We should've gotten rework on talent tree talents.

[Neuroticaine]

For those that need a reminder - World of Warcraft has now gone SIX YEARS without a single baseline ability or talent row being added.

Six. Fucking. Years.

In a vacuum, that doesn't mean anything.

Most specs have a good core rotation - well at least most of the specs I'm interested in playing. Adding a new button to press every 30 seconds to 3 minutes doesn't really add much depth. Maybe some fun new toy abilities for flavor would be nice. I don't need new abilities thrown at me every expansion just for the sake of it.

That said, that doesn't mean there isn't room for new abilities or reworks or rotations.

[Jastall]

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"?

Yeah I know for a fact Mists talents weren't balanced. The game itself sure as fuck wasn't with completely silly nonsense like Affliction snapshotting allowing them to obliterate meters or Vengeance as a mechanic allowing tanks to out-heal and out-DPS everyone by purposefully taking more damage.

Not that the current proc bonanza is much better, you'll get no arguments from me on that front, albeit outlier situations of Infinite Stars aren't the norm. It's just that each xpack has its fair share of ridiculousness on that topic. Legion was perhaps the best balanced expansion and it still had silly shit like Guardian being the best tank all expansion long or the balance trainwreck that was Surrender to Madness.

[DemonDays]

Yeah I know for a fact Mists talents weren't balanced. The game itself sure as fuck wasn't with completely silly nonsense like Affliction snapshotting allowing them to obliterate meters or Vengeance as a mechanic allowing tanks to out-heal and out-DPS everyone by purposefully taking more damage.

Not that the current proc bonanza is much better, you'll get no arguments from me on that front, albeit outlier situations of Infinite Stars aren't the norm. It's just that each xpack has its fair share of ridiculousness on that topic. Legion was perhaps the best balanced expansion and it still had silly shit like Guardian being the best tank all expansion long or the balance trainwreck that was Surrender to Madness.

Odd that you didn't mention Affliction being broken for the entire expansion. Being able to stand in mechanics and just Drain Soul heal through it whilst topping the meters on ST and Cleave/AoE fights.

The point is. The WoW team are fucking horrendous at balance.

How do you think Covenants are going to go? You honestly think after 15 years "this time" will be different?

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In a vacuum, that doesn't mean anything.

Most specs have a good core rotation - well at least most of the specs I'm interested in playing. Adding a new button to press every 30 seconds to 3 minutes doesn't really add much depth. Maybe some fun new toy abilities for flavor would be nice. I don't need new abilities thrown at me every expansion just for the sake of it.

That said, that doesn't mean there isn't room for new abilities or reworks or rotations.

Like-wise, I would like my base class to function without all the add-on crap.

Give me a fully functioning base spec without the need to plug holes with 2-4 rental systems.


They are shooting themselves in the foot and BfA is the perfect example. Strip the Artifacts and Legendaries away and what were we left with.

[Jastall]

Odd that you didn't mention Affliction being broken for the entire expansion. Being able to stand in mechanics and just Drain Soul heal through it whilst topping the meters on ST and Cleave/AoE fights.

The point is. The WoW team are fucking horrendous at balance.

How do you think Covenants are going to go? You honestly think after 15 years "this time" will be different?

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Like-wise, I would like my base class to function without all the add-on crap.

Give me a fully functioning base spec without the need to plug holes with 2-4 rental systems.


They are shooting themselves in the foot and BfA is the perfect example. Strip the Artifacts and Legendaries away and what were we left with.

Na, it's just a game with too many moving parts to balance. Ye olde expansions, with none of the rental powers you hate so much? They had worse balance than Legion or BFA, sometimes far worse. This isn't Starcraft and there will always be too many tuning knobs to keep things under control unless they simplify the game to such a degree that the pruning will look like a small wedge trimming in comparison to mass deforestation.

For Covenants I sure hope Blizzard gets the hint and either allows us to change them easily or allows you to pick an allied covenant- you can't get the cosmetic rewards or story campaign for that covenant, but can use its class ability and soulbinds. That way I can go, say, Maldraxxus for flavor and choose to ally with Revendreth if it ends up performing best.

[goldentforce]

Talents don't need a rework, they need a pass. A lot of talent trees only need a couple changes, but some specs have many uninteractive, unused, overtuned, or too vital talents. Passes for every spec every xpac is a lot of work, but it is required by this system and is sad that it hasn't happened often enough. Every spec in the game can be iterated and improved and talents are streamlined area that can always use iteration because its a choice.

[DemonDays]

Na, it's just a game with too many moving parts to balance. Ye olde expansions, with none of the rental powers you hate so much? They had worse balance than Legion or BFA, sometimes far worse. This isn't Starcraft and there will always be too many tuning knobs to keep things under control unless they simplify the game to such a degree that the pruning will look like a small wedge trimming in comparison to mass deforestation.

For Covenants I sure hope Blizzard gets the hint and either allows us to change them easily or allows you to pick an allied covenant- you can't get the cosmetic rewards or story campaign for that covenant, but can use its class ability and soulbinds. That way I can go, say, Maldraxxus for flavor and choose to ally with Revendreth if it ends up performing best.

They have simplified the game to a ridiculous degree.

Glyphs - gone.
Reforging - gone.
Fun stats - gone.
Heaps of abilities - gone.

The only complexity in this game is in the encounter design. It's all front loaded in raids. The rest of the game is a joke difficulty wise.


Your idea for Covenants is actually excellent. This solves the "you shouldn't have access to everything" argument that the fanboys keep spouting. Letting us choose 1 main one and 1 secondary one is actually fantastic.

[Jastall]

They have simplified the game to a ridiculous degree.

Glyphs - gone.
Reforging - gone.
Fun stats - gone.
Heaps of abilities - gone.

The only complexity in this game is in the encounter design. It's all front loaded in raids. The rest of the game is a joke difficulty wise.


Your idea for Covenants is actually excellent. This solves the "you shouldn't have access to everything" argument that the fanboys keep spouting. Letting us choose 1 main one and 1 secondary one is actually fantastic.

I mean I never considered Hit, Dodge or Armor Pen fun stats. To be honest the only fun stat in my mind is Haste, given that it's the only one that has actual, tangible gameplay feedback and isn't either "raise this to a certain number than forget it exists until the next xpack" or fifty shades of "you do more damage the more of this you have". Reforging would be cool, but IMO limit the number of pieces you can reforge or something, it became a chore to have to do it on every piece that dropped.

Yeah, the idea is to allow you to make an important choice in the roleplay/cosmetic department (which is important in an RPG) while leaving the player an out in terms of pure performance, without just making the entire system meaningless by transforming it into a glorified talent tree you swap on a whim.

[Hctaz]

Honestly I think they need to stop having talents that are so different from each other. Like... the current rows are just too... weird. Take Frost DK for example: The first talent row is an ability that stacks every 8 seconds to provide your next Obliterate with some additional frost damage (something that enhances your Obliterate in some way and is related to Frost damage), you have a second talent of Icy Talons which causes your runic power spending abilities to give you a stacking attack speed buff, (nothing to do with Obliterate or enhancing an ability by waiting for a stack to build up in some way) and then you have Cold Heart which just turns your Chains of Ice into a 45 second nuke.

The three things are completely unrelated and make zero sense to me. Why do you not have one that's like... "Obliterate deals additional Frost damage", "Obliterate grants you a charge of Cold Heart" which works similar to how Cold Heart works now (or even improves something else possibly), and "Obliterate puts a stacking frost DoT on the target"

So then you have three talents in the same row which all improve Obliterate in some way, are all self contained, are all related/scale with Mastery, and are all good for different situations. The first one would just be random bonus damage for when you need to target swap frequently but you don't require some form of additional burst damage. This would be the most generic for stuff like dungeons. You have Cold Heart which would be for boss fights where maybe you're attacking a main boss but then an add spawns once every certain number of seconds that you need to burst down quickly. And then the frost DoT would be for Patchwerk style bosses where you don't have to target swap or have a lot of downtime. It's for when you can just sit on the boss and make it work.

They should just kinda all be like that, should they not? Then the spec can just work baseline and your talent rows modify one aspect of your rotation.

[cparle87]

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.

How do you know they don't? I do admit it must be hard to believe they do, what with the "They don't even play their own game" meme.

[Schattenlied]

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:

It's painful how true this is...

What the hell happened to this game?

[oplawlz]

How do you know they don't? I do admit it must be hard to believe they do, what with the "They don't even play their own game" meme.

Because they've said multiple times that they don't. Even if they hadn't though, I don't think anyone can look at, say, shadow priests in BFA and say "oh yeah, someone put a lot of love into this".

Every expac some class gets dumpstered, and the only explanation for that is the class designers are spread too thin (in my opinion).

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Just throwing this out there, not sure if there are actually people giving them legit full on feedback but you should totally post that either on Ion's twitter or just make sure the feedback gets heard, that's a top notch post explanation if I ever saw one.

***Edit: or the car one, or both at this rate lol***

From everything we've seen so far the team seems to be pretty open about hearing and correcting based on alpha testing feedback. Already seen some great changes based purely on what is being discussed in the community (war smf!) , which is fantastic. Hopefully they can finish out all the specs before they have to ship.

[Tyris Flare]

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.

I'm not defending the decision, just saying the reasoning. Management probably just doesn't feel that it's a priority.

[cparle87]

Because they've said multiple times that they don't. Even if they hadn't though, I don't think anyone can look at, say, shadow priests in BFA and say "oh yeah, someone put a lot of love into this".

Every expac some class gets dumpstered, and the only explanation for that is the class designers are spread too thin (in my opinion).

Or people could learn to keep their egos in check and accept that something they don't like isn't bad and accept the reality that others do like it.

[kaminaris]

Just throwing this out there, not sure if there are actually people giving them legit full on feedback but you should totally post that either on Ion's twitter or just make sure the feedback gets heard, that's a top notch post explanation if I ever saw one.

***Edit: or the car one, or both at this rate lol***

This is so wrong I have to make bold text:

MoP class design was shit. Talents were not better at all. Had exactly the same problem as we have now - half of talents were dead.

[Otimus]

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

They pretty much say this or some variation of this before every new expansion and it's amounted to very little.

[Gasparde]

That would require effort spent on class balance - shit that seemingly doesn't matter enough because it doesn't sell. What does sell though is 5 new talent systems per expansion - 5 new talent systems that will also barely have any effort spent on them if Azerite pieces are anything to go by.

I can't wait for Covenants, Soulbinds and Conduits to ship in the usual horrendously balanced state, see 1 patch like 1 month in, then get 0 attention to the still broken system for another 4 months, then just have more shit added on top of it, and then never see any balancing again because by that time all of their attention will be on shitting out the next expansion.

There is no excuse for a talent like Beast Master's Stomp existing, and there's even less of an excuse for that talent to be the 99% go-to pick in basically every situation for the last 6 years. And I can't fucking wait for that to still be the case throughout all of SL. Fucking tons of talent trees filled with dull, boring and pointless passives, dead talent rows, irrelevant talent rows and 100% perma-locked talent rows for fucking 2+ expansions now and they're still as reluctant as ever to do any fucking thing about it - but hey, after 2 years of begging Fire Mages got Phoenix Flames back, yay, whole spec is fixed now, talents are perfect, everything's great, here have some Devouring Plague Shadow Priests, that's gonna fix all of your concerns!

But don't worry, fucking Conduits are surely gonna fix it. Arcane Mages feeling like they have too much setup? Here, choose between a 3% Movement Speed and a 10% less Hearthstone CD Conduit. And don't forget to pick your Soulbind that gives you 10% less damage taken. Your spec is officially fixed. Now go a-fucking-head and buy some fucking store mounts.

[dcc626]

That would require effort spent on class balance - shit that seemingly doesn't matter enough because it doesn't sell. What does sell though is 5 new talent systems per expansion - 5 new talent systems that will also barely have any effort spent on them if Azerite pieces are anything to go by.

I can't wait for Covenants, Soulbinds and Conduits to ship in the usual horrendously balanced state, see 1 patch like 1 month in, then get 0 attention to the still broken system for another 4 months, then just have more shit added on top of it, and then never see any balancing again because by that time all of their attention will be on shitting out the next expansion.

There is no excuse for a talent like Beast Master's Stomp existing, and there's even less of an excuse for that talent to be the 99% go-to pick in basically every situation for the last 6 years. And I can't fucking wait for that to still be the case throughout all of SL. Fucking tons of talent trees filled with dull, boring and pointless passives, dead talent rows, irrelevant talent rows and 100% perma-locked talent rows for fucking 2+ expansions now and they're still as reluctant as ever to do any fucking thing about it - but hey, after 2 years of begging Fire Mages got Phoenix Flames back, yay, whole spec is fixed now, talents are perfect, everything's great, here have some Devouring Plague Shadow Priests, that's gonna fix all of your concerns!

But don't worry, fucking Conduits are surely gonna fix it. Arcane Mages feeling like they have too much setup? Here, choose between a 3% Movement Speed and a 10% less Hearthstone CD Conduit. And don't forget to pick your Soulbind that gives you 10% less damage taken. Your spec is officially fixed. Now go a-fucking-head and buy some fucking store mounts.

i was going to write something here, but i dont see the point. you seem to know everything. /shrug.

[Unholyground]

Honestly the fuck with balance, there should not be tiers, you should be able to select a certain amount but any combination of them. This game will never be balanced and trying to achieve it ruins a lot of the fun we could have. That is not to say things should always be op because nerfs do need to happen but there really is no choice. Also Druids should get the affinity talent tier as a bonus tier for free while they are at it.

[Saltysquidoon]

Talents don't need a rework, they need a pass. A lot of talent trees only need a couple changes, but some specs have many uninteractive, unused, overtuned, or too vital talents. Passes for every spec every xpac is a lot of work, but it is required by this system and is sad that it hasn't happened often enough. Every spec in the game can be iterated and improved and talents are streamlined area that can always use iteration because its a choice.

This

I think a lot of the frustrations people are expressing in this thread is because a lot of problem talents (being too strong or too weak) have been problem talents since legion and have remained almost entirely untouched in four years.

and then you have Cold Heart which just turns your Chains of Ice into a 45 second nuke.

The three things are completely unrelated and make zero sense to me.

That row is a 'special case' (that's sadly becoming more common over time) in that the cold heart talent is the second time they've used it as a bandaid instead of fixing frost. Frost has needed at least one more rotational ability since they removed blood flipping and all blizzard has ever done is band-aid over the hole in multiple different ways instead of just filling the hole.

[Sunslayer]

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This is so wrong I have to make bold text:

MoP class design was shit. Talents were not better at all. Had exactly the same problem as we have now - half of talents were dead.

I don't know a single human that would agree with you on MoP class design. I remember logging on one character and seeing someone having fun on their Hunter so I switch over have fun with that. Then grab my Lock, go PvP and have fun. I loved just playing my classes in MoP and to a slightly lesser extent, WoD. Classes today feel like boring garbage thanks to everything being so gutted and watered down. Say what you want but I had so much fun in MoP doing the dumbest stuff simply because I enjoyed my characters gameplay.

I didn't need some mindless, boring, endless grind to get me to log on in. I logged because the game was fun. Retail WoW has lost the "fun".