You have no choice for talents

Community General Discussion
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Seen a lot of posts about the old talent tree from MOP vs the current talent tree with hero talents. Wanted to share my opinion on them and I personally think the MOP system was better. It was easier to balance, less complicated and pretty much had the same result as today’s system.

Currently I think the talent tree gives the “illusion” of choice but in reality you don’t have a choice. Blizzard wanted to return to this system because they thought it would give more freedom with builds and talent choices for different situations. But just look at the top 100 players for every class and spec and I guarantee you they are all running the same talents. There is no choice, People will always pick what ever is “best” so why have a more complex system with way more passives and talents to try to balance?

Also think about a new player, knows nothing about WoW. What do you think would be easier for them to understand? A few rows with a couple of options? or the mess we have today where you have to branch out in so many different directions to unlock capstones and probably will just look at some guide and “copy paste” a talent build from a top player so you don’t have to deal with it. Simple is always better and wish they would return to that.

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I never liked that slop of an old system and never will. Trees are far superior. Your rose tinted glasses are showing.

Reading each talent and picking them one by one as they level like they should be. Or choosing one of the already made starter builds.

As if that wasn’t also the case with that cookie cutter row crap, lmao.

And your argument of “if it’s going to be cookie cutter no matter what, then just keep it simple” is bad and you should feel bad. More player agency should always exist in talents that directly affect how you play and enjoy the game.

Good thing Blizz will ignore these threads from nostalgic MoP classic players thinking that old system was better.

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But see, you’ve subscribed to that meme that .1% DPS matters, so there’s “only one” perfect build.

And it doesn’t. And there isn’t.

95%, arguably all, of the game content is “show up” content. Show up, do A rotation (not necessarily THE rotation), and kill the bosses. You don’t need the perfect rotation, you don’t need the Meta classes, you don’t need BiS.

You need to show up with others and execute the mechanics. The mechanics matter more than your overall stats.

You can have the best gear, the best rotation, etc. But if you stand in the fire, you’re dead, and you do 0 DPS.

Watch any of the “hard content”, things like old Green Fire, things like Underpin, things like the Mage Tower.

People that beat those bosses and encounters are not BiS. Nor are the RWF folks. They’re not the “best of the best…with honors”. Rather, they show up, and master the mechanics of the fight. Their iLevels are all over the map.

And, mind, that’s the tippy top most hardest content in the game. Everything else? Do you think the one button rotation cares what talents you have?

Spec how you like, play what you like.

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Just get rid of the talent system then. I agree with OP its the illusion of choice. There is no choice. You either run set A or you dont do top damage. Plain and simple.

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Why should I care what the “top 100 players” are doing?

I play the way I want.

And yes, we all understand that the trees are often the illusion of choice, but the illusion feels good and it’s more fun.

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The MoP tree was horrible. It destroyed leveling. You get a point every level now and at least you can do stuff that makes zero sense now even though everything is simmed to .01% increase.

MoP had great gameplay but those talents sucked and there’s no way around it.

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You have plenty of choices. Just ask neko lol

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Guy, if you’re trying to be relevant in competitive content, there will be a best build. This is true in literally every form of competition in the world. This doesn’t mean the people doing the game or sport casually for fun shouldn’t have these options available to them.

Oh nevermind, I see you have no grasp of perspectives other than your own.

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Why stop here? Those same players will also pick the best tank/healer/dps at the time to do the best. So just remove all of the classes that are not the best yeah? Why try to balance all of them? They’re just illusions of choice.

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MoP talent mechanics were boring.

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It wasn’t. It was terrible for leveling. It was terrible for choice. It was not engaging, it was not remotely fun.

You had no choice, except whether you were giving up an interrupt or damage reduction or something for a speed boost. Your “choice” was “which way do I want to be screwed with no other options?”

Do you people even comprehend that we were level squished because that crap system couldn’t keep up with us? That as you leveled you got NOTHING for so many levels?

Do you people not understand that this system has so many options and ways to grow with us now and keeps leveling engaging?

And don’t tell me there’s no choice now, because that’s absolute CRAP. Two million downloads to expand how many loadouts we can save says otherwise.

Stop trying to make this game worse.

Im so sick of you people not looking at the big picture and screwing over this game. We fought for this new system and if gets removed because of narrow minded bs like this, I’m going to laugh as we watch a mass exodus of people like SWTOR saw when they switched to a similar crap system.

Another one of these threads to mute.

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Merely going off the opinion here buddy. Sorry that its different than yours and you have to live and play in the same world as me.

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Thankfully I don’t because Blizz would never do something as stupid as to remove talents. They likely will never remove the trees again seeing as they have spent a lot of dev time into creating them and their additions in the form of hero talents.

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The problem with the current system is a lack of curated choice. In the row system bliz at least knew what each talent was competing against, and could theoretically tune them against eachother. Now that’s impossible, if there’s high value talents you just end up grabbing all of them instead of making choices, then the low value stuff that’s left over barely matters.

I do agree trees are more immersive. But it is trading one set of problems for another when I’d prefer a synthesis of the two to try to fix it all in one go.

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I think the more overarching issue is by the time new players get to the point where they can engage with the endgame content they have already either learned from research, friends, or guild mates, how everything works. Much like the rest of us they can either google the best possible build and then just copy it over or use an add-on that actually builds the talent tree out for you without having to look elsewhere. There aren’t that many new people coming to this game. 7 1/2 million players means there might be a couple hundred new people and if the new people have problems there’s actually a new members chat that occurs for the first 10 levels of the game, where they can ask questions as their leveling, including what to do with a skill tree.

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We shall see. My opinion still remains. Hopefully your comment doesnt age like milk.

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I have to grudgingly agree that having talent trees in retail are useless and may as well be baked into the class.
They were valuable and impactful during the long leveling journey, when it was a critical reward that you got to carefully choose your next talent point when you reached the appropriate level. But we’ve killed levelling in retail, it may as well not exist, either.
We use WeakAuras and add-ons to click a button to switch between “single target” and “aoe”, and casual gamers don’t have the time (or understanding of the backend math) to study the talent choices well enough to understand why they are choosing this talent over another. It’s far too easy to look up a cookiecutter build…hell, Blizz even made it a one-click QoL feature by introducing the import functionality for talent builds.
I don’t agree with it, or like it. I prefer a longer, harder leveling journey (but not Classic long) where your choices…and talents…make a difference. I believe when you have to spend time and effort in leveling it gives you time to sit in your choices and determine what feels fun versus what you have to do to not get called out in a dungeon.
But the state of the game today is endgame. You want leveling and RPG elements? Go play Classic. Retail players hate the levelling…they hate anything that isn’t one-button-easy. So just kill it, bake talents into the class and let people start at max level.

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The introduction of that talent system was one of the main reasons I disliked that expansion as a whole. It sucked then and it sucks again on Classic. No thanks.

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I love that people think they have choices when we have log sites that track this info and they show everyone is running basically the same thing with exceptions for a couple flavor talents…

In other words we havd MoP talents hidden behind a curtain.

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Yes I do. I literally remove a point from things like Camo into Movement speed.

WoWHead wants my M+ loadout to have Camo in it, for skips. No. I dont like skipping, never liked Camo, so that point goes into movement speed.

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