Immediate Reaction to the Tree? Underwhelmed.

[thesmall001]

Foreword: If someone could relay this on the US forums so it might get a bit of note from someone who matters since I'm stuck in the crappy EU forums that'd be hugely appreciated. Also I'd love some >>>CONSTRUCTIVE<<< and well formed opinions, improvements and arguments in response. If you can't be bothered to respond nicely then don't even bother reading this, go back to theorising about how deathwing is secretly bolvar in disguise and a cult of ponies are manipulating Azeroth and who would win in a fight between Saurfang and Chuck Norris. Finally, although I use specific class examples here let it be noted I'm talking about things on a design-philosophy level as I've played a mix of Tank/Healer/DPS over several classes at raid level, I'm not particularly fussed about one class/tree over another changes (this is not a "Shammy need moar OP" post.)

When they announced that they'd be reducing the talent trees I panicked and said "Oh lawd no". Then I analysed it for a while and decided "Okay I'll reserve judement for when they start to show, this could potentially completely remove variation from build to build and ruin the game or it could make it awesome if they do it just right."

What I was hoping for was having talents consolidated, for example, instead of a 5/10/15/20/25% boost to Lightning Bolt from SP and and 3/6/10% boost to Lava Burst from SP spread over 8 points there is just a straight boost to the SP co-efficients of those spells in one powerful talent (deep in the tree, around Level 30~ so you can't double dip) combined with a whole bunch of mechanic-changing talents and a few abilities both of teh cooldown variety and of the regular use type ("Clickables"). I understand that some of this completely goes against the Cataclysm ideals we've been adjusting to (with the removal of straight increase talents) but that was before we cut the trees down so drasticly.

It's my opinion that a talent tree should (at least to some extent) make you better at what you're meant to do, they are all that seperates (sticking with my Shaman example) an Enhancement Shaman in SP gear and a proper Elemental Shaman. I understand the need to run the talents through a weight watchers power diet, but from a levelling perspective it would be as much a game changer to have this sudden boost to your performance as getting a new active "clicky" ability, it would suggest to you "you're meant to be shooting spells rather than hitting stuff with sticks", it is more of a noticable change than a slight increase every level for 8 levels and that will make you fall in love with your class/tree as much as having an entire tree of clickables would. Not to mention the fact that I've always liked the idea that talents represent your characters development as a specialist in their tree and that every talent in a tree should tie in to you being a better healer as a Holy Paladin or tank as a Prot Warrior. From an end-game perspective it has a noticable effect on seperating the Enhance/Elemental spells but that's not to say you couldn't have a near identical talent deep into the Enhancement tree saying "Your Lightning Bolt gains 30/60/90% of your AP as bonus damage." (wild numbers to make a point) because again this fulfils the purpose of affecting gameplay drasticly and helping you understand where you're niches are. I know alot of this "learning to be good at what you do" will be addressed through new UI changes and class-quests and I'm sure they will do so very effectively but in my opinion that is less engaging than learning through clearly defined experience.

So that's what I'd like to see some more of, because although they are passive changes they are dramatic changes with a big impact both to your play style as you level and on how you feel as a class at the end of that tree at end-game raiding levels. Masteries and Tree Passives are still there to represent the big class-defining changes and I really like them but a handful of these talents would also go a long way to making talent trees as engaging and important as possible and I worry that too much is been tied into the Mast/Bonuses as they feel "invisible" because they run "underneath" your mechanics. The best thing in my opinion would be having a choice between more utilities or more of these big damage/healing/general-number modifiers (best achieved by having pre-reqs to reach one or the other) and that leads me onto my next point.

The next problem that I briefly touched on is "cookie-cutter" specs and the room for difference from spec to spec. I knew the moment that they announced the changes it would be seriously difficult for them to pull this off the way they suggested they wanted to. I listened to the posts from the blues and I just could not believe that reducing the amount of choices would give us more... choices. It just seemed illogical and I couldn't wrap my head around it so I've decided that me and the devs must just have very different opinions on what variety is all about.

The best example for this is what I know best, my main is a Holy Paladin and we are awesome. As anyone who's played one knows, Holy Paladins have a fair amount of wiggle room with their specs right now on live. There are at least 3 main builds, all of which have the same fudemental talents from the Holy tree but then you get the excess points to spend. I personally go for alot of extra Holy talents, I get Aura Mastery and the Cleanse improvments (etc.) thus boosting my healing utilities whereas my co-tank healer chooses to go as deep into the Ret tree as she can, sacrificing utility to get as much crit as possible to boost her through-put and finally our only other Holy paladin (who sadly stopped playing lately) went as deep into the Prot tree as possible to get raid protection utilities such as Divine Guardian. The three specs were drasticly different and because of that we all bought something unique to our raids aside from IMBA direct healing. This is the way around the homogenization (sp?) issues that are abound right now.

I would absolutely love to see this level of difference available to all the classes because it's made an otherwise boring class (Spam heal tank, keep beacon on off-tank, do this for 7 months) into an interesting series of choices and all in all gives a choice between different play styles within the same class.

This is just a fraction of all the stuff going on in my head to do with this game and normally I keep it all bottled up because I can't post on a forum where someone might actually listen and take it into account, but it's gotten to a point where I just need to vent even if it will get ripped apart by people who think I'm a dumbass So do your stuff intenet. Sorry for any typos or sentences that lack sense. I really can't be arsed to double check after spending so much time writing it. Sorry lol.

---------- Post added 2010-07-14 at 04:56 PM ----------

*Sigh* After all that nobody replies or even reads QQ.

---------- Post added 2010-07-15 at 01:41 PM ----------

Well over 100 people read it but nobody said whether they liked, disliked, agreed or disagreed with anything I said. So sad first post for me lol