They are also revamping a lot, and I don’ t mind a different play style per expansion even. I am looking forward to survival hunter+packleader, since it was kind of boring. And I admit, per hero talent, I expect to see something new, either an active button, or some sort of passive ability ( but I also meant, a few visual )
It probably depend per class or spec, but i do think i have too much crap going on on my resto shaman. With weird internal times to buff a spell, and the amount of abilities anyway.
More classes have that problem. Like how do we get on an ability like vivify that has an internal timer that makes it an instant instead of a cast. And without a weakaura you can not see what that timer actually is.
Can not speak about MoP though. I didnt play that expansion.
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Don’t call it “pruning” as this has a rather pejorative meaning on the forums. Call it simplification. The could do with some simplifying but not only Talents / Abilities but in other areas too, especially Professions.
I think the Talent system can be useful for simplifying the Abilities. There can be Passives to replace Active spells or instance.
I wouldn’t go back to MOP as it was a bit too simple but maybe something in between. Fewer nodes on the tree would be better. A talent point every 2 or 3 levels maybe instead of every level.
This is impossible. There is always only one and exactly only one optimal solution. The best thing developers can do is simply try to balance the various options so that there is no large discrepancy. But the reality is that the playerbase would still outright copy only the optimal one even if the difference from any other option was 0.1%.
It’s the same old question again. You have Abilities A and B. A deals 100 damage and can be used every 1 second, B deals 200 damage and can be used every 2 seconds. You can only choose 1 of the 2, not both. Are the 2 abilities balanced?
The answer is that they’re not. On paper they may appear as both providing 100 dps. In every single scenario however, Ability A is either equal to B in effectiveness or superior, never inferior. In layman terms, A is optimal, B is noobtrap.
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True, for any individual situation. But it gets to become more intricate when there are a number of them and they are all different. I found it fun to be able to adapt my builds for any and all of them depending on who I am playing with and what type of content I am planning to do.
This goes beyond simple raid / AoE environments. In DF I was always making these decisions on the go: trading this particular utility for another, switching defense with offense, and so on, with the deciding factors being whether I was with an Aug or not, the level of difficulty, and many more.
This season I was mostly slacking but I did a bit of PvP at the end of the season, and I’ve been performing the same thinking process based on the type of BG I was in, whether we had a dedicated FC or we hadn’t, if I was to guard, skirmish or participate in team fights, and all that.
My build setups changed drastically. I really wouldn’t like all of my knobs and levers to go.
I don’t know, I can only look at that with my own experience in mind. I’ll choose actives where I enjoy the interactions with other spells, and passives where I know keeping up an active option will not be enjoyable to me or too much hassle to track. I know there’s a clear limit to what I can do and I’ll try to choose realistically and accordingly. I can hardly be the only one doing that 
In that sense I think the trees are quite interesting, and do afford personal choices. Not always optimally, at times you need to pick rather crap stuff to get to the good part. And it varies a bit between classes/specs how fun it is to figure out a personal decent set up.
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When it is about trees i just go to archon.gg and copy paste the most used. Then put abilities on my bars. And i never look back at the talents. It are just too many.
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I do agree with that. Reading through all of them, understanding what they do exactly, considering if/how you’d use them and whether they fit your playstyle is rather daunting now. And it’s not always clear, that makes it even more overwhelming lol.
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Oh, the warlock and its level 90 talents!
Just yesterday, I was watching some YouTube videos about how good warlocks were and how they were played in Mists of Pandaria. I came across a FatBoss guide featuring someone from a top-20 world guild at the time.
They were discussing talents and mentioned that most of them were good, but the level 90 talent row for warlocks was a complete disaster. And then I saw what it was…
I believe warlock was not the only one with 90 lvl being bad
I didn’t do any research on that.
I can see situations where there is movement that means you get fewer hits off, in which case doing fewer big hits than small hits would be better.
But your point otherwise is correct. There will neve be 100% balance all the time. There are so many factors that play into. The fight mechanics, player reflexes as well as gear stats will all vary so wildly.
Under my suggestion above in posts #31 and and #38, these would continue to exist, with fewer levelers and knobs but still quite intricately.
Caution, I mentioned 1 second cooldown, not 1 second casttime 
I should have been clearer indeed, the 2 abilities are instant.
That is the issue. When talents are over complicated, few people will actually read or test it.
It is nearly impossible for players to read them if they play multiple alts. It simply takes too much time and effort to comprehend and set it up by themselves. It is painful for one who plays a lot of alts.
If the talent system is reasonably simple, players would actually read them.
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Yes, it means you can adjust your general tree on the content you’re doing, or mechanics you are facing. Issue is that the way it is designed, we can take too many abilities at once, which leads to button bloat, because we have too many (active) one point nodes
It is a matter subject to the class you’re playing and your personal preference. I feel some classes (eg feral druid) can feel bloated with abilities while others are more manageable. But at the end of the day it comes down to preferences. Some people love having more options while other prefer simpler rotations and actions bars,
True and also a point that no one should care, game shouldn’t be developed with that midnset!
Let those people min max everything they want, and if they are angry at some options ignore them they shouldn’t be the target of your game because that is a very small amount of players.
If there is 10 different abilities that you can choose and each does something different, you don’t need to worry about the balance anymore because you ahve options for each scenario.
And another point is “Balance” is a disease that corrupted the mind of WoW players, there is no such thing as 100% balance. That can only happen if there is only 1 class with 1 spec with 1 equipment with no choice in anything!! Nobody wants that.
Ignore the “Balance” and only focus on the general performance of classes;
All the classes/specs need to be performing well in gameplay (raid/dungeon/pvp/pve/solo/etc.) and fun to play**. That is the only rule they should follow, nothing else.
**Fun is a subjective matter, ofcourse, but player feedback exists for this reason.
It’s way more than 0.1%, but thing is that a build you copy for highest damage isn’t always the best one for all content, because damage profile and utility often matters a lot, so if you really wanna be optimal, you always need to tweak it a bit. Also, something that is seen as optimal for a +15 dungeon, is not necessarily optimal for a +6 farm run, because maybe the mobs die too fast. Or maybe as a tank, you feel like nothing is killing you, and then you can put more points in damage and less in mitigation things.
I find it gets needlessly complex when multiple talents affect the same skill, somebody did a screenshot a week ago that showed all talent interactions with “Frost bolt” for a frost mage, it was pretty ridiculous.
Going back to 6 “Pick one of these three” is a bit much, but things could stand being made a tad less complicated…
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I also just look murlok. io now and figure median from the top 50 players builds. At start of expansion looking at these trees in dragonflight I felt like my head were about to explode looking at my 8 classes and 17 specs I play, trying figure what to pick for them from these.
Pardon my language but this is the stupidest thing they have done for talent system in my opinion. I play 8 classes and 17 specs as total, there is no way in hell Im going to bother reading 17 talent trees every ability through individually to have abilities, it would take all day and I just want to play my specs. Not happy of this direction of turning wow talent trees to this.
They are not only annoying to figure but also clunky to switch stuff around between arena rounds or content and the like. Just look at this this mess, this is for rshaman.
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It is a nice suggestion.
But the issue with “every node is eventually picked up” is that, then then “non-choice” node is kinda meaningless, it serves no purpose at max level. They are just passive or abilities in spell book, that everyone will have at max level.
It is better to remove those “non-choice” node and keep those “choice” node. Then that’s exactly what MOP talent was: 6 nodes of 3 choices (passive or active abilities).
The MOP talent system was more simple and meaningful in this way.
Current talent systems just removes abilities (interrupt/cc, etc.) from basic spellbooks and integrated them into talents and add even more buttons.
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Exactly, its like the new reworked profession system which appears as having choise when in real its just extra hassle for nothing and there really is no choise in the end.
Just like adding bunch of basic abilities from old spellbooks into talents and then making us pick paths to them. Having dozen different presets for basic abilities having to load them between arena rounds in few seconds time windows or switch stuff around manually. Its annoying design and didnt really add anything new, only made gameplay feel more annoying having to work with the talent system.
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