The tbc trees, because I didn’t appreciate how one would get so many passives upon speccing into something in cata, nor the limitation that once you put a point in you had to fill that tree.
That’s actually v. good reason why many find TBC tree more superior.
The talent trees we’ve seen from Mists of Pandaria are better but even then, they’re still flawed.
It doesn’t matter how many or how few choices Blizzard provides the player, the game ultimately just boils down to a few cookie cut builds. Having a bunch of talents which make one spell X% more powerful might as well be baseline if you’re going to spec into it one way or another.
At least with the MoP style trees you have more meaningful choices but even then, we’ve got situational cookie cutter builds for raiding, Mythic+ and PvP with some stuff you might switch for certain fights or dungeons at a higher difficulty.
I’m inclined to believe that talents just shouldn’t exist at this stage. No attempt at making meaningful choices has worked and no attempt at correctly balancing everything has worked.
FFXIV, a game I’ve started playing recently, has no talents or specs. You play a class and it has a fixed toolset and a fixed role. Gladiator, which becomes Paladin at level 30, is a tank and nothing else. You have a toolset and that’s what you clear the content with. The game still has ranked PvP and still has hard raids without those choices. You also have the advantage of being able to play every job (class in WoW terms) on a single character so switching is like changing spec between fights.
FF14 isn’t a perfect game but I think there’s systems in that game which would work great in WoW. No talent trees would be fine and I don’t think every Protection Paladin, as an example, having a standardised set of abilities would be an issue.
I’m not excited by having to look up the build again on a website every time I ding to see where I should be putting the point. It is not fun, if you like it then that’s great, I’m just not someone who enjoys that. Or the need to go and train all the time, in fact I tend to leave it as long as I can then go train, unless I’m passing a trainer.
In Retail we get something every ding. It’s obviously not a talent but every level you should get something, a spell will improve, or a dungeon will unlock etc etc. The talents are also flexible so I can swap for different content/fights.
Guess what I don’t and you don’t have to. Nobody should look up these sites while leveling. I just met a level 23 hunter with 0 talents, and he is questing fine. Harder but fine.
And in classic you get what you mentioned for retail.
Cata but that is because it allowed me to play me favorite iteration of disc priest!
I NEED to minmax and follow online guides to the T
I do remember in the old days when people weren’t so aware of resources online that they would just stick every single talent into their chosen spec, not realising you need the odd one here or there in other trees too. Not sure that is so common these days.
As for Min Maxing there seems to be a heck of a lot of that in Classic. People running specific dungeons to specific rep before questing, best set ups. Meanwhile there’s me just mix and matching a bit of questing and dungeoning here and there.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.