It’s weird coming back to WoW and seeing the revamped trees. I’m glad we’ve got a couple of weeks before anything matters, but not so glad that hybrid SL-DF means that much of what we learn now we be OBE on Nov 15.
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They’re much less complicated than they may look at first glance.
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A lot of folks are gonna claim this is easy . But they are also experienced with the game.
My friend (new player) is probably gonna quit. The game was complicated enough for him before the change: oh well:
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I mean the same advice for new players still applies. Go to Icy Vein and C+P whatever they say is best until you understand the game well enough to make your own decisions.
Though I’m not sure how DF talent trees are inherently more complicated for new players than talent trees, covenants, conduits, legendaries and so on.
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Has your friend played like, any video game before?
As RPG character progression trees go, this ain’t that complicated.
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Don’t let them anywhere near Path of Exile, they might have a stroke lol.
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Yea, talent trees are much easier to keep track of than all the extra stuff we had in BfA and SL. I guess the trees could be problematic if you somehow are max level and don’t know what your spells and abilities are. But the leveling process does a pretty good job of easing players into the talent trees and letting them tweak things to their liking.
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Overwelmed? Just use the default tree and tweak as you play. Not rocket science for sure.
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Question:
Why aren’t you helping them understand the talent trees in that case?
These trees aren’t complicated, and even the most barebone use of the search function for abilities or just reading the nodes reveal everything to you
But still, more importantly, if you say that your friend is going to leave over this … why aren’t you helping them understand and make use of the talent trees? They are, after all as you say, your friend
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It’s easy. Start with the default config and move a few points around so you can get capstones or the active abilities you like. Don’t let it overwhelm you.
But it’s also hard. Icy Veins will have to tell you how deep you need to go into some passives and how to run your sims.
Overall, doesn’t seem worse. We had talent trees years ago too. I like how much it’s cleaned up my interface - it seems much harder to get abilities I have little use for now and I can pick up the abilities that worked so well for me last expansion.
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The trees are… I have some issues with them, but I like the general idea.
But… I’ve been an RPG nerd for 30 years…
A fleshed out in-game tutorial for new players would be a good thing.
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That’s what the default tree is for isn’t it?
A new player feeling overwhelmed shouldn’t need to touch the tree until they feel ready to explore?
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There’s a handy little drop down menu in the lower lefthand corner that allows you to choose a pre-made “starter” or “beginner” or whatever option that will choose them all for you with zero thought required if you so wish. It’s really not that serious. Quitting the game because of this…? 
lol mkay
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Yes, at first. But then when you go to Icy and find a string to simply import, you see the vast improvement.
Now, I can also save my builds in a notepad file so when the next “Your Talents Have Been Reset” patch rolls around, it will be soooo much easier to set my characters back up.
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If you want some actual advice as to how to make use of the talent trees … well, if you want to play your class as it’ll be in Dragonflight you could just remove the SL abilities from your hotbar - yes your class will be different and not “optimized” but, that’s hardly a stark requirement in prepatch or just starting out in SL to prepare for Dragonflight
Point is that … the trees aren’t complicated not really, but if you don’t want to toy around with 'em the starter builds are perfectly serviceable and you can remove the non-talented covenant abilities if you want to just play your class as it’ll be in Dragonflight
So there are ways around it to simplify or even just outright not care much about them, because we really don’t have to - its prepatch after all, no one is treating this time of an expansion particularly seriously
I’m having flashbacks to the FF-X grid system lol
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I am helping him. I have a character I only play when he’s on and we team up.
The issue is trying to explain things when I can’t just point to his screen. It’s super frustrating for me and him.
This is why I now get how hard this game is for new players to grasp. Until I played with him and saw his frustration, I thought it would be easy.
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“Do you like the sound of an ability? Well, pick the talent and use it on me to see what it does!”
If they started playing before the pre-patch, then they would have an idea of what their class did by just … reading the abilities
If they started playing during the pre-patch, then what’s the problem if they are leveling a character? Or did they use the boost to max level without having played the game at all before?
If you do that you get a warning that recommends that one levels a character first to get to grasp with the game before using a boost on a new class
I have played the game with folks who have played the game for longer than I have, shorter than I have, who started playing on their own or got help from others - at no point has anyone I have ever encountered said that the game is difficult to understand
So… we land on these new talent trees which … are all self-explanatory if you read the nodes, and if you have an ability that you like then you just use the search function to find every node that talks about that ability, or you start by reading all of the final nodes to see what they do and then go from there
At no point are these new talent trees ‘hard to grasp’ - not going to say anything about overwhelming because they look intimidating until you start reading the abilities because you do that and then you go “that’s a cool passive”
Gaming literacy is a thing so maybe that’s the underlying issue here, but the talent trees are honestly not difficult, they just look overwhelming
Also…
Why would you need to look at their screen?
Heck if you want to do that then just do screen sharing over discord, but I would recommend against it since “pointing and explaining” tends to be a really bad way to explain something for someone else to learn something
Telling them to do what I suggested at the start to actually just … pick an ability and try it is usually the way to get folks to learn
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Get on Discord, tell him to stream his game.
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Marksman is still terrible.
ST is like 4 buttons and 50 passives, yet still super weak right now. Tier in DF isn’t that great, so I’m not getting my hopes up.
Everyone was blasting hunters for how much “feedback” and blue posts the beta thread was getting, without realizing 85% of all posts were moving talent nodes back and forth and not actually fixing the issues with the class.
Right now we lack a ton of baseline utility that we normally would have, and our trees are so lame and bland.
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