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.
You will unless I have good reason to believe they’ll do it so that there’s minimal difference between choices.
Yes, I loved Wrath’s system as a standalone, but as there was one optimal, it’s simply not for a game this tightly-tuned. It belongs in a game where the assumption is that minute differences in parses won’t keep you from overcoming a fight.
Adding meaningful choices to a game this tightly-tuned involves balancing their sims within less than a percent or accepting that one choice isn’t a choice, but a pitfall designed to trick people into picking it and then punish them for it.
Everything you described is exactly the same in both systems. The game at the level you describe was, is, and always will be “play-by-guide.” People watch the videos of the fights beforehand, they seek the gear they’re told is best, they pick the talents that they’re told to pick, and they hit the buttons they’re told to hit - they play how a guide tells them to play. Less than 1% of the people playing at that level actually engage their creativity to a productive end, and those are the people writing the guides.
And with all that, the old system was better for those of us who just want to play our characters in a way that is fun for us in the other 90% of the game that isn’t cutting-edge group content.
I don’t mind the talent rows, but it in itself is an incomplete system. They really should bring back talent trees for the each level reward, while also keeping the talent rows as benchmark rewards.
Mine is certainly a cynical take on it, and it’s really only referring to the highly competitive raiders. What they pull off still requires tons of skill.
Most people who just raid for fun are doing it for the social aspect of it at this point I’d think/hope. I know many of them are happy to have a guide to tell them what to do so they don’t have to worry about that stuff - they can just show up and contribute and enjoy the experience.
I mean there will always be min-maxing, especially in a game like this one. I’m not arguing against that.
My best example for what I’m referring to, and perhaps it’s wrapped in nostalgia before I was a parent and before I had any serious duties to attend to, is my warlock. He’s an undead warlock that I made at the very beginning. When I started, occasionally a motivator for the next level was “oh man I’ll get that new talent the next tier down!”, and while I might not get an active skill to use, I at least got that talent point. Talent points, and my character’s absolute chaos that was his talent trees when I was starting, was a form of investment.
Here it is now, how many years and expansions later and I’m not saying that I stopped playing him when they switched the talent trees to what they are now, but I can say that that was where my enjoyment of his progression started to noticeably decline. Perhaps I grew as a person and that it just happened to coincide with the release of the new talents, I’ll grant that. But without being able to go back and talk to myself however many eons ago that feels I’ll never know.
He sits now at 113. It’s just hard to level knowing I get no new talents, no new skills, no new anything other than the number that pops up on my character screen. I still love the lore of warlocks, demonology especially, but he’s just hard for me to play.
I’ll also grant, from other comments, that perhaps the old talent trees weren’t the best. Fair enough, but I enjoyed them more than this current method. I recently started leveling a paladin and realized that I’d gone something like 30 levels without selecting two talents. I can’t say I’d have made that mistake in the older system.
To me that still means that up til 50 you only really get rewarded every 5 levels. Takes away the importance of the in between levels to me.
Likewise with the final tier being at 50 – so I gain 10 whole new levels without learning some new skills? That seems incredibly unrewarding. And yes, convenants and whatever but I’m tired of time sink systems that reward me for the expansion and no further.