Upcoming talent change gutting

[Tharkkun]

Never said anything about the same spec, though I wasn't specific either. I meant one spec as AoE (Demo for example) and another as ST (Destro for example).

Still holding out that they realize how retarded this change is and revert it or come up with a better "tax". they can't integrate specs core toolkits as much as they have into the talent system and then slap that type of talent changing restriction on. Absurd

Yeah I'm done debating this. I have my opinion and it differs from a good chunk of the posters here. Blizzard will either change it or stick with it. Either way after a month of it being live no one will think twice about it again.

[RedGamer030]

Clearly trolling. The intention is for it to be so expensive that the typical player cannot afford to carry them.

I was originally confused by your post, but it makes sense now. You are forewarning that your above comment is "clearly trolling." Understood.

[Donair]

can you talk about real life with that post count?

lmao. rekt. Was thinking the same thing.

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Wow..I wonder how you talk if something really bad happens in your life.

can you talk about real life with that post count?

Lmao

Rekt. Was thinking the same thing.

[TheLimonTree]

Read the person I replied to.

He posts about how it's not that bad.
You reply about how people who approve of this are just insulting others and a quip exaggerating the inconvenience
I point out it's not that hard to buy a few items ahead of time.

seems relevant to me.

[kamuimac]

lmao. rekt. Was thinking the same thing.

i can speak for him but ... my advice get a job/position which lets you read mmochamp/post during work hours ^^

[Raiju]

Repair bot is a 1 time cost, feasts don't cost 2-5k each.

feasts cost a lot more than 2k start of expansion generally. Once again - before hte mop-wod inflation.

[Deleted]

You have this backwards, imo.

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

Almost every other MMORPG out there talents can't be changed at all unless you pay some high cost, do something extreme.

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.

In a raid your "diversity" results in either

(a) a single-target talented afflock feeling like shit on anything other than single target

or

(b) said single-target afflock being told "sorry, tonight's progress boss isn't single target so we aren't taking you


And the likely outcome would be levelling two afflocks with all the tedium that implies and specialising them

Then you've got the added spice that some classes are invariably less pidgeon-holed by their talent choices than others. From what I can see warlocks are particularly bottled up by their talent choices, at least in demo and affy, and maybe some other classes aren't.

The days of Warcraft as an "RPG" are long gone and good riddance. Most player and certainly most raiders do not go into raids thinking "ooh, I will do crap damage and maybe cost my guild a boss kill, but at least I'm faithful to my chosen class identity"

But you know, at the end of the day, people will just grit their teeth, pay the new "raid tax" and swap talents just like they do now.

It's nothing more than another tax, like flasks, pots, runes and food. And progression raiders will quite rightly kick players who refuse to do it.

[Deleted]

Yes, but a player can't change their class design, they have to accept it. However, affy's weaknesses resulted in lots of players just not playing it - they just played destruction.

The basic point remains - it's it completely obvious that the Legion talent system is designed from the ground up to make talents much more critical and to induce players to want and need to change them as a boss encounter demands.

We've got this weird thing where Blizz make talent choices fairly trivial and make huge efforts to avoid the old "cookie cutter talent" problem (you chose your talents by looking up the best build on Icy Veins and never changed it)...and even make it trivially easy to swap them around

Now in Legion they make talents more important than they ever were by making what were baseline abilities talents, and by making AOE/Cleave/single target talents stronger and mutually exclusive ...and then they decide, hey no, we don't want players swapping talents around even though we designed the system from the ground up to make them need to!

I repeat, this is nothing more than a "raid tax" and it's only purpose is to make raiders play world content more to obtain the mats to make the reagents or to grind the gold to pay for them. No different to food/pots/flasks/runes, which only exist as a cheap way to "keep world content relevant" as the Blizz jargon goes. It all adds up to more game hours played

And I note you completely ignored point (a)

It is just no fun at all to feel like a gimp in any encounter - you have to put up with it if Blizz decided your class/spec is going to be bad at something, it is worse when they dangle the ability to be better at something but then put a whole bunch of little hurdles to jump in front of it to do so

It's not as if there's gong to be anything remotely interesting or fun about either grinding the cost of the reagent or hearthing/summoning sessions within raids.

That was bad enough in the old days when talent builds were way more fixed and players had very little need to change them. It happened more often when people changed specialisation.

Personally I think it's way more fun to be able to make situational choices as required than it is to either be locked into a role that just makes you feel like you're not contributing as much as the guy next to you, or to have to jump through extra hoops that are nothing but tedious.

It's just a raid tax, that's all, and we got plenty of those already.

And we are bound to have the inevitable problem that some classes are much more dependent on talents than others. I'm willing to be that some classes - cough hunters cough - that will end up being way less dependent on talents and will do a boss and completely dominate trash pulls and mini-bosses

Yeah, you can say that these do not matter, but no-one likes to feel like a gimp in any situation, and honestly, some of the biggest laughs in a raid can be had by pulling massive numbers via AOE

[Deleted]

I think they should just put a CD on talent swaps so you can just keep changing them for trash packs and then back for bosses but the CD resets after death/boss reset so you can easily change talents after a swipe, like Blood Lust works now.

This might solve the issues that blizzard for some reason has with free talent changes but also not cost raiders anything who will be changing talents between bosses.

[Fabinas]

While i am for this talent change, reading most posts here and in the gold spec swap threads, i find it strange that Blizzard's choices are either to "annoy" spec swappers, taxing hybrid classes or "annoy" talent swappers, taxing pure dps specs. Sure, there are hybrids who dont swap specs as often, but play one spec and switch talents or pure dps classes who spec swap because of better toolkit and don't bother much with talents (plus, spec swapping can also lead to talent switch). Thing is, by removing dual spec, noone can dodge the talent swapping by having 2x same spec choices with different talents.

[Xaviaton]

Yes! Legion is all about class/spec identity. I am so painfully tired of not having to make any actual choices in regards to your spec in WoW with dual-spec and it looked even worse in Legion. This is great news in my book.

[Deleted]

This is pure gold.

Blizzard: "We want players to make meaningful choices when it comes to talents. In order to do that, we remove the ability to switch talents on the fly. To amplify this idea further, we give you the ability to create tomes that make your meaningful choices obsolete.

Behold, for our ideas are soaked in greatness."

[Dagzter]

Yes! Legion is all about class/spec identity.

You already have 'class/spec identity'. You have this by having selected both a class and a specialization within the aforementioned class. You also have Race and Faction identity, if finding a specific demographic to compartmentalize yourself into is integral to your gameplay experience.

I am so painfully tired of not having to make any actual choices in regards to your spec in WoW with dual-spec and it looked even worse in Legion. This is great news in my book.

I'm afraid you are going to be disappointed if you genuinely believe this is going to promote 'actual choice'. Ultimately, this will boil down to two scenarios:

(1) In Raiding (anything higher than LFR, that is), absolutely nothing will change as player will continue to min/max their approach to boss encounters (and to a lesser extent substantial trash packs). This is because the entire Talent System has been designed from the ground up to promote talent swapping in order to maximize effectiveness in any given situation. Indeed, this has actually only been further exacerbated in Legion, as Blizzard's design philosophy, evidenced by the current iteration of the talent system available in Beta, is to ask the individual player to make a competitive choice on a given talent row to spec for either Single-Target, AoE, or Cleave; or Burst and Sustained damage etc. This ensure that all raiders will absolutely have to adapt their talent choices between fights in order to play optimally.

Therefore, in this instance, all that really has been added is an additional cost and inconvenience for the raid team, but this in itself is probably not going to be much of an issue - guilds are rich these days and generally you'll find many rather altruistic players supplying the necessary reagent/resources so as to mitigate the inconvenience for their fellow players. Hey-ho.

(2) In practically all other content, this will simply lead to the re-establishment of cookie-cutter builds which are seen to be the satisfactory middle-ground for each spec. I suspect, and this is subjective opinion of course, that the vast majority of players will simply not bother with the hassle of changing talents whilst questing out in the world, running dungeons, participating in world quests etc. What will happen is that a standard selection of talents will be made, likely influenced by a variety of sources such as Icy Veins, which takes into consideration each talent row and plots it against a mean average of the types of situations you are likely to encounter out in the game world. The likely outcome is that you'll have specs who are simply better off spec'ing into, say, Single-Target as a rule (rather than bothering with AoE), who will consequently be put into situations where their lack of AoE capability compromises their ability to play their spec as well as they could. This inconveniences them, their friends, their groups and anyone else they meet out in the game world; however, as the only other option is to 'BRB' and head to a suitable rest-area to correct this problem, the likelihood is that they will just not bother - I wouldn't even particularly blame them.

In the end, it will simply devolve into choosing your cookie-cutter build once and then forgetting about it for the rest of your time in the expansion.

But dat class identity doh!

[MkGuyver]

ppl will hearthstone out, get resummoned and after a while blizz will either nerf hearthstones or undo these changes

[deadman1]

He posts about how it's not that bad.
You reply about how people who approve of this are just insulting others and a quip exaggerating the inconvenience
I point out it's not that hard to buy a few items ahead of time.

seems relevant to me.

He implied that we would have to go to cities, I replied that going to cities wont work. Also don't say "wah wah" means it isn't that bad, it's condescending BS.

Again if you want to talk read the context.

Oh wah wah!!!! We actually have to visit our class trainers for once!

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feasts cost a lot more than 2k start of expansion generally. Once again - before hte mop-wod inflation.

I don't agree, I remember them being closer to 1k at the start of WoD, and again for the umpteenth time, if gold isn't available as easily is Legion, the inflation won't last.

I feel like I've said this before, if it costs too much that will force people to hearth to change talents, if people have to hearth just to change talents, then the outrage will grow exponentially. It's not a viable mechanic to have to break the bank or put the raid on hold for 5-10 minutes.

Not only is that not viable but it's BAD game design.

[Deliverer]

People are exaggurating with this line of thinking.

In guilds that do that, an extreme minority, they -already- swap out any class if another class would be more optimal anyhow. Every other guild I know is absolutely fine the majority of the raid not being exactly the 100% most optimal class. And when it comes to mechanic, I've not seen a single boss in WoD in which an afflock wouldn't have been useful, even if not optimal. Let's not exaggurate that afflocks were designed so they could only do strong single target damage, they also were very strong at fights that allowed them to multi-DoT high health targets. Most classes and specs are always specialized in more than one "gameplay aspect": single target, cleave, AoE, multi-Dotting, burst, etc.

It's not a minority it's every guild that progress mythic that does that you just can't play sub optimal in mythic

[Deliverer]

Uh, I've been 13/13M since over half a year, and been raidtesting on alpha / beta now.

No, my guild even killed Xul'horac Mythic without any rogues and deathknights to cheeze the black holes. No definitely not every mythic guild does that, even my old world top #3 guild (years ago) didn't do that.

The majority of mythic guilds definitely don't make sure they have the perfect class setup for every boss either. They're often happy to do it "with what they have", and "what they have" is good enough. Mythic isn't -that- demanding when it comes to class or spec setup. There already is a large margin to let people play whatever they want / got.

Of course you work around with what you have and don't want a perfect comp if you are not cutting edge but from there to say you can play what you like it just ain't true because some specs are just better than other that's why you don't see locks playing demo outside of a couple of fights, rogs playing assassination or hunters playing survival or Bm. And the same can be said for talents you can't go in with a talent instead of a much better one because you like it more.

[Deliverer]

You already have to pay repairs, pots, flasks and probably even runes since they said they liked the rune system. I don't think having one item for respeccing is a good thing with the current talent system. It's just a waste of gold for organized guilds and no pugs will ever put down the damn thing for respeccing if it is not some organized pug. Same can be said for dungeons if you were not in a city when you get teleport.
If during progress we might need some more single target or aoe and have a couple of people swap talents I have to either waste the item so they can respecc and eventually put a new one after if the new tactic isn't working or have people going to dala and put down a portal to summon them back.
I won't have limited time next expansion when raiding because my new guild raid quite a lot but in the 9 hour guild I've been this expansion that would be just a waste of time.
Some casual guilds won't probably have the money to buy 4/5 of these items for a raid night, hell you would need to put down one to go aoe on trash if the previous boss you killed was a single target fight.

This talent system is made for people to often swap talents if they want to put this barrier to talent swap then they should go back to vanilla-Cata model.

[TheLimonTree]

He implied that we would have to go to cities, I replied that going to cities wont work.

You have to be purposefully misreading everything, because I literally just said that.

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Oh wah wah!!!! We actually have to visit our class trainers for once!

Ok, sure he's condescending, but his message is still there.

Common thread of people that like this change, a lot of them throw insults out instead of making civil comments.

"don't pull the raid boss I have to pop back to dalaran to respec for this fight can you 29 other people just wait for me"

Would be a decent argument against it if it wasn't for the fact you can...

Or you know, use one of those tomes they're adding that lets everyone nearby change talents? just an idea.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Now stop stop stop people, is this change about changing specs or talents in a spec you currently have?

Because I'm all for this change when it comes to changing specs; but having to use a consumable after every trash pack in a raid because you need to change your aoe talents to ST talents and vice versa, as always, is stupid as hell.

This is where I take issue with it, changing at between AoE and ST talents for raid bosses is where I changed talents the majority of the time. It seems kinda stupid to me to require the tome to be dropped after every boss so 1/4 or more of the raid can swap between their AoE and ST talents.