They struggle cuz they are trying to follow the philosophy of keeping the specs seperate classes, instead of classes having specs like in classic.
Back then you had X classes - quite easy to balance the talents, if one overperforms then nerf it a bit, if it underperform then boost it a bit, look Legion Artifact traits.
Now you have Y x3 classes - since each spec is seperate class let’s be honest. Balancing is a nighmare as you have to keep up all of them in mind, well we see how it’s going.
I’d love it if they went back to the previous style of talents - what’s the difference between cookiecutter builds back then and now? Back then I could mix and match in-between specs, while now I just cannot.
Cookiecutter builds are not an argument, they will always exist. What matter is us players having a choice, or not. And I vote to have a choice how to build my character.
New talent trees were a great choice when they were implemented. Old talents looked like you had a choice in choosing your own path, but in reality, most of them were just flat stat boosts or talents you had to choose in a specific tree no matter what (like a hit % on bear or leader of the pack, etc.). Most of the time there was 1 meta build for PvE and one for PvP for each tree and even then, they weren’t that different.
New talents added much needed impactful choice to playstyles.
The main problems now with those “new” talents are:
They feel too spaced. 1 talent every 15 levels feels like a grind to get a meaningful reward for leveling.
Solution(easy): add more power levels to each talent. They would unlock every 5 levels after taking said talent.
Solution(hard): In addition to the main effect, add 3 pathways to each talent and you would be able to choose 2 of them (1 after 5 next levels and another after next 5), leaving you with 2 out of 3.
Example: [Feral Talent]~Ancient Predator~ Activate to reset the cooldown on Dash, Tiger’s Fury and see enemy’s contours, even if they are behind walls or hidden.
Unlock 1: ~Smell their fear~ Passively gain 10% increased movement speed against targets facing away from you
Unlock 2: ~Smell their blood~ Upon activation of the ~Ancient Predator~ jump to the nearest target with an active bleed effect
Unlock 3: ~Smell their agony~ Gain additional attack speed and critical strike rating the lower your target health is.
…
Their blessing and a course is the fact that many are situational, so there are clear choices between AoE or a single target. Between mobility and survivability. This is nice for casual play, but the more hardcore you play, the more often you feel forced to change talents between bosses and it will become tedious after a while.
Solution(easy): Add two to four “talent save slots” (something a’la equipment manager). You would still consume a book, but you could save your most used builds for quick switching.
Solution(hard): Balance the game better (no offense).
In general. I like new talents and I think it was a step in the right direction, but so much time has passed since their introduction, we can probably think about a new and better system. It is difficult to find a solution from the perspective of a player because we don’t know the values Blizzard holds to things like balance vs fun or player choice vs guided experience.
Yes. Because what i liked about old trees was that i could make some crazy things with it these new talent “trees” that were given to us after already butchered talent trees after cataclysm are just boring as watching paint dry.
The only advantage of the old trees was that it gave you something to do and a feeling of progress every time you levelled. Something WoW is seriously missing.
Otherwise the old trees gave you less choice than the new ones in my opinion, and should be left dead. And I speak as a Druid who generally loves all trees.
I would go as far as say F the balance they are never going to get to the point where all the classes are balanced without sacrificing all that makes classes fun and unique.
After old trees were taken away game became stale when leveling and boring and stale at “endgame”.
Sure there has always been cookie cutter builds but now we have zero to none customization and absolutely zero ways to build old crazy fun builds like we used to be able to do with vanilla-wotlk trees.
Cataclysm trees i wont count on that because it forced us to use almost all points to one tree before you could use points in other specs.
No, they were entirely pointless. You’d have some wacky build like SL/SL pop up once every 2 expansions, but other than that there was close to no choice involved.
Of course people are going to pretend that they totally skipped the core talents of a build and were able to do as much damage as everyone else. Or that somehow it didn’t matter that they did optimal damage even though crap like Sunwell required so much min maxing that you even had to be a leatherworker, on top of a cookie cutter,on top of a specific class in order to beat some DPS checks in there.
I think they did it because the trees were becoming too much work - but too much work for them, not for players.
Of course, as with any big directional change, I’m sure many factors influenced it, but at the core, I honestly feel that was it.
Pro Tip: any time they use the phrase “concentrated coolness”, they mean they don’t want you to ask the nitty-gritty development reasons behind a thing. I don’t even blame them for that - with the responses they get, it’s the way it needs to be.
That was the planned start of at least a two-step move. As Ghostcrawler explained: “We changed talent trees in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the underlying problems the talent design had since its inception. We actually considered going to the Mists model for Cataclysm , but we were worried that the change would be too shocking to players, so we went with a more restrained design first.”
I wonder whether at that time they had already planned to take away our ability to play a full class, and confine us to narrow specs.
It would be nice to have more variety with the talent builds so that there was more than one optimal choice across the board. The original trees did go some way to doing that as play style and other stats were linked to what you chose as being the best fit for you. As always, some talents were the best to go for.
It wouldn’t work now with gearing. For instance the hunter tree was from a time when we used intellect so to use those talents we’d need int back on the gear and available to be used but still with agility as a working stat.
I seriously doubt they were harder to maintain. When I say there’s a lot of passive I wasn’t joking in the slightest. I’m sure increasing crit/haste/cooldowns is rather simple once the basic code is already in. If people noticed, while levelling now we have this stuff again with the increased spell ranks augmenting spells but Blizzard dont notify us now while we levelling
Lawyers dont lie they twist the truth. If they did lie the’d be up in court too.