What do you think of the announced updates to the user interface and talents coming in WoW: Dragonflight?
The talent tree changes bring up a lot of questions for me.
What kind of talents can we expect to find in these trees?
Will they be the old style of talents? 1% gains here and there that you put 5 points into, or is each box only 1 point?
What percentage of the tree will be filled out at max level?
Is there going to be any way to get additional talents?
Are there any updates to PvP talents as well?
How much balancing is there expected to be done, or will there still be ādead talentsā?
6 Likes
I love that theyāre making UI parts moveable.
One thing Iād like elaborated on - will the ādefaultā UI still be there for people who donāt want to customize? Or will you be changing the default to be different?
As for talents, as I said in the main thread, I am skeptical. Very, very skeptical.
Itās very easy to cross the line from āNeat new powersā to āWe stripped power from you and youāll only be able to opt into certain parts at a time.ā
Please be careful with this. It will feel horrible if it feels like you just stole power from us just to give it back only partly. This is one of the reasons the Box of Many Things was disliked.
Also, assuming all specs/classes have similar amounts of talents, I personally donāt feel confident that you guys can balance ~1600 talents. Thatāsā¦ a lot. I donāt think anyone could balance that many. Which means we will get a lot of dead talents. Which makes me wonder why youāre doing the trees at all.
10 Likes
I love the old UI so I donāt really have any thoughts on the new one. I do hope I can still use the old one with the original frames and original gryphons. But Iām sure someone will make an āold UIā addon somehow if its not available to use a āclassicā view.
Iām so excited about the talent trees! I loved the old trees and its very exciting to see them back as an option. The current every 5 levels and 3 choices is so boring and Iāve never liked it. Each level will feel important again 
3 Likes
Main quick bit of feedback on talents from the limited glance is that core spells/utility are locked away behind choices you may not want to otherwise pick.
If these are empowerments to the ability then thatās great.
If itās the actual ability, then thatās bad from a player perspective as power has been removed to just get it back again (but at a cost).
11 Likes
Yes yes yes yes yes yes.
The double talent tree (the class one and spec one) may give us a lot of options, while making spec balancing easier. It may be a way to ease PVE/PVP balancing as well?
Plus, seeing the Convoke the Spirits icon in the Druid tree showcased makes me very hopeful that some well-loved abilities like the Divine Toll arenāt going away.
The UI improvements have a blanket approve: if we retain the ability to customize it in any way through addons, and that at the same time the base UI get improved by taking the best from ubiquitous addons, whatās not to love? I would very much love to throw away many addons (while giving them an eternal place of honor for the ideas they brought to the game).
5 Likes
I am so happy and excited about the talent-trees, it looks as if gameplay and choosing your own path will finally return to retail! I have missed the ability to choose your own style and this definetly seems to give us that back!
5 Likes
This is just what WoW needed, and Iām excited to see what the talent trees are going to be like. Since itās just an early preview, I expect we might see some changes to it before we get to play with them on the alpha/beta, but so far everything looks good.
I noticed some talents seemingly let you choose between multiple different options on the same talent - I thought that was pretty cool, but looks confusing on the UI. Maybe some changes are needed there.
6 Likes
UI looks really good. Curious how much of the current API will be broken with the changes. Iām excited to play default again
The talents look good but there wasnāt much detail so itās hard to give feedback. The current talent system sucks though so Iām glad it is on the radar and it looks promising so far. The loadouts are a huge win.
The UI is probably something I spend way more time on than anything else besides of playing the game itself, so Iām really curious to see what changes it will bring. For example, will we have pixel perfect alignments? Will addons be able to hook into the mover system? Will it have an actionbar system like with ElvUI and can we have round icons? etc. What will change in terms of chat? default font? What kind of API changes will we see in Lua? Will we get more performance in how Lua is handled inside client? Updated Lua version with better UTF-8 support?
I can probably ask 100 more questions about this and I hope weāll get some more deep diving information on this in the near future!
4 Likes
I really like having to select skills as I level because it adds to the feeling of building my character and becoming more powerful.
Talent trees can be tricky to get right though. Too detailed and you end up in a PoE spiderweb of death. Not complex enough and you get what we have now, where you donāt even notice you just got a new spell or rank.
Talent trees also tend to have an illusion of choice. Where the min/max push or encounter drives people down one path. I donāt know if there is any way to get away from that totally. I rather liked the version we had in Covenants for the soulbinds. It was easy to select and then to switch as needed. There were trade offs, but multiple paths were useful. What I did not like was having to get token drops to build that power. It did not feel like my character was progressing based on merit, it felt like a gated RNG drop. I am glad they later fixed that.
Allowing us to customize the UI is great. It is a long desired move and I have high hopes for it. I use the standard UI for the most part, but a lot of others donāt so they will benefit. Not having to spend time on addons between patches will be great.
The ability to move UI elements is very welcome! I used to use MoveAnything (but it was wonky after doing anything in a vehicle) and I now use BlizzMove, which is better, but which still doesnāt really allow me to move everything Iād like to.
1 Like
Regarding Buff/Debuff tracking:
Would it be possible to ātest displayā debuffs tied to encounter abilities but also buffs tied to your class or items (trinkets) and order them on the screen? So basically no longer looking at that upper right corner to track the remaining time of whatever it may be?
In a way this might be approachable by combining the dungeon journal listings without the need to be infight with the given encounter for example.
1 Like
Iāve always been a minimalist when it comes to my UI. I use very little add-ons to change the look of it, but I do utilize some that hides parts of the UI that isnāt needed. Itāll be nice to be able to move parts of the UI around freely and gives more options for even more minimalist options for someone like me without the need for addons.
Sounds good to me.
I really love the fact that itās finally getting reworked because it feels like a mess in itās current iteration ever since we lost the weapons in legion without getting a new row.
I would love to also see more information, maybe a video that goes over a class/specās tree to see how exactly it works? Would also be nice to get more information on other gameplay related topics such as endgame/m+/raids/gear/loot and so on. What about borrowed power/aspects? Will they finally be purely cosmetic choices? Or will they be tied to player power again?
On the topic of UI at the end of the day I will just use addons but my main concern is if it will be better optimized? Because I feel like UI is the main culprit when it comes to fps issues in the game especially in cases with many nameplates showing up at the same time.
5 Likes
The UI rework is a solid win. Iām one of the few holdouts in my guild who hasnāt switched to ElvUIāand I was planning to finally make the switch near the end of this tier when it would be minimally disruptive. But now I think Iām gonna stick with the old UI and see how I like the revamped one when it comes out.
Talent treesāIām cautiously optimistic, but the devil is in the details on this one, isnāt it? Iād love to see these new trees accomplish what the Covenant system did once we became freely able to swap. Itās neat that a Kyrian Holy Paladin plays so differently than a Venthyr Holy Paladin, yet both are viable options. If the talent tree can deliver that kind of experience, where you can choose between some very different builds and there is no one ābestā build (except perhaps for World First and MDI competitors), I think that will be a win. But that is so hard to pull off, and in Shadowlands it took several content patches for us to reach that level of balance.
3 Likes
The first thing that comes to mind when I see the screenshots of the talent trees is āWow that looks complicatedā lol
I play a lot of alts, a few of them I play at a fairly high level, others I really donāt so much with very much seriousness.
Iād really like to see an option where I can select a role e.g. healer/tank/ranged dps/ melee dps, and then dungeon/raid/PvP and the system just picks a decent spec for that role and content. That way I can jump on an alt and poof I have a tank spec set up or whatever, very quickly. And off I go to do whatever I want to do in the moment.
I also want a button in the corner called āadvanced optionsā, when I hit that I want every single little tweakable bit available to me to min/max whatever it is I want to do at a higher, less casual and more serious way.
I think if a casual or new player sees the full customization options right off the bat, some faces are gonna melt and some brains are gonna explode lol
With regard to the UI I pretty much want to put as much or as little information where I want it to be. A few modes that automatically switch. Out of combat in a city itās super clean and chat oriented. Once I enter a raid I want my full blown death star control panel with all the widgets to pop right up. The HUD of all HUDS. When I leave the raid and find myself out in the world or in a battleground I want my open world UI to pop up on itās own and in PvP I want that UI to pop up on itās own.
Itās hard to tell from the launch videos how much of this is already in there or not so I figured Iād just decribe these two topics exactly with what Iād personally like to see.
I only want to mess around with this stuff when I choose to. I do not want to spend 2 hours on wowhead figuring out how to wrangle all this stuff to do what I want when really I just want to jump on a new alt and play the game.
2 Likes
The new Talent system looks great, Iām eager to see what specific class changes come with it. I hope the player tutorial experience is updated to reflect this new talent system. Right now it just asks you to pick a spec and pretty much leaves a player to their own devices. With a more complex system, it might be wise to implement a more hands-on tutorial for newer players to go through.
You mentioned being able to save your builds to your character. It would be pretty awesome for a way to share those in the game between players. So someone could just load in someone elseās build and itās filled in for them.
2 Likes
One of the things I would like to see with the UI is for Blizzard to expand the tools available via the base UI for overcoming dungeon/raid mechanics and to use those tools to provide players with the means to overcome raid mechanics without relying on WeakAuras or addons.
For example, Lords of Dread is impossible for my guild to overcome without the use of WeakAuras, since we are deaf and cannot use voice chat. The fact that we have to use a WeakAura to enable voting on impostors is really frustrating when the means to implement it via the base UI already exist with the Extra Action Button. Blizzard could have provided accessibility to those without voice chat on this boss by using that button to allow us to vote on the impostors, then have some kind of buff apply to our target to denote votes.
Regarding talents, Iām quite surprised that effort is being put into re-working talents again when itās a virtual certainty that the theorycrafters are going to figure out the absolute best min-maxed talent builds in the beta, which everybody will then use. Big talent trees are just an illusion when it comes to player choice, which, if I recall correctly, was Blizzardās reason for simplifying them to their current form in the first place.
3 Likes
I love that the ui is not so static anymore and I am sure that especially a lot of new users will find this more comfortable, to change there ui ingame instead of using addons to get the things where they want them to be.
There are a lot of addons i would like to get rid of, because you permanetly have to update them, you get lua errors etcā¦ So I like every step that goes in the direction to implement things in the game instead of having addons for it.
I like the new talent trees very muchā¦ even if there will be theorycrafters that will tell you the absolut best way to do, there will still be people that donāt need the best talents in their guild to compete or with the content they do. So it leaves you with more personal choices, instead of picking 5 different talents (which are the same in almost every situation for some classes) and thats it.
2 Likes