Hear me out. I’m honestly not trying to get a visceral reaction out of anyone - I’d like to see some legitimately constructive discussion out of this.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the pressure to swap my talents between fights. Resummoning all the people that blip out for a second before each boss, setting keybinds for inactive abilities, etc. But given the ease at which you can swap your talents, it became the expectation that you do so if you want to perform efficiently.
Is this a healthy thing for the game? Is it truly a “talent” if you’re able to change it so freely? Should we even have talents at all if they are ultimately this meaningless and just make much of it baseline?
Honestly, a forced cool down on anything in this game that ties directly to player power feels awful. The reduced drop rate on legendaries in Legion, the Azerite reforge cost in BfA, anything that prevents a player from simply changing talents at will. It’s not good game design, in my opinion.
Some people like going out to swap talents, to maximize their performance. Taking that away from them isn’t fair. We have people in our raid that never change their talents and people who do for every fight; the way it is now, it’s a choice. Adding a cool down removes that choice, and that doesn’t feel good for anyone.
I suppose the question is, then, if players should have the power to specialize at all? Since specialization is not something that talents are ultimately accomplishing being so ephemeral.
Talents should be overhauled entirely along with given a limitation on switching. Personally I’m more of a fan of a gold cost(I know the super hardcore will farm their way around it, that’s partially the point).
I don’t think talent swapping for individual fights is healthy for the game, but it’s also how the system is fundamentally designed right now.
So before adding a limitation on switching, you’d have to change the system otherwise it’d just fall apart.
Precisely. I like the design philosophy that you never need to be utilizing every single tool you have available to you at all times. I would much prefer to have all the talents “baked in” and simply rely on my own knowledge to inform what I’m doing rather than these choices being made before each and every fight.
There isn’t much specialization in FFXIV and it seems to work out just fine.
I think, even without talents, we have a lot of specialization in WOW. For it to be actually meaningful it would be too much in a social mmo. It would make it difficult to put together groups if you needed a Prayer Circle Kyrian Blood Elf Holy Priest.
If the abilities don’t matter for grouping then they aren’t actually meaningful choices.
Now that gets I to a more interesting scenario. Talents are not in a good spot right now because all they really do is make you specialize in AoE or single target (essentially, at its most basic level). They likely need a pretty big overhaul though I fear what Blizzard will do with that.
I think this is very similar to the Covenant debate, that of making your choice dramatically impact the game. With how the game is set up now, the balance that Blizzard provides isn’t enough at this time for the permanent and important choices that Blizzard wants to go with. There would need to be a pretty grand adjustment in his talents and borrowed power affect specializations for the “important choice” aspect to be made viable.
How is this unfounded declaration, with no supporting evidence or clarification whatsoever, any different from the people who don’t think LFR (or titanforging, or world quests, or mythic +) are healthy for the game? My guess is it doesnt affect you, so consider not worrying about it.
I don’t think that’s a good idea. As someone who likes Heroic Raiding, light M+ for my weekly chest, and arena… if I had a CD on talents I would not be subbed to this game, especially since the different types of content have much different talent choices.
Covenants are being marketed as more of a permanent choice, which I’ll learn to live with. Talents are not marketed this way and for good reason. Giving them a cooldown would most certainly cause a huge portion of the player-base to quit.
My initial thoughts on that point is that class design does not occur in a vacuum. If encounters are designed to cater to such a specific subset of players, that’s poor encounter design.
It undermines the choice to be able to so readily change it and takes it away from being a choice and towards more just being a math formula.
After all if my choices are +5% damage dealt and +50% damage dealt, that’s not really much of a choice. There’s a very clearly superior choice there.
The current talent system is a lot like that, only the actual numbers vary from fight to fight and the game is designed around the idea that you’ll be picking the obviously superior talent for each fight.
Other people swapping may not affect me, but the talent system being designed around it in a way that I find to not be all that engaging or fun definitely affects my enjoyment of the game.
It’s accomplishing a choice. As an HPal I can play Glimmer build for M+, or maybe a different build if I feel like it. In arena I can switch out Repentance for Blinding Light depending on team comp, or I can opt for short HoJ if playing God Comp.
Builds offer choice and diversity without locking you into said choice. Giving all those talents baseline would cause classes to be overloaded messes that would be impossible to balance, and it would make no sense in the realm of how certain specs play.
Imagine giving a Druid all the affinity types, that would be an absolute mess. Talents exist a choice that is swappable depending on the content or situation you are in, and they should stay as such.
The idea to give all those functions baseline is quite a headscratcher.
Indeed. When it becomes not only the playerbase’s expectation what you switch, but also that of encounter designers, it becomes an issue. Particularly to the more lazy among us, and to those who don’t research everything they do in-game for 10 minutes before actively engaging in it.
Being able to freely swap back and forth between specs has never made in-game sense to me to begin with. Throws the RP aspect right out the window while catering to the min/maxers.
But I do not see how a cooldown would mitigate this.
I would argue it’s more of a prescription than a choice. If your talents are simply “A is good for X and bad for Y vs. B is bad X for and good for Y,” why would you ever take A when you’re doing Y? Is it truly a choice if you need to reconsider it moment to moment?
Druids are a good example of a loss of class identity - why should you have to choose an affinity? Can you simply not be a Druid, and do what is required of you in the moment?
Dunno what anyone think is fun by locking you into a cooldown for swapping things. If something isn’t working out in an MMO, I want to change it or that person to make it work better.
In a single player game, it doesn’t bother me that much; because it’s just me and my own stupid decisions. Which again, the, arguably, best RPG of the decade being Divinity: Original Sin II, let’s you switch whenever the hell you want to.