Restrictions aren’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re framing is cynical rather than the actual point you’re making.
But I do agree with you, to a point - the way talents are set up, you are choosing what to be suboptimal at during an activity. It’s more akin to chopping out select pieces of your class’ kit than actually specializing in one aspect of it, given how binary some of the choices are (do competitive AoE or not, have a stun or not, etc.).
IMO, we have enough of them with race/class/spec. And this moves into the level of too many restrictions.
As someone who is fairly cynical, my previous statement seems rather neutral. You have to make a choice.
Allow me to reframe the discussion, then, since we’re quibbling over semantics at this point: Is the current talent system a good system? Or is it the remnants of a system that used to be required and should be rethought?
Wait, I thought we were talking about covenants… Maybe I’m in too many threads lol
But talents, yes they could be better.
I don’t change my talents much at all, yet I fail to see how putting a cooldown on it would improve the game for anyone.
My initial thought is that it would place pressure on Blizzard to be a bit more holistic in their class design, given how much functionality is tied up in that system backed by the reasoning that you can access it whenever you’re not actively in combat.
How would you improve them?
You’ll never trick me into giving my ideas away for free!
But really, I’m not sure. More things baseline and talent trees that allow you to tweak for what you like most? Something along those lines.
Precisely. Instead of allowing talents to let you “specialize” in something, they’re simply allowing you access to that facet of your class or not.
Swapping specs is fine. Gate talent swapping instead. Force players to use Tomes, and make them only work within cities. Make the reagent cost increase by 1 Tome each time, outside of the first swap each day. Reset to 1 again at weekly reset.
I just think not having tomes is being lazy and unprepared, consumables are super cheap and there are tomes to change talents where ever you want, you don’t need to min max is the point here though, if you’re bad enough that you don’t think it matters to min max then you probably aren’t in a bracket where it matters. Not trying to be insulting just stating a point that it probably won’t even matter, you probably won’t get booted, if you don’t care about parsing I doubt the rest of the raid cares, they probably only care that the boss dies. But with this mentality you probably won’t progress further into groups that do care so that’s really on them.
As is, what are the pros and cons of the system being structured as it is?
On man’s heaven, is another man’s hell. Or in other words, swapping gear and talents is actually fun for a lot of people. The devs are designing the game to intentionally stop it, since everything will be cleared too fast if they don’t. Why ruin the game for so many, just to stop the slow down the top players?
Im four days late to the party but I 100% agree with the OP. We need more RPG coming back to this game. Where is the logic that you can change your talents and specializations at the click of a button? How can you just forget a spell to learn a new one and then back again? Makes no sense.
I somehow doubt that the game will be ‘ruined’ for more than, MAYBE 20% of players. Probably more like 5-10%. Most of whom are the ones the changes are supposed to slow down.
Where is the logic that you would learn spells and abilities while training to become your class, then forget 2/3 of them?
I pull out a spellbook to res someone, but I can’t look up holy light out of it?
The guy worst hit is the one who plays a few hours a week on one toon doing pet battles and collecting/mog hunting. 3/4 of the stuff he does will be locked off.
Outside of that, everyone who plays different roles on characters are likely impacted when their off spec feels a lot worse because it’s got a bad covenant. This will be a lot of tanks and healers in pugs.
The guys pumping world first and CE? They’re going to be mildly annoyed, but they’ll also be prepped with 4 of each toon for the appropriate cov.
Bull. Crap.
The guy who plays a few hours a week on one toon doing pet battles and collecting/mog hunting doesn’t change talents constantly. They MIGHT change specs now and then, but someone playing that casually isn’t going to be constantly changing things up, because they go, “Eh, this works fine,” and set it and forget it, because they don’t chase a meta.
Tanks and healers in pugs can write their own ticket in getting groups. Covenants won’t change that. Especially since most people in pugs probably don’t know the meta, and wouldn’t care unless their favorite streamer tells them to. And if for some reason a tank or healer isn’t getting invited to a group, they can always start their own, and know that it will fill up.
Really? I don’t think this disclaimer is fooling anyone.
If you have to put a disclaimer to try to convince people that what they might see as a flamebait troll post isn’t, then it probably is.
Sorry, was referring to covenants, where they’ll be locked out of most of the stuff they do.
And when it feels bad to end up with lackluster or flat out useless abilities for their off spec, people aren’t going to want to make the switch as much.
No, being gated behind toolboxing IS a problem, it IS broken design, and it DOES affect players. Turning dials before and after encounters was the dumbest design decision in WoW until corruptions happened. Celebrate it all you want. There are a LOT of players who think the MOP talent system is a broken failure.