I cry at night over talent tree absense

[puppypizza]

Where's that post by Ghostcrawler about how he bemoans people playing for efficiency over fun... I believe a talent tree can work, but it takes a bit of imagination and practice.

Incidentally, I only ended up using half the new talents on my warlock char. The rest are obviously PVP talents (useless to me) or extremely situational. And I hear they're gonna make one of the ones I picked baseline for the class later. So I guess there's not much choice in these new ones either. Either it's a no-brainer because someone "mathed" it out and god forbid you pick a spec that does -0.5% than the optimal build because then you're playing it "wrong", or the talents are basically fluff that gets re-balanced if they're even slightly overpowered and there's no wrong choice anyway. Ho hum.

[Afrospinach]

Which is an all around terrible change.

The old talent system was interesting enough that you could spend hours deciding on what talent tree might work best for you. You'd realize that maybe you were having trouble generating rage, or maybe a bit more hit chance from talents instead of gear might be great help or maybe you might be able to weave slams into your rotation or more heroic strike queues that you could reduce the rage cost for.

The old system allowed you to modify your gameplay like this new one never can. Everyone loves new abilities but when that's all the new talent tree is with nothing but situational decisions that can be made for it then you know they've utterly failed at their design goal. Hell, I'd go so far as to say these new talents are a step back from the wotlk/tbc model.

You know, I just never felt that at all, the most interesting things I can remember were the old 22/8/21? rogue PVP and the TBC lunar guidance resto druid. But everything we have now is more interesting. After TBC the end talent was so definitive you really were just bad for not taking it(not completely universally true IIRC, but mostly), your choice evaporated right there. The "picked 99% of the time" talents are just rolled into spec and you are just left with the actual choices of which there were really sparingly few in any iteration of the talent tree, whether you were bad or not. More SS damage or not more SS damage? HMMMMMM. Riveting. Don't get me wrong, I liked the discovery and all but that is completely fleeting.

[kleinlax21]

I'm not going to lie, I dream about an ideal world where the old Wrath talent system was able to provide us with actual choices. I really wish they would have been able to make every talent interesting like MoP's talents are. It is depressing to look at your talent "tree" and see six choices of 3 talents, which I can totally understand.

However, I know that I prefer the new talent system to the old one, where you might get lucky and be able to change your talents every major patch. Now, I can feel free to change my talents whenever I want. I think the greatest indicator of success that the new system provides is how often you need to go to the reagents vendor in order to purchase more of those damn talent-wiping scrolls. I swear, I buy at least 30 per week and it's honestly annoying how often I have to keep going back to the same vendor! I think that is the best indicator (to me at least)of the success the new talent system has been able to achieve, and I love how I can drastically change my playstyle whenever I want to.

Like I said, I really wish they could have made the Wrath talent system work, because honestly, who doesn't like choosing a ton of talents for their build? The only downside is that they were unable to provide us players with any choice under such a system. I hope that, ideally, they change the talent system to 9 tiers for the new expac, which would provide us with a new talent to choose from every 10 levels. Once they perfect this iteration of the talent system, they will (hopefully IMO)increase the number of talent tiers we have to pick from. I LOVE the amount of choice we have in our talents this expac, and it has only left me hungry for more! I hope that Blizzard is up to the challenge that their innovation has caused and I look forward to further iterations of this talent tree philosophy.

[Ferocity]

I remember earlier Blizzcon have shown us talent tress which were supposed to be in Cata (back when other people were designign this part of game). Mastery was "double-sided" (not sure of proper word here) - you were getting noticeable chunk of mastery depending on how deep you spec'd in the tree, and could get masteries from other trees as well. But on next Blizzcon we were introduced heavily watered-down talent trees and mastery as stat which was completely useless till level 80.

To some degree, Rift took original idea of what Cata trees were supposed to be - if you are interested to see what WoW should have but will never have, you can check Rift talent trees' system.

But these new ones... making me choose talents to fit situations... making me think about which skills will bring more utility... it's just too much.

But you can also choose none without much of a loss. Only few "choices" out of all new "talents" have any significant impact on PvE side of things.

[Deleted]

If using the most effective spec you can copy and past all over the internet made your brain tickle, your brain is easily tickled. If you wanted to be viable in anything there was 1 spec to go with and perhaps 2-3 talent points you could put in whatever you like.

The new talent system is far more fun, actually making you able to see what abilities are best for a certain encounter or in arenas or RBGs, and being able to swap them on the fly.

I thought should be over this delusion that the old talent system offered any choice by now, but I guess some people keep dwelling in the past.

[Immitis]

i like being able to go on a site and look at whats the "optimal spec" but still being able to say "yeah but that one seems better for me and the way i play" i no longer go online and copy everything exactly i can do what i want for the way i play and not be hindered

[The Small Hours]

The new talent trees are awesome. The only thing that blizz needs to do for us now is our reforging and gem/enchant selection.

[Stasso]

I love how people hate on the old talent system like it wasn't something out RPGs, the whole plus crit and plus hit was a hold over from old school rpgs, but passive talents like those became brain dead.
Now the old system wasnt perfect but niether is the new one. A middle ground should have been establish and i feel blizzard took the cheap way out.
Currently you still have cookie cutter builds, there are talents that are just useless, look at rogues, they couldnt even come up with new abilities and had to recycle them.
Contray to popular belief you could be more creative with the old than the new, mut/prep comes to mine, not to mention the new system might encourage more experiments i just dont think it is as great.

The one thing i miss most are the prerequisite talents. Also how some specs, arms and combat, that could differ based on weapon preferences, now i dont feel the specs have an unique identity anymore.

Edit:show me a ww monk who didnt cookie cut xuen and i will show you a player not living up to their Potential

[skitzy129]

Contray to popular belief

It isn't "contrary to popular belief", it's just fact. The new system is more versatile without sacrificing performance than the old system. That's just the cold hard facts on it. It's not even debatable.

The old system offered one solution per tree. Just one. If you weren't playing that one then you were hindering yourself. Plain and simple. The old system was 100% bad, and while the new system isn't perfect, it's a massive step up.

[Stasso]

It isn't "contrary to popular belief", it's just fact. The new system is more versatile without sacrificing performance than the old system. That's just the cold hard facts on it. It's not even debatable.

The old system offered one solution per tree. Just one. If you weren't playing that one then you were hindering yourself. Plain and simple. The old system was 100% bad, and while the new system isn't perfect, it's a massive step up.

Only if you were raiding or pvp were you hindering yourself, questing solo, you could get away with. The fact is there were more talents with the old than new so you literally had more choices, so if you wanted to rebel you could. Now you can do it easier but it just doesn't feel as grand. There is less creativity, you either go with a b or c, and c tends to average out to not be changed as often. Xeun, Anticipation come to mind as be vastly superior to the others in raiding that it is a brain dead choice, you might get another gimmick fight like the wasp in aq20 or the blind dragon but outside those fights you got the cookie cut talent still.

[Tauren]

Only because people didn't know better at the time. Reintroduce those exact style trees right now and you'd be facing the exact same thing that happened in later expansions. People would just math out the best specs, end of story.

no thats not end of story lol

ive played private servers and theres indeed different ways to make your talents. and thats where everyone knows everything about vanilla because its 2013

[YouAreAllWrong]

The new talent system is probably the best feature of MoP (yet). It's way more flexible, and it allows you to experiment and spec your character depending on the situation.
The old talent system especially in WotLK and Cata (not so much in TBC and Classic) you could only experiment with like 5 points basically. I used to respec once a week maybe now I spend 30 tomes a day. Plus the new talent system and glyph system is getting better and better in every patch.
You can't really go back to the old system.

[Deleted]

The fact that you gained a point every level made for a pretty good feeling. I messed around a lot with my talent trees for all sorts of purposes. I'd like it if they re-introduced something akin to the old talent trees (no problem if there are cookie cutter builds for raiding or pvp) to complement the current talents. For me, it'd feel more fun.

[Deleted]

ONLY thing better about the old system was that it was more fun to pick them talents during leveling. At max lvl though, the new system beats the old hands down.

[Xavas]

I loved making weird/potentially bad builds using the old system, especially during the levelling process. Wouldn't use them for anything competitive but being able to mix stuff added a lot of flavor, in my opinion. Blizzard's been trying to move away from that semi-sandbox approach in general for quite some time, though.

Bottom line, I don't quite like it but it's their game. Furthermore, it is more new player friendly I guess.

[Deleted]

Old system, everyone the same spec or he was ridiculed by everyone with the "right" cookie cutter build, there is no denial.

If you wanted to play Arena or non random BG groups, you had the one PvP build that was glorified till no end and everyone used it. (TBC resto druid comes to my mind, so does Warrior and Rogue with maces)

Everyone of the old specs was ripped apart, mathed out and the best one was taken, there is no fuckin argue. It was fun while leveling, you had one point every level that was nice.

The new is not so much fun while leveling, so much less points to click
But atleast nobody gets laughed at if they run instances with their own build, or most of the time atleast.

It's obvious that hardcore raider figure something out that fits best for whatever boss. But the rest of the game is pretty much untouched, you can adjust more to your playstyle.

And thats the sole reason the new talents > old talents.

[Cybran]

Yes, my brain tickled when I used the exact same spec as everybody else for every single fight instead of using a little bit of creativity.

I'm sorry, I forgot to download my sarcasm font. I hope it came through, just the same.

Only difference now is that the cookie cutter build is pre selected for everyone. The current system is restrictive and broken as all hell. There is not "choice" at all.

---------- Post added 2013-01-24 at 12:06 PM ----------

You can say that if you like, but it doesn't change the fact that if you were using a different build then in most cases you were objectively wrong.
Every tree had a few floating points you could swap around, but in PvE at least there were just certain things you had to take or you were guaranteed not to be doing your maximum potential, and there was almost nothing to gain by picking anything else.

If you aren't using Aspect of the ironhawk, glaive toss and Dire beast you are objectively wrong. What options are you talking about???

[shadowboy]

The previous model gave you a fixed number of talent points (max level - 9 for vanilla/bc/wrath and 31 points for cata), but most of the points you spent were on talents that directly affected your effectiveness. In order to advance to a new row sometimes you had to choose a few (generally 3-4) utility points. Those utility points were really the only choice. The MoP talent model removes all of the mandatory talents, bakes them into your abilities, then gives you those utility talents as your entire tree. Instead of having 3-4 utility talents you now have 6. In my universe, 6 is greater than 4. The new system offers more choice.

[Auberdeen]

hybrid classes were so amazing...shockadins...kittytree...

fuck the math and BiS and theorycrafting. i miss the fun of clicking the talent boxes.

[Venziir]

Funny, this thread makes my brain tickle - just not in the good way...