this change isn't worth the reaction you're giving it
The real motivation for this is to just increase the grind to keep people logged in and playing. It's just another variant of potions and flasks.
Look at the talent design, they are clearly designed to make people change talents more, and more often. Almost all the cleave/AOE/single target enhancers are mutually exclusive - or in warlock for example, they took away teleport/speed/shield from baseline, and made them talents. On the same line.
They know damn well that it will absolutely suck to not be able to change talents between bosses, particularly in dungeons where you don't spend an evening doing maybe two or three or four encounters. You will absolutely need to change talents between bosses, and for the trash in between. And probably two or three talents at a time.
Talents have switched back again from lifestyle choices of equal value to pretty much mandatory. One of the key foundations to dungeon/raid variety is to make encounters different; you will always have a boss that requires ST, then one that requires cleave, and so on. Anyone even half competent and not wanting to suck will absolutely have to switch talents, because that's how they've designed talents this time.
Forget all the bullshit about "making difficult choices", this is all about pushing people into switching talents and then attaching a cost to that to "make world content remain relevant" to use the Blizz jargon.
They want players to have to carry bags full of reagents to raids, because it means you will have to play extra hours to farm the mats or the gold to buy them off the Ah or whatever. It's just the same as any other consumable, like food or flasks or pots.
The only upside to this is that it guarantees you'll want a lock in ever raid, so that people can hearth in and out to switch talents and then get summoned back.
This idea is as shitty as the days when as a lock I had to farm bags of soulshards before a raid because they were consumables.
They stated they are trying to tune this back. That's exactly what they DON'T want you doing. There's no point to a talent system if before every fight you pick the optimal talent set up. With bosses, fine...swap to the talent build that makes the most sense. But you shouldn't be swapping before each trash pull.
That's what the goal is here, to making talent changing a good idea for big/boss fights...but not EVERY fight.
“The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it.”
Agreed. Some of the dumbest people I've actually ever spoken to reside in this community. By that, I mean the people that actually complained about 78 gold. 78 gold as the highest cost for respeccing whenever and wherever you wanted. Is this even real? How can you complain about 78 gold? You make that with 1-2 quests or selling 1-2 pieces of shit gear. You can make 900g-2k from a single 25m heroic cata raid, it's impossible NOT to make money on this game. It's actually impossible unless all you do is log on and sit there doing nothing. Questing, garrisons, selling shit gear, professions, etc. Everything you do in this game makes you a decent sum of money.
After people finished complaining about 78 gold which equates to lint that I could find in my pocket, we get this and people still complain. This isn't even bad, if people (the ones that are upset about both this and the 78 gold) actually attempted to understand what blizzard is saying here, I'm sure they'd get it. Being able to swap talents whenever and wherever the fuck you want basically made having talents obsolete.
It's not like people were switching talents before every mob based on ST mobs or AOE mobs and if you did that's not really optimal. It should take around 6-7 seconds to kill a mob, switching your talents wouldn't really change that and nor does it matter. Changing them before bosses is definitely going to happen as it does now, so I'm not really sure what we're going to do about that. Basically the one thing I disagree with is that scribes will now be mandatory for raids. No scribe=no talent switch. That's not exactly a bad thing I guess since anyone could be a scribe but eh.
TLDR: Community will complain about anything Blizzard does. "Blizzard breathes too much omg" "Ded game LUL" "Game sux LUL" is what I see every single day. People actually complained about 78g, which is the amount we get for 2 quests which takes about 5 minutes. People not being able to make gold is the shittiest excuse I've ever heard, run 1 cata raid on 25m heroic and you make 1k, takes about 15-20 minutes. Blizzard changes it and implements something they seem to have been thinking about for a while and the community complains some more. Is that even surprising anymore? It's just normal for this community. It's normal for a community this large to have upset people with waaaaay too much time on their hands but people actually spend hours complaining about WoW instead of 1. Playing the game or 2. Playing a different game. If you don't enjoy the game, give feedback, don't sit in twitch chats saying "game sux lul" "blizzard is dumb lul". Waste of time.
I really don't understand the thought process behind forcing players to choose between single target/AoE talents in the same row in the first place. I could understand if there was a row of AoE talents, and you pick one to supplement your specs native AoE, but with legion it seems they want players to be swapping talents constantly to do basic things. Even if there was no cost at all it's going to be very tedious.
It's far beyond min-maxing, in some cases your core AoE is locked behind a talent. Look at affliction for example, if it's AoE is balanced around being able to throw five SoCs at once with Sow the Seeds, how useless are you going to be on trash/adds when you're swimming in shards from multiple agony targets, but are stuck throwing one seed at a time? On the other hand, the talent is useless for single target, and you lose a burst CD (soul harvest) by having it. The level 100 talent options are similar; phantom singularity for AoE vs soul conduit/effigy for single target.
Not all specs have to deal with this, so I really don't get it. I'm looking at the legion beast mastery tree for example, and you wouldn't really have to swap talents for PVE at all.
That's exactly what talents in this expansion are though. Look at them - we've clearly switched back from talents being roughly equal to each other on each line and therefore being style choices (to avoid the alleged "mandatory talent build" problem), to a talent system where each line has some serious choices
If you have a boss that has say AOE, you will absolutely have to take the AOE talents. If the next boss is single target, that means you will absolutely have to change talents, because the AOE and ST enhancers are almost all mutually exclusive.
Raiders who don't will - deservedly - lose their places, because it will be worse than not having food/flasks/pots
Outside of raiding and dungeons, talents are largely irrelevant, for world content they don't matter, just like levelling your artefact won't matter.
This change means any decent raider will have to carry bags of whatever reagent they are going to impose, and it sounds like they are not going to be like the current tomes are. I bet they will attach it to inscription or something.
Why? Because it's a very cheap way of increasing the number of hours people are logged in to play. Like having to farm the mats to make pots because it makes stuff like gathering herbs or doing alchemy "worth it"
You know, this reminds me of Wizards of the coast and MTG. They wanted to stop Modern pro tours, but the community complained, so before the next modern pro tour they banned the most popular deck and people started demanding no pro tours to avoid their decks getting banned.
For the Alliance, and for Azeroth!
That may be because the last times they did that was at the beginning of cataclysm (for healing) and at the beginning of MoP (for crafting profession with the dailies), and the game became tedious to play for a few month after the expansions release.I have lost all faith in this community. People complain that the numerous QoL changes Blizzard has added over the years has made the game too easy, and they try something different for once, and everyone loses their goddamn minds.
Also, the issue behind the game behind "too easy" doesn't come from the QoL changes (as in TBC they made QoL changes too, especially regarding crafting pots and flasks, and nobody complained about that) but from the change they made to the battle system in the 3.0 patch. As long as blizzard doesn't understand that people won't be happy with wow.
Agreed.
I don't mind it if Scribes will make the item, as long as it won't be like with engineers and their repair bots...as long as we can buy the tomes off the AH/make it using our own scribes, I'm fine with it.
Still sucks that people whined over the gold cost though. Those tomes won't be free either.
But they've designed the talents to require this! you don't just dial it back now that you've got the core toolkit for specs all tied up in talents. That's the frustration point. It doesn't matter how easy it is to drop whatever the fuck the regent does before a boss fight... Its the point that they designed it to be changed, but now saying they dont want you changing..
Raid.. before boss fight.. thats fone thing...
what are you going to do for the 5 man....? "Hold up dont pull yet I need to.." boss is pulled.