Simply put something akin to the MOP talent design was infinitely superior to the bloated and over hybridized specs we have now.
A variation that was straightforward for the content you did was much more beneficial than a system where you can partially put points into on your way to a capstone.
In splitting trees between general and your specialized we just promoted an excessive amount of hybridization and diluted the classes.
The idea of choice is an illusion here with loadouts being largely predetermined due to poor balancing and excessive variables. In a game that is twenty years old and could use new blood, this complexity is unnecessary.
Rather than balance classes they are giving everyone everything to appease a meta of gear acquisition through mythic plus keys. The extra talents are just busy choices on the way from leveling one to seventy anyway.
People are complaining about mythic plus in war within being too damning in trying to interrupt things, but blizzard is likely assuming you will forgo your best DPS or HPS options for more utility having given everyone far too much utility to begin with.
This alone has killed PVP in this game with so much of class design done with dungeon keys in mind. I suppose that is a side point, but everything ties back to the talent revamp that occurred after shadowlands.
Now hero talents are thrown atop this mess. In doing this and offering this illusion of choice, the classes rotationally just don’t function as well and are not nearly as intuitive only inviting more weak-aura and such to play most efficiently.
Talents in any form have always been an illusion of choice if you want to do high end content, but with the trees it’s at least a nice illusion.
For more casual players, there is genuine choice because of the fact that we can just not care if one talent is a bit less optimal than another. Trees offer a lot more because we can pick up the stuff that’s way too good to pass up but still have a lot of points left to play with.
I have my gripes with the system, especially with how hero talents are being done, but I’d rather have the trees than the MoP style rows.
I have the unpopular opinion that characters should learn every talent available by max level. Your character is the strongest level? Then they also have all the talents they can have. Forgetting how to do something to learn something else seems so silly.
Then the endgame can be fully balanced around ONE talent build, no switching needed to be optimal before your specific dungeon, and still get choices as you level. So I guess hero talents are right up my alley? Lol
I would say that this isn’t always accurate when it comes to healing, at least. Some healers have had legitimate choice based on their group comp, the content they were doing, and the strategy their team would employ, even at the high end. It wasn’t the entire set of talents by any stretch, but was more than the very empirically static calculation that dictates the foundation of DPS talent selections.
A variation that was boring, meaningless and crap design.
This makes absolutely no sense. Each class has their own general tree and then their own spec tree. Each one has different ways you can go for different playstyles or content.
People have been complaining of not enough loadouts and the two loadout addons combined have roughly 1.5 million downloads. So tell me again how it’s an illusion and all predetermined.
… what?
I don’t know what a “busy choice” means, but having a talent system be engaging while leveling is a net positive.
I agree the MoP talents were superior but this isn’t going to end well.
League got rid of their talent trees for a reason. They’re practically MoP 2.0. Players are mostly fine with it (I think).
But naw, us WoW players gotta have gucci talent trees that take up the entire dang screen. Kick? Nope that’s all the way deep down in the Druid tree. GG’s tree designers. You really knocked it out of the park.
I hear you, and yes there would be a lot of buttons with these current trees. I think it should work more like cata trees where there are like 4 active abilities you learn per spec (also delete class trees).
How is the current talent tree fun, meaningful and good design? lol
The MoP → SL tree was so much better. They’re literally the same talents, but one has the actual choices displayed as choice rows, the other has them scattered around mandatory pick ups.
The only area the new talent trees are better at is leveling, which is an area of the game Blizzard sweeps under the rug more with every patch.
There’s tons of choices and acting like there isn’t is either people being that obtuse or flat out lying to push a bad narrative.
This system can grow with us, the other one couldn’t.
There was no real choice with the last crap system and needed borrowed power systems to sustain it.
People got locked out of many utilities due to how the three choices for each level were designed.
This is exactly what people have been asking for over many expansions: a real talent system that’s actually engaging with the leveling, can grow and give better choice.
As an affliction lock the only genuine choices I have is Absolute Corruption verse Siphon Life, taking Haunt or not, do I talent into Dread Touch or the AOE alternative, and do I take Seed of Corruption which shouldn’t even be a talent decision. It should be baseline, which it used to be.
So really I have 3 meaningful choices.
The Warlock class tree has genuinely no choices to make.
Uhm, no, it is in fact the opposite.
It is super easy to add a new row of talent choices. The current talent tree is awkward to expand, why do you think they’re doing Hero Powers?
The MoP → SL system didn’t depend on Borrowed Power and I am at a loss as to what makes you think that. MoP and WoD didn’t even have borrowed power.
I’d rather be locked out of utility than my AOE toolkit.
But I don’t even think that is true…? And that is purely a balance and logistics thing, not a structural system error.
Thinking back on it, I feel like Cata probably had the best iteration of the talent system.
It cut a lot of the bloat of the WotLK trees and just handed us most of our mandatory abilities, but it still offers more points to play around with than the talent rows did.
One of the gripes I do have with the current system is that we should just be given the bulk of our core rotation. The way they have it now feels like it leads to button bloat, as well as some “literally not a choice” things like how my Arcane Mage is forced to take Arcane Missiles as my first talent.
I’d rather have Wrath style talents back, when classes were actually classes, not pre-defined specs.
Since they did not bring those back, I’d prefer to keep the MoP design.
The current trees are mainly “AoE vs. ST”.
Those were never really a talent issue in pre-MoP trees.
Current trees are filled to the brim with things that should just be baseline.
We should neverneed to spec into our interrupts and basic utility.
Nope, it killed free point usage.
The current game is a mechanical mess of overdesign, and I honestly can’t wait for Classic MoP → Legion.
Because the rows were god-awful and over 50% of the talents were never selected in any form of content.
At least the in the current iteration of the talent tree, you move around slightly. It’s def not perfect, but it’s above and beyond better than the boxes.
