Isn't Artifacts just the Old Talent system?

[Aggrophobic]

Back In the Vanilla days they had a bloated talent system with just percent increases... isn't that what this is?

Yes, it is.
But now you have a choice... Oh, wait.

[Nerovar]

It's constant character progression.

Character progression is not a self purpose. If there's no decision making involved then it isn't your character. We're playing an RPG after all.

There were two types of players back then. People that used cookie cutter builds, and people that didn't know how to google cookie cutter builds.

What an ignorant statement. Just because you didn't know any people who tested out fun builds for let's say PvP you're just going to assume that no one did? And even if most people used cookie-cutter builds what's the harm in that? Do you honestly believe that everyone has to be forced to min/max the shit out of their character?

For the most part, the talents are far more viable across the tiers in a myriad of situations. And you'll be hurt far less in the DPS category for selecting the "not-.1% increase-DPS-optimal" talent in modern talent trees than you would have been if you had taken the '+pet run speed' instead of the '+crit damage' as a hunter back in the day.

Every spec I play has certain best in slot talents that I don't even change when I switch between PvE and PvP. In some rows there's only one usable talent because everything else was nerfed into oblivion. Same goes for PvP talents. On my Windwalker I'd really like to play with Tigereye Brew but I simply can't because it's in the same row as the Fists of Fury stun talent. Maybe if there still was something like stat customization, different weapon choices etc. in PvP I could make it work but that's pretty much impossible in Legion because everything was pressed into the same shape and you have little to no influence on your playstyle. It's the illusion of choice.

Things like warforging/titanforging, gem slots and the nature of having to make the decision to trade off secondary stats for primary stats makes that a much harder thing to simply "follow." There was no RNG with what talents you got; there IS RNG with what gear you get.

Well, I don't really care about that tbh because Blizzard already has removed secondary stats from PvP via templates. I also believe that all these random factors are another way of artificially keeping the player attracted to the game as it's almost impossible now to obtain a "perfect" set of gear which is why you'll keep on grinding, hoping that you'll get another big upgrade, best secondary stats, gem slot etc. without ever being satisfied. Steady dose increase without satisfaction is also known as addiction.
And all that just to keep you subscribed and playing. Man, what a great game.

[McFuu]

Short answer is no, both systems are very different.
Long answer, they are alike in that there is an appearance of choice. Granted there are some choices in the vanilla talent system, they are small. Main talents were straight forward. The artifact system is simply a choose your own progression system. But eventually you don't choose anymore.

Current wow talent system is by far the best system we've had in this game. It's not even a contest, it's way better now than ever before.

[Deleted]

Current wow talent system is by far the best system we've had in this game. It's not even a contest, it's way better now than ever before.

Amen brother. I really hope you don't get flamed for that you spoke the truth. Truth hurt. A lot. Even more so on MMO-Champ.

[McFuu]

Amen brother. I really hope you don't get flamed for that you spoke the truth. Truth hurt. A lot. Even more so on MMO-Champ.

I don't see how anyone can actually disagree. We actually have a choice now. And for many classes the choices are more than situational. It's such a great system compared to before. Granted it's not some silly path of exile tree, it's simplicity is what makes it great.

[Yassy]

Back In the Vanilla days they had a bloated talent system with just percent increases... isn't that what this is?

First, if you look at the talent trees, they werent bloated with percent increases. Most talents changed the effect of an ability, the percent increases were there to differentiate spec A from spec B. You got Shadow Damage and Shadow Pen in the Shadow tree so that your shadow spells did more damage than they would in Holy. They werent interesting, but they functioned phenomenally. The rest of the trees were filled with things like Disarm Immunity, 4% more physical damage to a boss, Faster casting on Mana Burn, enter Bear form with Rage, Spell Criticals reduce the cast time of your next critical by .5, ETC. Ghostcrawler made the mistake in his post explaining the shift from Vanilla > MoP Talent design by effectively saying passive talents are boring. 5% more fire damage is boring, but it serves its purpose. Backlash is not boring. Auspicious Spirits is not boring. Clarity of Power was a *Passive* talent that completely changed your rotation. Builds like Shockadin are what made PvP fun for some players. Builds like that cant exist anymore without the ability to effectively cheese up the stats of a spell. Which was not done by picking the talent Holy Shock and Seal of Command, but by augmenting them with supplemental passives that made them hit hard. And getting a Deathbringer off Onyxia.

Second, to answer your question, no. Artifacts are nothing like the old Talent system. Look at the intent of their design. Vanilla Talent trees were designed to give players a reward for when they leveled up, and to offer players the ability to be different from another player of the same class. Talent trees were added sometime in Alpha/Beta for that reason. The Artifact system is designed to offer players post level cap progression with a better consolation reward and that wouldnt bloat into future expansions. Before Legion, gold was the universal consolation prize. Gold inflated drastically that it just isnt appealing to receive in small increments anymore and wont offer my character any meaningful gains. Also, Artifact power creates parity between new and veteran players in terms of value. Obviously that 750 gold WQ is far more valuable to a new player with 5k gold to his account vs someone whos run the Auction House for 10 years and is capped.

So no, they are nothing alike in purpose. The only thing they share in common is that they modify your stats and abilities. They aren't even in a tree.

[Hyral]

bloated talent system with just percent increases... isn't that what this is?

Yes. On that angle it is basically the same thing but you can obtain all increses and they moved this aspect of progression of your character to the end game to drag on the life of the game rather than placing it along with the natural progression of your character.

I think most people disagreeing with you are ignoring the angle from which you are asking the question. It's common for posters to not actually read the post and just the title.

[Deleted]

Not even close. plus that telent system was fun...the artefacts seem to become bloatware....

[vertigo12]

The thing about then: Build a build and retrain pay more gold.
I have dual talent back then I can be specced holy but have pain suppresion or I am disc but I can have spirit pf redemption.

Basically now a spec is locked to it's talent and the only difference is you van switch in and out of 15/30/45 talent depending on the cotent you are doing may it be raid or 5man.
Withe the revamp of talents into 3 column which depends on the spec you have the addition of relics + artifact traits somehow give back the feel of pre MoP talents.

Relics and artifact traits are basically talent point modifiers.
With the introduction of relics you can skip certain talent pre-req as long as you got relics on the slot.

[DeicideUH]

Now that is a super cool idea! Picking the order you get things sounds perfect actually!

I would post it in the official forums if I were you.

Thank you, I'll do that.

[Radaney]

It's pretty much the same, even down to the cookie cutter Artifact levelling we had at the start of Legion.

[Kaleredar]

Character progression is not a self purpose. If there's no decision making involved then it isn't your character. We're playing an RPG after all.

As I said, you have to make decisions on what gear is better for your current allocation of stats. It's not as simple as "the ilevel is higher" when chunks of secondary stats are flying around, or especially on things like trinkets.

What an ignorant statement. Just because you didn't know any people who tested out fun builds for let's say PvP you're just going to assume that no one did? And even if most people used cookie-cutter builds what's the harm in that? Do you honestly believe that everyone has to be forced to min/max the shit out of their character?


Every spec I play has certain best in slot talents that I don't even change when I switch between PvE and PvP. In some rows there's only one usable talent because everything else was nerfed into oblivion. Same goes for PvP talents. On my Windwalker I'd really like to play with Tigereye Brew but I simply can't because it's in the same row as the Fists of Fury stun talent. Maybe if there still was something like stat customization, different weapon choices etc. in PvP I could make it work but that's pretty much impossible in Legion because everything was pressed into the same shape and you have little to no influence on your playstyle. It's the illusion of choice.

So why not play with tiger's eye brew? I mean, "do you honestly believe that everyone has to be forced to min/max the shit out of their character?"

You're simultaneously championing bad talent builds in the old system while bemoaning "not completely optimal" talent builds currently. That's pretty hypocritical.

Well, I don't really care about that tbh because Blizzard already has removed secondary stats from PvP via templates.

I'm assuming that's because they want people to enter PvP in a somewhat balanced form, instead of instantly exploding for dozens of BGs while you try and grind up the requisit PvP gear to not be completely useless.

I also believe that all these random factors are another way of artificially keeping the player attracted to the game as it's almost impossible now to obtain a "perfect" set of gear which is why you'll keep on grinding, hoping that you'll get another big upgrade, best secondary stats, gem slot etc. without ever being satisfied. Steady dose increase without satisfaction is also known as addiction.
And all that just to keep you subscribed and playing. Man, what a great game.

So you'd rather people easily be able to obtain BIS gear immediately and without any decision making?

You're saying that they should add back meaningless choice in the form of old talents while removing ACTUAL choice from the game.

[Teri]

No no no no.

Artifacts don't give me choice of 31/20, 30/21, 20/31 , 21/30 or tri-spec builds etc. You just fill things in.

Relics don't really give a ton of choice either, some traits are obviously good or bad, but itemlevel still plays a big role. Also heavily affected with drop source and titanforging.

- - - Updated - - -

Back In the Vanilla days they had a bloated talent system with just percent increases... isn't that what this is?

The % increases were filler, it was all about the 11/21/31 point talents for a lot of classes that gave new abilities, and there were a lot more variations even tri-specs.

Also some talents like "10/20/30/40/50% crit vs frozen targets" were obviously situational (can't freeze a raid boss) but still very powerful solo or pvp.

Remember you could bypass some parts of a tree you did not need for the situation as each spec had 50 points to distribute.

You didnt need "reduce threat" for pvp or chill duration for most boss pve.

I raided and pvped vanilla and switched builds all the time and not just 1 build for each.

Poor people in vanilla obviously stuck to 1 "best" website generic build, as gold cost increased each respec.

[Nerovar]

As I said, you have to make decisions on what gear is better for your current allocation of stats. It's not as simple as "the ilevel is higher" when chunks of secondary stats are flying around, or especially on things like trinkets.

Are we still talking about Artifact Weapons?

So why not play with tiger's eye brew? I mean, "do you honestly believe that everyone has to be forced to min/max the shit out of their character?"

You're simultaneously championing bad talent builds in the old system while bemoaning "not completely optimal" talent builds currently. That's pretty hypocritical.

Maybe you should read what I said before calling me a hypocrite. First of all there's a difference between choosing a minor passive stat increase and an ability that changes you entire playstyle. The difference between let's say having 1% less crit but 1% more haste and losing a stun for a minor damage increase that is hard to use in PvP is kinda huge. It's not the same thing at all. Before they introduced artifact weapons and templates these things weren't that much of a problem. During 6.2 the most common WW build used Chi explosion and a staff + haste build for a certain proc that you would only get while wielding a two-handed weapon. This way you could maximize your Tigereye Brew (back in the day it was baseline and our main burst CD) uptime. Another build was relying heavily on multistrike, utilizing one-handed weapons and using Hurricane Strikes as an additional burst CD that also allowed you to actively dodge CC.
I had item sets for both builds because they required item sets in order to work. But despite Chi Explosion being better I could play with both talents because I was able to adapt using different weapons and prioritizing different secondary stats and I enjoyed it. You no longer have the freedom to do this and because of what? So that some people who are to lazy to farm PvP gear can enter BGs without getting butthurt?

Also if you read my previous posts you can see that I'm not against the talents they've introduced with MoP (ideally I'd like to have a talent tree for passive effects and one for active abilities). I'm just saying that there will always BiS builds but this is no reason to restrict player freedom.

I'm assuming that's because they want people to enter PvP in a somewhat balanced form, instead of instantly exploding for dozens of BGs while you try and grind up the requisit PvP gear to not be completely useless.

Yeah, why should you spend a few hours farming honor gear in Ashran before entering PvP? Why should you work for something at all? Gear progression is a part of the game. It worked in PvP and worked in PvE. Also there were already systems in WoD that created a minimum ilvl in PvP instances that would scale everyone up to a certain ilvl without affecting their stat distribution but instead of improving on these things they created another broken system to bloat the game even further. But I digress...

So you'd rather people easily be able to obtain BIS gear immediately and without any decision making?

You're saying that they should add back meaningless choice in the form of old talents while removing ACTUAL choice from the game.

Where the hell did I say or imply that you should be able to obtain something immediately?
All I'm saying is that gear progression should end at some point during a content patch. You should be able to get best in slot gear if you work for it and not have to keep on grinding for all eternity hoping for some ridiculous RNG to favour you some day. In previous expansions you could calculate how long it would take for you to get your full set of conquest gear and then you were good to go and had fun for the rest of the season or equipped your other characters, farmed a second set for different talent builds etc.

[Joeydivision82]

Spoken like someone who has never even seen the old talent style.

I was thinking the exact same thing. At least he didn't claim to play back in the day and talk about how it sucked and it's all nostalgia and rose tinted glasses and then drop the dead giveaway he had not actually played during that time.

[Vrothgar]

Yes it is, 3 trees doesn't matter... You spend points to get to top talent/talents so yes this is the same