running. I gripe about how all three mage specs feel the same, but even I have to admit that the mage talent tree does offer quite a lot of wiggle room for those willing to try hard at their spec. Allowing each spec to distinguish themselves a bit. If you want a simple rotation then take it, once you have the hang of that you will start using those skills you “had to take to get to the passives you want” and notice the power spike. Be patient and learn how you want to play the game and your class. I love my DH, but don’t play it how others think I should because I play it to have fun, and I do have fun with it.
Only if you’re trying to play at a high level. Normal dungeons and raids are so easy (not mention LFR/G) that you can literally run any build you have fun with and it won’t be an issue. As shown by my DH. I don’t top DOS charts, but I don’t do God awful. I just have fun and bring what I have to offer. Building your talent tree in a specific way is only something we need to worry about if we are trying to do high end content. If you want to play open world or just normals then there is a ton of freedom. As much as classic? No, but more than we’ve had recently. The change to talent tree along with the story were the reasons I came back to the game after leaving at the start of WoD.
Yes, I do understand that sometimes depending on the content you want to pursue, you’re hand might be tied with your talent build. But then again, Druids do heals in high end groups, priests are clappers in DPS and DH take the cake with tanking. And all three have a specific racial you want as well. So for high end content chasers there’s is zero wiggle room. While for everyone else, the sky is quite literally the limit now.
My faith in making my own talent builds was sort of destroyed when I made a fun ret Paladin build and it was doing like 60k less damage as others. It was such a big difference and mostly made up of passives I didn’t take because I liked the animation of less used spells lol. I’m not “high end” player but I like to be good!
But maybe I’ll try making my own feral build to have more utility like I like to have! I always feel so naked without stuns and a dispel.
