The change that will make me quit

[Beardyface]

Your crude examples of how tomes are going to ruin timed mythic runs have nothing to do with tomes themselves, only what happens when you have a disorganized and amateur group. If you want to do better, plan better.

These new tomes will be an inconvenience and gold sink, but that's about it. Everything else you wrote was simply aggrandizing to get the point across that you don't like this change. It's fine not to like it, but at least be realistic with your complaints.

So, what do you have to say to the people who PuG, then? Do you honestly think that this won't be a problem in pick up groups? Which, again, consist of the vast majority of players.

Whether or not I overreacted to an idea can be argued, but overreaction or not, it doesn't make it a good idea. Or, in other words:

Like I said before, you can rationalize anything, but that doesn't make it right.

[Archimtiros]

So, what do you have to say to the people who PuG, then? Do you honestly think that this won't be a problem in pick up groups? Which, again, consist of the vast majority of players.

As in my previous post, I'd say that the difficulty isn't designed to be pugged, so it's a challenge you simply have to learn to overcome if you want to pursue the content.

That isn't to say that pugs can't accomplish those difficulties. There are plenty of players, myself included, who have led pug groups through the hardest game difficulties, and in doing so you quickly learn what behavior to tolerate and what rules need enforcing.

Whether or not I overreacted to an idea can be argued, but overreaction or not, it doesn't make it a good idea. Or, in other words:

I didn't say you overreacted, I said you were aggrandizing to make your points. Those are two very different things. Your "examples" of the player who has to constantly drop tomes and was always out of materials so had to log on an alt and mail stuff were representative of an issue with player preparedness, not one caused by the addition of tomes. Using a tome and changing a talent is hardly time consuming, it takes a handful of seconds at most, making it a logistics issue that any group leader worth their crown should be able to handle.

I'd also suggest not taking my words out of context, especially when the quote in question is regarding a wildly different subject and you miss the mark on their meaning altogether.

[ghdan]

Sounds like they are giving Warlocks something to do... gotta change your talents before a boss, everyone hearth in order and change things, then summon back.

[Shadowbane]

I get where they were coming from. The talents we have now aren't really talents at all. They're just another spell-book of abilities we can swap out for another at leisure. Everything is reduced to the PvP talent, the AoE talent, or the PvE talent. You can pick any talent and it's fine because if it doesn't perform well for one thing you just change it. If you ask me, the idea of a talent is that it isn't so conveniently interchangeable. When everyone can talent anything, anywhere, they lose their meaning.

[Archimtiros]

Sounds like they are giving Warlocks something to do... gotta change your talents before a boss, everyone hearth in order and change things, then summon back.

Well that's what tomes are for.

More than anything they're trying to reinforce the concept of preparedness, and in that regard I don't mind. Ideally, I do think that talents should be important choices, rather than something that is swapped on a whim, but that creates an issue with game-balance, and so this is their attempt at a middle ground.

My only reservation comes from the fact that many players simply don't care. Even at the highest levels of play, there are many that don't take the game seriously, nor do they consider the waste of time that their lack of preparedness causes for the rest of their group. Anyone who has done any kind of "serious" group content knows how painful nonchalant players are already, and adding another element on top of that isn't exactly a recipe for success.

That said, is it the developers fault? Not really. No matter how easy they make things in the game, there will always be lazy players, and it's hardly their obligation to cater to the lowest common denominator.

[Beardyface]

I didn't say you overreacted, I said you were aggrandizing to make your points. Those are two very different things.

Now you're splitting hairs.

I'd also suggest not taking my words out of context, especially when the quote in question is regarding a wildly different subject and you miss the mark on their meaning altogether.

If you like, but you said it better than I did.

I'll say it another way, then:

No analyzation of my reaction to this change makes it a good one.

The change is bad. Period. The talents as they exist are laid out and designed to be changed between freely. If they want talents to be a meaningful choice, they should have designed them in a totally different fashion.

[Pengalor]

If you're out in the world doing dailies, visit an Inn for a free swap.

Yeah, that totally doesn't break up the gameplay..."Oh look, a rare mob I want to try and solo, better switch over to some survivability talen...shit. OK *sigh*, I'll run over to the inn and come back" *run to the inn, switch talents, run back, mob is already dead, realize you now have to run back to the inn to change to your normal talents*.

EDIT:

I'm actually for this- there's truth to what they're saying. If you swap to the optimized talent for every encounter, what's the point of having talents at all? Might as well give all talents baseline and it become a question of which abilities you use depending on the fight.

You've got to be kidding me. Blizzard are the ones that designed the dungeons and raids to be like that in the first place. If they didn't want people switching constantly then they should figure out how to make both single target and AOE work out on every fight.

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I don't even think scribes will make much money off of this.
Guilds will have scribes crafting this stuff from gbank herbs, and pugs will not be using it.

Agreed, this isn't like feasts where a lot of guilds just can't be arsed to level cooking so they buy the food/feasts. Every guild I've been in had a leveled scribe and every guild had herb/ore donations that were well stocked.

[Archimtiros]

Now you're splitting hairs.

Considering that one is an assessment of your feelings toward the idea, and the other is an evaluation of reasoning the you used to condemn it, I'd say no, it's not.

To simplify:

• Saying "this destroys the game, I'm quitting" could be considered an overreaction, but it's an entirely personal assessment, and therefore it's not possible to argue against your feelings on the matter.
• Saying "this breaks the game because X, Y, Z" when X, Y and Z are over-exaggerated for emphasis would be an example of aggrandizing. You're using hyperbole to vindicate your claims.

To simplify further: if you don't like it, say you don't like it; don't shill bullshit to justify why you don't like it.

If you like, but you said it better than I did.

What I said previously had no bearing on this conversation, as they concerned wildly different points.

None of my responses to you have been an attempt to rationalize the introduction of tomes. All I've done is point out the failure of logic within your reasoning and explain to you why they do/not apply. That's not the same as rationalization, though you can see an example of rationalization here.

I'll say it another way, then:

No analyzation of my reaction to this change makes it a good one.

The change is bad. Period. The talents as they exist are laid out and designed to be changed between freely. If they want talents to be a meaningful choice, they should have designed them in a totally different fashion.

And as I said before, you're perfectly fine to think that, but don't expect people not to argue with you if you make inaccurate or over-exaggerated statements to attempt to defend that opinion.

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Yeah, that totally doesn't break up the gameplay..."Oh look, a rare mob I want to try and solo, better switch over to some survivability talen...shit. OK *sigh*, I'll run over to the inn and come back" *run to the inn, switch talents, run back, mob is already dead, realize you now have to run back to the inn to change to your normal talents*.

This is a fair complaint, though I think it's important to factor that most rares don't require you to change talents like that anymore. Granted, this depends on a variety of factors including relative gear level, but since MoP's Timeless Isle they've shifted away from rares being a "strength check" that need to be muscled through and toward being awareness based. In other words, they tend to be easy as long as you obey their mechanics (interrupt, move out of AoE, etc).

You've got to be kidding me. Blizzard are the ones that designed the dungeons and raids to be like that in the first place. If they didn't want people switching constantly then they should figure out how to make both single target and AOE work out on every fight.

More of a balance concern than a design one. Again, it's a fair point, but that's also where tomes come in. Consider that for every player that complains about having to change talents to optimize for every fight (which I tend to be one of), there is at least one other player who understands that you really don't have to and can still accomplish the encounter. This also depends heavily on your group makeup.

Agreed, this isn't like feasts where a lot of guilds just can't be arsed to level cooking so they buy the food/feasts. Every guild I've been in had a leveled scribe and every guild had herb/ore donations that were well stocked.

And that's precisely why dealing with tomes isn't going to be as big of a problem as people are making it seem right now. It'll be a concern very early on in the expansion, but after awhile they'll be as abundant and openly wasted as feasts.

[Pengalor]

This is a fair complaint, though I think it's important to factor that most rares don't require you to change talents like that anymore. Granted, this depends on a variety of factors including relative gear level, but since MoP's Timeless Isle they've shifted away from rares being a "strength check" that need to be muscled through and toward being awareness based. In other words, they tend to be easy as long as you obey their mechanics (interrupt, move out of AoE, etc).

Maybe for you. I play a hunter and I can't tell you how many times I've changed between talents depending on what I'm fighting (including switching between Lone Wolf and other talents because sometimes you want a pet and sometimes you don't). This change is incredibly frustrating for doing things out in the world for me. BTW, most rares aren't too hard but there are certainly a few that I had to talent specifically for in WoD (the void one that drops the pet in SMV springs to mind).

More of a balance concern than a design one. Again, it's a fair point, but that's also where tomes come in. Consider that for every player that complains about having to change talents to optimize for every fight (which I tend to be one of), there is at least one other player who understands that you really don't have to and can still accomplish the encounter. This also depends heavily on your group makeup.

That's not really a reasonable thing to expect. First off, there is a huge crowd of people who are focused on optimizing their play to the best of their abilities (I'm one of them). Secondly, my issue is with the ridiculous hypocrisy of their idea. They changed the talent system specifically to give people the freedom to switch talents to fit the situation and to give greater variability in what you could use in different fights. This change would fly in the face of the new talent system. Fact is, this probably hurts organized raiding the least. It does, however, hurt pugs, dungeons, and world content quite a bit. You can expect an organized raid group to have these new tomes (prohibitively expensive though they may be), you can not expect someone in a dungeon to drop one for a single player or for someone questing to carry these things around.

And that's precisely why dealing with tomes isn't going to be as big of a problem as people are making it seem right now. It'll be a concern very early on in the expansion, but after awhile they'll be as abundant and openly wasted as feasts.

Partial response above. I will say though that I think you are underestimating how expensive these are. They currently require 10 of one ink and 100 of another, plus the parchment cost, and that's all for a single use. I'm sure towards the middle or end of the expansion it might not be so bad but I don't know if limiting it to 'very early' is right, I could easily see this being expensive halfway through.

[Spiffums]

I'll bring the pitchforks, someone else get the torches.

This idea would have made a tiny bit of sense if they had not already designed Legion to be a system where all of your AoE abilities come from choosing talents that would be a DPS loss if used on single target fights. This idea they propose negates the things that made the current talent system superior to the talent trees.

It's supposed to make you think about what to choose instead of just going all AOE or all Single Target. People still got bosses down before talent switching became a thing.

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I get the feeling they'll amend that to also allow them to be changed in raid boss encounters, or make the tomes relatively easy to acquire.

Either way, if you'd miss out on an entire game purely because you can't change your talents easily then you're the type of person that I would be happy to see leave anyway. There's a thing called "adapting" that I think would work well for you because you have apparently not figured it out. I wasn't particularly happy about the idea of hearthing to change talents per boss but if that's the design they're going for then I'll figure out a way to work around it.

You and countless others need to understand the difference between "out of touch" and "design differs from what I want".

Just means you have to bring a scribe to every raid. Guilds farm stuff for raids now like pots and runes. It just adds another thing to farm for. If you want to change your talents very pull then take up scribing and herbing. It's not the end of the world.

Or you can wag a warlock and a mage to port people to and from the city before the pulls.

[Archimtiros]

Maybe for you. I play a hunter and I can't tell you how many times I've changed between talents depending on what I'm fighting (including switching between Lone Wolf and other talents because sometimes you want a pet and sometimes you don't). This change is incredibly frustrating for doing things out in the world for me. BTW, most rares aren't too hard but there are certainly a few that I had to talent specifically for in WoD (the void one that drops the pet in SMV springs to mind).

I dunno, I've played hunter fairly extensively, and I can say that I've never had a problem with rare mobs since the aforementioned design changes. If you are, I'd go so far as to say that you're probably ignoring the mobs mechanics and trying to muscle through it, as mentioned above. Granted this isn't always the players fault, as sometimes the encounter does a poor job of telegraphing those mechanics beforehand.

There's also the larger theme behind the change to remember: Preparation. If you're doing open world content, set up your talents appropriately before you start, and this is much less of an issue. Either way, you certainly shouldn't need to be changing your talents for every other mob or zone. If you are, it's much more likely that your class has a design problem, or you have a problem playing it.

Where I can see it being a hassle is if you want to use one set of talents for open world and another for dungeons, and are queuing while questing, without the ability to return to a "rest" spot before entering the dungeon. This could be fixed easily by setting the entrance area of the dungeons, where you typically get quests, to a rest spot allowing free change of talents.

That's not really a reasonable thing to expect. First off, there is a huge crowd of people who are focused on optimizing their play to the best of their abilities (I'm one of them). Secondly, my issue is with the ridiculous hypocrisy of their idea. They changed the talent system specifically to give people the freedom to switch talents to fit the situation and to give greater variability in what you could use in different fights. This change would fly in the face of the new talent system. Fact is, this probably hurts organized raiding the least. It does, however, hurt pugs, dungeons, and world content quite a bit. You can expect an organized raid group to have these new tomes (prohibitively expensive though they may be), you can not expect someone in a dungeon to drop one for a single player or for someone questing to carry these things around.

Isn't that exactly what I said? It's a difficult argument to make because there are parties in both the "you must optimize for everything" and the "you don't have to optimize for everything" camps?

The problem with the hypocrisy argument is that it doesn't take into account the fact that this is an evolving game. Every time they make a decision their being hypocritical; hell people said the same thing about going from the old 31+ talent system to "free" talents, and it comes up every week with regards to flying. Yes, they changed to this style of talents to give players more freedom of choice... and now they've decided that it gave them too much freedom of choice, so they're restricting it. You still have the freedom to choose, mind, it just comes at a cost.

Sure, it's easier to have tomes available in raids when you can lean on your other 19 teammates, but at the same time, you're encouraged to change talents to optimize much more for raids than you are other content. If you're changing talents every boss in dungeons or every 5 minutes in the open world, you're probably over doing it, mythic difficulty notwithstanding.

Partial response above. I will say though that I think you are underestimating how expensive these are. They currently require 10 of one ink and 100 of another, plus the parchment cost, and that's all for a single use. I'm sure towards the middle or end of the expansion it might not be so bad but I don't know if limiting it to 'very early' is right, I could easily see this being expensive halfway through.

They're certainly expensive, though it's completely possible the material cost will change, but that's where economies come in. You think there won't be an explosion of herbalists and inscriptionists due to this? It happens every time there's a new "rare" material introduced, whether it's two-tier Flasks, Feasts, Savage Bloods, Epic Gems, or Augment Runes, and this will be no different. There's also a distinct lack of continual gold sinks in the game, so I expect they'll be a fairly common commodity by the end of the first tier, if not before.

[Kioshi]

Thought I would help you out here.

https://youtu.be/qS7nqwGt4-I

[Pengalor]

I dunno, I've played hunter fairly extensively, and I can say that I've never had a problem with rare mobs since the aforementioned design changes. If you are, I'd go so far as to say that you're probably ignoring the mobs mechanics and trying to muscle through it, as mentioned above. Granted this isn't always the players fault, as sometimes the encounter does a poor job of advertising those mechanics beforehand.

Oh Jesus, here we go with this bullshit. No, it has nothing to do with the class being bad or my skill level. The fact that I even gave you a specific example of a mob and you conveniently ignored it shows me your argument doesn't really have a leg to stand on, you are now just relying on assumptions about me.

There's also the larger theme behind the change to remember: Preparation. If you're doing open world content, set up your talents appropriately before you start, and this is much less of an issue. Either way, you certainly shouldn't need to be changing your talents for every other mob or zone. If you are, it's much more likely that your class has a design problem, or you have a problem with playing it.

I have already explained that sometimes you want different talents for different situations, even out in the world. Yet again with the bullshit assumptions though (as well as the hilariously hyperbolic 'changing for every mob'). If you're not interested in having a rational and intelligent discussion then just say so.

Where I can really see it being a hassle is if you want to use one set of talents for open world and another for dungeons, and are queuing while questing, without the ability to return to a "rest" spot before entering the dungeon. This could be fixed easily by setting the entrance area of the dungeons, where you typically get quests, to a rest spot allowing free change of talents.

Or...they could just keep it as it is now where there aren't any issues and they don't have to program in new 'safe zones' in dungeons that will probably cause other issues.

Isn't that exactly what I said? It's a difficult argument to make because there are parties in both the "you must optimize for everything" and the "you don't have to optimize for everything" camps?

The problem with the hypocrisy argument is that it doesn't take into account the fact that this is an evolving game. Every time they make a decision their being hypocritical; hell people said the same thing about going from the old 31+ talent system to "free" talents, and it comes up every week with regards to flying. Yes, they changed to this style of talents to give players more freedom of choice... and now they've decided that it gave them too much freedom of choice, so they're restricting it. You still have the freedom to choose, mind, it just comes at a cost.

It sounded like you were suggesting that you could just find one camp or the other depending on what you wanted, to which I was pointing out that it's not a reasonable expectation. Most people are going to want their group to be optimized and players should want to be optimized for their group.

As for the hypocrisy argument, there isn't a problem at all. This isn't like they changed the talent system, decided it doesn't work, and did something else. No, they changed it, desinged the fights to work with it (including Legion fights) and then decided that they didn't want people using the system the way they designed and intended it to work. It's like they are of two minds and can't figure out which direction they want to go. And I'm fine with a cost, just don't make it a ridiculous one that both requires another player to make it work or requires an insane amount of farming for something you might do several times in a single night. They could have slightly increased the price of the current Tome system and it wouldn't have been nearly as big of a deal. Then again, that's just like Blizzard to want to overcorrect on every change, buff, and nerf.

[Archimtiros]

Oh Jesus, here we go with this bullshit. No, it has nothing to do with the class being bad or my skill level. The fact that I even gave you a specific example of a mob and you conveniently ignored it shows me your argument doesn't really have a leg to stand on, you are now just relying on assumptions about me.

I didn't say you were, I was speaking in generalities in which I said "Either way, you certainly shouldn't need to be changing your talents for every other mob or zone. If you are, it's much more likely that your class has a design problem, or you have a problem playing it.". The point being not that you won't find the need to change talents once in a blue moon, but that you certainly shouldn't be changing talents constantly. Might there be a specific mob which breaks this mold? Absolutely. However, if there's only one, or even a scant handful of them, it's far more likely that the problem lies either in the class in question, or if every class has that problem, then the mob itself is overtuned.

What you conveniently ignored is that we're not talking about one specific mob in the game, we're talking about overall design, so take a deep breath and chill out a little bit.

I have already explained that sometimes you want different talents for different situations, even out in the world. Yet again with the bullshit assumptions though (as well as the hilariously hyperbolic 'changing for every mob'). If you're not interested in having a rational and intelligent discussion then just say so.

Actually you didn't explain anything, you made a blanket statement and so in response I did as well... and yet I'm the one being irrational? I'm going to repeat my earlier advice, chill out.

That said, if you want to provide some legitimate examples as to why you feel the need to switch talents back and forth on a regular basis during open world content, feel free to do so. It's key to remember however that "optimization" is much less of a concern for the open world content, as it's level of difficulty is substantially lower, allowing you to get by with many more talent combinations, so saying something like "I need Lone Wolf to grind mobs faster, and need to spec out of it to take on a rare mob" is going to be a pretty thin argument when you can simply play without Lone Wolf the whole time and still operate at 80% efficiency all the time.

Or...they could just keep it as it is now where there aren't any issues and they don't have to program in new 'safe zones' in dungeons that will probably cause other issues.

Well we both know that isn't going to happen, so put that dream to bed.

It sounded like you were suggesting that you could just find one camp or the other depending on what you wanted, to which I was pointing out that it's not a reasonable expectation. Most people are going to want their group to be optimized and players should want to be optimized for their group.

Not sure how, as that's not what I said. I also disagree with the assessment that most people are going to want to be optimized, as the game has far fewer power players than casual ones.

As for the hypocrisy argument, there isn't a problem at all. This isn't like they changed the talent system, decided it doesn't work, and did something else. No, they changed it, desinged the fights to work with it (including Legion fights) and then decided that they didn't want people using the system the way they designed and intended it to work. It's like they are of two minds and can't figure out which direction they want to go. And I'm fine with a cost, just don't make it a ridiculous one that both requires another player to make it work or requires an insane amount of farming for something you might do several times in a single night. They could have slightly increased the price of the current Tome system and it wouldn't have been nearly as big of a deal. Then again, that's just like Blizzard to want to overcorrect on every change, buff, and nerf.

Obviously they did decide it didn't work out because they are trying something else.

I disagree with your assessment of boss design as well, it isn't like we didn't have raids in which bosses intermittently favored different talent setups before this system came into being, and I do remember respeccing to deal with different encounters in the earlier expansions, it simply happened less often because it was too great a hassle. Instead players simply did what many will likely do after this change: pick the talents which work best for the majority of situations, or don't you remember Arms Warriors specced into Bladestorm on single target fights in Wrath?

I agree that the cost is high, as I've said before, and it would be nice if it were less intrusive... but at the same time consider that if they make it too cheap, there's effectively no change. They could make an individual use version which doesn't enable talent changing for the entire group at the cost of, say 10 pigment rather than 100, but then the cost becomes trivial, and doesn't accomplish their intended goal.

[stevenho]

I'm not sure why you guys are even arguing about this.
It adds absolutely no value to the game, all it does is create an annoyance.

[Warriorsarri]

Only reasoning I saw them give when they introduced this change was that people where switching talents constantly between trash packs and bosses. In raids this is a very minor thing, which I can guarantee very few did, I have a feeling they where mainly referring to Mythic+ Dungeons. If this change was implemented to make it so that you didn't switch talents for each pack in Dungeons, why not simply give it the Challenge mode treatment, only being able to change talents before you start the timer?

All this change does is give raiders a bigger headache, and makes outdoor content a lot more annoying. Sure, it will "only" be another feast that we will need to keep track off, but it's still a very useless change that simply doesn't make any sense.

[Murlocbait]

The more I think about it, the more I feel that a lot of the problems introduced in WoD and now going into Legion have been created by attempts to introduce (or reintroduce) old WoW concepts into the current game. Rep grinds via mindless killing instead of daily quests. Stripping out utility and CC from certain specs/classes to try to eliminate homogenization. Etc. And now this.

It seems like they want to try to put in the old feel of vanilla-LK talents, where you set it then went out and played. Changing talents was pretty rare, because it was a big investment of money and taking the time to go to your trainer and do it. That worked with the old talent trees. But the new talent system introduced in MoP just doesn't lend itself to that kind of limitation. It was designed from the ground up to offer more meaningful choices to players, so that we would want to experiment more and try out the different talents at different times. It was the fundamental foundation of the entire design.

Ham-fisting old limitations into the new design is inherently flawed. Even if they are intent on doing it, to do it properly would require a complete evaluation and redesign on the new talent system to make it all work. Instead, they're jamming an old idea into a new design where it just doesn't belong. And the best defense anyone can make for the decision is "It's not that bad." No one has offered a single explanation of what it brings to the game to make it more enjoyable or make the play experience more meaningful.

[Ehrenpanzer]

"But, in terms of the materials required, we're thinking of something that's more aimed at groups, and probably not the sort of thing an individual is likely to carry a stack of and use freely."

^ So its like tomes only prohibitively expensive. Great.

"X guild now recruiting warlocks"......

Seriously though.. every raid will now have a warlock so heroic+ raiders can do a hearth cycle for bosses for talents

[barackohmama]

I get where they were coming from. The talents we have now aren't really talents at all. They're just another spell-book of abilities we can swap out for another at leisure. Everything is reduced to the PvP talent, the AoE talent, or the PvE talent. You can pick any talent and it's fine because if it doesn't perform well for one thing you just change it. If you ask me, the idea of a talent is that it isn't so conveniently interchangeable. When everyone can talent anything, anywhere, they lose their meaning.

The whole talent system has been flawed from day one. it doesn't add much to the game, most spells could just be baseline and the game would be just as fun. Sure it might be engaging having to choose before every encounter, but even if spells are baseline you have to choose which one is the best to use for a particular situation. Only good thing about talents is that you can discuss with your guild what talent to pick etc, but that's not enough to counter all the hassle with the system.

[Cinemajicka]

Only reasoning I saw them give when they introduced this change was that people where switching talents constantly between trash packs and bosses. In raids this is a very minor thing, which I can guarantee very few did, I have a feeling they where mainly referring to Mythic+ Dungeons. If this change was implemented to make it so that you didn't switch talents for each pack in Dungeons, why not simply give it the Challenge mode treatment, only being able to change talents before you start the timer? .

This is how Mythic+ works. Once you start the timer your talents are locked in for the duration of the dungeon.