I prefer it over the older one in terms of variety in talents, however while leveling it does lack the rewarding feeling the old one had.
I’m mainly using the term tree as it’s used in basically all MMORPG’s to reference a talent system, but yeah the current one isn’t very similar to an actual tree at all.
The current system hasn’t worked for years for most of the specs, and I speak as a tank, DPS and healer, and there’s more to it than just “fix x talent”. Like when it comes to leveling, getting a talent every 15 levels and then the 45 tier most commonly being a utility tier, and not adding anything to the leveling experience at all just feels bad. We’re talking about the overall system and how the game and player interacts with it, not just about balance.
I agree that they need to be faster at fixing talents, but changes don’t have to be all bad and can sometimes be buffs, especially if a class is underperforming (like ret paladins and MM hunters right now)
Being simple isn’t always bad, like if I respecced with the old talent system I generally still picked 90% the same talents and then that 10% was the “flexibility”
Wait so it’s not a cookie cutter build if you can optimize it for every boss?
Wait so is there a build for every boss or not?
I agree, during leveling just looking at that tree makes me bored since some talent tiers are even useless. Yay I got nothing, 15 more levels for the one I care about.
Completely agree, having a talent tier where all of them are negligible is horrible design.
Kinda disagree, some classes are way worse than others. As a mage almost everything in my talent tree is perfectly usable in PvE, like M+.
I can’t exactly remember any inherently broken talent interactions. The only one I can think of was the old PoM Pyro but that was just because Pyro was strong because it was an EIGHT SECOND CAST and shouldn’t have even been affected by PoM.
Personally I’m happy with the current system, I just wish we could change them whenever we cared to outside of combat like we had in WoD, it was superb.
There just should be more cut and dry talents, A is good at AoE and B at single target, none of this A-B-C are all within 5% of each other bullcrap.
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No, not happy.
I understand why they changed the “tree” into whatever this is now, preventing cookie-cutters and adding game-play to it (get a usable skill/passive instead of a simple 1% increase on X). But these new trees simply don’t work in WoW like they do on Diablo 3, which is where these are based from.
Personally I find it annoying having to change talent X or Y for this or that boss fight, only to change it back for the next boss. I either have to go to town and get summoned back, or use an expensive book in my current location. So unlike Diablo, I find that you can’t just use it anywhere out of combat and be done with it. I prefer to have something solid that I don’t have to swap or change every day.
Also, cookie-cutter builds still exist, so the “variety” isn’t there either, which makes their existence mostly pointless as they failed it’s main objective.
It’s also extremely unrewarding to level up as you only get sporadic talent choices, and absolutely nothing from 100 onward.
It needs to be worked on, a lot.
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I don’t like the talent grids because they are flicking switches back and forth at will rather than building a character. Very e-sports-y, very MOBA, very anti-RPG.
Another gripe is, as Malaficus pointed out, that the grids served as a fig-leaf for Blizzard’s decisions in The Prune: "See, you’ve still got [that thing that used to be core to your gameplay]! (You just have to do without that other thing you used to have instead.)
And of course it’s another kick in the gut for any feeling of progression when levelling.
As for the “cookie-cutter” narrative. Um, I just went to WowPopular, but it seems to be gone. They used to show the most common talent choices used by players. In many specs, the vast majority were using one build, with perhaps one talent different, so AFAICS, nothing has changed. Still as cookie-cutter as ever, just with less choice for those who want to customise. While it is possible to vary your talents somewhat, and no doubt some people do, at least occasionally, it’s not commonly done.
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I agree, simple isn’t always bad, but what I think this system is too simple, which makes it always get cornered into one viable/cookie cutter, or even functional talent setup most tiers.
The cookie cutter builds fit basically every boss in a tier, and then you only change one talent (Like DH’s only change between Trail of Ruin and Fel Barrage)
The opportunity I see that blizzard might have for the next expansion is giving us a full talent tree that has options that probably won’t force itself into a corner like with my first point. Having a simple system, then having some talents that are aimed at PvP’ers and some at PvE’ers just destroys any variety for players who want to do only one of those. What I’d like to see is a talent tree completely for PvE, and a talent tree completely for PvP. You put on warmode, and you only see the PvP tree. Maybe the PvP one is more interesting for some players while doing open world content or leveling, so they’ll try it and probably end up liking it and thus, probably start doing PvP and vice versa with PvE. Though, the issue with this is: A player levels up with the PvP talent tree, gets to max, gears up, friends ask him to help in a dungeon, he swaps to PvE talent tree, and boom! He has no clue how to play with half the talents because they are completely different.
I personally can’t remember any talent builds that “broke” something, but I remember them saying at some point (I think during blizzcon) that they had to spend so much time testing and creating raids ‘around’ the talent trees, to make sure there wasn’t a build that broke things. I’ve also seen it happen in other games where they had a similar talent system than vanilla WoW did.
I completely agree that there need to be more cut and dry talents. At the moment, it’s either very vague in what situations some talents are good at and they keep trying to design them to be within 5% or so of each other so people don’t feel so pressured to pick the optimal builds and thus can pick whatever they want, because it’s such a small DPS increase, but at the end of the day, Blizz suck at numbers, so they are never going to achieve that small % difference.
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Bad talents are not necessarily a balance issue.
The problem with WoW is that it is now 120 levels. It’s not feasible to have 120 individual talent points unless you want 0.05% crit talents.
The first stage of the artifact weapons essentially recreated the old talent system except you could have them all. People complained that had to go through minor buffs to get to the gold traits.
Just the same as complaints with the old system back in the day.
The phrase you think you do but you dont is a meme now but it’s very much true, like it or not.
While we have the spec talent systems we also have the Azerite System too for customisation. People forget about that. Blizzard said the choice will be more impactful in later tiers.
I dont recall Blizzard ever saying this.
Personally I feel as if the talent tree variety is all just fake freedom of choice, sure there will always be the superior talent however. If my memory didn’t fail me in mists of pandaria warrior as an example was very flexible compared to today’s warrior with talent set-up.
The cookie cutter viability isn’t the same due to how many talent swaps have been so poorly executed and the lack of glyphs hurts too IMO, the removal of alot of core abilities makes the talent set up even less forced too tbh.
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You can go on Wowhead for something similar to Wowpopular, select a class and go into “Raid & Uldir Tips” for that spec and when you scroll down you can see what % of each talent is being chosen for each boss, but I have no clue how they gather the data. As in, are they just using the top 100? HC? Mythic?
They also show azerite traits and trinkets
As long as a row covers only one aspect, there will always be a winner and 2 non-choices in that row, and they are just like that.
row 1 - single target dps
row 2 - mobilty
row 3 - aoe
and so on (not necessarily like that, but you know the deal).
To break that, each row would have to cover 3 different situations, then it would offer much more free choice like
row 1 - single target, aoe, defense
row 2 - self heal, mobility, aoe
row 3 - single target, utility, defense
in most cases we still would NOT take anything outside of dps, but if we have to decide between single and aoe instead of different variants of single vs single and aoe vs aoe I think it creates more diversity.
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I completely agree, and this is where an extra row would do the game a lot of good. Currently, blizzard are mixing in mobility in the same row as defensives. I understand their thought process, if you give your players more mobility, sometimes you have to make them weaker to compensate, but that doesn’t really work in a game like WoW. If they are going to keep the current system, the way you described it is how I would like it to be, but with at least one extra row and they separate mobility and the defensives.
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As a MW monk im quite happy with my talents, at least with the mandatory ones, but I dont see much choice there too.
I would go much further into breaking talents all at once and let us pick 10 abilities, that then form the core. Zero baseline abilites and just learned by picking.
row 1 enveloping mist, soothing mist, gusts of mists
row 2 essence font, vivify, chi burst
and so on
with each ability branching into 2 or 3 modifications.
that is pruning for one but diversity at the same time
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I’ve always felt the talent trees are a bad joke compared to what they used to be. One talent point every 15 levels? No thanks. I preferred the customisation and the endless builds we had with the old system, not the bland mess we have now.
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Remove azerite then id be happy, oh and bring back armour sets, pvp vendors, less gcd and remove titan rolls the im gud
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No there is nothing interesting in current talent “trees”
Sure the 71 point wotlk tree had cookie cutter route but what it had was awesome customization ability where you could do some crazy things with your character.
But the current one is just cookie cutter unimaginative boring hollow lazy poor excuse of an secondary sketch on a used toilet paper.
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You lot must be looking at a different talent system to me. You are talking about those supposed extra skills we get at various levels of the game right… Honestly if it wasn’t for the ‘annoying’ pop up that keeps coming up every time I port anywhere I wouldn’t bother with half of them. Its laughable really… I read them when they become active and I just don’t get why they are even talents. I truly never use like 80% of them. They tend to apply to spells I never use anyway. Why can’t I have some real benefits to the actual things I really do… I wait so long for the upgrade and then find its an AOE kinda thing which I avoid like the plague, so what is the use. And that annoying PvP stuff that insists on reminding me of talents or skills that I will never like ever use. Ever.
It really would be nice for a change to be able to actually use a skill or talent that I received via levelling instead of the crud we get right now. The talents are just way too general and are not suited to my gameplay. So I don’t use 'em and don’t need 'em.
Conflicted.
On one hand I like that I am able to swap talents about in the arena prep room, it, in theory, can help out vs hardcountering and whatnot (though in practice that’s a bit iffy). However…
Old talent system felt more part of an RPG progress system making leveling more rewarding. I also liked making my own builds, I remember in Wrath I had like 4 different builds for my enhancement shaman, 1 for dueling, 2 for arenas and 1 for pve.
While the old system was more restricting in the sense that I can’t tailor talents like I can now before arena/bg starts, the way classes seem to miss a huge chunk of necessary utility in baseline abilities and need talents to fill those vital gaps just makes it feel more restricting than the old system ever felt.
It’s ok but I also liked the old one because it gave you constant little tweaks on level up. Now it can be like 15 levels before you get anything. Neither has much room for maneuvaribility if you want the optimal build for a certain task, so in that regard there is not much difference.
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Im not a fan of it.
in most cases its very one sided and favors 1 talent over the rest, I feel like that’s the gameplay and balance issue.
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I’ll just ask a simple question.
Would the game be so different if they made the azerite traits talents and gave us a few more tiers?
Why didn’t they just do that rather than come up with a convoluted system that depends on so much rng.
They want to give us talent like stuff in everything but an actual talent tree which is a shame. Some of the best talents are locked behind the pvp talent tree🤦♂️
/gamedesign ?
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