Spec Changes: The Quest of Blizzard to beat Theorycrafters and Elitist Jerks

[Deleted]

To my mind, Blizzard try to beat the cookie cutter specs and mathematics by declaring a war on 'numbers'.

But of course, numbers are what this world is based on. You will never beat numbers, they are always there saying 'this is better than this for this situation'.

So what did they do? They did not try to beat the numbers, they try to make all the numbers flat.

i.e. Leave the most important spells generic and mainly let them choose situational spells.


I'm going to bet that they will not succeed 100% because some situational spells translate to clear damage/healing/threat and hence numbers. And sometimes, most of the raid can use them. e.g. Mages have a 'situational' spell to get damage increase from fire damage on them. But that proved to be extremely important in almost all FL.

However, at the largest part it will work: The classes will be cookie cutter by design with most unimportant and/or situational specs on choice.



tl;dr: Specializations become flat for all with mainly unimportant and/or situational spells remaining on choice. Or at least that's the goal.

[Vinz Clortho]

I always thought Talent Trees were pretty stupid. You should have always chosen your spec, and that would define how your character plays, instead of choosing random talent points to define your character.

[MCitra]

My only concern with this is how they are going to make this fair for 10 v 25 man raiding.
Since both 10 man and 25 man is the same set of achievment even if many feels there is a big diffrence between them and so on this will make the gap even bigger.
In a 10 man guild you will have players with this or that talent only.
but in the 25 man raid where you perhaps have 3 druids and 4 paladins you can take every single thing to help you in raids. which in my honest opinion is "Unfair" advantage.

i know the talents is yet set and the numbers and such will change but from this PoV that is now, the 25 man will basicly get boosted (sorry for bad choice of word) with all these abilitys that they can have due to the numbers.

I might be totally off right now but i just thought of in a 10 man v 25 man aspect with this on perhaps a bad way

Edit;this might also make guilds stack classes dumdumdum!

[Deleted]

I always thought Talent Trees were pretty stupid. You should have always chosen your spec, and that would define how your character plays, instead of choosing random talent points to define your character.

To be honest they mildly irritate me as well.

I have a Master's degree in science and I feel like I do not know what the numbers are optimally [by just looking at the spell descriptions]. I have to read analyses by brilliant mathematicians on special heavily moderated sites (i.e. Elitist Jerks) to be sure I'm not doing something wrong with numbers.


What they try to do here is obvious: They try to let you only choose situational spells. Of course they will partly fail since some encounters can use situational spells to translate to numbers.

---------- Post added 2011-10-22 at 01:15 AM ----------

My only concern with this is how they are going to make this fair for 10 v 25 man raiding.
Since both 10 man and 25 man is the same set of achievment even if many feels there is a big diffrence between them and so on this will make the gap even bigger.
In a 10 man guild you will have players with this or that talent only.
but in the 25 man raid where you perhaps have 3 druids and 4 paladins you can take every single thing to help you in raids. which in my honest opinion is "Unfair" advantage.

i know the talents is yet set and the numbers and such will change but from this PoV that is now, the 25 man will basicly get boosted (sorry for bad choice of word) with all these abilitys that they can have due to the numbers.

I might be totally off right now but i just thought of in a 10 man v 25 man aspect with this on perhaps a bad way

Edit;this might also make guilds stack classes dumdumdum!

They are already imbalanced in that regard with bufs. It's very hard to have all bufs in a 10man.

[PHsname]

To be honest they mildly irritate me as well.

I have a Master's degree in science and I feel like I do not know what the numbers are optimally [by just looking at the spell descriptions]. I have to read analyses by brilliant mathematicians on special heavily moderated sites (i.e. Elitist Jerks) to be sure I'm not doing something wrong with numbers.

That's half the fun, though. The entire process of min/maxing your character involves all that testing and potential error. For me, that's part of what makes this game fun. Sites like EJ are communities especially centered on that process, and it's fun to see what other people have come up with, and to get feedback on what you've been up to.

I didn't like the Cata talent trees much, but these new ones are kind of weird. We'll see what they're like when they roll out, though.

[StaeleAilar]

My only concern with this is how they are going to make this fair for 10 v 25 man raiding.
Since both 10 man and 25 man is the same set of achievment even if many feels there is a big diffrence between them and so on this will make the gap even bigger.
In a 10 man guild you will have players with this or that talent only.
but in the 25 man raid where you perhaps have 3 druids and 4 paladins you can take every single thing to help you in raids. which in my honest opinion is "Unfair" advantage.

i know the talents is yet set and the numbers and such will change but from this PoV that is now, the 25 man will basicly get boosted (sorry for bad choice of word) with all these abilitys that they can have due to the numbers.

I might be totally off right now but i just thought of in a 10 man v 25 man aspect with this on perhaps a bad way

Edit;this might also make guilds stack classes dumdumdum!

Hopefully it does do this. Then we will see more 25 man guilds. Bit Bias here maybe but im fed up with the fact that 10 mans have been getting the same gear and loot as 25's.

[Buryit]

They can beat all the cookie cutter theory crafting joy some of us have by just removing it all and making it turn based dmg, just copy runescape lol.

[Rzzzor]

TALENT TREES ARE CONFUSING NEW PLAYERS
THIS GAME IS TOO HARD AND WE'RE LOSING SUBS BECAUSE OF THAT
DO SOMETHING

Sad but true.

[cFortyfive]

To be honest they mildly irritate me as well.

I have a Master's degree in science and I feel like I do not know what the numbers are optimally [by just looking at the spell descriptions]. I have to read analyses by brilliant mathematicians on special heavily moderated sites (i.e. Elitist Jerks) to be sure I'm not doing something wrong with numbers.

Don't really agree with this in the sense of that this was required at any point. To reach optimal numbers maybe but to go by their jargon - not to reach a viable level. Putting 31 points in your maintree and you are good to go - just chose everything that deals damage. And what do you do afterwards ? Oh yeah you are looking for which tree could increase your damage as well. Don't need to be a rocket scientist for that. Every time you feel the numbers in between talents are so close that you can't decide on your own and look it up on ej or whatever you are already at a point where it doesn't really matter all that much. Top10 guilds may need their minmaxing - the rest of us could just pass if we wanted to but alot of people feel that it is a fun part of the overall experience so they do it as well.

[Gamosh]

Sadly, there will ALWAYS be a cookie cutter build. No matter what, someone will find the best synergy for the talent choices which will lead too the highest possible output. Honestly this new talent tree system makes it harder on people to join a raiding guild if they are the casual player type. For example, XXX Guild now recruiting Priest! You must have this 4th tier talent and this 5th tier talent or no invite! (I'm basing this off the current guild recruitment that I see, i.e recruiting mages! If you like fire or frost and you want to join are guild you must re-roll to arcane or your a Noob!)

[Netherspark]

I always thought Talent Trees were pretty stupid. You should have always chosen your spec, and that would define how your character plays, instead of choosing random talent points to define your character.

The idea behind them was to improve your character as you progress over time, while eventualy choosing and customizing your entire set of abilities. The point is that YOU were the one defining your OWN character and not just adhering to what would have been handed to you.

But It didn't work because people only chose what gave them the highest numbers, so they tried to improve the talent system to change that. That didn't work either because people still only want big numbers and to be the "best" so now it gets whittled down to mostly utility abilities instead, while everything else gets normalized.

To be honest, this new system is really quite similar to the original system just without all the clutter (some of that clutter was actualy good though).

[Simca]

TALENT TREES ARE CONFUSING NEW PLAYERS
THIS GAME IS TOO HARD AND WE'RE LOSING SUBS BECAUSE OF THAT
DO SOMETHING

Sad but true.

I think a lot of the problem is that the old talent and spell system prevents them from making new expansions work well.

Rogues and Mages for example have a SHITTON of cooldowns and CC. They have more control than any other class. So let's continue the previous model and give Mages and Rogues 3 new abilities on top of everything they have now. Then in 6.0, 3 more new abilities.

Do you see where this becomes a problem? Mages will just chain Ring of Frost into Deep Freeze into Freeze while Polymorphing others and Counterspell while using their amazing level 88 cooldown and their massive level 93 damage nuke and their level 96 AoE targeted knockback silence. When you get too many abilities, classes get harder and harder to balance.


With the new talent system, it doesn't just force the player to make choices, but it also takes away some of the excess spells that could be combo'd for ridiculous effect. This leaves room for new spells without removing the old ones... you just have to pick your spells now.

Hopefully this will make balancing the game 100x easier... it certainly sounds like it will make it 100x more fun.

[raggin]

I HATE that they have designed the talent system in this way. It stinks really bad. Choose one ability every 15 levels that doesn't even make that much of a difference? Why not just get rid of the talents altogether? This is stupid blizz. I hope they make substantial changes to this system before they ship like they did in cata beta.

[Ares42]

I always thought Talent Trees were pretty stupid. You should have always chosen your spec, and that would define how your character plays, instead of choosing random talent points to define your character.

You're sorta hitting on what the major problem with talents in WoW has always been, but not in the way you think. Yes, it has almost always come down just picking one of the specs and then going with the talents that are most efficient down that path, but contrary to what Blizzard seem to understand the problem wasn't too many talents, it was too few. As you say you start out with your spec choice (which actually was a choice where different specs had advantages and disadvantages), but once you had made that choice there wasn't enough options inside that tree to make for new choices. If they had doubled the amount of talents in every tree and kept the same amount of points you would quickly have a situation where you actually had to make hard choices and sacrifice talents that you really wanted. The major problem with this though is that it would require way more work from Blizzard. Not only would they have to come up with new and interesting talents, but their balancing would have to deal with way more possible specs.

If they've done one thing right with this new system it has been to eliminate the separate trees, unfortunately though they have cut down the amount of choices to so few that they cannot in any way risk any of the choices actually having real consequences. If they actually had an important meaning someone could easily make 2 bad choices and completely screw themselves over. They should've much rather gone with one giant tree for every class where you could mix match without having to build up in specific specs. There would ofc still be cookie-cutter builds focusing on one or another aspect, but the potential for quirky builds that works out in unpredictable ways would be highly magnified.

[Simca]

If they've done one thing right with this new system it has been to eliminate the separate trees, unfortunately though they have cut down the amount of choices to so few that they cannot in any way risk any of the choices actually having real consequences. If they actually had an important meaning someone could easily make 2 bad choices and completely screw themselves over.

I disagree completely. The whole point is that none of it affects your DPS negatively in any significant way, so there are no "bad" choices. You can't be screwed over if you are picking utility talent vs utility talent.

Many of those choices they showed are VERY important and are absolutely critical to the way your character plays. The Warlock talents are a great example of this, but many many others had important choices too.


What was the point of DPS talents that were mandatory anyway? It was just like forcing people to take a multiple-choice test before they could play. If you didn't perform well on your talent test, you had shit DPS. If you copied the answers from google, your DPS was great. It was stupid.

[hulkgor]

My only concern with this is how they are going to make this fair for 10 v 25 man raiding.
Since both 10 man and 25 man is the same set of achievment even if many feels there is a big diffrence between them and so on this will make the gap even bigger.
In a 10 man guild you will have players with this or that talent only.
but in the 25 man raid where you perhaps have 3 druids and 4 paladins you can take every single thing to help you in raids. which in my honest opinion is "Unfair" advantage.

i know the talents is yet set and the numbers and such will change but from this PoV that is now, the 25 man will basicly get boosted (sorry for bad choice of word) with all these abilitys that they can have due to the numbers.

I might be totally off right now but i just thought of in a 10 man v 25 man aspect with this on perhaps a bad way

Edit;this might also make guilds stack classes dumdumdum!

I couldn't stop laughing whilst reading this. Honestly. People still arguing that 10man might be harder then 25? Getting boosted? LOL. Dude, come on.

I'm still at awe that they share rewards (loot,mounts,achieves,realmfirsts) between 10-25 raiding... that's the way to screw 25man raids even more.

[Calibar]

I disagree completely. The whole point is that none of it affects your DPS negatively in any significant way, so there are no "bad" choices. You can't be screwed over if you are picking utility talent vs utility talent.

Many of those choices they are showed are VERY important are absolutely critical to the way your character plays. The Warlock talents are a great example of this, but many many others had important choices too.


What was the point of DPS talents that were mandatory anyway? It was just like forcing people to take a multiple-choice test before they could play. If you didn't perform well on your talent test, you had shit DPS. If you copied the answers from google, your DPS was great. It was stupid.

I agree with you

Right now there are just mandatory talents that you have to take. In MoP they give you all of the needed talents and then give you options to play the way that you want to play.

[Umbra]

Sadly, there will ALWAYS be a cookie cutter build. No matter what, someone will find the best synergy for the talent choices which will lead too the highest possible output. Honestly this new talent tree system makes it harder on people to join a raiding guild if they are the casual player type. For example, XXX Guild now recruiting Priest! You must have this 4th tier talent and this 5th tier talent or no invite! (I'm basing this off the current guild recruitment that I see, i.e recruiting mages! If you like fire or frost and you want to join are guild you must re-roll to arcane or your a Noob!)

You mean, unlike our current talent trees, where you must have this talent and this talent and this talent and this talent and this talent and this talent and this talent and this talent and so forth?

What they're trying to do is letting you play your class the way you want to play it. As a DK, do you want a simple one-button press to spread diseases? Pick Outbreak. Do you want to be a viral plague machine? Pick Roiling Blood. Do you want to do AoE damage when you spread your diseases? Go with Corpse Explosion.

We'll see later on whether it works or not, but I think they can pull it off.

[Deleted]

Classic roleplaying games were always confusing me with their math, where to put my points and logic (I DON'T want to sleep now !) etc.
WoW sometimes confuses me with long tooltips, rotations, too many abilities, soft- and hardcaps, etc.

If at least talent trees get easier, I'M happy

[Vinz Clortho]

The idea behind them was to improve your character as you progress over time, while eventualy choosing and customizing your entire set of abilities. The point is that YOU were the one defining your OWN character and not just adhering to what would have been handed to you.

But It didn't work because people only chose what gave them the highest numbers, so they tried to improve the talent system to change that. That didn't work either because people still only want big numbers and to be the "best" so now it gets whittled down to mostly utility abilities instead, while everything else gets normalized.

To be honest, this new system is really quite similar to the original system just without all the clutter (some of that clutter was actualy good though).

I don't mind the clutter and actually choosing talents when they are usable 100% of the time. The problem with the clutter was all those fun "utility" choices where never incorparted into any aspect of the game in a raid group. You never needed 80% of the talents that you had.