I am checking out retail, and I do not understand it how people praise this system. I am forced to take a certain amount of talents before I move onto the next one. Like always, freedom of choice is just an illusion. I wanted to make an arms built focused on multi targets, yet I am barred by this “freedom of choice” system. Do I really need 5% leech? Or increased speed on heroic leap, or 5% movement speed? No, but I’m forced to pick either of them because the talents down the line are barred.
Here’s why I appreciated the talent trees in wotlk. I had a specific hybrid fury/prot build with bloodthirst increased glyph which allowed me to solo old dungeons and raids. That’s freedom. Not this dull system.
There is some choice and room for customization. For example, on my shaman I’d shift around individual points depending on what I needed for a dungeon or a weekly affix (abilities like Hex or Poison Cleansing Totem). I was also able to make a build that didn’t relay on Primordial Wave, and I could swap in and out mana related talents if that suited my playstyle.
It’s true that there are usually “best choices”, but that happens no matter how simplistic or how complex (think Path of Exile) a skill tree is. Of the skill tree versions we’ve had over the years, I think I overall prefer what we currently have (and what we’ll have in TWW).
Some classes talent trees have a lot of choice or what I like to call flexi points.
Sadly, warrior trees have almost no flexi points and feel pretty bad (not mentioning the bad capstones). Shaman trees have a lot more freedom in comparison.
I think that part of it is that the devs want to keep people from being able to make completely borked builds. The way it is now, is that whatever you choose, your character will be playable in most content (it won’t be the best, but serviceable).
It also depends on specific class/specs; not everyone is treated equally.
They are not good. Most hero talents are bad as well, they didn’t do a good job. On top of that they want to simplify all specs (nevermind those people who actually ENJOY playing difficulty specs)
Yes, it is illusion of choice. Pretty much. But for a lot of players perception is reality. Illusion of choice = choice.
Also different specs need different amount of talent points to fill the tree but they all get the same number of points from 1 to 70. The connections are arbitrary often.
Also, we barely got anything new with that. We got a cool-looking interface with almost all previous expansion borrowed power spells and spells that used to be baseline thrown together with classic style %-increases.
Also tier sets now are more and more directing you towards certain talents, so that the way people decide to play can be even more easily predicted. But some specs have barely any baseline spells left so nothing surprising here. Hero talents will further emphasize this “curated playstyle” aspect from what I have seen. They are like soulbinds or netherlight crucible.
One could say that just like computers (inc. smartphones etc) are now using us more than we the computers, the games play us more than we the games.
You made me cackle so uncontrollably I pulled a piece of gooseberry in my throat.
u triggered bro?
I think he means the starting segment where it seems like you have a huge choice of talents but in reality it is mostly previous baseline spells and you need to take like 80 or 90% of them anyway.
So the problem is that he wants to have every spell in the spell book and the rows just be + 1% crit ? Or does he want more spells being added and more being baseline?
That sounds like having less choice.
For example on my heal Druid atm I have to decide if I want to go into the right side for casts and mana effective gameplay or left side for being more tanky / mobile / meele heavy.
Sounds to me like more choice than what we had before. Specially as if I don’t go down the left side it doesn’t matter if I have rake learned or not
Myself, I would just prefer they were not so huge and the cohesion between tied talents was better and that each spec had an equal amount of nodes just like we get the same amount of points to spend.
I also find it quite worrisome that immediately after introducing the new talent trees they set out to rework them in DF, class by class.
Because some classes have a huge advantage in their talent trees then others, i mean and yes u have freedom of choice kind off in talent trees, ofc their are talents that are considerably better then others but still u have some freedom of choice. And the comparison from df to wrath talentrees is laughable tbh. In wrath bosses also didnt had any mechanics.
The current talent trees will face exactly the same problem as vanilla talent trees: becoming bloated and meaningless over time, when people getting more levels and points.
There is no need for unnecessarily complicated trees with meaningless points in-between and pathing problem.
The more complicated it is, the less likely players will actually read it, and more likely they will just copy/paste from 3rd party website.
Bring back the 7 rows of 3 options Legion/BFA/SL talent trees, no pathing requirement, easy and fast to set up, and ready to go in less than 1 minutes.
Complicated =/= hard =/=good, Simple =/= easy =/= bad.
Under current WoW status, complication is the least thing needed.
This is what bothers me most.
They said (in early DF) that they picked those familiar powers for talents to ‘ease us into the system’. Well… We’re going into TWW now - almost two years later- but we’re still playing with that basic setup, save for a few changes.
Hero talents really aren’t the change I wanted. I’d like to get actual freedom.
Just make a big screen full of talents; unconnected without mandatory requirements except for maybe a handful of ‘capstone talents’. And just let players go at it with the points they earned.
But of course that’d be WAY harder to balance than what they’re doing now.
They’re basically doing it for themselves; saving themselves workload.
And yes I agree in that a lot of design decisions are stifled and held back because so many players only care about the numbers they pull in a dungeon timerun. I would say they are not even considered at all.
