We should've gotten rework on talent tree talents.

[DemonDays]

Demonic's definitely one of these talents that should be baseline, no arguments here, alongside First Blood. On the flipside, you can look at Resto Druid and no row has a clear winner. Arms is fairly well distributed, while Prot Warrior basically has one build period. To me it seems there's about one problem spec per class, but we won't know what talent rows are locked until the expansion releases, and truthfully neither does Blizzard considering the stupid amount of moving gears that affect the complex machine that is WoW's balance.

There's far more examples that I care not to list. (Warlock for one)

They need to stop this disgusting practise of fixing specs in talent rows and then via rented power. The reason we "won't know" is as you said - a stupid amount of moving gears that is rental systems.


Apparently it's too much to ask for my spec to be functioning at a base level.

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Yeah I was excited at first look but the more I dig into the more I realize class wise nothing really changed. The major change is your good stuff will come from a rep grind rather than from random drops.

It's still borrowed power, except this time you are limited because you can only get it from a Rep and you better hope you pick the right one.

That's the hilarious thing that some of these fanboys are arguing.

"MEANINGFUL CHOICE REEEEEEE"

We want functioning specs BASELINE and then I wouldn't give a shit that the Covenant is a meaningful choice. The fact that I need to try and PLUG HOLES in my spec with the Covenenant is the ISSUE.

In BfA I can pick and choose which holes to plug via dogshit Azerite and Essences. In Legion I could do the same via moronic RNG legendaries and the whole Artifact talent tree was given to you anyway.


Now I have to PICK which holes to plug?

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Classes fucked beyond repair.

About topic, yes talents are badly designed. Demo lock while being the best designed spec in entire history of wow doesn't function without Demonic consumption.
Which is pants on head retarded (the talent). Whole mechanic on this talent is damn retarded.

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Well to be honest it's about half of them. Talents do need a rework to provide at least some choice, and I am not even talking about dps wise.

Yeah it's easily at least half of them. Maybe more.

That's the thing. People like to talk about DPS but it's not about that. It's about needing to pick certain talents so you have a flowing functioning spec.

[DemonDays]

Is there really only one choice? or do you just look at other Peoples logs and assume you have to take that choice because "DA ELITES ARE DOING IT!"

Because I swap between Talents constantly on all my characters to swap up gameplay fairly often.


The irony of people complaining about "current" talent trees being too cookie cutter is the fact that the original trees were even more cookie cutter/boring.

Old Talent Trees gave you specific talents you basically needed to pick up at every 10 point threshold and then just % damage increases for most others. Your biggest choice in old trees was spending maybe a few points on a slightly more defensive build at the cost of a bit of damage.

Ahhh I was waiting for one of you to show up.

I love that you brought up the old Vanilla talent trees. There is always one who does it.

These talent trees are exactly the same as the old ones. "Illusion of choice".

Just because you like to "mix your talents up" because you want it to feel different doesn't mean that at any point your spec is functioning or flowing properly.



Try going back a few pages and reading the example about Demonic in the Havoc DH tree.

Thematically fits the class: CHECK.
Feels like it should be baseline: CHECK.
Looks cool as fuck: CHECK.
Feels satisfying: CHECK.
Is also the best talent by 15%+ on it's row: CHECK.
Chosen by 99% of Havoc players: CHECK.


Also do some reading on Shadow, Demonology and Prot, then come back to us.

[Lollis]

To be fair some of the talents are a little more hard stuck as 'choices' at the moment because of Azerite traits too, that's not to say that they wouldn't be super strong anyway in many cases, but it's something to keep in mind.

Orb Builds have been close to viable for Frost Mages on certain encounters in BFA because of traits such as Packed Ice and Whiteout whereas the rest of the time it has been Glacial Spike and Splitting Ice due to Flash Freeze.

It's not always as simple as "this talent is number one full stop because the tree is broken" (although it very much feels like they are, especially with most of the utility and survivability talents)

[kaminaris]

To be fair some of the talents are a little more hard stuck as 'choices' at the moment because of Azerite traits too, that's not to say that they wouldn't be super strong anyway in many cases, but it's something to keep in mind.

Orb Builds have been close to viable for Frost Mages on certain encounters in BFA because of traits such as Packed Ice and Whiteout whereas the rest of the time it has been Glacial Spike and Splitting Ice due to Flash Freeze.

It's not always as simple as "this talent is number one full stop because the tree is broken" (although it very much feels like they are, especially with most of the utility and survivability talents)

It has been a problem since they reworked talents (well they got rid of other problems in the process) BUT blizzard tries to hard to make talents too impactful.

Those talents should be more boring because if you let you imagination carry you, you will end up like this:
1. Some generic passive
2. Some additional annoying-to-use ability
3. Let you Tyrant eat up small imps making him hit like a fucking truck.

Solution?
That generic passive sacrificed souls is the only good passive here.
Rework or cap tyrant consumption because it's retarded to use (it gets stronger based on SS RNG).
Remove nether portal and add talents that buffs your other abilities.

This way you will have a choice to have easy way passive, buff to burst damage, buff to sustained damage.
Balancing current talents will not solve a problem. But demonic consumption being best dps wise only makes things worse.

While I love current demo, it has this annoying issues as well.

[shade3891]

Just give us 7 points to divide however we choose, with a max of 2 per row.

[Sunslayer]

For some classes talents are essentially "build a working class" puzzle, and in many cases you're still end up missing parts.

This picture was making round on shadow discord a few months back:

Sadly, spot on. It's why WoW is struggling. Nothing real is changing for Shadowlands either.

[Saltysquidoon]

Revert to MOP = classes fixed

Plague leech is returned to the game and Unholy essentially becomes an unspecalised DK since it's entirely built around snapshotting a mechanic that no longer exists.

Is there really only one choice? or do you just look at other Peoples logs and assume you have to take that choice because "DA ELITES ARE DOING IT!"

Not sure if srs...In the closest fight to patchwerk first blood and demonic are taken 100% of the time on heroic and mythic difficulty and never less than 99% of the time across all difficulties.

[Aresk]

I main resto druid, which has pretty good talent diversity, so I may be biased here, but I feel like in general talents are decent. On my DPS specs and alts, I pick talents that compliment what I do on those. For most of them, they're talents that raise the skill floor and lower the skill ceiling. I'll never crank out the DPS that mythic raiders do, but I don't need to; I'd rather play doing passable DPS than having a chance to top meters but most times falling below the tanks because I screw up the rotation. Healing in general I feel is pretty good that way, with tanking being somewhere between that and DPS. I also think DPS is the hardest role to play well (because the ceiling is so high) and try to avoid it when I can (except those nights we end up with three tanks and five healers for raid...).

[oplawlz]

Well, the unfortunate answer is probably just development resources. Box selling features like Covenants just seem like they will inevitably get more attention than "boring" class tweaks and fixes, even though the latter are far more important.

Frankly the game makes too much money to use that excuse. While it's certainly true that adding more artists or programmers often isn't as useful as people think, there is literally no reason for every class not to have its own designer. It's great to have multiple people pitch ideas, but having one person who's only job is to ensure their class is amazing to play would have solved so, so many problems in this game over the last 16 years.

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Is there really only one choice? or do you just look at other Peoples logs and assume you have to take that choice because "DA ELITES ARE DOING IT!"

You realize everyone has access to sims, right? They're not even hard to use.

[Jastall]

There's far more examples that I care not to list. (Warlock for one)

They need to stop this disgusting practise of fixing specs in talent rows and then via rented power. The reason we "won't know" is as you said - a stupid amount of moving gears that is rental systems.

No iteration of talents was ever closed to balanced however. Not Cata's, not Mists's, certainly not Vanilla-Wrath's which also had plenty of shit that were required for your spec to be functional unless you think not having Mortal Strike as Arms is 10/10 base class design. This is not rental power at play, it's the simple reality that the game encourages min-maxing like few RPGs, MMOs or otherwise, do and thus it's extremely hard to balance a variety of bonuses for a variety of situations.

Furthermore, this isn't an RTS where you know how unit X will perform all the time and can control balance by turning one knob. WoW's a lot more complex than this; there's a reason balance is the shittiest in Classic despite classes being far simpler to play there, with the fewest amount of balance knobs; the devs weren't anywhere near good at it, they've actually improved over the years even as the game necessarily increasing in complexity.

[Saltysquidoon]

Plague leech was pretty awesome

Plague leech is conceptually and thematically antithical to the concept of a DK. That said my main point was around snapshotting, I was mostly memeing PL because it was clunky as shit.

[Lex Icon]

give proper choices or remove em(plently of games go for the latter.)

[DemonDays]

Well, the unfortunate answer is probably just development resources. Box selling features like Covenants just seem like they will inevitably get more attention than "boring" class tweaks and fixes, even though the latter are far more important.

Billion dollar franchise. Literally BILLIONS of dollars.

Add on to the fact they recently claimed they currently boast the "biggest WoW team ever".

There are no excuses anymore. None.

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Frankly the game makes too much money to use that excuse. While it's certainly true that adding more artists or programmers often isn't as useful as people think, there is literally no reason for every class not to have its own designer. It's great to have multiple people pitch ideas, but having one person who's only job is to ensure their class is amazing to play would have solved so, so many problems in this game over the last 16 years.

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You realize everyone has access to sims, right? They're not even hard to use.

You don't need access to sims.

Some talents are blatantly fucking better just by the wording of them.

It would take a monkey 5 minutes of playing with certain talents to work out what feels better and what is clearly doing much more DPS.



I will keep repeatedly using this example. Havoc DH. Demonic.

Are people going to use:

A clunky 6 second buff that is only applied when you use your movement abilities?
A shitty debuff you apply to a target for 15% more dmg and doesn't allow target swapping?
An ability that turns you your badass demon form for 8 seconds every single time to use Eyebeam. Energizing with Azerite and Essences.


One of them is clearly thematically more pleasing, way more fun, way more flashy and also very clearly does WAY more damage.

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No iteration of talents was ever closed to balanced however. Not Cata's, not Mists's, certainly not Vanilla-Wrath's which also had plenty of shit that were required for your spec to be functional unless you think not having Mortal Strike as Arms is 10/10 base class design. This is not rental power at play, it's the simple reality that the game encourages min-maxing like few RPGs, MMOs or otherwise, do and thus it's extremely hard to balance a variety of bonuses for a variety of situations.

Furthermore, this isn't an RTS where you know how unit X will perform all the time and can control balance by turning one knob. WoW's a lot more complex than this; there's a reason balance is the shittiest in Classic despite classes being far simpler to play there, with the fewest amount of balance knobs; the devs weren't anywhere near good at it, they've actually improved over the years even as the game necessarily increasing in complexity.

Go and take a look at MoPs talent trees.

They were the first iteration of the crap we have now and they were also the best iteration.

Each row actually had CHOICE. There wasn't previously BASELINE abilities shoved into them. There was rows that were very clearly aimed towards different things like ST, AoE, utility, movement etc.



Want to know why there's so many balance knobs? Because Blizzard keeps removing control from the players hands and increasing RNG ridiculous procs and tacked on systems like Azerite, Essences and Corruption.

They make their own jobs harder. When all they need to do is fix the base classes.


You've seen people post their logs on reddit? Where over 70% of their damage is coming from passive sources? You wonder why it's "so hard for Blizzard to balance"?

[MrKnubbles]

In my opinion, talents were best in Mists. Most of the talents these days feel so lackluster. I leveled a Beast Mastery Hunter this expansion and they had, by far, the lamest talents of any spec I've played.

[Schattenlied]

IMO most of the classes need complete overhauls to fix the disastrous overhauls that happened in Legion...

I normally hate overhauls because they cause the exact problem that happened with Legion's, but an overhaul is the only real way to recover from a trainwreck that bad, so we need another one.

[Sunslayer]

We are talking about a Dev team that let a Affliction talent that was a DPS loss over not choosing a talent remain in the game for years (still there right now). Expect very little and you'll still be disappointed.

[willtron]

I think talents need a massive rework.

The old talent tree and the new one are largely the same - people always pick the same cookie cutter spec, the number of chocies don't matter.

What I'd like to see is less onus placed on the talent system, make it more of a flavour thing for the class and spec identity. Things like Steady Shot takes longer to cast, but generates more focus - trade offs.

A number of choices tied to abilities you can change, but you can only pick one per skill and not have enough for all abilities.

[DemonDays]

I think talents need a massive rework.

The old talent tree and the new one are largely the same - people always pick the same cookie cutter spec, the number of chocies don't matter.

What I'd like to see is less onus placed on the talent system, make it more of a flavour thing for the class and spec identity. Things like Steady Shot takes longer to cast, but generates more focus - trade offs.

A number of choices tied to abilities you can change, but you can only pick one per skill and not have enough for all abilities.

The talent tree rework in MoP actually had 3 choices on a row that altered a single ability in 3 different ways or vice versa.

The current talent trees are basically you trying to complete yourself by adding arms and legs to your class.

[docterfreeze]

For some classes talents are essentially "build a working class" puzzle, and in many cases you're still end up missing parts.

This picture was making round on shadow discord a few months back:

same vein



it's pretty obvious they don't know how to make interesting and useful talents for each spec without giving a barebones base class. should just go back to classwide talents like MoP.

[DemonDays]

same vein



it's pretty obvious they don't know how to make interesting and useful talents for each spec without giving a barebones base class. should just go back to classwide talents like MoP.