The DF talent system has two large flaws. Imo these flaws are fatal, but it’s unlikely bliz will change course now.
The biggest flaw is attempting to create a singular class talent tree. Bliz has tried to do this by simultaneously giving meaningful pathways for each spec but also not making it 4 distinct pathways. Bliz should realize that this is impossible by the fact each tree already has distinct spec pathways. Smashing it together in a class trees only creates the illusion of choice.
At best, this does nothing useful. At worst it will cause some players to make silly confusing choices - ie. A bear with a bunch of useless balance class talents.
Adding baseline abilities to class tree is clearly just being done to fill space. Associate these abilities with the spec, if you must, but putting into talent tree just creates needless variables in class balancing.
A class tree, shared by all specs, must be independent from the concept of specs. Otherwise, it just becomes another spec tree. You can see Bliz clearly falling into this design trap here. The class trees all have a clear spec pathway through them. Begging the question, what is the purpose of having a class tree at all?
Class trees are a fine concept. To nobodys suprise you actually have to make more than 1 attempt at them to get it right. Imagine if movies were all shot in 1 take. The result would be the druid general tree.
I kind of agree, i think it was a huge mistake doing class trees and spec trees. It only makes it twice as hard to balance. Instead of just giving classes stuff baseline and spending twice the time improving spec trees we get half baked class and spec trees.
It might actually make it so much harder to balance because you are not balancing spec trees based off baseline abilities but you are balancing spec trees based off Possible class builds which would just be a nightmare it increases to complicity of talent tree balancing by a huge degree. So instead of balancing a spec tree off one baseline build you have to balance it based off 4-5 possible class talent tree builds.
Also, i think the problem with class trees are apparent with classes like druid who have 4 specs and one class tree, on top of historically having the most baseline skills\utility and now having to pick them all up again in a class tree using limited points which is basically reducing our total playable toolkit if we want the BIS build.
I’d rather the game be fun and interesting than perfectly balanced. Perfect balance isn’t fun in and of itself. And with this many classes/specs/professions, it’s impossible anyway.
Blizz is doing what they do: Every xpac they do a big shakeup. Every patch they do a meta shakeup.
And if you just accept that for what it is, and that you’re playing the game in a state that is temporary, and that you should enjoy it because the game won’t ever be just like this again, then you can probably have a good time.
It’s very rare that any class is left in such a bad state as to be totally unviable. As a community, we tend to greatly exaggerate the meta. (Nobody wants to take the hard road, that makes sense. We still push it to extremes though).
I really think the forums are great for pointing out that the way some people think they would enjoy the game is the opposite of how I enjoy the game. I like the idea of these trees. It’s fun, it makes me feel like I’m wracking my brain for cool combos or choices.
You’re not wrong, even a difference of 2% is “unviable” to some players, especially towards the top end, while normal and heroic raiders would be 100% fine taking a difference of 2% and it not being the cause of a wipe.
I take talents, usually, on my Warlock and Druid that are more fun and less damage % than meta choices, just like I play Necrolord on my Druid most of the time when it’s not a meta pick at all. Even Resto I still use Necrolord often for raid healing since it’s a lot more fun than Nightfae. Now, I will go back to NF if it’s a mega difficult boss or I am only 1 of 2 healers in a 10 man group and we’ve tried the boss a few times and us as healers failed the group. I will swap back, then, to NF, but until then I am usually Necrolord more often than not. There is a huge difference in HPS between Necrolord and NF for raid healing, between NF and any other covenant for raid healing as a Druid.
If Mastery for Affliction affected Drain Soul/Shadow Bolt, I would swap my Aff lock back to Necrolord, too, but I dislike having to stack Vers and swapping covenants for that means less Mastery stacking that I’ve done and regearing entirely for like Vers/Crit, Vers/Haste, which is annoying so I stay with NF there.
I like the different combos, though to be honest I didn’t want a class tree. I just wanted spec trees, but oh well, they’re actually pretty good for most of the class trees and spec trees. Druid class tree is still “meh” at best, though. I do love Innervate being in the tree for all 4 specs to get, I just hate how far down it is and Nature’s Vigil being back in is quite awesome, too.
Thats the thing the bear tree itself dosent allow for proper builds other then essentially one.
You go all moonfire talents along with incarn and go far left to get ursocs fury and savagery. That is basically the only build that will ever be used, theres no other build blizzard added.
They should expand upon the feral and astral sides of bear adding maybe more maul talents that make it an aoe bleed maybe allow rip and rake too be used in bear form or give more defensive value in its own way consistently and add in full moon and lunar beam too the astral bit.
Plenty of xpacs launched with terrible specs. Blizzard always tunes the numbers so they are okay but it doesnt change the fact that they have a history of releasing half baked specs because they run out of time.
You are missing the point completely in this post. Its not about numbers this post is about class tree and spec design, Literally nothing to do with numbers and viability. They could leave bear druid high on DPS to make up for the fact they didnt do a parse on the talent tree but it would still make the tree bad.
I… think it’s about numbers. Lol. Even in the OP he mentions bears running around with balance spells. Ie, what’s “optimal.”
If someone’s leveling in WoW for the first time, exploring their class fantasy, a shapeshifting druid, why SHOULDNT they have bear talents and balance druid talents, save for some ppl in a forum decided that’s “bad?” And how did they decide it was bad?
What wouldn’t be used in a raid.
Yea… the post was about numbers lol. So his post was apropos. He wants a game that’s fun. He doesn’t care about numbers.
in my opinion i think blizzard shouldn’t of done class trees. All it did was exponentially made spec trees more difficult to balance and made the whole game more difficult to balance.
If they didnt do class trees it would of given them more time to work on spec trees. Now we have to deal with some specs\classes having terrible or half baked trees that just need that little tiny bit of effort to make them good but it wont happen because they ran out of time.
Talent tree is not the problem, talent tree exists in every exp and always the core system of this game, it’s just with different forms. In SL, it’s talent + soul bind + covenant. The talent row is just putting the nodes you’ll certainly choose into your baseline, makes the talent much easier for players to decide. You feel different just because the dev team is worse than before so makes you feel uncomfortable about the system. So in talent tree you should see there are several build paths because this is a tree which doesn’t have the freedom as the talent rows. That’s probably why they change the tree to the row before, tree is much more complex than the rows.
So there will be something like the class tree if the didn’t do the class tree. They can’t do the class tree well not because they choose to use the class tree.
I think the class tree/spec tree works well overall. Sure I have some quibbles with various trees, but overall I think it’s good. The biggest exception to that is Druid. And I’m not even sure that it’s because Druid has four specs; I think it’s because each spec spends the overwhelming majority of their combat time in a different form than any other spec, so you end up with a lot of abilities that just aren’t as useful to you.
I personally like the talent system. I think the flexibility it offers and creativity it allows is super fun and helpful in different aspects of the game.
The class talent tree for druid is incredibly restrictive. It needs completely open pathing for it to work, and many CC abilities should be druid-wide.
