and there has been little upside compared with the older, substantially simpler but effectively equally dynamic system that had been in place since Mists.
The desire for something new and granular has overtaken the elegance of a simpler design that was easier to understand while allowing as much space for different gameplay designs for specs, should the devs have bothered investing more time in it.
The fact that we can cut and paste spec loadouts is an enormous crutch for managing an unwieldy system. The game would be in a much less satisfying place if we had to manually implement our talent changes and loadouts (as was the case prior to Mists) rather than going to Wowhead, copying a string, and then pasting it into WoW. It would be interesting to find out if Blizzard tracks how often this occurs. The net result though is relying on an external guide for builds that become pretty monolithic.
And it’s all been needless. Every “effective” build option people are using could be boiled down into a format of fewer talents more usefully arranged and easier to understand visually.
10 Likes
I think the opposite, I think they are very uncreative. Pretty much all the trees are”Left side single target and right side aoe” or vice versa. There are obvious talents that are just too situational so they barely have any use. Plus tier bonuses are built around a certain talent, so having tier restricts what talents you want to play with.
11 Likes
I certainly preferred the old system. This one feels like a needless step backward.
I don’t have the numbers, but I suspect the old system was easier for Blizz to balance and tweak as well.
2 Likes
I like that the BM tree has new talents, but at the same time we could also take some out of the tree or even replace them altogether within the tree where they are. For example why did we get ANOTHER 2 minute CD in Survival of the Fittest when we could’ve gotten Chelonian Crest from Torghast which would’ve ACTUALLY covered the one problem with Hunters in general (their lack of good downsideless defensives not on a 3-2 minute CD)?
Maybe make THIS a single two-point talent choice to replace SoF and it’s one modifying talent? 400% Aspect of the Turtle uptime with leech. BOOM, Hunters fixed.
It’s only somewhat more complicated than the original talent system. And you can tweak it whenever you want with no gold cost.
3 Likes
The new talent trees aren’t hard.
They’re pretty straight forward and have multiple enhancements for core spells. Wheres the confusion?
3 Likes
I disagree so much that I would put this in the category of the most adamantly disagreed post ever.
The new talent system is fantastic. It rewards as you level. It gives options (no, not everyone cares about the stupid meta) and it’s easily expandable as we’re seeing with the incoming talents.
It grows with us, it’s more engaging and the old system was absolute and complete trash.
11 Likes
The trees are a vast improvement over the pruned shrub we had from MoP through SL.
A lot of the trees are bad and need work, though.
The WORST thing about it is that everybody has the same number of points to spend, but different trees have different numbers of points in their nodes.
For example, Prot Warriors have a pretty bare tree (42 pts), so can get almost everything in their spec tree, whereas Guardian is still bloated and has many many more point nodes to spend in (49 pts), so Guardian characters can only get a much smaller portion of their tree.
It’s stupid. If everybody has the same number of points to spend, there should be the same number of spendable points in every tree.
P.S. The trees should be a cylinder instead of a flat surface.
8 Likes
I think they give the illusion of choice meant to pander to the classic Andy/Andreas who bemoan the passing of the “good old days”. There is still cookie cutter builds just like back then and, just like back then, a player can only choose to be suboptimal.
Personally, I think the game was far greater when we had out complete toolkit and all we were picking was niche utility or a focused talent making us better than X. This largely mostly applies to mythic+, the truest most difficult content in the game, and affixes that now require people to pick up avoided abilities they had baseline before but now have to specifically spec into just because the affixes of the week demand it.
Like say my shaman on afflicted weeks. I need to make sure to take poison cleanse totem “just” because it makes afflicted free on every other occurrence. If I forget on that week before jumping into a key, well now my group loses time as I run out to swap it when I could’ve just had the dumb totem sitting never used on some side bar until the now niche time I need it.
The only issue I have with the talent system is some specs it’s possible to select things on the left that do not benefit your spec in any way (these are things where you look at the abilities and wonder why they aren’t on the right). Not every spec has this issue of course.
In ten years it will make more sense, but the current trees were just a rush job where they took everything characters had, and then squeezed them into the new system.
Square peg, round hole.
They shouldn’t be adding the Hero Talents in TWW, though, they should be fixing the existing trees instead. But “fixing our botched rush job” isn’t very appealing in terms of marketing, I guess.
1 Like
I understand what you are saying, but the system feels like it was designed for the way the game used to be, where substantial time was spent playing the game to level a character, rather than a game largely played at max level.
new talent system is the illusion of complexity. when it comes down to the choices you make, there are about equal options to the Post-Cataclysm Talents.
WoW has intense spell/ability bloat right now.
For example, with base Shaman options:
- pick a Melee DR, Poison/Curse Cleanse, Passive group Heal, Totem reset
That’s 5 choices
with Enhancement Options:
- pick a gap closer, go lava lash or go storm. pickup a single target option or a cleave option
that’s 5 choices.
This is a ridiculous statement.
For most of MoP->SL, my talents usually didn’t matter because they were inconsequential, since the talents were either all bad, or one was grossly overpowering the other two.
Nowadays I have different builds for every fight in Amirdrassil, plus another one for M+ and open world.
3 Likes
Maybe for Monk. Not for Shaman.
Not everyone cares about end game and it’s infinitely better to be able to choose which paths you want to take with choices and to be rewarded every level, as opposed to the “you only get three choices, screw you if you want that better defensive talent, because you have to take Burning Rush!”
I seriously despised having three lousy choices that were always crap choices, as opposed to me being able to have seven thousand different builds depending on the content or what I feel like that day.
This is so wrong it’s not even funny. The sheer amount of loadouts I have for different builds is astounding compared to what we had before.
3 Likes
The more complicated, the better. They should make the talent trees even longer and more complex. Path of Exile style would be ideal, but I’d settle for SWG style. Vanilla WoW is the absolute minimum complexity for the system to feel rewarding.
Well, like I said, a lot of the trees are bad and need work. And they should be fixing them for TWW instead of rushing out another system that will need fixing.
PoE doesnt appeal to the number of players Blizzard wants to see from a monthly active users perspective.
I guarantee the goal going forward with Blizzard games will be wide appeal. They didnt hire someone with a marketing and biz dev background to appeal to sweatlords.
2 Likes
I’ll happily take the current Talent system to what we had back in MoP any day.