Do you like the old talents trees or the current ones?

[Awbee]

There's a lot more sucking the fun out of wows leveling even before the talent system removal. WoW (subjectively) probably has the worst leveling experience of any MMO currently on the market.

Hence "free lvl 90 with purchase of game", because blizzard has long since accepted that this game is entirely about the current xpac and endgame content. That is a totally different discussion though.

Have you tried leveling in Wildstar? Now that's a pain. Leveling in GW2 was very enjoyable until they butchered their talent system even worse than WoW, breaking it completely, the game's unplayable atm.

I still enjoy leveling in WoW, though not as much as I used to before the removal of the old talent system, before the removal of class quests, and before the leveling dungeons and mobs were made as one-shot as they are now. I would like for these things to be fixed, so that I and many others can better enjoy leveling again.

Blizz' free 90 thing is a terrible decision in my opinion, but they probably did it to avoid all the illegal character selling, and to fill Activision's pockets while doing so. Absolutely not an argument against improving leveling though.


You didn't respond to my points 8) - 10) yet.

[Wyrt]

I prefer the ones we have now, even if they're not perfect. I feel the poll is missing an option. I want something like the current trees, but with better talents.

Quality>quantity imo. Having a few meaningful choices is significantly better than having a bunch of meaningless choices.

[apepi]

I would like a um..., merge of the two. Have the same ones we have today but you get to use 5 points in each of the talents that determine its strength.

[Zulkhan]

Oh well. I like the old one more for "nostalgia issues" than anything.

But pragmatically speaking the new one is more functional. The old talent system had its charm and the possibility to "mix" specs, but in Cataclysm became nothing but a big pile of crap. It became a system that gave a dishonest delusion of choice that wasn't there. So, considered the way the old system took, the new one is thousand more better.

[ringpriest]

New system is more cookie cutter than ever... which is hilarious considering when people complained about the new system in MoP beta blizz just kept repeating "IT WILL SOLVE COOKIE CUTTER BUILDS!" over and over. Old System ftw.

It did solve "cookie cutter builds" - there are no longer builds. Kind of a "make themselves a silence and call it a peace" sort of solution for talents.

[Artoff]

Old one was way better,you could make some fun hybrid builds like frost/fire mage or dw elemental shaman

[Powerogue]

New talents are much better, I actually have a choice and every individual talent effects what my character is good at doing. The issue is now you feel less of an upgrade with each individual level, but I can live with that.

There was nothing tactical about "picking between Preset Talent Spec's 1-3 or your guild will kick you"

If I could give it a core flaw, though I'm still debating whether it is, it's that you can swap talents on a dime for about 50 silver. Boss fight requires you to have a certain talent? Swap it up! Makes the choice of the talents less meaningful, but it also means they won't kick you for not having a certain build for a certain boss, so there's that..

[Baconeggcheese]

Have you tried leveling in Wildstar? Now that's a pain. Leveling in GW2 was very enjoyable until they butchered their talent system even worse than WoW, breaking it completely, the game's unplayable atm.

I still enjoy leveling in WoW, though not as much as I used to before the removal of the old talent system, before the removal of class quests, and before the leveling dungeons and mobs were made as one-shot as they are now. I would like for these things to be fixed, so that I and many others can better enjoy leveling again.

Blizz' free 90 thing is a terrible decision in my opinion, but they probably did it to avoid all the illegal character selling, and to fill Activision's pockets while doing so. Absolutely not an argument against improving leveling though.


You didn't respond to my points 8) - 10) yet.

Currently leveling in wildstar, can't say its any worse / better than wows leveling. Only even attempting it out of sheer boredom and hopes that the game might become more fun later on. I hear the dungeons are quite engaging and not at all puggable. Apparently not a casual friendly game in the slightest. It sure isn't Swtors leveling that's for sure. Best leveling experience ever.

Free 90s is another discussion that could become another long debate. Considering what the leveling experience is like these days imo its a smart move on blizzards part.

Sorry I have a handful of people all trying to come at me at the same time, was just focusing on a single conversation. If you really want my opinions there...

8~ You still get these things gradually as passives and if you're paying attention to what you're awarded while leveling you'll still learn these things.

9~ Those choices are just made for you now instead and you end up with all of them at the end of the road anyway. Since again, leveling has been gutted into a fairly crappy experience we should not be focusing on it since its a minor part of the game. The major part and focus of the game is endgame, which is where you should be concerned about how the system functions. Do I think its crappy leveling has been so overlooked? Yes. Unfortunately that is the state of the game and putting the old talent system back in far from fixes the problems with wows leveling these days. However its a massive QoL improvement considering it as an endgame system vs the old one.

10~ Again, you still get *everything* you would have gotten except now its passively instead of an active "choice". You act as though the old system was infinitely flexible with choices, often times a lot of the choices we have now were similar to choices we had back then because you were required to spend points in pre-reqs to make your way down the tree. If they didn't want you stacking 3 mobility talents in the old system they simply set them up in a way where you couldn't reasonably pick all 3. This is not unique to the current system, you did not have completely free form flexibility with the old system.

[speakpkhq]

i greatly prefer the old talent trees, allowing me to tweak as i see fit. the new talent trees are pretty much set in stone one way or the other.

[Pua]

Let's just put this to bed.

I tried reading through the first bit and saw it was all ad hominem so I skipped to see if you actually tried to answer my question since it wasn't worth reading. Feel free to do the same with my post!

Complaining that I didn't answer your question, then trying to respond to my answer to your question, is a little... Well, it's just odd, isn't it?

fair enough in a world where leveling was a meaningful and immersive part of the game. Unfortunately leveling has since become something you piss through to get to the endgame content as blizzard has long since given up on trying to keep it up to date with what it once was back in the vanilla days. This is proven by blizzard tossing in a *buy your lvl 90* + a free lvl 90 with purchase of warlords thus skipping the entire thing.

None of that is a criticism of talent trees, it's a criticism of lazy design that they believe they can cash in on.

If you prefer pressing a button to get +5% dmg instead of the game automatically giving you +5% dmg that's fine, but it doesn't make the old system better because the end result is identical. Now consider that players are dinging 90 immediately and have never gotten that sense of progression and have a large chunk of points to spend and have no idea what to do with them. Website it is.

Again, this is a criticism of scummy Blizzard business practices. We can only discuss talent trees (as a concept) under the guise of what they were designed to do - bring your character up as you levelled.

Dramatically higher number of builds that aren't good / efficient allowing less skilled players to *think* they have these choices and are just playing sub-optimally.

You've repeated this hundreds of times and are utterly ignoring every valid point against it. People choosing their own talents IS NOT AN ILLUSION OF CHOICE TO THOSE PEOPLE. No, no, no. It's entirely their own decision on what they're doing and, outside of raiding which is a niche activity, players are absolutely free to do whatever they like.

It's ENTIRELY their own choice. There's no illusion, whatsoever.

And even if your point was valid, which it's not (it's just more of the same elitist gibberish you've been spouting for pages now), it still wouldn't counteract the very real number of options players used to have about combinations thanks to multiple points per talent, and the number of talents you could choose. Let's not forget that, up until Cataclysm, you could even choose what order you took talents in!

Fair enough, fun is fun. They were never better outside of very specific times in the games history, but fun is fun.

They were often better for individual players.

uuuhhhh, the reason for the whole *most people just went on a website to use cookie cutters* argument is because most people were absolutely not encouraged to experiment under this system and most players barely cared.

And you're basing this on...? Considering that most player don't post on forums, and even the ones that do are currently polling a preference for the old talent trees, you're just pulling this assertion from nowhere.

Absolutely nowhere.

Except it didn't.... because again there wasn't any real choice in there unless you were choosing to be be sub-optimal. No meaningful customization there (I agree though I'd like some more ***meaningful*** customization somewhere in the game)

Except it did, for reasons already explained. I'd be willing to wager that the vast majority of players liked making their own choices with their character and couldn't care less about whether they were 100% optimal or not. Then you had players like me who could use their talents to build something that suited their own group, despite being suboptimal.

I understand players have preferences, which is fine. But saying the old system was superior in any way is simply false. It's not a subjective thing.

Yes, it is. You just can't accept it.

They both do the exact same thing, again the new system just doesn't allow you to be wildly sub-optimal with your build and allows them to make more focused specs where they trimmed the fat on a lot of clunky mechanics that made their way into peoples rotations that shouldn't have been there in the first place due to having so many points and access to more baseline spells with the old system.

I don't know where to begin with the problems of the new system. Take a look at warlocks; multiple talents that have all had to be differentiated thanks to the way they work for individual specs. Then there's the fact you only get one every 15 levels which hardly feels meaningful. Then of course, too many of them are garbage and are only considered "interesting" because they're on a garbage tier. But you have to take one!

Let's talk about the "choice" in the new talent system, shall we?

My first choice is Juggernaut, Double-Time and Warbringer. I'd rather have something that affects Heroic Leap because I only really PvE and barely need to Charge more than once every 20 seconds. Except, I have no choice - I have to take a Charge talent and that's one of my six blown. Next up is self-healing and they're all worse than what other classes invariably have at baseline. Honestly, I'd rather take something else. But, no! I HAVE to take something I don't want. Next up it's another interrupt I don't need, an AoE snare that doesn't work in raids and a root that doesn't do anything either. I don't want any of that... But I have to take one, because it's all about choice!

It's garbage. They've taken choice away, and people have swallowed it because they can't see the wood for the trees. The "cookie-cutter" points in the old talent trees worked because they meant that you still had enough to get down the tree, but you could make choices on the way down. The biggest and most important part of this was that you could choose talents on the same tier, skip some altogether, and still get where you wanted to go. Now, you can't. You're forced to take shitty talents that you don't want, which eats up the opportunities to take talents that you do want.

This is where the illusion of choice sits. People have just become used to accepting a shit sandwich when they're told they MUST have a CC talent, they MUST have a healing talent, they MUST have a DPS cooldown talent. And if you don't want any of them?

Tough. You're taking them.

It's extraordinarily easy for me, at this point, to just take your route and argue until I'm blue in the face that a choice between three things you don't want is an illusion of choice. It would be extraordinarily easy because it's true. Yet, I'm not going to go down that route because I'm trying to respect the opinions of the 45% who don't agree with me.

Maybe you should just try and do the same.

[Baconeggcheese]

Complaining that I didn't answer your question, then trying to respond to my answer to your question, is a little... Well, it's just odd, isn't it?

So we're sitting at a table having a discussion, I ask a question

you dodge question, I ask you to answer the question, you answer the question in a way I completely disagree with, normal etiquette to you at this point is for me to go "ok thanks!" and then walk away? What? Have you never had a conversation before?

You gave a shit answer man of course I'd respond what? Anyway I'm gonna cherry pick here since most of these are the same argument over and over and the size of these posts is getting dumb.

None of that is a criticism of talent trees, it's a criticism of lazy design that they believe they can cash in on.

it is absolutely relevant to the design choices behind why they even created the new talent trees and made everything else that was a "choice" passive.

It's ENTIRELY their own choice. There's no illusion, whatsoever.

This is absolutely true if you want to play the game entirely solo and are just playing for funsies. The second you step into any group content and think you really still had a choice there you were literally becoming a detriment to your group by choosing to be sub-optimal.

This is far from an elitist mentality, its just baseline expectations. It would be the equivalent of refusing to use a voice program during raids or RBGs / Arenas. You could *choose* to not communicate with your team thus becoming a massive detriment to your entire group, you do have that choice technically but realistically if you're not an asshole you don't have a choice you should be in that voice program with everyone else.

And you're basing this on...? Considering that most player don't post on forums, and even the ones that do are currently polling a preference for the old talent trees, you're just pulling this assertion from nowhere.

Absolutely nowhere.

uh... I guessed you missed the part where blizzard ****completely overhauled how the system worked because they for a fact knew that player apathy was at an all time high****

I know you like to play conspiracy theorist there and go OH HURRDURR PARROT HURR which just shows a massive amount of naivety that blizzard makes huge design changes without massive consideration first.

This is where the illusion of choice sits. People have just become used to accepting a shit sandwich when they're told they MUST have a CC talent, they MUST have a healing talent, they MUST have a DPS cooldown talent. And if you don't want any of them?

Tough. You're taking them.

No you could totally just leave a row untalented, its the equivalent of your argument that we had choice with the old system since you think there was actually flexibility there.

You still have the choice to be wildly sub-optimal there by not taking anything. All of those talents you used to pick to make your way down the tree are now baseline passives. They all still exist, you just don't get to put points in them you get them automatically.

It's extraordinarily easy for me, at this point, to just take your route and argue until I'm blue in the face that a choice between three things you don't want is an illusion of choice.

Oh we absolutely still have a *mostly* illusion of choice with the current system. No one has ever tried to say otherwise, literally all this new system did was remove your ability to make extremely bad choices that you *thought* were good choices by making all the correct choices passive. With the current system a player can pick all the worst talents because they think they're fun and still do fairly well.

The new system doesn't have any more (or less) choice than the old system had, its basically the same. You have specific niche's / fights that call for a certain talent and otherwise you can safely spec into a "cookie cutter" build and be good to go. The difference is now you can change those talents in between fights, and you can't make any egregiously bad choices.

[Nighthaven-]

-gibberish-

Poor arguments, you're mostly arguing about arguing and not the case itself.
Zellviren 99999999999999999 - 0 Baconeggcheese


- The current talents are not talents, they're flavor. Every tier does exactly the same thing, the current flexibility you claim there is, is none: as there is only a default route where you still going to end up with 1 survival-ability, 1 Utility, and several flavor-abilities.

For example didn't pvp players sacrifice dps talents for survival-talents and vice-versa?


Of-course the current talent system makes life easier, but you shouldn't take a Donald to your raid group either.
It was common practice to leave/ ditch idiots to their own by inspecting them, and that is fine practice. No one wants to waste their time with no-thinkers/ people who need relearn how to step out of different fires from boss to boss.
The best thinkers, and best raiders, are those who can optimize. This applies to PvP as well. Adaption.


The current talents are neither interesting nor fun, and it is not what MMOs are based around: Optimization.
In some unfortunate class-cases there were only a single 'ultimate build', but there were still utilities you could pick up. but that's fine as there is only BiS gear too. Yet classes suffering from that problem had a talent-design-flaw, we shouldn't bring every class down to retard-proof level for that matter of equality-bs.

Currently there is nothing you can tune your play-style around on, nor customize your specialization in any-way in the way in the things you choose to pursue. Talents that synergies with crit builds, talents that make your style of play slightly stronger.

Bad players do not have bad performance because of what talents they've chosen, but because they're unable evaluate their own performance.
The current talents solved nothing, all for nothing, in a poor choice of saving-time by Blizzard.
The current talents is the illusion of choice, as there is none.

There is no feeling of slightly stronger character by each level either.

Only a very few talents made it into passives, about 3/4 of all talent-gimmicks are gone.
But we do not want everything for everyone either.

Two people of the same class and spec obviously want to differentiate themselves, and talents was another thing among gear only differentiation. It sounds like you just want to do better because of gear only/ you've spent more time in the game as someone else outsmarted you in their talent choices/ you tried to be talent-hipster.

[Baconeggcheese]

- The current talents are not talents, they're flavor. Every tier does exactly the same thing, the current flexibility you claim there is, is none:

I stopped reading here, you clearly haven't read anything I said or very very poorly interpreted it.

[Roamingstorm]

I do believe that they could help making some lackluster talents feel more epic...

[Nighthaven-]

Tell me how 90% of all talents magically does not do the same thing with slight alterations.

Yes, clearly you have trouble comprehending things.

[Thimagryn]

So we're sitting at a table having a discussion, I ask a question

you dodge question, I ask you to answer the question, you answer the question in a way I completely disagree with, normal etiquette to you at this point is for me to go "ok thanks!" and then walk away? What? Have you never had a conversation before?

Read your arguments. You're all over the place and you're never addressing the topic, rather you fall back on petty excuses that have nothing to do with core design. You argue with conjecture, that old talent trees are bad design, but have no factual basis for the argument. Simply saying they are bad choices doesn't make it true.

Borderlands 2 uses similar trees to original WoW. While there are many filler talents, there is still plenty of choice in how you want to tweak your build. Even if you are using a cookie cutter build, there are always tweaks you can make to fit your playstyle. WoW has completely done away with this in favour of a new system that works like glyphs. If you are to talk about illusion of choice, then it is all a ruse since no matter how you play the game, everyone ends up using the same spec/glyphs/talents. This is the same with the current system, where Talents will either be necessary, or can be ignored altogether. End game builds will always exist.

[K i s u]

The current ones are fine however I do miss the diversity of the old.

[Pua]

You gave a shit answer man of course I'd respond what? Anyway I'm gonna cherry pick here since most of these are the same argument over and over and the size of these posts is getting dumb.

I've literally no idea what you're crying about. I've answered every one of your questions, you just don't like my answers because they rail against your own prejudices and you can't prove anything I'm saying wrong.

it is absolutely relevant to the design choices behind why they even created the new talent trees and made everything else that was a "choice" passive.

Faster levelling speed and bought 90's have absolutely nothing to do with the core design tenets of talent trees.

Absolutely nothing.

This is absolutely true if you want to play the game entirely solo and are just playing for funsies. The second you step into any group content and think you really still had a choice there you were literally becoming a detriment to your group by choosing to be sub-optimal.

No, everything up to heroic raiding has freedom of choice and people will perform just fine. The elitist mentality I'm describing is the one where groups tell their players what to do, rather than merely accepting that what they're doing works perfectly for the content they're playing. Take my word for it, you could use almost any talents you liked during Cataclysm and still complete the majority of the content if you were a good player.

Internet gaming snobbery is the only thing that causes the "no choice" argument.

uh... I guessed you missed the part where blizzard ****completely overhauled how the system worked because they for a fact knew that player apathy was at an all time high****

They knew for a fact that player apathy was at an all-time high... Because of talent trees? What? What a thoroughly absurd and utterly unverifiable claim to make.

Seriously, if that's going to be your argument from now on (amongst the rest of the misaligned gibberish you're largely spouting) you're better off logging in and sticking to what you're best at. Meaningful discussion clearly isn't your forte.

No you could totally just leave a row untalented, its the equivalent of your argument that we had choice with the old system since you think there was actually flexibility there.

You still have the choice to be wildly sub-optimal there by not taking anything. All of those talents you used to pick to make your way down the tree are now baseline passives. They all still exist, you just don't get to put points in them you get them automatically.

Nobody is going to choose to be wildly suboptimal, and nobody ever has. Ever. You're now ignoring the point I'm making about the new trees having no choice, and trying to imply that "iz kewl taek nuthin" is somehow an intellectual riposte. If I wanted a set of talents on one rung of the old talent trees, but didn't like another rung, I could make it happen. Now, if I don't want self-healing as a warrior, it's too bad - I have to take it. Maybe I wanted all three healing talents and was willing to lose the CC and DPS tiers. Nope, I've got to take what Blizzard tell me to take.

I'm unsure which part of this is confusing you.

I'm starting to think the answer is 'all of it'.

Oh we absolutely still have a *mostly* illusion of choice with the current system. No one has ever tried to say otherwise, literally all this new system did was remove your ability to make extremely bad choices that you *thought* were good choices by making all the correct choices passive. With the current system a player can pick all the worst talents because they think they're fun and still do fairly well.

Previous talents were "fun" and still did "fairly well". Remember, PvP is a thing in this game, too.

The new system doesn't have any more (or less) choice than the old system had, its basically the same. You have specific niche's / fights that call for a certain talent and otherwise you can safely spec into a "cookie cutter" build and be good to go. The difference is now you can change those talents in between fights, and you can't make any egregiously bad choices.

No such thing as an "egregiously bad" choice, unless you misunderstand what that word means. It seems that if you could respec without going to a class trainer (which they could have done while keeping the previous talent trees), you'd be happy.

That's not an objective argument against talent trees. That's you trying to force objectivity on your own preference, while arguing in circles and irrelevance to avoid accepting that other people have a point.

[Grogo]

You two should just kiss, the sexual tension is killing me.

[Pua]

You two should just kiss, the sexual tension is killing me.

If he was reasonably hot, I'd be up for it. Alas, I'm currently dating a girl I really like, so the timing sucks. :<