Before there were talent trees, there were skill points during the alpha stages of the game? A class needed to feel like a class, not dump points into base stats like; Strength, Agility, Intellect, and Stamina?
Gotta give that Int. only warrior credit. He knew where the pointy end goes.
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I don’t think it’s the same way you’re thinking. Found an article that went through patch notes for 0.10 in alpha and it’s in relation to trade skills:
No More Skill Points
With the changes to trade skills, skill points (SP) will be removed from the game, and currency will be used instead to train skills formerly based on SP.
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I wish there was a bit more customization involved in characters other than playing the RNG game with corruptions. Though I don’t dislike the current system, a system like RIFT or POE has would be more my speed.
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Imagine how the average WoW player would react to a passive tree like PoE’s. Bonus points if you imagine it with cluster jewels.
It’d be great. “average” players would be sitting struggling to do mythic 5 mans while the elite mythic raiders would be measuring boss dps in seconds per boss kill.
I would love a system like PoE, but I have a couple of friends who won’t play that game because they don’t know how to build out their characters. There’s a level of accessibility that’s sacrificed to afford that customization.
Personally, I think that’s a fine sacrifice to make, but from a marketing/retention standpoint I can see where it might be intimidating to new players.
Oh definitely. I mean they could straight up have “default” character builds or whatever, but in the end it’s all hypothetical and likely never to happen now that the MMO trend has kinda died down except for the big ones.
I’m that guy. Tried it, but it’s dizziness of too much possibility, and like any talent tree game you just know at least 3/4ths the “answers” will be “wrong.” I still need to research how to place talents in this game, and if I’m just going to do research and base all my points off someone else’s experience why bother with that extra “customization?” I’m not customizing anything if the best answer is “do what already is proven to work.” I’m not a gaming engineer, I’m not going to discover a new build, I’m going to do what I’m told, with an extra helping of homework.
That’s what I don’t understand about nostalgia for the old trees. It was a bad idea back to D2 imo, because there were only ever a few “right solutions” to the trees. It was like that from day 1 to the final day of trees. Just don’t really dig the concept honestly. I don’t even like the piddly talent trees that are left, so many seem so obvious why even give us the illusion of choice?
I mean the thing is a lot of people do like that kind of thing. Myself included.
Not every game has to be for everyone 
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And that’s totally cool, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. Several of my friends play it and enjoy it and honestly I wish I could too. I guess I’ll just play this game by myself, all my friends are playing PoE so that’d be why I sound bitter about it if anything.
It’s a little different with PoE because there are a lot of situations where you find yourself going, “Oh, I like [Skill],” or, “Oh, I like [Weapon Type],” and then just build toward improving whatever it is you like.
I love playing Necromancer in PoE, and I never looked up a build guide for it – I just used the skill tree’s search function, found all of the skills that increased the number or power of minions, and then went ham getting to them.
From there, I only ever made alterations based on whether or not I was having mana issues, or difficulty staying alive. Of course, it’s made easier when you have Uniques that support how you want to play, and for a new player, that’s a tall order. Until you have a character in the 50-60 range, you aren’t going to have the ability to farm maps for Uniques that can help your character play the way you want.
And, if you do make a mistake, you can just burn a few Orbs of Regret to rebuild yourself. If you’re not wasting your currencies on stuff, you can easily respec your entire character in one go should the need arise.
Ultimately, I don’t think PoE’s skill tree would work for WoW, and I’m fine with that, but I will say that I will likely drop WoW for at least a month once PoE 2 releases.
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PoE talent trees are just way too player unfriendly in may opinion, there is no real transparency and too much visual clutter.
As you mentioned something like that would be incredibly offputting.
It works fine for an ARPG where levels are a quick process that keep getting thrown at you, but for a game like WoW it would be kinda ridiculous.
On top of that you basically forcing people to make poor build choices until they understand the system or blindly follow generated build paths, because noone in their right mind is going to sit down and go through all 500 talent options before spending their first point so they understand the path they want to take.
It’s a good system for what it does for those interested, but it requires significant investment early on in the game to use correctly. I fear most players don’t have that level of investment early on.
I think as far as MMOs go the closest I’ve seen to that style talent tree is Skyforge if I remember correctly. Similar branching layout although not quite as intense with it’s number of options.
They’d look it up on Icy Veins, of course.
I’m confused. Are you upset about something from the alpha test period of classic?
I think the biggest mistake I ever made in PoE was trying to build a Block Duelist with a Shield. Getting to block cap is easy, but without the necessary damage to back up the defenses, you still run into situations where a boss attack doesn’t get blocked and it one-shots you.
I had almost given up on the character, but what I ended up doing was burning about 50 Orbs of Regret and rebuilding him into a dual-wield block build. I managed to maintain my block cap and get the damage I needed to melt enemies.
Having said that, I almost don’t even understand the point of having shields in PoE. They’re really just not viable in their existing state.
I wouldn’t say that during any of that I felt forced to make a poor build choice, though. I had a build I wanted to try – so I built it. It worked okay through most of the leveling process, but couldn’t handle the damage scaling that kicks in as levels pass 60-ish and start pushing higher. So, having learned the build wasn’t viable, I nuked every point I’d dumped into Shield skills and cleaned up the pathways I no longer needed to get to them.
PoE without Orbs of Regret would be a miserable game, but with them, I think that build mistakes aren’t a huge problem.
If anything, I would say they should increase the number of them that can be easily obtained by players over the course of the normal story campaign. All totaled, I think a character obtains less than ten Orb of Regret from storyline rewards. I’d increase that to around 30-40 to encourage new players to take chances and experiment without worrying about mistakes.
I don’t know, sine I cam during beta phase 3. But I can’t remember hearing that such a thing ever happened.
UO pre alpha had skill points. Perhaps you are thinking of that? It was kind of awesome, you leveled and got points and I really liked the way that worked.
In the beta/final of UO, it became “skills by use.” This ruined the game for me, because I wanted to play with friends and their suggestion was that I hang in their house, hitting trapped animals/having them hit me and having an elemental cast on me (to build up attacking/resistances/etc. ) I don’t know about you, but this was not my idea of a fantasy “game.” Luckily, EQ came out eventually.
Oh, or I guess there were SP at some point in the alpha? Wow, that is crazy!
Not to mention with how pricy it is to fix mistakes, sometimes its easier to create a new character and just keep the gear.
For me it’s more that you need a clear direction and for that you need to know what the talent trees offer.
So even if you had issues with your build you had to know what you wanted to build around first and then try and then see if it worked. For new players that can be intimidating, looking over the entire tree to see something you like and building for it.
It’s just a lot to get within the first minutes of gameplay. I haven’t really played much PoE overall but I remember first playing and I just held the talent points for like 10ish levels because I wanted to go through the actual talwnt builds so I knew what I was doing instead of wasting them.
It’s almost like for new players it needs a small talent tree which is visually easy to read to get people into it which then opens into the larger one after x number of points have been spent so players initially get a feel for what they are doing with little consequence before having to make decisions.
This is actually a solid idea. Could work!