If We're Going Back to Level 60, Why not Bring Back Talent Trees?

[MoFalcon]

Because the old talent trees were inadequate and convoluted.

Why not just give us the game, since we already paid to level to 60 10yrs ago.......

Why not take all the gold we made since level 60 and start us all off with what we had after BC.

Why not get rid of flying completely

All of my questions are just a silly as yours. Everything about being level 50 the first time sucked.....Thats why!

[Anderson]

Because the old talent trees were inadequate and convoluted.

Why not just give us the game, since we already paid to level to 60 10yrs ago.......

Why not take all the gold we made since level 60 and start us all off with what we had after BC.

Why not get rid of flying completely

All of my questions are just a silly as yours. Everything about being level 50 the first time sucked.....Thats why!

"Mr. MoFalcon, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Your counter argument to real updated talent trees was to compare it to flying and gold amount? His comment was rational and had basis, your response was condescending and lacking of any real substance what so ever.

Bringing back original talent trees has in my experience been widely accepted as the best way to handle talents, im going to assume the reason he brought it up was because of the 100% leveling revamp. I did not see the economy get revamped, nor did I see anything that would impact the way my cutting edge mounts can fly. Blizzard wanted to incentivize leveling and make it worth going back and doing again, if the community wants talent trees that can actually be changed and modified to fit a unique play style than awesome lets make it happen.

However players like yourself will talk down a legitmate idea and give stupid counter arguments that are just about high roading the other person. Sadly players like yourself is why LFR exists, its why only get 3 talent choices every 15 levels.

[Triceron]

I don't think the talent tree structure in Borderlands would work for Wow. You're designed to be ridiculously powerful in Borderlands. It would be impossible to balance considering it's an MMO AND there's so many classes.

It's a numbers game.

Anything can be balanced. We had artifact weapons in Legion, now we're getting Covenants. Sure they're not the same systems but for some they were ridiculously powerful others not so much, but overall all classes had their fair share of ups and downs and relative power was kept within reason.

I don't see this as being a means to dismiss a system if all you're worrying about are the numbers. Nothing is impossible.

Look at the Borderlands system, most of the talents are the typical 'bloat' while the interesting stuff is all equal to active skills and talents that we already have available in WoW. You don't need to have Super Saiyan Mode Talent from Borderlands X for the system itself to work.

It's just a progression system. The real issue is how itemization and other systems has completely removed the need for talents to cover for base stats. All of your crit, haste, mastery etc is covered in item progression instead of dedicating points in a skill tree. Everything else that matters is either folded into a spec or provided as current Talents. The issue I have with current talent systems is it's designed for the end-means, and does absolutely nothing for the leveling experience or any sort of cohesive progression or builds. Instead of progressing your character's stats with a sense of choice-driven permanence, this is all allocated to much more temporary choice-driven options that can be swapped out any time. To me, this makes it feel like my character is just a template without the personal investment that I have in games like PoE or Borderlands where (even if there is skill reset) the progression defined my character and playthrough.

It's sort of the D2 vs D3 character progression issues I had. I much prefer Diablo 2 because of the sense of permanence you get with your character. If you don't like what you chose, you can still reset it or start a new character, but it doesn't water down your experience. D3 however is laser-focused on the end game, and after your first playthrough there is almost zero reason to take any time to enjoy the leveling progress whatsoever. It's just a mad-dash to the end game and trying to get any stat upgrade. Even if Vanilla-Wrath was designed in that fashion, there was still a sense of identity drawn from picking and choosing your talent path that gave context to builds and kept things meaningful. If you saw a Feral Druid in a raid with Innervate, then you know roughly what path they took and what sacrifices they made to take that talent, and that goes beyond just a mere swap of active ability between movement skill A B and C.

[WowIsDead64]

I mean part of the reason they were scrapped and/or rehashed was because the amount of talent points became bloated by level 80.

It seems like the route Blizz is going is to just perpetually keep us at level 60. Which I'm fine with. But instead of all this borrowed power stuff, why not just give us back our talent trees and improve on them. They're far more exciting when leveling. And Blizzard can perhaps introduce "talent pages" for when we need to quickly respec (no mis allocating points accidently).

They can keep the current PvP Talents to compliment the actual Talent Trees. Thoughts?

Blizzard think, that talent trees are interesting for leveling, but not interesting for endgame. And leveling isn't considered to be content anymore. Only endgame is content. Therefore...borrowed power.

[Razion]

If the only downside of the old talent trees is that the bonuses were boring and that not all the options were equal to one another, that seems like something they could address with redesign and balancing. I think it's worth considering a modern take on the old talent trees to see if they would actually work, because the perk of getting new talent points every level is fun - even when the bonuses were so plain, says something for how strong the concept was from the outset.

And while we've slowly made our way back to spell ranks as well, I think that kind of gives a bit of precedent to say that these kinds of bonuses as talent points could maybe once again be more feasible and certainly more cohesive in theme with the ability rankings coming along automatically to compliment level ups as well. I'm all for improving the leveling experience in WoW - it helps new players and leveling alts, and especially considering the leveling revamp of SL it seems like it's a good time to start thinking about it.

It maybe would have been best to see it happen in SL with the leveling revamp as well, but perhaps an expansion with another old world upgrade whether it be in the vein of the remastering of classic to make a cohesive leveling experience option to have the full game lore available to play through or a cata-style revamp where everything is brought to the now in Azeroth either way seems like a good time for that kind of change to compliment - as the leveling experience in those remastered or revamped zones of old Azeroth could be designed with talent points in mind to make the experience be that much more engaging and fulfilling.

I think it could be neat that they could plan for people to be roughly at a certain level and get talent points which could give people cool and interesting bonuses that could be more relevant to a remastered or revamped leveling zones. I think there's potential here and certainly it seems like a fun idea to revisit.

[Swnem]

Because talent trees suck.

You get those with conduits though. Be happy.

[TheRevenantHero]

It's a numbers game.

Anything can be balanced. We had artifact weapons in Legion, now we're getting Covenants. Sure they're not the same systems but for some they were ridiculously powerful others not so much, but overall all classes had their fair share of ups and downs and relative power was kept within reason.

I don't see this as being a means to dismiss a system if all you're worrying about are the numbers. Nothing is impossible.

Look at the Borderlands system, most of the talents are the typical 'bloat' while the interesting stuff is all equal to active skills and talents that we already have available in WoW. You don't need to have Super Saiyan Mode Talent from Borderlands X for the system itself to work.

It's just a progression system. The real issue is how itemization and other systems has completely removed the need for talents to cover for base stats. All of your crit, haste, mastery etc is covered in item progression instead of dedicating points in a skill tree. Everything else that matters is either folded into a spec or provided as current Talents. The issue I have with current talent systems is it's designed for the end-means, and does absolutely nothing for the leveling experience or any sort of cohesive progression or builds. Instead of progressing your character's stats with a sense of choice-driven permanence, this is all allocated to much more temporary choice-driven options that can be swapped out any time. To me, this makes it feel like my character is just a template without the personal investment that I have in games like PoE or Borderlands where (even if there is skill reset) the progression defined my character and playthrough.

It's sort of the D2 vs D3 character progression issues I had. I much prefer Diablo 2 because of the sense of permanence you get with your character. If you don't like what you chose, you can still reset it or start a new character, but it doesn't water down your experience. D3 however is laser-focused on the end game, and after your first playthrough there is almost zero reason to take any time to enjoy the leveling progress whatsoever. It's just a mad-dash to the end game and trying to get any stat upgrade. Even if Vanilla-Wrath was designed in that fashion, there was still a sense of identity drawn from picking and choosing your talent path that gave context to builds and kept things meaningful. If you saw a Feral Druid in a raid with Innervate, then you know roughly what path they took and what sacrifices they made to take that talent, and that goes beyond just a mere swap of active ability between movement skill A B and C.

Eh I personally don't think there is much bloat in Borderlands. Each talent point felt like it was actually increasing power for your character. But there's also only 4 characters so it's easier to balance. A Borderlands style talent tree in WoW would either be terrible like old talent trees or it will just be a mess with classes having no semblance of balance. the Borderlands leveling system works because it's, for the most part, purely pve. It doesn't work in MMOs with pvp.

[CylomDashti]

Overall, the old talent trees sucked. Most of them were boring stat increases, some of the talents were just flat-out stupid, you often had to take unappealing or undesired talents on the path to get to the ones you did one, and the whole system was "copy what current theorycrafting tells you and then never open the talent pane again." Some talents were mandatory for all specs (and should have been baseline), some you avoided in all of them. It was just general bad design, and not fun or meaningful once you were at the cap.

Doesn't this apply to the same system though?
I'm gonna speak about mage, cause that's what I've been playing.

You still follow what theorycrafters(sim) tells you. you only change talents if the sim says so, the older system would've been the same if you had to ability to change talents on the fly like we do now.
There will be a good chunk of players who will not follow the cookiecutter build, you can see if now with people not playing fire, yet doing pvp and m+ and raiding just fine, you can also see it in fire mages who do not pick the best talents cause they don't like the playstyle of it, or simply lack the skill that its actually a dps loss.
I do not like Rune of Power one bit, yet I've been playing with it for the last few years cause the rest of the row is just bad compared to it. I chose the cookiecutter build, while others did not and it is the same with old talents.

Some talents are mandatory for some classes? just like if I don't take azerite A and talents XYZ I lose most of my damage in current system?
And you avoided some talents just like you do now, cause they are DPS decrease if you take them, UH DK and I think WW monk come to mind.

Most of them were boring stat increases, some of the talents were just flat-out stupid, you often had to take unappealing or undesired talents

Now imagine the same system, but Improved over a period of the last 4(?) expansions.

not fun or meaningful once you were at the cap.

I call bull. Just because you didn't stray from the best path doesn't mean others didn't. When I first learned Frostfire bolt on my mage I really wanted to play that build so I found an outdated build and stuck with it for a while. I played a subpar Blood DK spec in Ulduar/ICC cause I really wanted that solo build (+perma pet).
Maybe it doesn't matter much to us now, but that slowly taking those 1% crit talents and slowly building my character did feel good back when I started.
>but illusion of choice
yeah, the same which was we have now and in SL (covenants).

- - - Updated - - -

We don't need old talent trees, we need current talent trees WITH MORE ROWS.

Or more talents per row, but then again, we have 3 per row as of now and usually there is 1 talent that is way ahead and is always the optimal choice.

[Devilyaki]

Cause talent trees are trash

[kukkamies]

I do like the old talent trees a lot more. The choices are much more visible and has more feeling when picking them. "To get that talent I like I have to take this path" or "That talent looks really nice when soloing, but to take it I'd have to skip this one or replace that one". I've spent hours just looking through different classes talent trees and which paths look nice.
The current system has pretty much no feeling or planning. Change in city whenever you want, pick one of three and it has no bearing on the next 3 you choose from.

[Ibbi]

to OP: Why would a level squish have anything to do with reversing back to old talent trees?

[Lazuli]

why do people still try to justify classic talent trees as meaningful choices, you literally could not get more cookie cutter if you try, there is no wiggle room.

new talent trees are much better and always will be, as different content will demand different abilities, and with these you have the choice to rise to whatever occasion. plus, nearly every single talent in the old talent trees was just 'enhance X', and gain a new ability. wow, so much choice and decision-making!!

There are so many useless talents that literally go unused all xpac long.

At least the game still felt like an rpg with old talents, current WoW talents are like choosing a call of duty load out. You might swap between a couple talents for aoe/single target or pvp, and thats it. There are many routes you can take on old talent trees.. not saying they're good, but the fact that you can means something and fits an rpg. When WoW classic was released I didn't look up a rogue leveling guide or talent tree build, I just fucking played the game my own way to 60 and it was fun as shit because I felt like I was building a character.

Of course there is going to be a meta, any game has that, and if thats your argument then NOTHING has choice in ANY game and its all just an illusion? Right.. perfect logic.

[Aleksej89]

MOP era had the best overall class design, i would prefer those classes to be copy/pasted into retail wow instead of the current ones.

[Tziva]

Doesn't this apply to the same system though?

No, not really, because only a few tiers of the current talent trees are pure throughput for most classes, and lots are about situational utility or strengthening

You still follow what theorycrafters(sim) tells you. you only change talents if the sim says so, the older system would've been the same if you had to ability to change talents on the fly like we do now.
There will be a good chunk of players who will not follow the cookiecutter build, you can see if now with people not playing fire, yet doing pvp and m+ and raiding just fine, you can also see it in fire mages who do not pick the best talents cause they don't like the playstyle of it, or simply lack the skill that its actually a dps loss.
I do not like Rune of Power one bit, yet I've been playing with it for the last few years cause the rest of the row is just bad compared to it. I chose the cookiecutter build, while others did not and it is the same with old talents.

This really isn't true for most classes and specs. I change talents in the situation warrants it, whether because the type of encounter or group comp, or whatever strengths and weaknesses there are either in myself or the group I'm in, not because of what maths better. Sure, on my rogue I take Poison Bomb always and never touch that tier because it's the top theorycrafted talent, but I do change other talents based on the encounter type where maybe I need Leeching Poison instead of Cheat Death or maybe my mastery is really low so I want to try out a bleed build with Exsanguinate instead of Toxic Blades. There's plenty of specs across most classes that have choices influenced by actual gameplay where theorycrafting is largely irrelevant. Do you want more mobility or a snare? Do you want to do slightly better AoE healing, or better single target? Do you want an execute or more consistent damage through the course of a fight? Do you want self-healing or a survival cooldown?

All of these kinds of can be tailored to situations on a regular basis. Even if you look at guides by respected class theorycrafters, almost every single one (if not every single one) has a least a few tiers that are "pick based on what is best in the situation" or some kind of selection flexibility. Almost no old talents functioned this way, and even if some did, it often didn't matter because you had very limited flexibility due to each tier due to prerequisite requirements. Even if there was potentially a talent like this in the old trees, you'd usually either be stuck having it or not because of what you needed to take in the next tier (or what you had to take in the last) unless you changed those things too, and adjusting to try it out often required adjusting other talents that you might not have wanted to change. It wasn't a function of how easily it is to change talents then vs now, it was a function of the "tree" style design of talents where everything is linked to everything else.

And personally I just think that the talents where you're choosing modifying or gaining new abilities is just plain more interesting and fun than talents that just give you a passive stat increase/invisible numbers buff. You don't have to agree, but that's my opinion and I don't think it's a hard one to understand.

Some talents are mandatory for some classes? just like if I don't take azerite A and talents XYZ I lose most of my damage in current system?

Again, you're focused entirely on throughput talents, which are a minority when you look across all tiers of all classes and all specs. Additionally, my post wasn't phrased in absolutes; I know there are some tiers for some specs of some classes like this now, but overwhelmingly the system supports flexibility based on playstyle and circumstance, which is something the old system was much much more rigid with. Sure, lots of things are still inflexible and just come out to pure maths but that doesn't negate the existence of the many situations where that isn't the case.

I think it is disingenious to argue that people don't interface with their talents now much much more than they did in the OG talent trees. Even people who are just copying cookie cutter guides are still probably swapping at least one tier when a particular context calls for it (or at least should be).

I call bull. Just because you didn't stray from the best path doesn't mean others didn't. When I first learned Frostfire bolt on my mage I really wanted to play that build so I found an outdated build and stuck with it for a while. I played a subpar Blood DK spec in Ulduar/ICC cause I really wanted that solo build (+perma pet).

I wasn't telling an anecdotal story about my own experience, I was talking about the inherent flaws of a system build on everything being a prerequisite of everything else. It is restrictive by design. You might try other builds, but all of those builds are going to be limited by what talents are required for other talents which are required for other talents, etc, often without a cohesive rhyme or reason for why they were placed where they were (for example: enh shaman which first tier had a talent buffing shields in a tree designed to use two handers).

I get you like the old talent frees. I didn't like many aspects of them, and I think they objectively had a lot of weakness in their design, and subjectively had weaknesses in terms of how fun and interactive they were (in that I don't think they were either of those things). I'm not really interested in arguing whether you personally think choosing .1% crit on your mage is as fun as choosing between Ring of Frost or double frost novas, because that's subjective. I can only say that: people interact with their talents a lot more now, and I personally like that. I find it more engaging and I find choosing between things based on situation a lot more compelling than set-and-forget copying a theorycrafting build, and I personally find the content of what the talents are to be superior.

[Drusin]

It seems like the route Blizz is going is to just perpetually keep us at level 60.

I've seen no indications of this being the case. Why do you think that?

I mean part of the reason they were scrapped and/or rehashed was because the amount of talent points became bloated by level 80.
Thoughts?

I always thought putting 5 points into 5% more damage was a waste of my time, just bake the 5% in.

[Rikkuu]

This is the second half of enhancement shaman TBC talents.... SUCH CHOICE, MUCH WOW... and its not the only case... even though im looking forward to TBC classic like a small child waiting for his candy... the old talent trees were boring, and outright stupid... if i had to point out one thing they did right in recent times, it would be the new talent system

[kukkamies]

I was talking about the inherent flaws of a system build on everything being a prerequisite of everything else. It is restrictive by design. You might try other builds, but all of those builds are going to be limited by what talents are required for other talents which are required for other talents, etc, often without a cohesive rhyme or reason for why they were placed where they were (for example: enh shaman which first tier had a talent buffing shields in a tree designed to use two handers).

It's not a flaw of the system, but a different way to design choices. PoE is a whole game built around talent trees with paths and it really drives unique playstyles.

Enh shaman isn't designed just for two handers. One handed and a shield is really good as well. You choose between survivability and higher uptime or more damage and lower uptime. Then choose between talents that buff yourself or buff your party. Also choose to go to Elemental for more damage or Restoration for more utility after done with Enh.

The 1% crit isn't equivalent with choosing between Ring of Frost or double frost novas. The choice would be between Ice Barrier and an instant cast Polymorph or between 15% chance to freeze with frost spells or having Blizzard turn into AoE slow. Or you can take both 15% chance to freeze and Blizzard AoE slow but give up 6 yards of range or a silence.
In classic the whole tree and all choices are linked in some way, whereas in new system all choices are individual. That's the depth part of old system and what was much harder to balance. There were dead talents like now, and there were choices like now.

[Lazuli]

It's not a flaw of the system, but a different way to design choices. PoE is a whole game built around talent trees with paths and it really drives unique playstyles.

Enh shaman isn't designed just for two handers. One handed and a shield is really good as well. You choose between survivability and higher uptime or more damage and lower uptime. Then choose between talents that buff yourself or buff your party. Also choose to go to Elemental for more damage or Restoration for more utility after done with Enh.

The 1% crit isn't equivalent with choosing between Ring of Frost or double frost novas. The choice would be between Ice Barrier and an instant cast Polymorph or between 15% chance to freeze with frost spells or having Blizzard turn into AoE slow. Or you can take both 15% chance to freeze and Blizzard AoE slow but give up 6 yards of range or a silence.
In classic the whole tree and all choices are linked in some way, whereas in new system all choices are individual. That's the depth part of old system and what was much harder to balance. There were dead talents like now, and there were choices like now.

Big true, this is also why glyphs were such a good addition, now ruined and abandoned like everything else in favor of borrowed power (I guess? don't actually know why they removed glyphs).

[Coldkil]

The problem with the talent system is that you still have PVP talents or very specific talents you only going to use in niche situations at certain levels. Some talents are just so obvious they stand out from the rest in a row.

Yep. In the end is a problem of balance between options and mixing up stuff that shouldn't be mixed. Imho, for PvP there should be a dedicated talent tree, with different options. It's more stuff to balance? Certainly, but it's just useless to bake everything in a single place when PvE and PvP have completely different needs/setups for example.

[Alkizon]

Well... I don’t even know if I could have donated something new to this theme, rather than already done in previous ones which discussed it.

Some of recent posts on theme question:
<1> <2>
Archived Discussions:

4. Some words about talents (&their connection with classes, borrowed powers) +(+/+)+(+/+/+)+(+/+/+/+/+/+/+)

Specifically about system design sequence and about hierarchy, also separate "level-squish" and "confines" threads.

Answering some of questions in the topic:
- allow full scope of abilities and mechanics to whole class (as, in fact, was before, "situational utility" is mostly class' part, not talents' one) with couple of specific ones putting to inherit from certain talents or from some of basic abilities (heard about evolution, development of abilities, transition to new class(school)/obtaining new dan of "your studies" and so on? there is topic in archive ones)
- glyphs were general/"cross-directional" talents, they quite good and original complemented old system
- MoP didn't have "best class design", but one of most balanced designs in terms of characteristics, hence such impression, there were no talents then, just basically class-wide perks (by some analogy with glyphs), and all basic talents were obtained on freebie - were shoved inside specs by default without choice.

---

Coldkil
PvP there should be a dedicated talent tree, with different options

They have already bowl of crap with pvp perks, if "additional separate tree" will be added to them, then that would be triumph of "piecewise" design; there're "characteristics" to solve this problem. There is no need to turn one game into two, original basic design easily copes with this task, all they need to do is follow it.

---

ps. Main advantage of old trees wasn't diversity (although it was, global system allowed to have it, but why? and answer is further), but freedom to choose each/any/little step of progress/castimization elements without violating class priorities. In other words, what was previously part of choice is no longer one = it's spec's default package now, but what was previously available to class as such has become "choice element" and not even everything, but only stuff, that devs decided for this spec... imo, deal is wildly unfair.

Do I want a simple system? I have long ago answered this question:

kamuimac
and ? 99% of playerbase dont play like this.

If it's about "carrent playerbase" then don't know, it could be, may be. But I couldn't name any of my friends whom I could include in these 99% back then, if to make discount on "tolerance", so let it be 50%, but in fact there were not so many as you think. Yes, not everyone did it well, but they made attempts to understand, mash the brain at least. We aren't even talking about this, but about whole system (classes(mechanics)+talents+stats/characteristics+tuning=RPG), it was much less complicated before! easier to analyze and understand than now. Naturally, yes, you don't need to understand it to play now, but if you suddenly will want, it'll probably take more time... and for what? Most of dependencies and information are not even tied to your character, but lying around somewhere in the mud (PvP talents, Azerite armor, etc.) tightly adhered to it and not accessible to you. Therefore, as one of the most lazy, but curious[/URL] people, I would gladly change carrent system to old one at any time.

These people know what ideologically I'm talking about