Return of the Dull?

[Tyranu]

At first glance I have to admit that I loved the new talent trees. Then I started to make hypothetical builds out of them. Now, I realize that they aren't final and many things will change, but the trees are so exceedingly dull when you make builds out of them that it seems pretty odd. Particularly for PVE builds.

Here's my step by step to creating a PVE build with the new trees:

1. Pick your main tree.
2. Look at the other trees and pick out the tier 1 and 2 talents that apply to your main tree and take them.
3. Allocate all additional points into the PVE talents of your main tree.

You will find that you have exactly enough to get the talents in the two other trees that you want while then taking all PVE talents in the main tree. There are a couple exceptions where the class can't even form a coherent build (Discipline Priest comes to mind), but that's for the most part what we have now. The cookie cutter builds are so obvious that it's silly. Other exceptions for trees with filler.

Druid:
Resto Druid - 9 PVE healing talents in Balance, 32 in Resto
Balance Druid - 5 PVE DPS talents in Resto, 33 in Balance +3 if OKF works on AOE
Cat Druid - 5 PVE DPS talents in Resto, 36 kitty talents in Feral
Bear Druid - 3 PVE tanking talents in Resto, 38 bear talents in Feral

Warlock:
Demonology - 7 PVE talents in Destro, 32 PVE talents in Demo +2 filler to get down tree
Destruction - 8 PVE talents in Demo + 1 filler (surv), 28 PVE talents in Destro +3 filler +1 leftover
Affliction - 6 PVE talents in Destro, 2 in Demo, 31 in Afflic + 2 filler

You can do this for pretty much every class. Vanilla worked with the 31 point trees because we had 51 talents to work with. With 41 talents the builds are laughable as the trees are designed specifically with cookie-cutters in mind. It sucks that Blizzard has decided to implement a system for Expansion #3 that is obviously intended for Expansion #5 when talents will be as fleshed out as they were in Vanilla. Very disappointing to me.

After playing around a bit with various classes, I completely agree... To me, the talent trees always represented a certain amount of choice. Sure, there were always 'cookie cutter' specs, but in most cases you still had around 5 points to put wherever you wanted them depending on your playstyle. Even in WotlK you have some amount of freedom. Now with the low amount of talent points and the painfully obvious 'choices' to take, it feels like a vanilla alpha system, not a third expansion system.

Complexity can be annoying, but it's kind of necessary to keep things interesting.

[Wingwraith]

What these new talent trees are making me wonder is if talents are really necessary at all.

Yeah, F it. Who needs talents anyway? And while we're at it, lets just take out all the quests too, because they only make the whole leveling process longer and more arduous. I should be able to afk in SW for 2 hours a day for a month and have my toon gain levels and skills by my /2 whit.

/sarcasm

[Boloney]

"Buhbuhbuh We all want vanilla wow back wotlk sucks everything sucks since BC buhbuhbuh"

BLizzard changes talent speccs pretty much how it worked in vanilla and guess what:

"Buhbuhbuh talent system sucks, want wotlk talents back buhbuhbuh"

they always want more

[khh]

the net effect of this whole change was simply making cookie cutter obligatory(or maybe making the concept of "build" obsolete depending on how you see it)

theres no way to make a completely useless char now, even picking talents at random will give you 70%~90% of the performance of the best build depending on the class/tree

i do not think thats bad thing, but thats not what blues have been hyping all this time

everything else is exactly the same, fun talents and such joined the dance studio in the graveyard of things that blues say but cant deliver

[Martana]

it seems to me that a lot of people are not actually looking at the talent trees, or even trying to build talent specs, before passing judgment.

the express purpose of the talent tree changes is that, after you get every talent that only a retard would skip in the tree that you wish you spec into, you have about 4-6 talent points remaining to use on utility from other trees, and if the trees pan out properly, the choice of where to spend these last talent points is difficult because there are several competing 'good' choices, each of which is compelling for it's own reasons.

most of the trees that are 'farther along' in development very clearly demonstrate this concept. i don't understand how people are not seeing it.

[Flaks]

Vanilla specs were STILL more interesting than this crap. If they wanted to give us free talents to use after we'd finished speccing for a specific tree they should give us more than the talents available now.

[Greenmahn]

"Buhbuhbuh We all want vanilla wow back wotlk sucks everything sucks since BC buhbuhbuh"

BLizzard changes talent speccs pretty much how it worked in vanilla and guess what:

"Buhbuhbuh talent system sucks, want wotlk talents back buhbuhbuh"

NOpe i would rather have teh old vanilla talents back then the trees as the stand now I have no problem with only 31 talent trees i just think their CURRENT system is flawed when GC announced they were all ready ready you would expect more polish then what you see currently YES its beta Yes things will change Is there a point about complaining about it especcially on a non blizz site yes we are Voicing our view points and some of us are discussing them and how they might change all you are doing is complaining about how we feel

next time how about you contribute to the discussion or voice your views without being negative to others is that really that hard to do?

---------- Post added 2010-07-14 at 05:25 PM ----------

the net effect of this whole change was simply making cookie cutter obligatory(or maybe making the concept of "build" obsolete depending on how you see it)

theres no way to make a completely useless char now, even picking talents at random will give you 70%~90% of the performance of the best build depending on the class/tree

i do not think thats bad thing, but thats not what blues have been hyping all this time

everything else is exactly the same, fun talents and such joined the dance studio in the graveyard of things that blues say but cant deliver

^^ This basically