New talents don't feel that good

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641

Because this a huge american company who’s goal is to make money and the games are just tools to get to that goal.
The group of nerds with a vision that created these great stories and games have left.
The games are now only about retaining customers.

A huge amount of players have been begging for necromancers since vanilla.
We got death knights, cool, people love them too.
But people also want necromancers, the caster type of necromancer.
They could easily solve this, warlocks could get skins for demo or unholy could get modifiers to make their abilities ranged, they have clawing shadows to make scourge strike ranged but the other abilities aren’t and they still swing their weapon when using clawing shadows.

Such a simple thing that they still haven’t bothered to get done.
And this is just one example, the list things they could do to satisfy players desires in terms of fantasy, customization and non-combat related content is long.

When they have started to tick off things on this list I can start to dream a little.
But considering how many job listings they have up right now I doubt they have the people needed to shorten the list any time soon.

Exactly what they said their goal was. They are rethinking the way we build our characters.

In the beginning there was class trainers and then the talent tree.
Solid system, you learned most of your abilities and tool from the trainers by buying them with gold at certain levels, then you went into the talent tree to pick powers that would help you in performing your role and sometimes give you a unique ability as you progressed further down that one path.

(In the between these we also got Glyphs but they changed every expansion, some were fun and cool that changed an ability but others were just simple damage buff to an ability.

A few expansions later we no longer had to go to trainers and trade our gold for new abilities instead we just automatically learned them when levelling up and the new talent system allow you to pick 1 talent out of 3 every 15 levels(ish).

Very convenient and simplified, less time was spent thinking about what to improve next and no more going back to town to learn new abilities.
But you lost the feeling of progression when levelling and the feeling like you built up your character.

Now this is of course subjective. Some might not even care about that.
But for me it was clearly noticeable already in Cataclysm when we only got a talent point every other level. The level up notification pops and you get excited only to realize you didnt get a new point or ability and nothing has changed from the previous level.

And I believe it is something that will help get new players invested in the game, where they feel that leveling up means something Since the guide system was added I have started to see how many new people there actually are in the game, but I rarely meet them at max level though. Why that is I can only speculate.

I believe this will make the levelling experience better.

And since this will also replace the “class trainers”(which are now learn on level up abilities) I think it’s fine to have everything in the trees.
Instead of you level up and learn something new you get a point and pick what you want to learn instead.

Now that is just a little about levelling and overall feel about building your character that I feel this system improves.

For max level characters it’s simply about more choice and the possibilities to expand on it by adding to it horizontally rather than vertically.
In the new system you have more customization even though there are paths and pick-1-of-2 talents.
I would personally not include pick 1 of 2 choices in a tree or atleast limit them to talents that have the same function like they did with Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption.
And Icecap + Obliteration since them together would grow out of control.
Anger management and reckless abandon is 100% gonna end up in the same situation.
Would also have been a good idea to turn scourge strike and clawing shadows into a Pick1-talent (Like for real, make scourge strike and festering strike into pick 1 talents and give them ranged options).
But Avalanche and Frozen Pulse does not need to be a pick one talent, neither does Inexorable assault and cold heart.
Apart from these pick-1 nodes I can look at two talents anywhere in the tree and decide to get them.

In the current trees all our talents are pick 1 of 3.
And some of these current choices makes you pick between mobility, cc or defense etc.
And you could say that it is easily fixed, yet we are still here 4 years later.
So still in some cases I can’t get all three that are currently in the same row I can still get 2 out of 3 which is a very welcome improvement.

As I mentioned above, the talent trees are not just replacing the current talent system but also how we learn our baseline.
And as I have mentioned before, I want more options at the start, it should be wider imo.

Good thing you have a lot of points to spend then so you can afford it.
But I agree that just plain increase damage % is boring, especially if it requires several points and doesnt add any additional effects per point.
When I get the fury tree preview I’m absolutely gonna look for things like these and suggest changes.
But they are gonna have to take a look at placing and pathing. Some has bad pathing, and then we have the resto tree that are able to get 6/7 of their bottom row talents at the same time and have very flexible paths.

What it needs is to merge some of the multi-point talents.
Blood has 4 talents that improve heartstrike for a total of 8 points and they can easily be merged into two talents with 2 points each.
Some of the trees look bad, others look pretty great. But it’s still an early look.
This is why I want them to release more mock-ups so we see if the bad ones are outliers or if it’s a recurring problem.

choosing 1 out of 4 makes it even worse.
And sure you could add more rows, adding smaller passive rows would be odd though since some of the rows already are minor passive talents.
Doesn’t change the fact that taking away 2 out 3 feels bad, would have preferred to be able to pick an extra in certain rows over extra rows.
Felt great in torghast when you got the power that gave you an extra talent.

Do you know what their teams look like atm? I don’t.
They still have job listings up for the WoW team.
It is not their priority to add new spells for other classes because they want evoker to be as flashy as possible. I don’t know what other work they need to get done aswell.
The quality of spell effects and animations has improved a lot since wotlk and mop though.
You are absolutely right about legion though, thats when they upped their game when it came to spells and effects. I guess they meant to update all the animations aswell but didnt make it in time since those released a year after launch of legion.
But one of legions selling points were also class fantasy.
What ability are you in need of though?

The sun king is a good example where off healing is good. Plenty of non-healer paladins and druids that did a lot of healing on that fight. We pretty much only say paladins and druids off-heal though.

And it works great for other fights as well that has boss downtime but the raid continues to take damage or have just taken heavy amounts of damage.

Because the build can now be tailored more for the fight.
For some specs in shadowlands their ST and AoE build has been the same.
It wasn’t until I got the covenant legendary that I got to try a pure ST build which simply didn’t work in practice due to how my covenant ability and the legendary worked.
So I ended up the same build for ST and AoE for most of shadowlands.

Yeah and that is good. All I need is the talent tree which already allow me to save profiles and gear also have the option to save loadouts by default.
So I don’t need to get a bunch of addons for it. I can just make a macro to link the talents with the equipment and its done, and probably wont randomly stop working like the addons did so I only got half the build activated.

I disagree.
1 increase rage gain by 2/4 on crit
2 20% chance to refund 20 rage
3 while enraged increased chance to reset cooldown and increase damage by 20%.
I’d rather pick a second one of these than bladestorm.

Which doesn’t do anything if I’m not in a scenario where multiple targets are present.

And I once again, disagree.
I do not think everyone should be a jack of all trades at all times.
Should everyone have easy access to some basic AoE, sure.
But why would everybody have a burst AoE cooldown by default?
What’s the point if everybody can do everything all the time?
Why even have swappable talents at that point?

If those talent abilities are gonna have visuals then yeah, the art team is gonna need to create those visuals.

642

This is, as I have said before, all true. But, if the best part of the old talent trees was bringing back the feeling of progression, then you can achieve that without affecting the actual customization of your classes, by having a class talent tree that you will eventually fully unlock when you reach max level, the order in which you do it is simply up to you.

But in order to get to these nodes, the way the paths are designed, you have to sacrifice a lot of other stuff to get to those said end results- Which, simply isn’t the case with the current talents.

Which is fine, if all of those 3 options are really good. The monk mobility bit is quite a good example: 1 extra roll charge and quicker roll recharge, chi torpedo (longer, better version of roll), and tiger’s lust (removes roots + slows and increases speed of you/somebody else).

But then you have some complete degenerate rows like arms warrior row with bounding strike, defensive stance and second wind on the same row, or indeed storm bolt, double charge and impending victory on the same row.

This problem won’t be fixed with this new system either, unless the options are all balanced the way your runic corruption and runic empowerment are. So again, it’s not a system issue, it’s Blizzard issue.

Aye- And we’ll be here 4 years later from now on too, assuming Blizzard doesn’t fix these talent trees. As said, the problem isn’t with the rows. It’s how Blizzard messed up their balancing Legion forwards. Some have it better, others less so.

Well then maybe they shouldn’t be the same system then.

Agreed.

I don’t think it’s a good starting point to a system if I am expected to “waste” any points. I mean, sure, they dug this grave for themselves. I am fully in agreement with you that making all those choices interesting across 38 specs and 13 classes is going to be tough, but again, that’s their problem, not mine.

Only if those rows are designed as poorly as some of the rows are now. If Monk mobility row got another good option, it’d still be a good row. Now you just have more choice, when actually you haven’t added too much “button bloat”.

It’s not my problem. But to say that Blizzard can’t do x thing because they’re working on a class just doesn’t add up, when they were able to do that with a far smaller team back in the day.

I completely agree with you, they have a lot of problems. But even before this scandal, the WoW team was, what, alone over 200+ devs in game development, if I remember right? That’s four times the amount of people than they had in Wotlk.

Now I don’t know how many people have left, but even if 150 have left, they’d still have more people to run the job.

I’m unsure how many people from the game design team work with animations and art- But there is surely some overlap. Still, seeing as they are completely different functions, I don’t think that’d affect it so much.

Well, personally, as a priest player, I’d like Cascade and Spectral guise back. Pet talent trees back for hunters, stances back for warriors (in a meaningful way that i’ve explained in my own expansion idea above), etc.

Well that wasn’t the point. DK arguably was the flashiest class ever in this game in 3.0, and the 3.1 nerf patch notes more or less prove it- And still, they added a whole bunch of new, cool stuff to classes. if they could do that then, they can do it now with the other classes too.

Obviously, but these situations are always the exception, rather than the norm. The thing is as said, most of the classes are capable of doing this even now. And, still, outside of very few cases, they almost never do it.

Well, actually no, because this leads to everyone just picking the same, most effective talent row for the fight → The choice is the exact same. Exactly as it is now too.

That wasn’t the point. You said you disliked these systems for the amount of setup and work you needed to do with them, but now when it’s the exact same thing (but just in one system), that’s apparently fine.

I’m not telling you whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just pointing out the dissonance there.

…Which is the point? That’s why it’s called an AOE damage row, not a ST row.

But they are. Even with this system. The only difference is that you just swap your jack of all trades kit to one specific form, and in the next, you’re different. Nothing (0/0) changes, other than you just swap things around.

I don’t even have one currently, so. Some classes naturally have more burstier AOE, others have more gradual AOE, and others something in the middle. The talents just in the current system let you tailor it a bit.

But should every class have some AOE baseline? Yeah, absolutely. The talents should then enhance those or customize those AOE options.

The point is that everybody can do everything all the time (though not the same thing, just similarly), and the choice for the player comes from knowing when and how to use said abilities, not from whether they have those abilities for this encounter or the other.

I think that is infinitely better system than choosing talents for choosing’s sake.

Ideally, talents just customize your playstyle in your class, just like the monk example I gave you.

If you want super bursty movement speed, you take chi roll.
If you want to have generally a bit more mobility, you take the 3rd roll talent.
If you want to have some mobility with a side of utility, you take tiger’s lust.

All of those talents enhance and make your mobility gameplay better, objectively. They are all viable and good. You, the player, simply choose which one fits your playstyle the most.

That is a meaningful and a good choice.

Blizzard wanted to do that since 2004 though.

True. But it shouldn’t be that way.

The thing is, you are absolutely right. They have known these requests for years. Long before this scandal thing, too. But, instead of doing what the game needed and players asked, they have done what they themselves wanted and what they thought was good.

We have seen where that has lead the game.

I don’t think the problem of the company is half as much the fact that some corpos are telling them not to make a good game, but the fact that the developers are so desperate to leave their own mark on the game and redesign the wheel with worse results.

643

Okay I created video talking about it in-depth.

644

I should have specified that I meant new abilities, since the complaint was that we are not getting new ones but getting back old ones we lost.
And there is a possibility that these come back in some form and otherwise I recommend that you suggest they come back if they arent in the new trees since they arent a lot of work to add.

I was saying that I liked to make my builds, it was just a hassle to deal with several different systems and required addons to organize plus extra sets of azerite since they could only be changed by going to an npc to “reforge” them. Having everything in one system that is easily managed is what I want.

The thing is we simply disagree on what we think is a good design for customizing your character.

I understand that you prefer it that way where everyone has a little of everything and the talents let you add some flavour to that.

I want something else than that though. I want to be able to make more specialized builds, play with concepts and see where it can get me.

Maybe I want to trade away all my movement increasing effects for immunity and defensives.
I might want to relive my experience of my frost dk which was slow but also unstoppable, instead of chasing after my opponent I brought them to me and locked them down while I was immune to nearly all forms of CC.

I want to be able to trade some utility for others when I feel like it.
Or one damage profile for another.

We agree on certain areas but when it comes to how the customization should work we are not gonna agree, because we want different things.

I hope they are able to shape them out in a way so we both can find enjoyment in them.

645

a simple solution is to grant items or events that grant more talent points…either temporarily or permanently

eg complete 10 random bgs and win ->1 point
complete 10 m+ → 1 talent point
etc

646

That’d be just borrowed power v.2

647

Yes, make the game even more broken. Good suggestion :+1: Another great example as to why every suggestion isn’t good for the game.

648

missed the

part?? or just troll?

649

You’re all annoying as %$#@ with your ‘‘meaningful choise’’ just like blizzard.We never had choice with talents since day 1,there was always the best path to choise and thats it.Dear god

650

I have actually put up about 3 talent examples and also some new abilities for each class in my expansion idea.

Well seeing as Blizzard for whatever reason doesn’t want to talk about specific classes and class design, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. That, and people have been asking to get back some of these talents back since WoD.

I do not think that is a very healthy design. Because balancing, what little remains of it, will be done not based on the averages but the extremes.

If you are able to just build a massively overpowered single target dps build through talents by forgoing everything else, then whatever nerfs will be coming your way will target those extremes. Problem is, this also affects the more hybrid builds as those talents are in part also part of them. This also works the other way, where even a small buff can completely break a spec.

Seeing as Blizzard can’t balance the game even now (and hasn’t been able to the past 3 yesrs or so), I do not really have faith that they can balance 60 x 38 talents when they can’t even balance 21 x 36.

Believe me, nothing would please me more than to see I am wrong. But I have not been wrong once the past 8 years, and I know that the wishes and hopes you put into this system will turn into disappointment when you see it.

The worst part is, its not even because it can’t be done. It is because it won’t be done.

Fundamentally, I think it is Blizzard’s job to decide what our classes should be about, and setting boundaries within which we can tinker. That is largely what has been happening with specs since MoP, and I think that for all the badly balanced options the current tree has, it has done that job extremely well.

To me, this new system looks like a scam and a lazy piece of work. And the reason for that is rather simple: all of the work they have put into the trees so far is just incredibly easy + lazy. There is barely anything new, and everything is recycled.

If Blizzard truly wanted to show us that they have something new for us, they’d done that. Not this.

651

This has to be trolling.

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652

Exactly. In a way, being able to create super-overpowered damage spec that goes all-in… is actually the worst thing that can happen to your class.
Because it’ll be much stronger than everything else (every other class), so Blizzard will tune it down… but then your regular damage spec will be garbage.

That’s why I say fun / utility shouldn’t compete vs dps and that x % damage increases are a problem.

653

female orc char…

654

Balance should naturally be targeted towards individual abilities that perform better or worse relative to other similar abilities.
And if one of those abilities are so broken that it pushes it past other classes in ST it would also be stronger than other classes on priority targets during AoE.
In those cases it should be nerfed even in the current system since they would be able to deal significantly more ST on top of AoE than other specs.

And just to make it clear, I’m not against being able to make builds that deal high prio target damage during AoE since I believe there is a place for such a build in certain encounters.

But if something is so strong that it brings them far beyond other specs it naturally needs to be dialled back to something more appropriate.
If that nerf negatively impacts an already weak build then it’s better to balance it by buffing other aspects so it doesn’t need to rely on this one over tuned talent in order to perform.

And obviously you wont be able to only pick single target talents, you are filling two thirds of the tree.
So it’s more of leaning more towards one or the other.
And for some encounters you will want an even blend of ST and AoE.

It is fine that you prefer your design, but for me it’s too similar to games like heroes of the storm where your character has these set abilities and then you modify them a little with often similar traits.
I want an mmorpg to have broader build design.

I have watched a few videos of a modded version where there are no classes and you get points to pick abilities and talents from all classes and can make very unique builds.
In that mod you can even make builds to create classes that are not available in retail like a necromancer or spellbreaker etc.
I’m not gonna mention the name of the modded version or play it because i dont want to support stealing IPs.
But I love the concept and if they made their own game with this design I would play it.

I think it is an important part of mmorpgs to be able to make very distinct builds and have them excel in different scenarios.

Blizzard can balance the game, they just wont.
They have said they only want to balance classes with bigger patches.
Because some people switch characters to the new meta and if they balance classes that could change that meta.
Which would upset those that have picked their character specifically because they are the new meta class.

And I think blizzard is making a huge mistake to not regularly balance classes to player can always choose the specs they prefer.
Of course there is always gonna be a meta but the gap can be narrower.

I don’t understand why people keep saying that they have been correct about all the previous expansions as if the other person didn’t see the issues with the previous expansions systems before they were out as well.
I saw the issues with these systems as well, a lot of people did.

The thing here is that we disagree on how the talent systems should work.
I always preferred the old talent trees over the talent rows, it’s just my preferred way to customize my characters power in RPGs.

I understand that some people are annoyed to not see something new or that previously baseline abilities are in the trees.
But I don’t think that makes the new trees bad.
If you had no previous experience with WoW would you still be negative about amount of different abilities available or that important abilities for your rotation are in the tree?
As a core system of the game I think the talent trees are good.
Are there more things I would like to see, sure, but if I don’t get them I will still enjoy the trees in their current form.

I agree partially.
But if the room for player customization is too narrow we also experience the problem of blizzard changing how a spec plays to the point where those that played that spec previously now hate it. Some people might find new love for that spec but to have previous players of that spec now having to play something else that they might not enjoy so much is bad.
A friend of mine stopped playing because the specs he liked changed so much that he simply dont enjoy the game anymore. None of the customization he can do will bring them back to their old playstyle.

Naturally dps vs utility should be solved, it should be dps vs dps and utility vs utility.

655

Well, seeing as we just got announced that DF will be releasing before the end of this year, there’s a grand total of 6 months for alpha + beta combined

Be honest with me my friend

Do you believe there will be any significant changes lol

656

It depends on what you mean by significant.
Do I think they will rearrange some talents, yeah I do.
Do I think they are gonna remove and make more abilities baseline, no.
But then again, I’m happy overall with the talent trees.
If they move around some stuff it will be great, and since they released the previews in order to get feedback and make changes like that I would be surprised if nothing happened.
And if they make bigger changes to the design so there is more options in the start of the tree and more returning abilities, that will be great.

And again, there are no borrowed power systems to implement and no new major abilities to test out so they can put all the work into the trees instead.
We only got 2 classes so far and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some of the feedback given addressed in the trees they are working on right now.

657

I was a little disappointed when i saw the DK talents. I thought it would be like vanilla, where maybe 1 talent in 1 tree was for stat boost, a couple for extra abilites and the rest just to improve them, through reduced cost, extra crit chance etc. But i can see why they are doing what they do. It’s to give people more choice of how they build their char

658

so, now that we have, what, 6 classes showcased, with multiple problems identified by players:

  • Badly designed talent rows that restrict choice (SP, BM, MM)
  • No choice / very obvious/clear paths to take (Rogue)
  • Massive disparity between talent trees and their their intent, e.g. Shadow priest has 9 utility spells in its spec talent tree. I haven’t checked the hunter and rogue ones, but the last time I did, all the DPS specs combined had 4 utility choices in their SPEC trees, which is what they promised: NO pitting of DPS vs Utility in them. Some specs like survival hunter also have several nodes with 2 - 3 spent points in them, despite being literally nothing else but “increases the damage of x ability by y”. Some of them are event adjacent to one another.
  • Some of the talent trees are ridiculously bloated with choice and nodes, e.g. druid and rogue can get 3 covenant abilities if they so wish, meanwhile hunter can just get 1? Why is there such a massive disparity between the classes? Why is that the case?

This isn’t going to be a walk in the park to balance. This will be worse to balance than all the borrowed power systems combined.

There also hasn’t been any acknowledgement from the devs save from mike Ybarra telling priests that it is odd that they don’t like Power infusion being castable on others.

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659

Well 5 classes. Priest was dropped alone. And it’s good that players are identifying issues this early. I hope they voice their concern so they have a lot of feedback when they start tuning the trees.

Yeah, some specs have larger issues that needs to be fixed.
Survival especially from my limited time to play with the trees.

Yeah this needs to be looked at aswell, I am not sure why the design of the trees for different classes and specs are so different.
It is possible that they are trying a lot of different design early on to see what sticks.
It is clear that the three latest classes have a lot of baseline compared to DK for example.
Some classes are in a unique situation though, like Priests, two healing specs and one dps.
While I think they should move the shadow utility to the class tree, they need to make it so they are not a free pick for holy and disc.

Yeah Hunters feel rushed. Rogue looks insanely good and fun though.
So hunters needs some more work, rogue might need to be taken back a notch.

It sure wont, its gonna need work to balance. But its gonna be easier to work in one system instead of three and there is no cross over between classes like it was with soulbinds and azerite/essences.

I understand that people don’t like dps cooldowns that can be applied to others, at least for dps specs.
For a healer it is quite fun though in my opinion.
Though a simple haste buff is pretty boring, I quite like Fae guardian, kindred spirits and the idea of the old symbiosis ability.
It is a fun mechanic in an MMORPG, but it’s a problem in competitive content.
There needs to be a benefit for the caster as well, preferably a larger benefit.

So yeah, they have a lot of work to do. But overall it looks great.
I see a lot of people making different builds and sharing them.
The warrior talents cant be revealed fast enough and hopefully we get to see these in action next week.

660

This.
I like making builds that really lean into a theme or fantasy. Even if they’re not ‘BiS’, if I have fun with them and make them work, it’s all worth it.

The complaints mostly come from people who feel they’re going to be forced to have a specific build in certain situations, simply because it’s BiS. That’s not a game fault; that’s a playerbase fault. Stop enabling the meta, people. Just stop. Refuse. Rise up.

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