Diablo 3 - Announcement - Simplified Skill Tooltips

Seeing the Forest for the Talent Trees
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on our crazy, exciting, and scary talent overhaul, for which we are enormously appreciative. For real and for true. We *want* your feedback on the new talents. That is why we are presenting so much detail so early. While we will continue to iterate on talent specifics, your feedback is an important part of that process. Don’t abstain because you’re convinced that things will change without you. Your input is one of our most important tools for improving the game.

We have seen a few consistent responses from players concerned or dismissive about the model, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to explain the philosophy behind some of our decisions, to provide a better framework upon which you can continue giving us feedback.

1. "I have fewer choices."
This is the big one, and the truth is it is ultimately correct. You will have fewer choices. But you will have more choices that *matter*. One of the important philosophies of game design is that interesting choices are fun. The word ‘interesting’ is key. Choosing between a talent that grants 10% damage and one that grants 5% damage, all else being equal, isn't interesting (unless perhaps you’re a superstar role-player). Choosing between a talent that grants you 5% haste or 5% crit might be interesting, but more than likely there is still a right answer (and like most of us, you'll probably just ask someone else what the answer is.) Choosing between a talent that grants you a root or a snare can be interesting. Which does more damage? Hard to say. Which is better? It depends on the situation.

This is why we don't have a clear damage, tanking, and healing talent choice every tier. In the case of the old trees, choosing the talent you want from among the talents that don’t interest you isn’t an interesting decision -- it's a multiple choice test, and an easy one at that. Are you Ret? You probably want the damage option. But what if the Ret player had to choose from three healing talents and couldn't sacrifice healing for damage? Now it gets interesting. Worst case scenario is the player just picks one at random because he refuses to heal. However, he has the ability. Maybe he'll use it in some situation. Meanwhile, other players will be happy that they can benefit more from the hybrid nature of the paladin class without having to give up damage to do so.

2. "There weren't cookie cutter builds."
You're wrong. Next!

To be fair, we did manage to engineer most of the Cataclysm talent trees to include a few legitimate choices. These typically occur when you need to spend enough points to get to the next tier of a tree to get the good stuff. Many specs had 1-4 points to spend wherever they want. That's a huge victory compared to pre-Cataclysm talent trees, but ultimately nothing to really brag about.

It is possible of course to strike a blow for individuality and use a non-cookie cutter build. Ninety-nine percent of the time, these builds are just going to be less effective. The remaining percent of the time, they will eventually become the new cookie-cutter. When players talk about their love of options, I think what they are really saying is they are in love with the idea of having dozens of interesting talents. We just don't think that will ever happen.

Look, we tried the talent tree model for seven years. We think it’s fundamentally flawed and unfixable. We know some of you have faith in us that someday we’ll eventually replace all of the boring +5% crit talents with interesting talents and give you 80 talent points that you can spend wherever, and that the game will still remain relatively balanced and fun. We greatly appreciate your faith, but we fear it is misplaced. It’s not a matter of coming up with enough fun mechanics, which is challenging but ultimately doable. The problem is the extreme number of combinations. When you have such a gigantic matrix, the chances of having unbeatable synergies, or combinations of talents that just don’t work together is really high. That’s not lazy design. That is recognizing how math works.

So given that we don’t think it’s humanly possible to have 40-50 fun, interesting and balanced talents in a tree, the alternative is to continue on with bloated trees that have a ton of inconsequential talents that you have to slog through to get to the fun stuff. A lot of you guys have stuck with us for years, continue to play regularly, and still love World of Warcraft. You are the reason we’re still making this game. We think you deserve better, and we think we can do better.

3. "We'll still have cookie-cutter builds with the new design."
I am slightly amused by the number of comments that say "The theorycrafters will just math out which is the right talent and we'll all just pick that one." But the theorycrafters aren’t agreeing with those comments, because they know they won’t be able to.

Just to make sure, I chose several specs at random and researched their builds. Sure enough, even with the Cataclysm builds today, you see quotes like “spend the last two points wherever you want” or “choose X or Y at your discretion.” It is “easy” (which I put in quotes because theorycrafters devote a lot of time and neurons to it) to determine the value of a DPS talent like Incite or Ignite. It is hard to determine the DPS value of Improved Sprint or Lichborne. Most of the Mists talents are things like the latter. Now there are still some pure throughput (damage, healing, or tanking) talents in the trees. We expect there will sometimes be a right answer as to which talent to take for those roles. On a fight like Baelroc (one boss, no adds), Bladestorm and Shockwave probably aren't competitive with Avatar. We're okay with that, because on Beth'tilac (lots of adds) they definitely can be and it will depend a lot on your play style and the role you have in the fight. However, given that we know a player can only have one of those three talents and that the synergistic effects from those talents with other talents are limited, it is much easier for us to balance say the healing value of Archangel and Divine Star. Despite what you read on the forums, we actually have gotten better at balancing World of Warcraft over the years.

4. "No rewards for leveling."
Once upon a time, you got a new talent point every level. That worked okay for a game with 60 levels. It works less well for a game with 90 levels. It probably is totally incomprehensible for a game with 150 levels, should we ever get there. We keep bumping the level cap because frankly it’s fun and we haven’t yet come up with a progression mechanism that will feel quite as good.

Leveling is pretty fast these days and fairly rewarding, in that you see lots of new content and get gear quickly, which is something we have trouble replicating at max level (though stay tuned for Mists of Pandaria). On top of that, you’ll still get lots of abilities as you level up. Instead of having to click Raging Blow, we’ll just give it to you, because frankly if you skip it, you’re making a mistake (or you’re RPing a Fury warrior who has taken too many blows to the head). There are gaps in getting new abilities, especially at high level, because we don’t want players to have to have four rows of action bars to play their character. Again, that is just the blessing and curse of having a game with so many levels.

Third, I’ll challenge the notion of just how interesting it is to get that second point in Pain and Suffering or Rule of Law while leveling. Do you really notice that you now kill a creature in 2.9 GCDs instead of 3 GCDs? (But see below for a bit more on this.) There are some game-challenging talents of course, like Shadowform, but as we just discussed, you'll still get those.

Finally, the reality is that for many players, WoW has become a game focused on max level. Back in the day, leveling a fleet of alts was really compelling gameplay, but for many of the old-timers, there just isn’t a ton of interest in making a second mage or whatever. Hopefully account-level achievements will help with that somewhat, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect all of our long-term players to have thirty or more characters at some point in the future. It’s a fair concern that the new talent system is geared more towards making max level exciting, but that’s also where players tend to spend most of their WoW-playing hours these days. We don’t know yet what we are going to do for players who want to play a monk but just can’t stomach the idea of hitting Hellfire Peninsula one more time, and how we solve the problem when you get a friend to try WoW, only to discover that your pal will need to spend several weeks or months getting up to max level before he or she is ready to join your Arena team or raid group. But these feel like problems we are going to have to solve at some point.

5. "I like being better than noobs."
It was surprising and a bit disappointing at how frequently we saw this argument. The players in question fully admit that they don't experiment to find the best build. They accept the cookie cutter spec that is offered from a website, but then they use the fact that they knew the cookie cutter to mock players who don't. Intimate knowledge of game mechanics certainly is and should be a component of skill. But knowing how to Google "4.3 Shadow spec" doesn't automatically make you a better player. Sorry, but I’m just going to dismiss this one as an illegitimate concern.

6. "The talents are all PvP choices."
We see this response from players who say “I don’t care about PvP,” or “raid bosses can’t be snared,” or even “I am a solo player, so I don’t need a defensive cooldown.”

First, a lot of players do care about PvP, and almost every choice in the new talent model will be interesting for them. We are also taking some steps with Mists to encourage more crossover between PvP and PvE as the game once had, so even if you don’t care for PvP now, maybe we can get you interested in the future.

Second, a lot of raid bosses can’t be snared, but their adds and trash sure can be. We don’t do a lot of Patchwerk fights these days. Crowd control, movement increases, and defensive cooldowns are all an important part of raid encounters these days. They are even a part of dungeon encounters until you overgear the content.

Now if you're a solo player or a fairly casual raider and you don't often find the need to use crowd control or hit a defensive cooldown, then maybe the choice isn't compelling. But we think that's a problem with the game. I think it’s a fair complaint that our outdoor world creatures have become a little monotonous over the years. Once upon a time, you could choose to take on that camp of gnolls, or you could try and handle the elite ogres, or you might get a patrolling kobold. While we don’t want outdoor leveling to be brutally difficult, that doesn’t mean that every situation needs to be solved with 3 Sinister Strikes. Imagine a cave full of weak spiders. You can choose to AE them all down, use a movement cooldown to get through the cave quickly, use a defensive cooldown to survive the damage, or use your heals to keep you up. When players use their full toolbox of abilities intelligently, they tend to feel good about their character and the game. But it is our responsibility to engineer more of those situations into the world.

7. "Spec doesn’t matter."
This is a concern especially for warriors, priests, DKs and the pure classes (those characters who have multiple specs of the same role). What we have concluded is that many players want to choose their spec based on flavor (“I want to be the mage who uses Frost magic”) or rotation (“I like the fast gameplay of the Frost DK”). While the raid buff / debuff matrix and spec utility helps to encourage diversity among groups and discourage raid stacking, it’s also a little lame when the Affliction lock is asked to spec Demonology (against the player’s desire) in order to bring a specific buff. In Mists, we want players to have even more flexibility about which character they want to play. Asking a player to swap from damage to tanking for a couple of fights is acceptable to us. Asking someone to respec from Unholy to Frost just for the debuff is not.

There will still be some utility in the various specs, but less than we have today. You should pick a spec because you like the rotation or the kit. Fire is about crit, Hot Streak, and Ignite. Frost is about Shatter combos and the Water Elemental. Arcane is about mana management and clearing Arcane Blast stacks.

8. “It must be new to be good.”
This is a tricky one. Specifically, the warlock and druid trees include a lot of new talent ideas simply because we felt like those classes needed them. While we want to make an effort to add some new mechanics every expansion just to keep things fresh, we don’t want to arbitrarily replace fun talents that have stood the test of time just in the name of change for change’s sake. Bladestorm is fun. Body and Soul is fun. Shadowstep is fun.

From a designer’s perspective, the half-life of a new spell or talent idea is fleetingly short. You know how when you buy a new car and drive it off the lot it immediately loses a huge chunk of its value? New game ideas are like that. Seeing something brand new is super exhilarating, but that thrill just doesn’t last. I suspect even by the time Mists launches, we will see a lot of comments along the lines of “When are druids going to get something new? We haven’t seen any new ideas since November!”

It isn’t our goal to come up with 18 new talents for every class. We want to come up with 18 fun talents, and that’s going to mean a mix of old and new. Try not to confuse “shiny” with “good,” and we’ll try on our end not to fall into that trap as well.

9. “You overhaul talents every expansion. Please leave well enough alone.”
This is another tricky issue, because neither extreme (stagnation versus constant design churn) is appealing, and every individual player (and designer!) has a different definition of where those extremes lie. We changed talent trees in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the underlying problems the talent design had since its inception. We actually considered going to the Mists model for Cataclysm, but we were worried that the change would be too shocking to players, so we went with a more restrained design first. As often happens with compromises, it didn’t fix the underlying problems. Our hope is that this new design solves them once and for all. That isn’t a promise to not change talents for 6.0, 7.0, and beyond. But we hope that an overhaul this drastic isn’t necessary again for a long time to come.
MMOs are inherently living designs that are going to change over time. This is particularly true of subscription models, where players rightly expect to see something for their monthly payment. We don’t think it’s fair to cling to designs that aren’t working just because that’s the design we shipped with. As we have discussed a great deal lately, we will try to limit our big design changes to new expansions, but it’s just not in our DNA to leave something at a B- level if we think we can make it A+.

10. “You’ve got your minds made up and don’t care about what we think.”
You’re wrong. Next!

As I have said a million times, good games (maybe good anything) can’t be designed by popular vote. Our design feedback process is about making informed decisions. The developers will make the decisions we feel are right for the game, but we’ll do that armed with the feedback from players about what is fun and not fun for them. If you want to provide the best feedback possible, try to be succinct (we get a lot of feedback), try to be specific (why don’t you like something), and don’t assume you speak for everyone (game design, like art, is often subjective). Don’t get upset if we don’t implement your idea -- that’s just not a realistic expectation. Don’t confuse the echo chamber phenomenon that can occur in forum discussions for consensus. Most importantly, try to remember what will be fun for everyone, and not just your character.

One more thing to keep in mind: Playing with the new talent system in-game is really different from choosing talents on “paper.” Some of the decisions we made didn’t come about until we could get into the game and see how leveling and playing actually felt. Once we’re in alpha, many of you guys will be able to give us some more concrete feedback. We understand that, and we’re pushing for doing that just as soon as we can. In the meantime, enjoy the Hour of Twilight.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Seeing the Forest for the Talent Trees started by chaud View original post
Comments 285 Comments
  1. Fleetwood's Avatar
    This is just another way for Blizz to make new "content" without actually doing so. They scramble (and cripple imo) the talent system to make it seem new and exciting. The only problem is, they are simplifying the game into utter boredom, thinking the whole time that if they make it dumb enough way more people will want to play. My money is on the opposite happening. Maybe - just ever so slightly maybe - new casual players will be attracted, but only for awhile. What was compelling about the game is being diluted to a bland pap. There is a very basic aspect of game design that is being totally missed, or perhaps abandoned, by Blizz. At least it took them a couple decades to stumble upon, giving us much rich entertainment in the meantime.
  1. Chickat's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Vasz View Post
    "This is the big one, and the truth is it is ultimately correct. You will have fewer choices. But you will have more choices that *matter*"

    This simply isn't true. My shaman for example has a bunch of totems I will never use, and a cooldown I've had for years. It's the same for almost all other classes too. None of the choices (with the exception of a few) "matter". TOTALLY dreadful idea. We went from like 60 talent points, to 40 and now 6 ... How is this more choice? Dreadful!
    The thing is you didn't have any choices at all if you wanted t be good. There was a cookie cutter spec and if you weren't that spec you weren't performing at your peak. +5% crit is not interesting. There will certainly be cookie cutter specs with his system too, but you will have different talents for every fight. Picking between cool abilitys is better then picking 5% crit or having 5% haste.
  1. Moradim's Avatar
    you should all know by now that blizzard will do whatever the fuck they want to, regardless of feedback. ask ret paladins who've been unhappy since launch about their spec problems, and how they have been ignored for the ENTIRETY of the expansion. we wanted less RNG, and got band-aids instead. when the customers are unhappy, do they care? no, they go ahead with their vision of what the spec should be like. 6 talent points when many talent points are pvp related, means things will be more cookie cutter than you think. IMHO, pre-cata talent trees were best. you had many options.

    also, it's absolutely amazing greg street manages to keep a job after he screws up time and time again.

    "dungeons are hard" GC, who then decides it's ok to make MoP 5-mans WOTLK difficulty (not an assumption, their own words).

    if you think wow is in decline, look no further than this fool as to why some things arent as good as they could be.
  1. myrddinde's Avatar
    Sorry Blizzard, these arguments are so out of touch with the game that you may not understand what you are saying. Fact or not, you take away some of our enhancement talents and give them back as choices that matter ... yeah great job, pat yourself on your shoulder for doing a good job ... None of the crap are really choices that matter ... now I can chose if I want to be enh/elemental or enh/resto ... this alone give more choices than all you have planned for mop, because this is stuff that really matters. Alone the Wind Shear nerf, how it hit us enh shamans just shows how out of touch you are with our class. 0 raiding enh shamans had this talent, yep 0 ... now you take away our healing for mop. A whole mana bar used on healing surges gives us only 40% of our hp back ... great ... I am kind of sad that you announced the annual pass before these details, because the talent system as it is now will not keep me tied to this game. You have been dumbing down stuff for 2 expansions now and at some time you reach a point where it is a bit too much for people to bear. You have been losing subs en masse and go on making this game pointless, kind of sad ... Vanilla may have had its flaws ... basically everything required some effort and if you saw a human on a tiger then you knew he put a hell lot of effort into it ... like 10000000 morrowgrain ... nowadays its just so pointless ... everything ... I can hardly find the motivation to log on anymore. You even punish people who want to put effort into farming (daily satchels for seasonal bosses). I have been running horseman each day on like 5 chars the past years and saw the mount only twice and that on the same char, cool system ... the more I think about it the more I want to cancel the sub right now.
  1. Sewaddle's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Crofford View Post
    These talent trees remove options for customization. For instance, I loved it in Wrath when DK dual wield tanking was feasible. In an MMO, choice and customization is everything. I don't want to play the same prot paladin as all the other prot paladins. With the new talents, any other prot paladin in the world is just 15 seconds away from being exactly like you. At least in WotLK if someone wanted to copy your spec they would have to look you up on armory. This is homogenization and cookie cutting, plain and simple. And I hate where this game is going.
    Can you honestly say that we have "customization" with the current trees? You're just gonna go to EJ and copypasta the optimal build anyways.

    The amount of anger in response to the talent changes is upsetting
  1. k1037's Avatar
    The CONCEPT behind the new talent system is fine.

    They could have done something interesting with that concept, like say...
    - 5 tiers of utility talents useful to all specs of that class.
    - 5 tiers of spec-specific talents which require actual sacrifice and dramatically change play style.
    - 5 tiers of role-specific talents which are available to every class with a spec which fits the role (things like Last Stand for all tanks).

    Instead, they went with utterly meaningless choices. The talents are either no-brainers for your spec/role or are just pointless passives which have little to do with your spec.

    GC is setting up a ridiculous false dichotomy by pretending the only two options are the Cata cookie cutter system or the MoP REMOVAL of meaningful talents altogether. No, the other option is creating a complex talent system which allows for drastically different specs/playstyles/abilities. Balance would be nearly impossible with that sort of system, and homogenization would be impossible, but that's sort of the whole point. If you create content quickly enough, that sort of system would just have so many choices which would perform so differently on each new encounter that "cookie cutter" would lose all meaning.

    But that's hard and complicated, and the new WoW is all about homogenization, over-simplification, and the removal of mechanics. Most of those here who are defending it are doing so based entirely on Blizzard's PR. Do none of you remember what they said about the Cata talent revamp? Right, don't listen to the PR here, either.
  1. palladiamors's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sewaddle View Post
    Can you honestly say that we have "customization" with the current trees? You're just gonna go to EJ and copypasta the optimal build anyways.

    The amount of anger in response to the talent changes is upsetting
    Whose this 'you' you're talking about? Definitely not I, since I never once went to EJ for a build. I built my characters talents from the ground up, determining what was best for me and my playstyle. Often that was close to the 'cookie cutter' that people would post here and on the forums, but it was always mine. Picked by me, and tested by me. So yes. I can say I had 'customization'.

    People are angry because they DON'T LIKE IT. I don't see how that's hard to understand. Just because you don't get it, doesn't mean people don't have a reason to be mad about it. And Blizzard taking this high and mighty "We are right, you are WRONG" attitude make's it even worse. Sorry, but the only people who are wrong here are Blizzard. For me, this new talent system is what's wrong. That's my opinion, and them trying to tell me it's incorect is not only annoying, but frankly stupid.
  1. garion55's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Eldanir View Post
    Once again Idiotcrawler writes a beautiful text, well worded wall of words with witty jokes and tongue-in-cheek remarks. But he's basically saying the same thing he said for Cataclysm, and two years after we're still waiting for the revamped, balanced talent trees. So he's trying the same trick for MoP. The guy can sure talk the talk but cannot walk the walk.

    i truly am honestly shocked that he still has a job. i dont get that. if i had lost the % of costumers at my job that he has since he took over i would be unemployed. my boss wouldn't stand for that. amazing that the people above GC do.
  1. igame's Avatar
    Typical Blizz: We know whats fun, you will like what we tell you to like.
  1. F-Minus's Avatar
    PVE speaking;As long as the combat model (raids/dungeons) will always be who deals more damage, and who heals more damage, the will always be cutter builds, even with this new talent system (this time around you just pick a new talent for each boss), which will be posted by guilds once they get to kill the boss anyway.
    They need to go away from that combat model and introduce some mechanics that are not based only on Damage Given/Damage Taken and maybe some talents which nobody uses might come handy. I don't know, design some experimental encounters in the likes of chess event and similar, but this time include active player participation, I don't know races, who gets faster from A to B, and then some speed talents like Body and Soul might come handy.

    I'm not saying go away from the current model, but if you sometimes change the fights around a bit, maybe I wouldn't have to go for that extra 15% more healing talent, but pick something else instead. But you messed that up anyway with Cataclysm with your Mastery. At least before I could make a complete crap build, by spending equal amount of points in all 3 trees, as opposed right now most points are spent in a single tree anyway, just to unlock the other two.
    As a Holy priest right now, you have exactly 3 choices: Go with 2/2 Inspiration or 2/2 body and soul or 2/2 Blessed Resilience, you have to pick one, everything else in that Holy tree is pretty much needed anyway. And when you're done with the Holy tree, you are left with 9 talents with which you can do crap anyway, but pick the obviously best choices - and that is not cookie cutters but bad talent design.

    If they can offer some choices with this new MoP talent system, they could have offered similar choices in the past with each talent tear. Or you know, have spells/abilities that are not affected by talents, but rather offer just new abilities through talents, just the change from that would offer various talent specs, instead of boosting Greater Heal by 15% offer a new kind of Heal, or maybe a new Shield on the same tier level and so on and so forth - well they're doing that right now effectively, but still I would like to see more choices in the end and maybe keep the trees alive for each spec.

    It all vent downhill with the talents when you removed downranking spells.
  1. lilbuddhaman's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by garion55 View Post
    i truly am honestly shocked that he still has a job. i dont get that. if i had lost the % of costumers at my job that he has since he took over i would be unemployed. my boss wouldn't stand for that. amazing that the people above GC do.
    All I read is from the entire post is dodged questions and conflicting responses. Almost as bad as last week's "the resources don't exist... I didn't say they don't exist" post from Daxx
  1. F-Minus's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by garion55 View Post
    i truly am honestly shocked that he still has a job. i dont get that. if i had lost the % of costumers at my job that he has since he took over i would be unemployed. my boss wouldn't stand for that. amazing that the people above GC do.
    I'm amazed, just as you, that he's still in charge of WoW. He is just driving it into the ground.

    The saddest part about him is, he doesn't listen to the community at all, unless it really starts boiling and usually downplays any major concerns with his broken logic which apparently isn't working quite well, looking and how WoW is in decline ever since he took over the reins. Worse even, he sometimes actively insults customers of his, with his witty remarks. It's just pretty sad what this game has turned into after his appearance.
  1. mmoc1c348ea123's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Moradim View Post
    ask ret paladins who've been unhappy since launch about their spec problems,
    You bitch and whine about this class yet survey after survey, after survey shows that Paladins are the most played class.

    You sure as hell ain't tanking and holy always QQ about raid wide heals all the time, so where are all the other Pallys? Oh yeah, they're playing Ret.



    Ret pallys cry all the time because in WOTLK start they got nerfed. holy shit an anti undead class was OP in an undead instance! By the end of Wrath you were still pulling sick numbers unless you were an idiot.
    Now in Cata you expect the same numbers when not fighting undead. Suck it up. You're still a powerful class with a shit ton of players. (if not the majority)


    As Ghostcrawler said "don’t assume you speak for everyone" The wow forums are a tiny percent of the player base and the more vocal players are the unhappy players. If you were so shit, no one would play you. Look at the fun Rogues have had this expansion closely followed by Warlocks.

    I play Ret myself and everytime I see someone spitting the dummy out and crying about being a shit class I die a little inside. Get a grip seriously or change the god dam record.
  1. Opaqus's Avatar
    2. "There weren't cookie cutter builds."You're wrong. Next!
    Wraps this shit up neatly and it's #2.A+ Blizz.
  1. tantojutsu's Avatar
    If your idea requires this extent of damage control, you might want to rethink the idea, Blizz. We can't all be crazy.
  1. ringpriest's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Crofford View Post
    10. “You’ve got your minds made up and don’t care about what we think.”
    You’re wrong. Next!

    lololololololol Please tell me someone found this funny.

    Yep. Absolutely hilarious. And what makes it even funnier is that I'm pretty sure Ghostcrawler has no idea that it is funny.
  1. Sephirote's Avatar
    Well I just finish to read this big blue post.

    I really think that it's not giving us more choice honestly, I think it's give us less choice. chosing between 6pts dont give me more choice I will just still pick the one that do damage if I want to DPS. honestly what would have been nice is give us the choice to chose between the 3 talent tree by just making more pts, 80pts woot now I can be a real ret with healing, now cool I can be a fire arcane mage cause I can slow peeps and then fireball them.

    Incase you guys didnt try Rift go look at the spec. it's awesome! that was nice to have to chose who you wanted to be. a mage/rogue could have been fun. I played till lvl35 just to try it.

    I'm a wow fan since 2004 and I will always be. I'm not raiding anymore cause I dont have the time for it but I'm lvling a warlock for fun and honestly I hate when I pop my lvl and have no point to put on. can you imagined what it will be now with only 6 pts yaye finally lvl 20 to get a pts !!! damn it now I have to lvl 40 to have this sorry blizzard I always have been a greet fan of you and your game are the more polish one but this 6 pts thingy suck hard. I'll give it a try for sure but I really dont think I will like it sorry.
  1. Kirnef's Avatar
    I feel violated.... Once again they spit on us players.
  1. Durandro's Avatar
    Honestly, some of the answers Blizzard gave are...

    Pure gold.

    Someone moaning about something stupid? Call them out on it! I'm pleased they didn't just ignore the question, and just pointed out how silly it was to even ask it (or indeed, state it as fact).

    Here's a fact: regardless of what Blizzard do, people will complain. If they do something new, go back to something old, or keep things as they are, people will whine and cry and winge endlessly.

    Better to call them out on it rather then pander to it. Blizzard may not always make the best choices, but overall their products are of high quality which is reflected on the fact they have huge numbers of fans and subscribers. And no, don't point out a decline in subs - even with them they still blow their competition out of the water, meaning if they are bad then whatever company you support is worse.
  1. mmoccc2c4457a1's Avatar
    A long list of answers, each one of them completely BS if you ask me. How expected.

    It's just sad how badly this shows that Blizzard simply doesn't even care about its playerbase enough anymore to even listen to them. Instead, whenever anybody makes a point that's actually decent, built up from actual evidence even, they still just assume that he's only a part of the "vocal minority".

    I'm just going to say right now that Blizzard will be in for a surprise. With talents like these, dungeons and raids are going to have to be easy as shit if we even want to stand a chance at survival. And I guarantee that not just the "vocal minority" will dislike that enough to just leave after a while.

    ---------- Post added 2011-12-09 at 06:39 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Durandro View Post
    Honestly, some of the answers Blizzard gave are...

    Pure gold.

    Someone moaning about something stupid? Call them out on it! I'm pleased they didn't just ignore the question, and just pointed out how silly it was to even ask it (or indeed, state it as fact).

    Here's a fact: regardless of what Blizzard do, people will complain. If they do something new, go back to something old, or keep things as they are, people will whine and cry and winge endlessly.

    Better to call them out on it rather then pander to it. Blizzard may not always make the best choices, but overall their products are of high quality which is reflected on the fact they have huge numbers of fans and subscribers. And no, don't point out a decline in subs - even with them they still blow their competition out of the water, meaning if they are bad then whatever company you support is worse.
    More then half of the current subscribers are no longer there because of the content, but because they have in-game friends that they don't want to leave.

    They may put up with a lot. But will their friends do so as well? That's a risk Blizzard has not given even a single thought, and it makes for a very unstable platform that they're building MoP on.

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