I know I’ll likely meet resistance about this: for Shadow Lands, what with the level squish and all of that, I would like to see the talent trees revert to what we had in Wrath.
I’ve never liked these tiered talent trees, especially because when leveling back in vanilla / BC / Wrath you may not have gotten a new skill every level, but you at least got a skill point that you could use.
I understand why the trees needed to be redone – I’m a developer in my day job so I get just how crazy that must have been getting. But these talent trees are sort of boring, and they only rarely offer a reward for leveling up (as of now once ever 15 or so levels).
I know, the odds are high that this falls on deaf ears, but on the off chance that perhaps I am not alone in my distaste for the current talent system, maybe we could bring that back? I miss investment I felt from choosing where to allocate a talent point, especially at lower levels when some of the more open talents could help you still – it’s one of the reason I enjoy wow classic.
There is both downsides and upsides to both Talent Tree’s systems. But to perfectly fair, the current talent tree will go with the level squish in SL, starting at level 15 for Tier 1, then going every 5 levels until the final tier at level 50.
Except that’s not at all true. There were talents like that, but they had far more of an impact than you’re suggesting. And the other talents could be much more interesting, and tailor your class a bit more to how you like to play instead of playing the exact same type of character as every other person of that class.
The new talent system is better for flexibility, but it’s fairly boring. They do have impacts on how they play but there’s nearly always a best and worst choice - so no difference with vanilla’s trees - but you may not like how that playstyle feels.
Perhaps it should be not a wholesale return of Wrath’s trees, but something between those and modern trees. Think wrath trees except the “boring” x% talents weeded out. If nothing else, It would allow us to put points into more than one tree again which I would count as a huge win (RIP mage elemental spec).
There was one difference, though… in classic, TBC, and to a lesser extend WotLK, leveling characters didn’t have a burgeoning surplus of power like they do now, so you actually felt those x% increase talents mount up over the levels, especially early on. These days when you ding and get a new talent point, you often don’t even realize it because it’s not gonna make any difference… stuff will just wilt when you sneeze at it regardless if you spend your point or not.
Yes, the old trees had filler talents, and the new trees don’t because you’re only spending 7 points instead of 40. So they’re basically the same in this regard.
What made the old trees better was the ability to hybridize between the trees. Were you all in on one spec? 70/30? 40/30/30?
People will immediately say “hur dur you gimp yourself if you do that,” but again it’s no different now. At least before we had the option to “gimp” ourselves if we wanted to pursue a non min/max-for-raiding build. Which MANY of us do.
My class was at its best in cataclysm at the height of the old talent trees. It’s been nothing but downhill ever since.
As I’ve said before, we used to have people who didn’t read or do anything outside of the game and just sprinkled their points all over the place and it made their character basically useless outside of them playing by themselves. The new system more or less makes it dummy proof where while there may be sub optimal choices, you can’t really mess up too much.
If they were to bring back talent trees, they would have to borrow from Rift where there are already premade templates to choose from.
I really don’t think things are much different now. These people still don’t have interrupts/dispels on their bars, and have rotations that make neckbeards cry. The current talent trees haven’t suddenly turned these people into players you’d actually want in any sort of competitive content.
Catering to apathetic and/or stupid people is pretty much always a bad idea.
I think there’s a middle ground between this and wrath. Putting in 3-5 points for sometbjng seemed excessive but then having 1 row with 3 options seems very limited. Maybe they can expand in what they have now.
Half the talents we have are completely dead and remain unused
Some of the tiers are so unbalanced you gimp yourself by picking the wrong choice
Some of the time the talents are way more fun but under tuned
Let’s take outlaw for example
First talent tier for you use the one for more pistol shot damage and more combo points, has a bunch of traits that play into it
So your other options are a passive for more Sabre slashes and one for some ability that makes you do slightly more damage
Then you have a talent called alacrity or something that is pretty much a flat 20% haste boost which completely over shadows the other talent on that line, and the other one is slice and dice that lowers your dps more than not using a talent at all
The systems currently dumb and they knew adding mechanics to classes outside of talents
So it seems like even blizzard thinks we don’t have enough talents
Indeed, it was really nice to pick and choose between all 3 trees to create highly specialized builds for speedy transmog runs, soloing elites, or whatever else. People need to remember that there’s more to (WoW) life than max level instanced group stuff.