Talents took completely the wrong direction after WOTLK

Community General Discussion
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MMORPG

The single biggest flaw that Blizzard made after WOTLK is forgetting these last 3 letters.

If you ask people about the talent trees of old, you will here the same rehashed response.

‘People used to use cookie cutter builds, there was no variety because everyone ran the same talents’

First of all, let’s absolutely destroy that myth. Unless you were a cutting edge hardcore raider where every little detail was scrutinised and min maxed to the extreme, it was simply not true.

WOTLK had a HUGE number of viable builds. The amount of creativity was just ridiculous and I’ll show you some examples.

2H + Shield Warrior - Before Gladiator Stance was ever a thing, the Titan Grip Prot Warrior was an amazing build. 51 points in the Fury Tree + the remainder in Prot allowed Warriors to sacrifice survivability for an incredible DPS/Tank hybrid alternative.

Arms/Prot - 38 into Arms to acquire Unrelenting Assault and Juggernaut. You lost some surviability but this was another incredible DPS/Tank Hybrid that lowered Revenges cooldown by 4 seconds as well as giving you amazing mobility to stance dance and use Charge while in Combat.

Dual Wield 1H Arms/Fury - Axe in one hand, Sword in the other. A fairly even split between Arms and Fury but very competitive with Flurry and high crit. Hugely fun.

2H Fury/Arms- It might not have thrown out the raw numbers heavy Arms did but it wasn’t that far behind. Incredibly fast paced and fun with seemingly endless Rage and Slam Procs.

And this is just for Warriors!

Death Knights had a huge number of talent combinations, 2H Enhancement Shamans (yes they did perform well), Frozen Power Ele/Enhance hybrid, Disc/Shadow Hybrid with insane Mana sustain, Dreamstate Balance/Resto hybrid, ProtRetadin, SL/SL/SL (Soul Leech, Soul Link, Siphon Life) Warlock (an utter terror in PVP) Destro/Demon Imp Lock focusing on turning the Imp into a hugely dangerous caster minion, Survival/MM Hunter hybrid, Survival/BM hybrid, Frostfire Mages I literally could continue and elaborate on each one of these amazingly creative, powerful builds.

You could truly customise your class in the way that YOU enjoyed it to play.

It is a desperate shame that the game moved away from this philosophy. Bringing back some old abilities and shoehorning them in for Shadowlands will in no way shape or form bring back this unparalleled customisation. This is what made people excited and eager to try out new things. There was always something new to discover and it is a true shame this wasn’t built upon and encouraged further as opposed to being destroyed.

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I agree mostly.

However I have one thing to add. People back then didn’t use cookie cutter builds. There was variety back then.

Nowadays everything needs to be optimized for players. They’ll google “what’s the best build for class XYZ” and run with whatever. Back then, the RPG part was big because the players were less experienced and there was much less information readily available. I’m not saying there wasn’t any, but it was much less common to, let’s say read a guide.

I mean I’m raiding actively in retail and in classic, although only one day a week in classic, but people are literally talking about how they are pushing their logs in CLASSIC WOW. Imagine that “Oh man I’m so good, I got those lucky crits and I went into the raid with all the world buffs. I’m pressing frost bolt better than all the other mages!”

It’s the players that have changed.

The mindset of the players has drifted away from having fun to being as effective as possible in whatever role you’re playing, obviously not for all of them, but for far too many that it’d be possible to go back.

I too miss wotlk talent trees greatly, I remember having a 5-61-5 pvp bear / cat, it was great fun, but if people play the 10 year old game that woltk is now, it’d be as people say. Classic isn’t the same, tbc won’t be the same and the same will stay true for any other expansion that gets “classic realms” or whatever.

I dislike talent rows a fair bit, but I see the arguments for people who have started later, that they’d dislike the old talent trees.

The greatest plus I can think off of old talent trees was simply that they made leveling feel insanely more rewarding, combined with different ranks of spells. If a character now hits 90, they get exactly one more talent, 10 levels later, and then they’re dry until they unlock azerite essences. It just feels like I’m growing weaker while leveling, rather than stronger. Is that truly how the leveling process in an RPG should feel like?

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Agree with this post.

There is also the classic statements ”old talent trees were boring, this and that gave 1% increase in something” or ”this talent was far better than another”.

The truth is that we have the same situation today, many talents are not fit for a situation or are plain undertuned. Many use identical talent builds today because they are simply the best talents for various activities/situations.

The whole point when they replaced the Cataclysm talent tree with the current one in MoP was to remove this obstacle and let players choose freely, yet the problem is still there: That people are forced into certain builds in order to perform.

The old talent tree was also alot more rewarding while leveling. You could truly feel and see your character evolve and grow stronger for every point you spent. One talent row every 15 levels today is the exact opposite of that, it’s unrewarding and makes players feel as if the journey to max level is a long and dull one.

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Its largely because is compilated and stored we have references to cookie cutter builds. Over time players have become better, so more are documented. In early vanilla this wasn’t done outside of serious raiding.

Even now some variety exists even if you look to documentation of builds. Let’s use Resto shaman as an example. You can go deep Resto 0/5-7/46-43, buff totem build 0/12/39, weapon totem build 0/22/29, off DPS healer (also good PvP) 30/0/21. And withing these builds quite a few of the points to get to the “mandatory” ones are flexible and up to you, ie with the weapon totem build whether you dump all points into totem cost reduction with some pushback resist or go purely for extra hit rating is up to you depending on whether you want to have better offensive power or facilitate easier totem twisting. Sake goes for whether you pick up flurry and two handers to hit 22 points or go for shield talents etc for extra defense. It’s not as rigid as people think.

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First of all I feel like people love to throw the letters RPG around very loosely.
RPG can mean different things to different people. Nothing you described to me sounds like RPG mechanics.

RPG would be things like hunter arrows, rogues actually crafting their poisons again, or having to go back to a class trainer every so often.
Not balance in player power traits.

It is absolutely not a myth.
Classic WoW today, right now, is a perfect example of that.
My first memory of WoW was running a dungeon in WOTLK and having random people inspect my Fire Mage and getting onto me about not having the right talents selected.

I liked the old talent tree, but you will not win an argument in its defensive if you try and come at it from a purely game play mechanical balance perspective.
In terms of freedom of choice they were far inferior.

There were far too many passives and most of the major actives were core to your spec. The current tree offers more rotational and thematic options that actually make a difference.

The only valid point about the old talent tree in my opinion is it felt good to get a new point every level, even if it was just a 1% damage increase to a spell or something.

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Most people follow tradition.

Check famous site - Iceyveins , wowhead.
Close brain and do what they say. It’s convenient and less time consuming.

Even in WoLK most people just used Elitejerks and followed their guides.

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So you just had more options of “meta” but for said content there was always the “go to” talent tree…

Dont get me wrong, i know where u are pointig, but we all know deep down it was same, just like now.

For example : u could play 2h fury/prot hybrid warrior tank, u lost some deff, gained some DPS, it looked cool. Was it good tho? For dungeons maybe, but lets be honest they were ez. For raids? U either was 1h shield warr tank or u went dps, thats it. And something like that it worked with basicly all other options.

So even now u have XY combinations, for like normal/hc dungeons i could run lunar meme beam and have fun cuz its nice concept, but for my m+ i either take RNT or nothing… U see where this is going?

People still have options, and they can use them, its just they are so unbalanced its not worth, and even if it was balanced by like 2-3% off, people will still follow meta nowdays just because they have to, even if they do basicly no content.

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I was never a min/maxer but as soon as I learned about sites like ElitestJerks and Wowhead, I already used Thotbot for working out where I was supposed to go and what to do on the less explained quests, I started using them for the cookie cutter specs. This was true for a lot of my friends who also weren’t top end raiders or the like.

We used cookie cutters because even though we weren’t ever going to be top end raiders like the guys in EJ we wanted to be as good as we could be and we knew that making it up by ourselves without the fallback of being spreadsheet and min/max stat gods that we would never get better.

Sure, there were a few people who did go out and do ‘fun’ buillds but in my experience these were the guys at the top end who knew what they were doing. These were the spreadsheeters and the min/maxers who knew that a point here or there wouldn’t make much of a difference because they had already got most of the optimum points. Us mere mortals couldn’t make ‘fun’ builds we could only make utterly useless builds that were pointless.

Edit: Oh and when I talk about cookie cutter specs I don’t simply refer to one and only one spec per class the cookie cutter could all depend on what weapons and armour you had available. What I, and I assume most others, mean when they talk about cookie cutter was that you would go to the website that had already worked out the stat priority for your class/spec and had worked out the optimum route to spend your points in order to give the best results.

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The old talent trees gave you a sense of progression, same as the old spell books.

My issues today is the blatant lies we were sold the new talents with: the old talents were “boring” they only have 1% of something. Today my talents give me a proc at most, or in the most special of cases a new button to press.

However it doesn’t feel like they add much either, since all classes are now built on the “build resource with small skills, spend resource on big skill” philosophy. In WotLK all spells were important to cast, not just “the big ones”.

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Actually this game has never had huge number of viable builds. There has always been PvP cookie cutter and PvE cookie cutter. Was in Vanilla is in BfA. The fact in BfA some classes have 2 useful specs is exception rather than norm.

i thought they were sense of progression until in classic I was reminded that only difference is the actual end talent of each build and others you do not even feel realistically. Illusion on its finest. Majority of players will never - ever feel even 5% damage gain. Let alone 1% because their skill-set or gear (or both) is not on level to feel it.

Actually you have more options NOW because NOW talents do make a notable difference.

And I love how OP mentions DK. Considering in wotlk beta alone I maxed out a few and I raided and Pvpd plenty as one and killed LK HC in both 10 and 25 man. DK had options to quest and and do low content how you desired, but in reality you had 2 choices in PvE - UH (that most were) or full arp DW frost (but you needed good relationship with fellow rogues and warriors to get that gear) And already by cataclysm you were toned down so bad that only meme-players were allowed to 25 man raids as frost.

You can now too play whatever spec you want and in SL you get some weapon wielding choices back. That does not equal to being viable and getting rid of “best spec”.

For me OP is just full of a bit of nostalgia without actual remembrance of the past.

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It may have had optimal builds but there were a huge number of viable builds. I actually named them.

If you were min-maxing.

2H Blood, 2H Frost/Blood, 1H Blood/Frost. There were so many combinations and they were all viable. Every single class in the game had 5-6 viable builds.

Yeah, now you have to choose abilities that used to be baseline. So much choice.

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I don’t agree. The number of talent choices that are viable now is extremely limited for each spec, not to mention some choices overshadow the others by a mile.

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talents changed to current style in MoP, not WOTLK.

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I do not miss those horrible big old talent trees one bit.

In today’s culture were even the most casual players min max, it would totally be a repeat of the cookie cutter builds we saw back then.

I hated every time the best build changed, to have to go reset then put every single individual talent back in again. Granted they could make that more flexible with changes but so many of the talents we had to choose were so meaningless and were literally just working you way down to various abilities. There is no flexibility to change talents depending on what content you are doing.

When there was an update and the game reset all your talents was a pain as well. You couldn’t even go and play until you’d found the latest build and put all those points back in again.

Nothing will ever make me want to go back to that awful unwieldy inflexible system.

People are all different, some will always be nostalgic for the old trees and having to visit an npc to upgrade your spells.

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Agree. I think both models have the same degree of cookie-cutteritis about them in fairness. In the classic talent system though the cookie-cutter tended to revolve around the “big” talents (10, 20, 30, 40 pointers) but less about how you got there (there were of course frontrunners in some cases but in others it’s quite open).
In the modern system there is pretty much always a “you should pick this if you’re doing Y content” talent, and they differ as to the content you’re doing rather than being different means to acheive the same.
And some are just absolutely awful it beggars belief how they got in there in the first place, and that effect is compounded in a system where you have only three choices per tier and it’s a 1-point spend, because it reduces the choice instantly to simply “A or B” because C is just absolutely pants. In the classic tree there are some very dodgey talents, but generally speaking there are plenty of other ways to spend your points.

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And what if what I proposed was the solution.

I mean, if the argument for old talent tree is more focused around leveling then the solution is simple :

During levelling, we’re getting the old talent tree, that gives 1% on X and Y spell, increase this or that stat.

Once level max is reached, then all talents are being unlocked, opening current toolbox.

KISS !

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Viability can be seen many ways - and doing world content can be done naked too, does not make it ‘viable’.

And dks get their weapon-choice thing back, so that’s there. But most likely end up as broken as it was before which was reason they removed it begin with, but hey illusion of choice is important, I guess.

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Oh so that’s what makes an RPG? the number of talent points?

Anyway, in terms of output the current talents have a much bigger impact on the customization of your character and playstyle than the old tree had.
Most of those “builds” with the old tree played exactly the same, the difference being choosing between 3% damage against snared targets and less threat + chance to resist dispels or whatever. In most cases if i gave you a character to run a dungeon with, you weren’t able to tell which talents you had, beyond the standard spec skeleton.

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Yesss. I always check skyrim and play random chars I made, archer destruction ranger, warrior priest dude etc. So much fun

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True, kinda miss wotlk talent trees…