Why Talent Trees Are Bad

Community General Discussion
21

As a druid main in all of DF, I feel the opposite; druids had it the best of any class because our talent trees had choices unless you just didn’t do content where choices mattered. The only one of the four specs that could realistically make this complaint was Boomy, but Boomy always has the least interesting options in builds because it’s mechanically one of the most straightforward specs to play.

With JUST resto alone, I didn’t have enough talent profiles for what I wanted. And feral also had me actively playing a good 3 profiles on its own, which still wasn’t enough.

Bear could play with minimal stuff, but didn’t have to, and often rewarded breaking the mold.

And that’s with zero PvP.

22

I swear my brain just lagged irl.

I cannot believe what I just read.

Lol.

Your response seems to contradict itself in a few places. You start by saying Druids had the best talent tree options of any class, but then you acknowledge that Boomkin had limited and less interesting choices, which is exactly the point being made. If a whole spec within the class lacks engaging options, that kind of undermines the claim that Druids had the best choices overall.

Also, you mention that Resto didn’t have enough talent profiles for what you wanted, and Feral needed three different profiles, which again suggests that the choices were limited or restrictive. How can you say Druids had the best options when you yourself felt constrained by them? It sounds like the experience varied significantly between specs, which aligns with the original complaint more than it opposes it.

23

Hybrid tax.
This is done on purpose to avoid classes with multiple roles from being too dominant.

1 Like
24

I would love to agree here.

But its just negligence.

There is no hybrid tax because hybrid functionality just doesn’t even work with the current trees.

This is a lazy development tax.

Similar to how the entire Shaman Tree got reworked. It wasn’t on the basis of Hybrid Tax it was on the basis they completely were negligent and did not create proper trees.

3 Likes
25

My fear as it is an iterative process that by the time they get them all good they’re going to abandon them for something else.

1 Like
26

Not really, it’s the illusion of choice right now. Sure you put a lot of points in, but you are so railroaded it doesn’t matter. At most there’s 2 viable builds with proper synergies for any one spec. You actually got more choice with the MoP trees as it was more about playstyle and utility.

2 Likes
27

I totally agree. With you there.

MoP Trees you could make crazy builds with the glyph system as well. The crazy part is they were viable builds as well!

But in retail, we almost always play the 2 cookie cutter builds.

1 single target

2 Aoe target

There is no customization outside of that it is simply F tier.

This makes me wonder why even have them at this point. Just do as FFXIV does and make it one class.

No choice in modification as they force us to play how THEY WANT to begin with.

28

The real problem is they took 2/3 playstyles for each spec and spread them out over dozens of nodes, with 1/2 flavor choices just like Mists. It’s essentially the same exact thing but with a few more choices compared to Mists.

Must Haves, then choose 1, 2, or 3

Must Have mid, then choose 1, 2, 3, or 4

Must haves bottom, then choose 1, 2, or 3

Left side, must haves, then chose 1, 2, 3, or 4

and so on.

It’s essentially still the Mists tree but there are more options in the least. And now it has a bit more complexity with Hero Specs.

The issue usually is interconnectivity between nodes, node options that people don’t like cause they feel they should come standard with the kit, the feeling of lack of choice (same issue as old trees, illusion of choice in a way but a tad improved). And lastly you essentially get most of everything anyway so it feels kinda cheap like a pseudo talent tree kinda like the Legion Artifact tree.

The Class tree on the left provides a bit of hybridization options which is at least cool tho.

The other issue is you have many who say this is already too complex as well. And WoW tries to appeal to a wide playerbase so it likely won’t go ultra hardcore in talent options anyway cause then it’ll be vastly too complex. And Blizzard likely doesn’t want a balancing nightmare.

Padgarre the Couch Dev hath spoketh

29

This is just simply wrong in any way you look at it. Sure if you want to min max your character there is going to be 1 or 2 solid ways to play that will always out DPS other specs. Even if the difference is minimal every single website will tell you “you must play like this”. That doesn’t mean its an illusion of choice. MoP railroaded us into all playing our classes the exact same way. The only actual choices were almost 100% utility based and not actual choices that had anything to do with your dps rotations or your survival chances.

2 Likes
30

Nah. Pandaria gave you 2 throughput lines that significantly impacted your playstyle, each with 3 distinct and impactful choices. So at least 9 different configurations that impact your playstyle, not taking into account the 2 utility and 2 healing options that also spiced it up. In the current trees you only put two or three permutations together that make any real sense for most classes. The path down either works with your capstones or it doesn’t, or it’s a choice between minor numerical changes, and you fill in like 3/4 of the tree, so it’s more about what you don’t pick than what you do. If they really wanted any meaningful choice the tree / options would be bigger and you’d fill in much less of it.

3 Likes
31

Shamans had the best class tree of any. Absolutely insanity to think a tree that provides utility for whichever situation you want to cater to is bad. Resto had some problems with mandatory healing points being in the tree but besides that it was very well done. Lost all credit with this one

32

“Illusion of choice” you mean MoP talents? You had multiple rows of three talents and 95% of the time only one of those talents were good.

6 Likes
33

Yeah, except not as diluted as it is now. There has never been any real choice. It was just marginally less bad. But anyone thinking you have amazing choices now is delusional.

1 Like
35

Well speaking as shaman you have a multitude of utility you couldn’t access before and can easily have tons of different trees, and even within the enhance spec tree you have two completely different builds and some micro changes within them. You 100% have way more to choose from, even if you’re stun locked from the choices you can make. There will always be a “bis” or highest dps choice for certain things but that’s inescapable

1 Like
36

this exactly this

37

I didn’t lose any credibility.

If sham tree was so well design. Why did they rework it?

To take utility away?

No.

Infact you got even more.

lol

38

Shaman is one of the better ones, after the rework, but 95% of the choices only really matter in PvP. Also, its just giving back baseline utility they had before, masqueraded as a choice. Now you get to opt out for some other minor choices.

2 Likes
39

I personally love the new talent trees from DF, they offer actual choices in most cases as opposed to ‘illusion of choice’. After years of players being upset (including me) over illusion of choice vs actual choice, we finally have talent trees with depth that provide actual choice. You can find people playing different builds in raid even at the high end, you can find people playing 2-3 different talents typically even within the ‘cookie cutter’ builds, etc.

They just needed to take more time in TWW to really work it out. The specs that have amazing talent trees should show how good this system actually is, but all specs need to have good trees and that is not currently the case. Hero talents kind of got in the way of focusing purely on talent trees.

1 Like
40

Yes,

by time working it out. This means reworking the failed tree and moving baseline abilities out.

Which is the entire purpose of the post.

To educate and push for better tree options and remove baseline abilities from the base tree.

To allow people to make meaningful choices.

41

Talent trees are not bad. They just need to move active skills and visual procs to early in the tree.

And work to have some balance for the different talent builds instead of what we’ve had with dead talents and capstones for an entire xpac.

1 Like