Talent system is a failure

[Banard]

Yeah my optimal talents change from fight to fight as a monk. Threads like this are just so ignorant. I played in Vanilla. I know the old talent trees and yes, you basically got a build and rarely, ever, respecced it. 90% of the talents were 'duhhh, obvious' choices. The old system gave the ILLUSION of flexibility because it had so many choices, but it was just that: an illusion.

Hi Will

how are you? did you read the thread? did you see what people are saying? did you see what i was saying?

(1) no one is advocating the old system...like the 9th time i typed this
(2) ok so your optimal talents change from fight to fight...you have a cookie cutter spec for each boss...cool.....is that fun? ...do you find that engaging? Are you like, man i can't wait for the next fight to change specs again..its so much fun! Or is it more an annoying un-engaging aspect of the game?

I can tell you as a hunter with 1 cookie cutter build its annoying as ^&*%$ when the monk forgets his tomes and has to hearth to respec and then get re-summon...oh what the lock called in sick.../dbm 5 min break

[Deleted]

I really recommend you see things for what they are and not for what you want them to be. It will save you much grief and perhaps give you peace.

I am at peace, thank you, and i do like the game, a lot in fact, but the talent tree is a failure, maybe it is not me who is seeing things the way he wants them to be XD.

[Golden]

Old talent trees were removed because there was never a "choice" there was always a optimal build.

Its been years with the new talent system, the goal was to give players a choice and step away from "cookie cutter builds"....and really besides a few instance its been 90% the same...there was an optimal build and you ignore the rest.

So in that sense...the talent system is a failure.

I don't want the developers wasting time "trying to make a each talent tier" a viable choice. Its time to bake the talents in...re-balance and move on. This feature has failed to its original goal.

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: i am not advocating to bring back the old system...just the new system do not solve the old system flaws of cookie cutter builds. Please note cookie cutter builds can change per boss or per style pve/pvp/dungeon etc...the issue is choice is an illusion.

Honestly, I'd like to go back to the system where one row was single target talents, one row was AoE talents, one row was mobility talents, etc. At least then, you could pick stuff towards your personal tastes a bit. This new system where every talent row is all a mix of stuff and you have to switch up your talents before after each boss is just annoying.

[Deleted]

II'll edit my first post so people can understand...i am not advocating to bring back the old system...

...which only makes your post even less agreeable, since actual talent trees offering customization of your toon were vastly superior to the boring table of banality that replaced them in MoP; additionally they allowed more than 3 viable specs on a class

just the new system do not solve the old system flaws.

Generally, replacing a car with a moped does not solve car problems, it just takes away the extra sears and trunk

so to answer some of this ...your first bullet...care or don't care about optimal build does not mean there isn't one. Removing the talents and baking them in does not change anything here. Alternative is just an illusion...and that is the argument i am trying to make.

On the contrary, as long as player plays for fun and not for absolute surety that the 3% dps increase given by talent X over Y, presence vs. absence of optimal builds means absolutely nothing.

on your 2nd point..sometimes certain classes have to re-adjust a talent or two....sometimes...not every one in the raid...especially not hunters... but in the end, how does this improve the game? How is clicking a book and clicking a talent tree before a pull = fun?

It isn't. It's another reason for me to miss the trees and dislike the table.

for your third point...the point of talent trees is to have alternatives ..in the old system and now...the reason they got rid of the old system was to add "choice"....but really is there choice? Or is there a optimal choice for a particular fight? That still isn't a choice.

There were many choices back then and there are some choices now. Of course, as long as your priority is absolute top potential dps/hps/surv, you will never have nearly as many choices as people whose priorities are different.

point four..why the hate on for discussing a game we all enjoy an play?

What WHAT on WHAT? You may want see my posts on other topics for samples of pure loathing or no-shit-taken, but hate is a big word. Also, we're not discussing a game we all enjoy. You presume to decide what is and isn't a waste of dev time and I call your presumption out.

bad morning?

I never realized that agreeing or not to your personal opinion on what does and doesn't constitute waste of dev time depends on the quality of my morning. Need to check that.

And from this point...do you play wow because of the talent system? do you log in and say...this talent system is amazing it makes me want to spend hours playing this game? How many people select things and forget about them and barley look at them?

Nothing about the talent system is "engaging" game play.

I play WoW because my GF doesn't like GW2 at all (no Triad) and SWTOR not enough (SF vs. fantasy). I did get her to almosy complete the sith lord storyline but then Legion came out and she got me to give it a try.
Character customization in all its aspects is core gameplay for me. Each time a create a new toon it takes ages, I spend a lot of my game time on xmogs and yes, talents are a huge thing for me in MMOs.
Certainly, the minitable is not too hot, especially compared to old talent trees, so here we actually agree: the new and axed talents are not very engaging indeed.
I know it can be baffling, but people have different tastes. Some want to top the meters, some want to have fun. I prefer to have fun. I kept playing my favourite specs when they got gutted and I keep taking sub-par talents if I like them for other reasons than pure dps contribution.

[Wavebossa]

Honestly, I'd like to go back to the system where one row was single target talents, one row was AoE talents, one row was mobility talents, etc. At least then, you could pick stuff towards your personal tastes a bit. This new system where every talent row is all a mix of stuff and you have to switch up your talents before after each boss is just annoying.

And here is where the difficulty lies for Blizzard. All 3 choices will need to be fair choices in all aspects of the game, while still being different enough from each other to justify them being separate talents.

Its a very tall task but I don't think its impossible.

That way you could choose what you like the best and roll with it until you feel like swapping, not because this boss or this encounter forces you to.

[Ladyoftheforest]

I am at peace, thank you, and i do like the game, a lot in fact, but the talent tree is a failure to me, maybe it is not me who is seeing things the way he wants them to be XD.

Fixed your post. I play several classes and the only class I feel that is limited to a cookie cutter build is Marksmanship hunter. The other 3 classes gives me sufficient choises to choose from. To be frank, I really have no wish to see every talent being a viable one. It would make the gameplay far too convoluted.

[Deleted]

I know it can be baffling, but people have different tastes. Some want to top the meters, some want to have fun. I prefer to have fun. I kept playing my favourite specs when they got gutted and I keep taking sub-par talents if I like them for other reasons than pure dps contribution.

It is not baffling, and there are always people who can get the best of a bad situation, but the fact that you do keep playing sub-par talents, and still enjoy the game, does not change the fact that there should be no sub-par talents in a well designed talent system.
Also when a talent that only provides DPS is sub-par it is quite difficult to find another contribution for it.

[corebit]

That is nice, but for me, the moment that any talent in any row is never the best option, or to put it better, it is always the worst one and by a huge margin, being it PVE or PVP, then that talent has no place in the game.
The tuning you talk about might solve some gross situations that we do have now, but trust me, there will always be talents that have absolutely no sense in any situation in game, and that is why i say the system is a failure.

Why is the system a failure when I just mentioned talents that are viable and players of all levels take them? If there are talents that are not useful, it's up to Blizzard to fix them. If certain talents are too mandatory, then as the developers mentioned in the Blizzcon panel, they may consider making them baseline.

What system WOULD YOU propose that supposedly offers true choice to the player?

[Wavebossa]

I really have no wish to see every talent being a viable one. It would make the gameplay far too convoluted

How? Please explain

[Deleted]

Sorry but the old talent tree system was horrendous

[Jotaux]

I think in WoD you had more options for talents but in legion you are pretty much locked in to a spec with maybe wiggle room with a mobility talent. You are discouraged from experimenting with different talents as well because you have to either spend an obscene amount of gold on a tome or hearth to a rested zone in order to change talents mid raid.

[Deleted]

Fixed your post. I play several classes and the only class I feel that is limited to a cookie cutter build is Marksmanship hunter. The other 3 classes gives me sufficient choises to choose from. To be frank, I really have no wish to see every talent being a viable one. It would make the gameplay far too convoluted.

Did you need so many posts to discover that i was all the time talking about MY opinion on the topic at hand?
Yeah i see that the talent tree system is fine FOR YOU.

[Yassy]

Compare that to BC and Wrath days where you literally could only build one way to be even playable. Theres a difference between playability and fringe dps gain.

Completely untrue. Unless you mean how talent trees and specs were often centered around their 31/41/51 point talents. But that was how classes were designed. Most players had slight variations to their builds because the trees were littered with soft utility/utility talents. Disarm Immunities, Stun resists, Threat reductions, Mana reductions. Talent builds could change as you got more and more gear as well. Mana talents became less necessary if you had more spirit, threat talents werent always needed if you had an incredibly good/geared tank(or thunderfury), crit and hit had their various caps which allowed for builds to pick up more utility, more damage, more something elsewhere. The specs werent so locked down that if you had 10 points mis-allocated that your class was unplayable. That's just completely wrong. Sure there might be SOME cases of it existing to a certain extent, but thats no different than now.

If an Arms warrior deviates from the current cookie cutter, they gut their damage. Shadow Priests without STM in comparison to Shadow Priests with STM are a completely different class in terms of performance. Especially in fights that favor the talent like Xavius where the imbalance becomes more pronounced.

[Wavebossa]

Sorry but the old talent tree system was horrendous

No one's advocating for the old talent tree. We are saying the new talent tree was introduced under the guise of "removing cookie cutter specs" and has failed completely in that regard.

Specs are far more cookie cutter now than they have ever been. Anyone who has played BC and Wrath knows this

[Deleted]

Why is the system a failure when I just mentioned talents that are viable and players of all levels take them? If there are talents that are not useful, it's up to Blizzard to fix them. If certain talents are too mandatory, then as the developers mentioned in the Blizzcon panel, they may consider making them baseline.

What system WOULD YOU propose that supposedly offers true choice to the player?

Yeah sorry you are right.
The talent tree it is not a failure of a system per se, it is blizzard implementation of it what has been, is and will be a failure, because expansion after expansion they are unable to make all talents in all rows viable for at least any situation in the game.

[Ladyoftheforest]

You're actually quite smart at working with what you have. But you should be finding better raiders, not lowering standards because they're sub par

That is not your call to make. Dendin's way of raiding and the atmosphere he tries to create is of his making, by his own right and standard. Not yours.

[corebit]

No one's advocating for the old talent tree. We are saying the new talent tree was introduced under the guise of "removing cookie cutter specs" and has failed completely in that regard.

Easy to say something is a failure. How about you come up with a talent system that removes all cookie cutter specs?

I don't know why people keep saying we need to ditch the current talent system, yet are unable to think up an alternative that solves all their gripes.

The current talent system is good, if A talent is cookie-cutter for A encounter, and B talent is cookie-cutter for B encounter then that is fine. Both these talents will see use in some way or another. We don't need to view "cookie-cutter" as some sort of plague or disease that makes the game unplayable. The problem lies in talents that see almost zero use, or talents that are too mandatory. Those need fixing, but we don't need to ditch the entire system.

[Deleted]

It is not baffling, and there are always people who can get the best of a bad situation, but the fact that you do keep playing sub-par talents, and still enjoy the game, does not change the fact that there should be no sub-par talents in a well designed talent system.
Also when a talent that only provides DPS is sub-par it is quite difficult to find another contribution for it.

Er, nope.
Firstly, well-designed talent system allows people to make choices. For example, choosing slightly higher dps vs. simpler rotation.
Secondly, there aren't quite so many cases where a talent provides bigger DPS exclusively and there is a competing talent on the same tier which also provides bigger DPS exclusively. One will usually offer slightly better dps for the cost of more complex rotation. Say, Stampede vs. Killer Cobra where one gives you extra button press while another makes Bestial Wrath develop an extra relationship with Aspect of the Wild. Or, say Barrage vs. Murder of Crows when one earns the hunters a whole new era of hate from everybody else and the other requires very careful timing on trash.
Over/underperforming combinations don't require fundamental redesign of the talent system or its complete removal, just adjustments to specific skills, so that, say, Machine Gun rotation does not completely trump any other frost DK options.

[Zeek Daniels]

Old talent trees were removed because there was never a "choice" there was always a optimal build.

Its been years with the new talent system, the goal was to give players a choice and step away from "cookie cutter builds"....and really besides a few instance its been 90% the same...there was an optimal build and you ignore the rest.

So in that sense...the talent system is a failure.

I don't want the developers wasting time "trying to make a each talent tier" a viable choice. Its time to bake the talents in...re-balance and move on. This feature has failed to its original goal.

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: i am not advocating to bring back the old system...just the new system do not solve the old system flaws of cookie cutter builds. Please note cookie cutter builds can change per boss or per style pve/pvp/dungeon etc...the issue is choice is an illusion.

As an elemental shaman i completely disagree. Talents are also there for people who cant play the "Most optimal" spec for the class. I personally dont like how Ascendance plays into our current class. I do however love lightning rod. I do really good dmg with Lit rod spec. Its also better for AoE.

Theres always been a cookie cutter build for ever class that performs better than the other builds but sometimes those builds dont work for everyone. But since you seem to be a "elite" player of course your only going to play the build that does the most dmg. Thats fine. But maybe u should play the other builds just for fun.

[procne]

I think the bigger problem is that blizzard revamps specs too much between expansions. Gotta learn my class from scratch every time. And at the same time they have to start balancing from scratch. Not speaking about cases where a spec needs overhaul because it's broken / boring.

It's nice they want to change things from time to time to make them more interesting. But at the same time I have 35 other specs to learn if I get bored with my current one.