Talents Trees are out of Control

Community General Discussion
1

Just some stats for you, then my thoughts.

The below may be 1-2 off in some of the retail numbers due to insane amount of individual talents and 2 choice talents like “Blessing of Summer or Merciful Auras”.

I’m comparing now to Wrath, when talent trees were at their biggest and were subsequently trimmed in Cata.

Retail

  • 58 talents on the Standard Paladin Tree
  • 52 in holy
  • 41 Hero talents (between the three)
  • 46 Talents Prot
  • 52 Talents Ret

249 talents total across all 3 specs to learn for paladin

Wrath

  • 26 talents in Holy
  • 26 talents in Prot
  • 26 talents in Ret

78 talents total across all 3 specs to learn for paladin

So, 249 talents compared to 78. Over 3 times the amount of talents to learn… for one class. So god forbid you want to have alts (something blizzard finally wants and is making easier in other areas of the game).

What makes the insane talent growth even worse is, unlike in wrath where most of the talents you had time to learn over the course of vanilla/tbc/wrath, the new talent trees spawned out of nothing and are regularly blown up/reworked. Holy and Ret have had several MAJOR talent tree revamps mid expansion in the short time they’ve been around.

The complexity of talents is also out of control. Most of the new talents completely change what abilities do, making it impossible to naturally choose a good talent tree.

Here’s a good way to illustrate this.
If in Wrath I asked a relatively new player to fill in what they think the meta build is for their spec, they would probably get 70-100% of the spec correct. Today if I asked a 10 to 15 year veteran to fill out what they think the meta build is, they’d be lucky to get 50% of it correct. A newbie would probably just have a stroke.

This, for me, sucks. While being able to copy/paste your talent tree off a website is easy, it doesn’t feel good. It makes me feel like I don’t know my class anymore (esp with the constant changes) and when I try to decipher the talent tree, I just get overwhelmed trying to piece together how everything plays together.

Maybe I’m just old… Or, maybe, this talent tree actually sucks and everyone just acts like it’s amazing because it’s “complex” and they want to appear smart. But if all you do is copy/paste it off a website, then it’s actually less engaging when we only had 3 choices a row like in Panda. At least then we actually made the choices.

Rant over.

19 Likes
2

Ctrl C
Ctrl V
Done

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3

They give you starter builds to use if you don’t want to think about it at all. Or a very convenient talent sharing function so you can just copy builds from other people.

So what though? Ask them instead to choose the talents that just sound cool to them and they’ll likely have a great time.

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Well its a good thing ppl simcraft the meta so i can just copy paste

These trees take the place of trainers and revamp the boring 1/2% increase talents of the days of old

Now is there an argument that all the synergies make things more difficult and therefore vanilla versions of spells are neutered? Sure

But idk i dont think they are that bad. Especially with the ease of changing and saving loadouts

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I know you can copy/paste in, that’s not fun or engaging.

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Goto wowhead or icy veins, and copy the talents lol… or if you wanna be fnacy goto raider io and get bis talents

7

While i agree with you for the most part, I don’t really see a way to change that now.

It would take far too much work to remake every single spec. Barring WOW2 i think this is how it will be for a long time.

Edit: All of the new ppl I’ve gotten into ive immediately told not to try making their own build. Ive pointed them twords wowhead of their chosen spec. In a way that does take alot away from the game.

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8

I don’t think this comparison with Wrath works. The game is way more complex than it was, what, 15, 16 years ago?

Besides, people wanted old talent trees back and to have choices, so here we are. Honestly I was fine with the ‘pick three’ talents since they were usually big picks and got rid of a lot of the fluff you got in the trees.

I do wish they flat out told you that some talents are more or less mandatory. I didn’t initially have Secret Technique on my Sub Rogue unlocked, felt like I could get more with Eviscerate spam. And then unlocked the Trickster Hero Talents and then realized two important talents are behind Secret Technique.

Otherwise, just mess around with the talent trees. You don’t need the optimal build unless you’re pushing top tier content, which most don’t.

2 Likes
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Stop infantilizing new players and players in general. It might be a shock to learn that the allure of someone playing a new game is learning new things. It’s not that difficult to read through a talent tree and at least have a basic understanding of what does what.

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I like how you added in hero talents like you don’t just get all of them

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Logs into Path of Exile 2

:sunglasses:

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read the entire post before saying something

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And yet I love all of the options I have, because that is fun and engaging. There are literally addons to give us more loadouts because people have so many options.

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14

Gods are people really complaining that you actually have choices on how to build your characters instead of just dumb cookie cutter click and forget things that have basically no actual impact?

No, shoo. go away.

If you don’t want to play an RPG, don’t play an RPG, go play some mindless action game that has no thought behind it where you just mash buttons all day.

Stop dumbing down our RPGs because you don’t want to be bothered.

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you aren’t making any of the decisions, you’re copy/pasting them in from online. You don’t even know your entire talent tree.

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16

Wrong. I make all of my own decisions on my builds. Not everyone is so lazy to just copy paste. Some actually learn what their talents are and the different builds.

Sounds like a failure on your part.

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17

The talents trees are insanely complicated. I bet you don’t even know half your talents.

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18

Your whole complaint was that the talent trees are too complicated. There are ways to simplify it by removing some of the decision making for you.

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19

This again sounds like a failure on your part. They aren’t complicated whatsoever.

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Haha read the entire post bro