New Talent Trees Oversimplified?

[Badma]

Everyone had the same talents to begin with. Unless you had no idea what you were doing.

It might have seemed that way to you, but not every class had one viable build per tree. Priests for example have several viable PvE holy specs and I've seen well progressed people using all of them. I've seen lots of end-game tanks with more than one tanking spec as well.

Its the DPS classes who are most cookie cutter because the math exists to support a theoretical "max" dps spec in an ideal situation, which is what most people who care read about on elitistjerks.com and go for. I was in an ICC10 pug the other night with no replenishment buff and couldn't help but think as I chugged mana pots and watched my shadowfiend cooldown that the 4k dps marks hunter would have been more useful with a survival spec. If only he knew better.

You're supposed to use those free points to decide what nifty utility (PvP) talents you want

This ^^. It fits with my theory that Blizz (not so) secretly wants us all to PvP more. I would also bet money that unlike all of you, 90% of WoW players *never* research their class on *any* website, and by condensing the talent trees, Blizz continues it's trend of catering to the masses. Whether we think this is good or bad, the bottom line seems to be that talent specs aren't going to play as important a part as they have in the past in determining a player's success in the game. It's going to boil down (as it always has) to how well you pay attention and push buttons in response. For DPS players who care about maxing their performance I see this as a win, and for tanks and healers, it really feels like a loss. But for the typical player who didn't take the time to really learn about their own class in Wrath and the previous versions of the game, it's probably a good thing no matter what spec they play.

[Eyeball2452]

Everyone had the same talents to begin with. Unless you had no idea what you were doing.

If that's the defense of the new system, Blizz should just eliminate talents all together.

My question is, how is this a step forward for the people who buy Cat? As far as I can tell, all you get after 80 is a few second tier talents from a secondary tree.

[Badma]

If you're looking at the beta talent trees as they are now, you're wasting your time. The talent trees that are in the current build of the beta are the first pass, and in some cases haven't been touched other than being stripped down to fit the new tree structures, so there will be a lot of changes made between now and the talent trees going live.

If you had somebody building a house for you, you wouldn't come along when they're in the middle of laying the foundations and complain that it doesn't have a roof. You'd wait until they say they've finished building, and THEN complain if it doesn't have a roof.

The idea behind a "forum" is that it's a place where people discuss ideas... so telling us all we're "wasting our time" seems really out of place, in a forum. If people were just mindlessly QQ'ing about things then I could see your point. But so far this thread has been relatively free of that.

[rabbimojo]

The thing i'm still wondering most is were the hell are those "FUN TALENTS" blizzard was talking about, and about diversity of builds, isn't that bullcrap?

Not everyone finds talents fun, and maybe you're one of those types. There are plenty of neat talents already in the list. A "neat" talent is one that has a meaningful impact on how you interact with the game. From arms alone, consider the following talents: Blitz, Taste for Blood, Sweeping Strikes, Imp overpower, Sudden death, Lambs to the slaughter, juggernaut, second wind, bladestorm, disarming glare (neat but is being cut).

That's one tree, and the bulk of the talents significantly change how your character plays after you take the talent.

Right now, there seems to be a bit too few talents in each tree, to me, causing a lot of specs to come out very similar. However, on live, that's already the case, oftentimes much worse than you're seeing with beta trees.

[Azrile]

Just remember, this is very VERY early in the process. I mean look at the druid trees, they aren't even playable.

With the ones that are finished, lets take warrior for example. Almost all 3 trees are very playable right now, and actually they did exactly what they wanted to do, they cut the fat and they made almost every talent useful. So they have accomplished 3 goals. Each spec will feel more like 'a spec' at level 10, each talent point you spend will feel significant, and you won't be spending points in things you don't want.

The only goal they haven't achieved YET!! is diversification. If I were a dev, the diversifying talents would come when I do glyphs. What I would do is design glyphs, and then if I had a glyph that seemed a little too powerful, I would add it instead as a talent and find it a place on the talent tree where it forces a hard decision. Doing it this way, it seems like it would be very easy to add another 6-9 points to each tree and give players options.

I always thought of glyphs as 'baby talents' though, not sure if that is the devs mentality also.

In any event, they have done a great job with the trees they said were more polished. In particular warriors and subt rogues look awesome. The only thing they really need to do is go back and add 6-9 viable talent points to each tree, which isn't that hard to do.

[MystiskeM]

Without having read all replies, I'm going to speak to those complaining about not being able to put together a spec without any pvp/utility abilities.
You have to see it this way, which is the intention; you get all the flat modifier talents which we have now in wotlk for free through mastery/specialization whatever the name is for it atm. And if you happen to get leftover points after taking all core dmg/healing/tanking talents, you get free utility/pvp talents for you to fool around with, without having to activate your "pvp" spec through dual specs.

It's all for the greater good, more interesting abilities even for what you now call "pve" specs, so they won't be distinguished as easily from "pvp" specs when cataclysm is the name of the game. The jump from pvp to pve or vice versa is narrower, and you can choose 2 different specs that way, be it tank and heal or another combination of specs.

Hope I make sense, and be patient

[rabbimojo]

...
I would also bet money that unlike all of you, 90% of WoW players *never* research their class on *any* website, and by condensing the talent trees, Blizz continues it's trend of catering to the masses.
...

Yeah... Talents as they are on live have fairly little variation. A few lucky trees have options, but a quick browse of Wowpopular.com shows how much weight is on the primary specs (especially if you differentiate pve from pvp).

For the most part, right now talents serve as a trap for players who are new or don't have time/don't want to spend time to research every character they play. They don't provide any sort of meaningful gameplay options for experienced players, though from these threads I get the impression many of those players don't realize how little choice they have.

I don't know that Blizz's goal is to get people into pvp so much as talents we traditionally label as "pvp" are just... anything utility-oriented. We tend to think of ourselves in PvE as cogs in a machine, so we want to maximize our performance in the very very narrow role we're assigned. So, say, polymorph stunning when it gets broken gets a "wtf? pvp talent" from a lot of mages; after all, it doesn't increase damage.

However, that's where Blizz can add the most to our experience. If the only talents a PVE dpser cares about are those that actually increase damage, then the only things Blizzard can add are damage-increasing talents. However, that's just speeding up the treadmill, it doesn't actually change the DPSer's experience. Every DPSer is kept in line, more or less, so it isn't as though you're going to leap up the charts with your new OP talent. Every boss is balanced around the capabilities of players, so it isn't as though it's going to make fights significantly easier.

But a post-CC stun? That's not something that needs to be balanced around right now. That's actually progress on your character's power, relative to other characters and relative to the encounters.

---------- Post added 2010-07-16 at 10:53 AM ----------

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With the ones that are finished, lets take warrior for example.
...
In particular warriors and subt rogues look awesome.
...

I have heard people guffaw at the thought that sub rogues are done.
I think it's probably too early to call any tree anywhere near done. e.g., Disarming Glare doesn't exist anymore. Impending Victory doesn't exist anymore. etc.

Certainly some trees are more done than others. I'm just trying to keep cautioning people against thinking anything is set in stone.

[Dillybear]

really, im thinking a lot what you are. yes there used to be a lot more "wrong choices" but there was always a time that those choices were correct, times when u could use those and at least for me it helped showing players that actually knew their class if they knew when to take and when not to take talants, i play a balance druid and overall most of that build was mandatory, but there were plenty of times where u would choose between builds based on gear and fights. i jsut think now with almost no variety that just takes a lot of the fun out of speccing. i like being given the wrong choice so that i feel good when i make the right one. especially since not everyone needs to copy/paste a spec build to understand what talants are nessicary.

[Azrile]

One other thing GC keeps mention is the anti-pvp talents (he referred to it as an arms race). A certain spec uses CC's to succeed. So over the years, other classes were given anti-cc's to counter those cc's. So then the class that needed cc's was underpowered, so was given more cc's... then the other classes were given more anti-cc's to get them away from those ccs. Etc etc.

So I think what GC wants to do is difuse the arms race and get CCs back to where they were. Classes won't need 4 different CC's and their victims won't need 3 different talents to remove those CCs. Instead, it might be 2 and 1, and that one will come from somewhere besides talents (trinkets, spells, set bonuses).

What this means is that there won't be nearly as many pvp 'talents', instead you will have normal talents, and just armor yourself or use spells for pvp.

[Neichus]

Blizzard has said that right now they're just getting the ideas into the trees. Balancing potential builds is the next step. I personally was most impressed by Protection Warriors out of all the trees I looked at. There's a lot of choice between Rage mechanics, threat generation, and general utility. There are also several new talents with new ideas. Arms by comparison I think is just a bit behind in the process. They have a few new ideas but they're not quite fleshed out yet.

Beyond this, it's just a case of adjusting what talents are available in the top 2 Tiers of other trees. Again to take Arms, it almost always can invest some points in Fury to increase its DPS; this means that all utility talents will continue to be skipped unless absolutely necessary to take. But after playing around with the calculator for a while, I can already think of how to fix this. As long as T1 has a mixture of talents that are of middling value and T2 doesn't have anything that's ridiculously powerful, it'll become a choice. Having some attractive T1 talents ensures that all builds aren't 41/0/0, but as long as nothing in T2 is a HUGE DPS gain then there's going to be some residual choice. I think this sort of shuffling is what will occur next once Blizzard establishes everything they want the different specs to have.

Edit: one fun option would be if they moved Blood and Thunder to T2 Protection. I think that would offer a fairly interesting AoE talent option to Arms, while speccing Fury would be more single-target.

[darkling235]

Well me myself personally didn't mind all the old 'boring' talents. I think they should have added the mastery system, the level 10 ability and quit while they were ahead. Those would have been great new features for the game and I'm not even convinced we needed new talents for these 5 levels except to replace the ones removed for the level 10 ability. I can't help but think that the class talent trees being reworked like this is a lot like having 3 meta classes per class with not much variation between meta classes.

[Alindor]

I like this change. Setting aside all of the "boring talents" "fun talents" crap, I think it will make talents less important to the gameplay overall. Instead of spending multiple hours tinkering with your spec in spreadsheets and all that jazz, you'll spend more farming/instancing, etc. It's about time they changed it, because much more of that expansion and it would have been completely idiotic.

[Luko]

Everyone is just going to have to understand that this game isn't going to be complicated anymore. I'm sure bosses and events will still require much strategy, practice, and learn-by-doing scenarios.

Theory crafting on the other hand will die out pretty fast. People are going to be "discovering" the "best" specs for each scenario on week one if not day one. Not very different from now except in the fact that there wont be much dispute. There won't be a lot of other options to choose from.

TL;DR ~ The game is no longer about being best. So have fun with it. If you're not having fun, move on. No?

[Badma]

.... However, that's where Blizz can add the most to our experience. If the only talents a PVE dpser cares about are those that actually increase damage, then the only things Blizzard can add are damage-increasing talents. However, that's just speeding up the treadmill, it doesn't actually change the DPSer's experience. Every DPSer is kept in line, more or less, so it isn't as though you're going to leap up the charts with your new OP talent. Every boss is balanced around the capabilities of players, so it isn't as though it's going to make fights significantly easier.

But a post-CC stun? That's not something that needs to be balanced around right now. That's actually progress on your character's power, relative to other characters and relative to the encounters.

Good point.

[Guesswho69]

Self healing used to be big back PVE in BC. I remember some fights, you had to bandage yourself just due to the sheer amount of raid damage that was done, and mana was finite resource. Sometimes dps would stop hitting the boss for 8 seconds, bandage, and then get back into the fight.

[Ssith]

my personal favorite tree is Affli lock. there are 35 possible points in a 31-point tree. i'm well aware that this is the first pass, i was just amused when i noticed that.

[darkling235]

my personal favorite tree is Affli lock. there are 35 possible points in a 31-point tree. i'm well aware that this is the first pass, i was just amused when i noticed that.

Yea I play a lock myself and noticed the same issue. In fairness though the warlock trees are probably the least developed so far