Upcoming talent change gutting

[Deleted]

I have to ask what's wrong with the current system but add triple (quad for Druids) spec? I don't see why this change is needed. Only reason I see for it, is to give Scribes something to keep them relevant with glyphs gone

[Balir]

There is nothing wrong with this change. Just a bunch of hipster/fotm blizz haters finding another minor thing to rage at.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I don't have a huge problem with the change honestly. I am kinda over the phase of my life where Blizzard can surprise me or get a rise out of with their huge swings as they knee jerk around how they design the game. Which I kinda feel this is. A classic knee jerk. I do think they have some point in talents needing to feel more important than a dip switch you hit constantly. But I think it could have been more easily handled by just tossing a 5 to 10 minute CD on each row of talents between changes instead of a forced travel back to town. That way your not going to be talent switching on every pack of trash. But you can adjust and try new things on bosses and adapt them every couple pulls as you progress as you learn the boss. For me it feels like a solid middle ground that accomplishes most of everything Blizzard wants but still leaves adaptable play style alive without wasting everyone's time when you realize your talents just happen to be garbage for a particular boss.

[Relapses]

It's false to pretend that on every single boss everyone should be specced one way or the other. There might be room for both a ST Feral and an AoE Feral druid in the same raid, in fact, it might even be optimal to have a diversity of them, and even if that isn't the case on a single particular boss, for example the AoE Feral is subpar on a specific boss it might very well be the case that you'll need a good geared AoE Feral on a boss afterwards, so you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by having sat him out.

You must raid in extremely different raids than I do. Maybe in Mythic HFC with bloated ilvls and shit you're right, it doesn't matter. But for progression raiding and ESPECIALLY top 100 raiding, you absolutely must use the proper talents if you want to have a raid spot. That's exactly what often separates a player in the top 100 from the plethora of players below -- the ability to discern proper talent selection and the ability to maximize their personal performance.

[Nachtigal]

The concept of talents in pre-MoP were fundamentally different and the exact reason why MoP changed it was because Blizzard felt even though there were many talents, most of the players just used whatever "cookie cutter" spec was best. The option of "choice" is exactly why they made the change. And now they're going directly against that by making the option for change prohibited by an erroneous, idiotic mechanic that doesn't really make the game feel any more immersive and encourages players to use suboptimal talents.

To this day things are cookie cutter anyways, every death knight will use X talent because it's the highest dps gain on fight Y.
You cannot argue against things being "cookie cutter" when you're preaching in the name of optimality.
When you want everyone to be optimal, there is only one way of being optimal. Everyone will be cookie cutter.

This game was never designed to have every class able to bring anything and everything to the table, and it's time it went back to it's roots.
When every class can do the same thing as everybody else, what's the point in having 13 different classes? At that point, all the differences are strictly visual.

Maybe Blizzard doesn't want DK's to be good at AoE, and wants them to be really good at ST, so you'll want a DK in your group for ST, and a hunter in your group for AoE.

[kamuimac]

There is nothing wrong with this change. Just a bunch of hipster/fotm blizz haters finding another minor thing to rage at.

so according to you speccin into ST talents for ST fight is considered as being "hipser/fotm" .... ye .... dunno really how to comment that lv of ....

[Deleted]

Helped/boosted a friend through the WoD CMs last night. Number of talents switched varied between 5 and around 15. Yeah, 10+.

Again though, if tuning stays the way it is right now, on beta then you'll be forced to switch talents even in normal dungeons. They are way harder that what you're used to and every class now has very clear singel and multi target talents so that no class is able to handle both single target and AOE with the same talents.

Talents switched, not talent switches. The difference is, you pay per talent switch session, not per talent - you drop a book, switch any number of talents, go. Next boss, next book. Etc.

Also, normal dungeons are probably overtuned on beta, you can mark my words: anything lower than Mythic will be doable as is. You'll typically run them specced for AoE and burst rather than sustain, and that's it. Serious dps checks on bosses on normal, or even heroic, ain't gonna happen.

You must raid in extremely different raids than I do. Maybe in Mythic HFC with bloated ilvls and shit you're right, it doesn't matter. But for progression raiding and ESPECIALLY top 100 raiding, you absolutely must use the proper talents if you want to have a raid spot. That's exactly what often separates a player in the top 100 from the plethora of players below -- the ability to discern proper talent selection and the ability to maximize their personal performance.

Ofc. You have people reassign on the spot, based on RL's decision to push more into the boss or more on the adds etc. That's why any raiding guild will have a bank tab of tomes. Or 2 ;]

[Deleted]

This is a good change. It would suck having ro respec every pull for optimal setup if youre not doing that youre saying fuck you to your fellow group

It makes the problem you describe worse, because the talent system is designed so that you cannot be optimal without switching talents. All of the single target/aoe/cleave talents are mutually exclusive, it is simply not possible to have any talent build that makes you good at one thing without making you bad at another.

Having a talent system as it was previously, where talents were mostly style choices (which itself was brought in because of the old "mandatory build problem", where people just looked up on Icy Veins the highest dps build and used it) - a talent change cost was fine.

However, in Legion, you will absolutely have to change talents. And change a lot of them. Probably at every boss. Because they are designed to make you do that.

Look at the affliction warlock - you absolutely MUST take Sow the Seeds and Phantom Sigularity as talent to do AOE. However, taking Sow the Seeds/Singularity is a substantial dps loss compared to the other two talents in every other situation.

They removed Burning Rush (speed), teleport and temporary shield from being baseline and made them into mutually exclusive talents. You can have mobility or survivability, but not both.

The key to raid variety is to make every successive boss have different mechanics. All of the raid wings had a single target boss, a cleave boss, and so on.

Talents in Legion are far more critical and important than they have been for a long time.

What they have done is do away with a trivial cost for something most people will do far less in Legion (switching specs, let alone changing primary specs you just won't do, because of the artefact) - but instead they added a stupid cost to changing talents, which the game design in Legion will require most players to do more and more often.

You will either end up pidgeon-holed into a role specialisation ("Yay, I can be good at AOE but crap at everything else") OR you will have to do what most raiders will be compelled to do - swap talents around almost constantly.

And they have attached a cost to that. The reason is obvious - it adds up to more hours of gameplay obtained at virtually no development cost, because it will induce players to farm the mats or the gold to get yet another stack of raid consumables

Exactly the reason we have food buffs, flasks and pots. You need them as a competent raider, and to get them, you have to do gathering for the mats and level the professions, or you have to farm the gold to pay someone else to do it. It all adds up to more hours spent playing WoW.

[Relapses]

A game should never be balanced for outliers, top or bottom.

And even when I was in a world top #5 guild a few years ago, things still weren't as strict as you make them out to be. Some people played the specs they enjoyed still, even if it wasn't the most optimal even in those kind of high pressure guilds people understood the importance of letting people play what they enjoy to play.

Sure, there's plenty of try-hard shitty "let's pointlessly exaggurate, cuz we're #hardcore" raidguilds out there, but they're idiots, and I wouldn't cater the game to them either.

Again, you're operating under this idea that this is somehow going to stop players from retalenting. It won't because these raiders often go to enormous extremes to make sure they have an upper hand so bringing the requisite number of inscription items/waiting for players to retalent in town will just become yet another reality of raiding. (6x split raiding says hi.) I'm not asking Blizzard to cater to these players but I am questioning the reasoning behind it since it won't change anything that they wouldn't have done anyway...other than add an artificial tax/time investment to the process.

[Deleted]

And you thought that was good design? You thought it was fun doing that?.

It's more fun that being pidgeon-holed into one role - trust me, I played an afflock and "good at single target and crap at everything else" is absolutely zero fun

In your hypothetical "you make a serous choice in your talents and stick with it" you are just pidegon-holing yourself. Talents have a far bigger impact on gameplay than they do in Draenor (where talents are mostly about playstyle but don't have big impacts on performance as they are all fairly equalised in the tiers) - not only are "target talents" mutually exclusive (AOE/cleave/ST ones lock each other out), but talents in many cases have replaced baseline abilities.

Talent importance and the ability and need to swap them around have greatly increased in Legion - and now they are making it much harder to do so. You can either swap talents around or you can be garbage at anything you don't happen to have talented for.

The moment I saw the Legion talent trees my first reaction was "wow, I have they have a system or addon that lets you store and retrieve talent builds because you're going to have to constantly fiddle around with them"

Instead we get this bullshit.

[Deleted]

Again, you're operating under this idea that this is somehow going to stop players from retalenting. It won't because these raiders often go to enormous extremes to make sure they have an upper hand so bringing the requisite number of inscription items/waiting for players to retalent in town will just become yet another reality of raiding. (6x split raiding says hi.) I'm not asking Blizzard to cater to these players but I am questioning the reasoning behind it since it won't change anything that they wouldn't have done anyway...other than add an artificial tax/time investment to the process.

THIS. It won't stop raiders from retalenting, it just makes raiding a bigger pain in the ass without it needing to be. As you so aptly point out, it is nothing other than a rather tedious tax on raiding, like flasks/food/pots/ (and previously gems and enchants)

Raids are really the only place you will change talents and are the one place where an extra ineffectual tax on fun is not needed, outside of raids changing talents is not necessary and this change will not be stopping anyone from doing what they wouldn't be bothering with anyway


As a raider I WILL be changing talents (I'd rightly get kicked if I did not), so this change will not change what I do, it just adds an extra layer of rather tedious work to do it.

Outside of raids you don't need to give a crap about talents

For PVP, my guess is that there will simply be all-round-best talent builds and people will just stick with those.

- - - Updated - - -

They sadly, still allow you to respec. Wether it's fun or not is subjective, and I also assume Blizzard would adjust their content design with that in mind. There are many fights in Mythic HFC on which I play Affliction, even if I could pad the meters more with an AoE spec.

I think that having to respec into say demo you don't like because it's less tedious than re-talenting affliction you do like is dreadful design, and undermines the entire point of having talents.

Unfortunately, I think one of the responses to this change will simply be having an AOE talents spec and a ST spec, and swapping between those. They'll probably sticking-plaster THAT to make it even worse than the retalenting costs.

-sigh-

I honestly cannot see why they thought this change was a good idea at all.

[Relapses]

That isn't much of an issue anyhow. Basically you're admitting not much will change, except for perhaps a decrease in pointless min-max respeccing of talents for bosses which are already on farm.

I mean, if you go back to my first post on this matter that's pretty much exactly what I said. I understand the WHY, I just don't agree with it since it's added extra bullshit. The other thing I dislike is that for mainstream players it sends a message that it's generally okay not to experiment with talent choice, which imo will only further the gap between players who raid and players who don't. I also further disagree with this contention of yours that it will somehow create "talent identity." It'll just mean there will be, on average, far more people playing the game with suboptimal talents. Again, imo, NOT a good thing.

[Aggrophobic]

Talents switched, not talent switches. The difference is, you pay per talent switch session, not per talent - you drop a book, switch any number of talents, go. Next boss, next book. Etc.

Also, normal dungeons are probably overtuned on beta, you can mark my words: anything lower than Mythic will be doable as is. You'll typically run them specced for AoE and burst rather than sustain, and that's it. Serious dps checks on bosses on normal, or even heroic, ain't gonna happen.



Ofc. You have people reassign on the spot, based on RL's decision to push more into the boss or more on the adds etc. That's why any raiding guild will have a bank tab of tomes. Or 2 ;]

Thats right, switched between 5 to 15 times (not number of talents, times) . It's going to be even more in Legion as talents trees are designed so that they have to be switched all the time, for all classes and specs.

Again, punishing people for trying to do the right thing is bad in every way. Rewarding people for playing a suboptimal spec is just as bad. The new system does both.
This is by far the worst change Blizzard has ever suggested.

[BiggestNoob]

You have this backwards, imo.

It undermines the point of talents if you can easily swap back and forth between them.

The opposite is true. There are then a set of best talents that everyone runs rather than learning them all and choosing correctly based on need. Not being able to switch them removes depth from the game and results in cookie cutters that completely undermine player choice and that is undermining the entire point of having talents in the first place.

I've played many MMORPGs in which the only way to change your talent points was by starting a new character. It added more diversity between people that played the same class.

And if your build was bad in a tier you didn't raid, you just uninstalled, or spent an enormous time making something that was relevant, just for it to become irrelevant in short order. These games focus highly on grinding, and this plays into that.

I've played games like that where it took thousands of hours to max a character, and one PvP balance patch later and you were creating a level 1 character to make a build based on the meta change. That wasn't fun, because it basically forced everyone to bot, just because people wanted to play the game with a slightly different build.

There's a reason modern games allow you to respec. All of them.

[deadman1]

5-mans often yes, solo... not, but I don't think respeccing talents *on the fly* (rather than in town) while soloing is a real concern. Sure, someone might want to do it, but I don't really see too many people respeccing during questing for anything else than testing purposes.

Then who cares about limiting if "people don't do it much" anyways?

- - - Updated - - -

And how is this an "arbitrary time-sink?"

Because it adds no gameplay.

The system is nearly identical to the one we have today, with one extra step. There is seemingly no reason.

I'll link my other post so you can get a better idea of my stance.

But either way it doesn't stop people from hearthing or running to a quest hub to change their talents, it just makes it more inconvenient.

Beware personal anecdotes ahead - The reason I said "this doesn't make your talents more impactful is because I know for a fact if I forget to spec into mirror image while questing, I'm just going to mount up, run to the nearest inn and change. It's not going to make me say "oh well better just use inacnters flow" it's going to make me say "fuck now I have to go back to the quest hub and stand next to the innkeeper." Maybe not everyone will be like that, but for me as a mage, Mirror image helps me kill bigger mobs because they tank for me as a fluffy little mage.

So maybe you can see from my point of view why it's annoying. Right now I can just use a tome in my inventory, but now I'm going to have to go to an Inn (and I will) I won't just stick to the talents that I don't want to use. That isn't fun for me.

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WoW is an arbitrary time sink.

Exactly, so why artificially extend that for no gameplay gain?

[Lightup]

I don't understand who comes up with those ideas and how they get approved

[deadman1]

Instead Blizzard's 'MoP-WoD' talent system makes it more so that anyone can be anything at any time and can switch it around on the go, one mob pack he's a single target champion, and the next mob pack he suddenly is specialized in AoE damage. Which is dumb as fuck, tbh, might as well let people swap between Frost and Fire on the go (like it does)... might as well let people swap between being a Mage and a Warrior as well. There is almost no sense of class or character identity, that needs to be fixed.

This whole "swapping on the go to change into anything you want at anytime" is counter to MMORPG design.

Slippery slope argument.

Also very few people are asking for no restrictions, we are just asking for different restrictions.

The new one in Legion isn't going to obtain the goal that you want, I don't know how you can't see that. People are going to switch. While questing they are going to run back to the quest hub to change their talents. While in CMs Mythic dungeons and Raids people are going to use the new reagent. The only thing it will cut down on is switching talents for raid trash maybe ... So it doesn't actually stop anyone from switching, it doesn't make any choices more "impactful" it just makes it slightly more annoying to change.

In the end IF someone WANTS to change, they will. Period.

[Dhrizzle]

I hope warlocks are ready to summon people before every boss when they leave to respec.

We have summoning stones nowadays.

[Deleted]

Most of the classes seem to have interesting rotations and talents that change them up. (i've tried all of them on the beta)

The hunter falls short in this category. I especially do not know what whent through their mind when creating the BM spec.
Maybe blizzard literally just think that people who play hunters are looking for an easier time at PvE and as thus is giving it to them.(no offence)

THe DH's havoc rotation is also kinda bland, but it has a lot of utility to make up for it(i guess).

[Dhrizzle]

This is literally one of the stupidest things I've ever seen from Blizzard.

In top guilds, players are going to change talents based on the encounter so it's just going to be yet another fucking thing for guilds to farm ridiculous amounts of materials for just so players can switch talents freely. Either that or further the dependence of Warlocks to summon people in who leave for talent changes. In all, it just inconveniences many so that Blizzard can further this ideology of "choices have meaning." Ridiculous. Stupid. I hope to God this gets changed before going live.

What do you find ridiculous about the amount of mats needed?