Is the intention of the "new" talent system that some points are just wasted?

[cocomen2]

They place same talents two times in talent tree with pretext "If you pick boths of these, this talent gonna have 2 charges" - like "What the hell!" if you already made it mandatory just make it having 2 charges as baseline and add really useful talent in new opened slot, or make that nod 2/2; why i must waste shitload of talent points to go LEFT side of talent tree and then waste points to go RIGHT side of talent tree -> to TAKE the very same talent TWO times, while other classes enjoying their "NEW" talents.

FFS, Shaman dev WAKE THE SHIT UP!





For now examples of near perfection state is Priest how nice and cool their three is, second place Death Knight how logistically and clean their talents placed. Priest>DK.................>other classes df talent trees.

[InfiniteCharger]

This is what people asked for, so it's what they got.

It just looks bigger and more big and wow so big and...big! So everyone's lizard brain tells them that it must be great because bigger is better and it must mean that it's so complex and you can do so much!!!!

So yeah, it exists purely because of feels, really.

But it isn't what people asked for generally and of course mileage may vary, but if they wanted vanilla style talents, that means the ability to pick from the different spec talents all in one build. And that is not what they added in this version as you still only get talents specific to a single spec, plus this new thing called base class talents adding abilities that used to be baseline. Also, if they wanted more of the borrowed power type of talents in a permanent talent tree, this is not it either as that would require earning talent points based on something other than leveling per expansion, with a relatively low fixed cap.

And on top of that you are losing abilities and talents overall because technically characters without level squish would be level 140ish and we stopped getting new abilities and new talents every expansion long ago. So this is actually a net loss of talents and abilities from leveling and new expansions alone, on top of another prune of abilities that we got with borrowed power systems.

[jeezusisacasual]

I change my class and spec every single season to avoid being bored with the game to begin with, i am not a warlock for 10 years or a rogue or whatever. I play whatever is great and can help me finish my goals ( which is KSM ) as soon as possible to move onto another game or another alt perhaps if the content is good enough for me to do it. This season i was a Brewmaster and next season will likely be Prot Warrior or Blood DK. I fully understand i play WoW as a seasonal game with no guild or raid to be tied down to and since the advent of M+ i can forgo the typical MMO staples to enjoy the game like i do in Destiny or FF14 or a new CoD and move around games until new content is out for one of them, i am the dreaded content locust that was talked about years ago.

This is the problem with so much information being available before the content is even released, the game is figured out before it launches which is good in that you get the prep time to get established beforehand but ruins most immersive style gameplay loops or hooks. This also mostly breaks down to kicks being a selectable talent for me and the overall lack of blizzard to fix issues in a timely manner or in a way that changes community perspective since this is an online game and they bear some responsibility to that.

The only way to make this worse is to make that point permanent like the old RPG's of yesteryear.

[Vampyrr]

So many people upset with changes to a better talent system. Most people that are upset is because there's no clear cut 'best' for them to google yet. The return of these talent trees is to open up some more uniqueness to each player, being able to build how they want instead of as the one viable option.

What's really crazy to me is people complaining about 'wasted' points and how the MOP style was better because you could just pick the option you want regardless of previous choices but really, I don't understand that complaint. Like, you have what, 7 choices? 7 points vs 61 points. So okay, maybe one (or more) of those points are 'useless' but you still get WAY more choices/useful points than 7 you would have.

In my opinion, these talents real goal, in which they were successful in, is to make builds less cookie cutter, to make you have to make actual decisions in regards to how you want to play. Not just give you everything. Granted eventually there will be 'bis builds but for now, if you look at it though, they did a great job giving you tough decisions.

I know a lot of people just want everything and want for Blizzard to just force feed them a spec, but for those that actually want to think and work on making interesting/fun builds, this will do just that. Worst case, if the vocal majority is unhappy with the talent trees, Blizzard will get rid of them again. For now, just relax and let other people have fun for once. We've put up with subpart talent systems for years now, y'all can survive one xpac.

I thought the old system was trash and the new system following a trash design is also trash. Do something different for leveling but the current pick only what you want is better. Then the pick things that will never get used or are boring to get what I really want is a bad design.

[Nzx]

feel like a lot of the time talents feel unimpactful or even entirely useless in order to get the talents below them.

a ton of useless sink points. In order to get Thick Hide, which is a really nice 6% flat damage reduction, I have to spec into Frenzied Regen (fine), Thrash, Swipe, and Ironfur (all bad/will never see any use).

I'm just trying to wrap my head around these new talent set ups. I was under the impression that every talent would be an interesting choice or have some direct impact on gameplay, but it feels like that isn't the case for maybe as much as 25-40% of the talents I pick up.

Hahahaha. I thought it would take longer before we wrapped right back around to complaining about how there aren't sixty-one "meaningful choices" in the old-style talent trees, but here we are less than a week into Alpha and it already feels like I'm back in Cataclysm. You guys will fucking never be satisfied.

I was under the impression that every talent would ... have some direct impact on gameplay

"I want meaningful choices!"

having to spend talent points to get core abilities

"No wait not that meaningful!"

[kiramon]

Silly.

Useless talents like this balance the strength of the target talent. Would you prefer they disconnect it and give you 1% Dr /6 points max?
Or does your soul desire they make it clear by connecting it to things you want to take anyways so there is no actual choice and instead just a preset rollercoaster track ?

[Alkizon]

It's really no different but that's what the player base wanted so back we go.

"Player base" beged for differ. We've discussed this over and over again over the past few months. New trees have nothing to do with old ones, and problems of new trees are exactly the same as they were in the period between old trees being broken and turned into what you still use on retail. Nothing has changed, everything is the same, only interface has changed a little, or, as my friend likes to joke about - "same balls, only in side view" (not sure about direct meaning, but apparently "ball of same shape/purpose/operation, but only with displaced ornament/pattern because of different visible part").

Here that discussions: <1> <2> <3> <4> <5> <6> <7>
Reason why this is "same $hit as last few years" is stated in description of such systems' specifics, which is described in quote of first link.

This is completely different, people, old trees didn't contain "class" in it and even more so "class-spec" or 2 independent trees, in vast majority of situations they simply contained modernization of stuff that was in anyday/anytime available to any representative of that class or gave general useful RPG bonuses (especially starting ones, but often still remaining tied to specific class abilities), saving characters work with certain characteristics (purpose of which in general is precisely character's "role" in encounter). Do you see this in new trees? I don't

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.

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without ANY STRINGS or shit that you don't want.

Just as I said:

Problem is that those talents aren't talents at all, when they give abilities and mechanics (but shouldn't), problem is that "general tree" is the only thing that should be and it should include "specialization" tree inside, problem is the fact that specialization shouldn't mean right away specific role chosen by devs, player is the one who sets beat for combinations, which means that tree should contain not key ones, but making them more convenient, stronger, more specific from general set of those of the "whole class", preferred by one or another player. What follows from this? Tree, as such, isn't much needed to fulfill such requirements, only list of these same modifications with ranks - so, you can have a little bit of everything, or choose specific ones and pump them all the way... But if we return to tree, then there are certain dependencies in following certain modifications: first there are general ones, perhaps not even tied to a class, simply strengthening character as is, then tree begins to branch out to modify more specific abilities that form specialization, and at the end there are key ones. If you look at what they showed, then for both trees everything is in random order + "perk-abilities" remain tied to specific specialization and not just specialization, but even roles, which they didn't hesitate to mention. At the same time - PvP perks remain, which should not exist at all, for this there are PvP-sets, as well as for more complex PvE content - PvE-sets, and all this requires additional separate PvP and PvE secondary characteristics, so that progress in one direction doesn't hindered progress in other one.

problem isn't in "presentation", but in core part of design, which wasn't change at all.

[cocomen2]

Silly.

Useless talents like this balance the strength of the target talent. Would you prefer they disconnect it and give you 1% Dr /6 points max?
Or does your soul desire they make it clear by connecting it to things you want to take anyways so there is no actual choice and instead just a preset rollercoaster track ?

Lets say talent pool of 50 talents, and you given 20 glyph like slots, pick any 20 out of 50 -> without ANY STRINGS or shit that you don't want.

Tons of choices. Some are more powerful than others. You get differently powered ones at different levels. None of the points feel "wasted".

Now turn it up to Eleven and give us 30 of those. 15 class-specific and 15 spec-specific slots, with 60 or so actual talents to place of varying levels between Major, Minor, and Prime.

Save and share builds all the same, make the UI clean like the new talent trees. But suddenly you don't have to juggle the right points around to make sure youre not locked out of points elsewhere in the tree.

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Bonus points: You can slot lesser talents into greater slots. So if you really want all the Minor talents, you can still give up some Major slots. The difference between that and Dragonflight's trees being that you KNOW what youre sacrificing, ita right in your face what slot youre giving up, instead of having to do janky math to figure out whether yiull still have enough points to get that Prime talent at max level.

Devs crying that they don't want to BLOAT our skill book with tons of spells, FFS make talents that enhance OLD abilities and make them play different way, not everything must be "NEW BUTTON", just like old Glyphs were boosting already existing skills.

[Segus1992]

I'm not saying that they're bad, i'm not saying that they don't have no brainers like previous talent trees, but whereas previously you had a very basic baseline toolkit, talenting into such no brainers like a regular AoE spell, Interrupts, healing spells like Chain Heal, or defensive CD's is just questionable design.

100% this is mainly to give more illusion of choice that only actually becomes a choice in super heavy single target situations. Currently on Alpha you can (supposedly) change talents at will at any time though, so if this is the case when the game goes live there will be a lot of build swapping to eke out that extra 1-2% dps. I'm not sure if this is the goal but if it is I definitely would've prefered the basic kits (say the first 8 talents on the class side of the tree) being baseline and having fewer talent points.

I don't necessarily think interrupts being a talent point is terrible though but I DO think ALL interrupts should be dps gains so people want to spec into them even when optimizing. An optimal dps spec having to skip basic defensive CDs (like Dispersion or Vampiric Embrace which currently no PvE Priest should ever take on Alpha) is really bad though.

Alternative is that utility skills like interrupts and defensive CDs lead to dps talents that end up being similar to the route that skips it which is currently not the case for either Dispersion or VE for Shadow.

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Lets say talent pool of 50 talents, and you given 20 glyph like slots, pick any 20 out of 50 -> without ANY STRINGS or shit that you don't want.

Devs crying that they don't want to BLOAT our skill book with tons of spells, FFS make talents that enhance OLD abilities and make them play different way, not everything must be "NEW BUTTON", just like old Glyphs were boosting already existing skills.

Awful idea, basically a worse version of the current (Shadowlands) talents. This creates fewer choices unless you want all of the literally 600 glyphs to be perfectly balanced (read: boring as fuck), and almost literally 0 interesting choices otherwise because you'll have a list of the 15+ glyphs you need to take at all times and MAYBE 5 bad glyphs you can swap.

[doodle90]

So you want 6% DR for no reason? the 6% DR is a bonus for specing into all of those tank things. Thats why it follows them. Why would they put it at the start? Zero point in even having the talent then lol. Do you guys not understand how builds and trade offs work? IF I want a crit+10% and its hidden behind x y z I have to factor in X Y Z to see if crit +10% is worth it for my build. Stop thinking of stuff as individual its what killed wows sense of progression and variety. Like its obvious that talent is made for someone who wants to use BEAR form as a defensive CD or shift. Thick hide is there to further that. If you don't wanna do that maybe don't go for thick hide? Or do and dont use part of your kit.

Also they already said you will only be able to change talents in rested areas just like now. And not everything is about DPS, some talents are about survival, some are about aoe some are about soloing. THe mop killed all of that. You could go for all the defensive talents if you wanted for soloing even tho the build sucks for groups, but with MOP you lost that thanks to MAH LEET DPS ONRZY type people. Stop thinking about 1-2% dps for everything because it ruins the game. Not everything needs to be about how much dps you do.

[Kralljin]

I don't necessarily think interrupts being a talent point is terrible though but I DO think ALL interrupts should be dps gains so people want to spec into them even when optimizing. An optimal dps spec having to skip basic defensive CDs (like Dispersion or Vampiric Embrace which currently no PvE Priest should ever take on Alpha) is really bad though.

I think it's not good design because it just doesn't feel good to spend anything of value to acquire something you had before.
Been there before with the transition from Legion to BfA, putting talents to re acquire an artifact ability just felt bad.

Nevermind that skipping out on these rather critical talents can backfire in sheer practice.
Imagine for a moment you have guy X who really likes to min/max everything and swaps talents based on the encounter, currently, that's completely fine (putting any covenant nonsense aside).
Now, guy X isn't perfect and sometimes forgets to swap, he might realize the issue mid encounter and complain on voice, okay, some people mock him and move on, because him doing 1-2% less damage isn't going to make or break that thing.

Imagine now for a moment that the optimal dps spec is one where you haven't specced into some rather crucial ability, be it interrupt, defensive or utility based.
Guy X still swaps around on an encounter basis, forgets to swap back, doesn't have the critical ability Y for the encounter and realizes this mid fight.
Which will not be funny for anyone.

I think the problem is simply that the rift between having that talent vs. not having it is so monumentally big in a given situation that they should really keep the baseline stuff out of the talent tree and make it baseline.

[Segus1992]

I think it's not good design because it just doesn't feel good to spend anything of value to acquire something you had before.
Been there before with the transition from Legion to BfA, putting talents to re acquire an artifact ability just felt bad.

Nevermind that skipping out on these rather critical talents can backfire in sheer practice.
Imagine for a moment you have guy X who really likes to min/max everything and swaps talents based on the encounter, currently, that's completely fine (putting any covenant nonsense aside).
Now, guy X isn't perfect and sometimes forgets to swap, he might realize the issue mid encounter and complain on voice, okay, some people mock him and move on, because him doing 1-2% less damage isn't going to make or break that thing.

Hm, did you not read what I said? We agree on the last point.

As for the first, I don't think every single point has to feel good; that's how we got the Shadowlands talents. I also don't agree something previously baseline can't become a talent now, the problem in BfA was that you had to replace something else with it, which isn't the case now (at least not in the same way).

Imagine now for a moment that the optimal dps spec is one where you haven't specced into some rather crucial ability, be it interrupt, defensive or utility based.
Guy X still swaps around on an encounter basis, forgets to swap back, doesn't have the critical ability Y for the encounter and realizes this mid fight.
Which will not be funny for anyone.

I think the problem is simply that the rift between having that talent vs. not having it is so monumentally big in a given situation that they should really keep the baseline stuff out of the talent tree and make it baseline.

Well like I said, I think utility talents need to either lead to strong DPS talents and/or (in the case of interrupts) directly contribute to DPS meaning an optimal build (assuming you use your interrupt) includes/can include those skills.

That said I don't think your hypothetical scenario is bad enough to design the game around. If literally nobody in the raid has specced into interrupt yes that's a design flaw - if the fight has assigned one person to interrupt and that person forgets to talent it that's a player flaw.

[Theangryone]

Of coruse its been a very long time since I played a version of WoW that had the old talent trees, but I don't necessarily recall it feeling as useless as a lot of these talents do. Having said that, are we really wanting to base the design of the talent trees around a system that was removed years and years ago for good reason?

Current talents are relatively uninteresting, but if the old talent trees had a lot of issues too, why are we going back to that system? They could have done new talent trees where each talent was actually meaningful/fun/interesting, instead of "travel points"

Talent trees were useless, there were only one or two optimal builds that wouldn’t get you booted from groups.

[Fkiolaris]

C'mon, look at some of those talent trees.
You have to talent into basic shit like interrupts and defensive CD's.

I'm not saying that they're bad, i'm not saying that they don't have no brainers like previous talent trees, but whereas previously you had a very basic baseline toolkit, talenting into such no brainers like a regular AoE spell, Interrupts, healing spells like Chain Heal, or defensive CD's is just questionable design.

That's why I instantly lost any interest in these talent trees. But I guess it should be expected, this is how Blizzard have been designing their new systems in WoW since Legion

[Talon8669]

I've been playing around with the new talent trees for DF, and I can't help but feel like a lot of the time talents feel unimpactful or even entirely useless in order to get the talents below them.

For example, the baseline druid tree has a ton of useless sink points. In order to get Thick Hide, which is a really nice 6% flat damage reduction, I have to spec into Frenzied Regen (fine), Thrash, Swipe, and Ironfur (all bad/will never see any use).

I'm just trying to wrap my head around these new talent set ups. I was under the impression that every talent would be an interesting choice or have some direct impact on gameplay, but it feels like that isn't the case for maybe as much as 25-40% of the talents I pick up.

Then the other extreme - having to spend talent points to get core abilities which are required for the spec to function. For example, shadow priests have to spend talents speccing into mind flay and devouring plague... Why don't assassination rogues have to spec into envenom, if this is the path Blizzard is taking for talents? It wouldn't even be as bad for assassination - at least they still would have eviscerate to use instead, but balance/shadow literally have no other spender

Some talent points are going to be fillers and some talent points might not have any use to you but would have uses for say leveling, dungeons or PvP. The point of them is to give the player some customizability. The reality is that customizability is probably only pertinent in PvP but we have yet to see the final iterations which is why they are asking for feed back. Feel free to go to the official forums and provide feedback, they are literally asking people to do this.

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100% this is mainly to give more illusion of choice that only actually becomes a choice in super heavy single target situations. Currently on Alpha you can (supposedly) change talents at will at any time though, so if this is the case when the game goes live there will be a lot of build swapping to eke out that extra 1-2% dps. I'm not sure if this is the goal but if it is I definitely would've prefered the basic kits (say the first 8 talents on the class side of the tree) being baseline and having fewer talent points.

I don't necessarily think interrupts being a talent point is terrible though but I DO think ALL interrupts should be dps gains so people want to spec into them even when optimizing. An optimal dps spec having to skip basic defensive CDs (like Dispersion or Vampiric Embrace which currently no PvE Priest should ever take on Alpha) is really bad though.

Alternative is that utility skills like interrupts and defensive CDs lead to dps talents that end up being similar to the route that skips it which is currently not the case for either Dispersion or VE for Shadow.

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Awful idea, basically a worse version of the current (Shadowlands) talents. This creates fewer choices unless you want all of the literally 600 glyphs to be perfectly balanced (read: boring as fuck), and almost literally 0 interesting choices otherwise because you'll have a list of the 15+ glyphs you need to take at all times and MAYBE 5 bad glyphs you can swap.

I don't think having to choose between through put and utility/defensives is bad; in fact I think it's great design. I really hope they are able to push people out of the min/max mindset and instead realize that they can chose another path and still be an effective raid member because they bring something else than just pure damage or at the very least it allows raids to sit down and customize what they want/need for the fights. But hey just my thoughts, this will probably have the most affect in PvP which I think is also fantastic as it has the potential to bring a lot of build diversities to PvP.

[Kralljin]

the problem in BfA was that you had to replace something else with it, which isn't the case now (at least not in the same way).

I mean, it kind of is.
I toyed around with the Shaman talent tree, then i realized at the end that i have picked up neither Chain Heal, Earth Elemental, Tremor or Cap Totem.

I don't care much about CH as Elemental, but Earth Elemental, Tremor and Cap totem yeah that's kind of a loss and i would have to invest talent points into because the talents at the bottom are also quite solid.

If literally nobody in the raid has specced into interrupt yes that's a design flaw - if the fight has assigned one person to interrupt and that person forgets to talent it that's a player flaw.

It can apply to any ability that Blizzard puts into the talent that has a very basic function.

Take a defensive CD's, you don't wanna hear "oops, forgot to spec AMS" when your DK gets targeted by some ability, simply because a previous encounter didn't have involve any magical damage.

Nevermind that "designing the game around" is also a bit loaded, it's more to illustrate that putting those basic abilities into a talent tree can lead to negative player experiences.

[tomten]

Of coruse its been a very long time since I played a version of WoW that had the old talent trees, but I don't necessarily recall it feeling as useless as a lot of these talents do. Having said that, are we really wanting to base the design of the talent trees around a system that was removed years and years ago for good reason?

Current talents are relatively uninteresting, but if the old talent trees had a lot of issues too, why are we going back to that system? They could have done new talent trees where each talent was actually meaningful/fun/interesting, instead of "travel points"

Then you remember it wrong. Take a trip to classic and revisit it. You will see its exactly the same.
Because "this" is what "people" want. I dont want it. But people apparently do.

[Hctaz]

You may be absolutely correct that druid is the outlier, its the worst that I've seen and was one of the first released, so hopefully it sees a big change in a near update. Priest also looked pretty bad.

I'll have to build with some more of these hybrid talent trees to see the stink about them, but they're set up this way on purpose, and I think it makes sense to do it as such.

The class tree has sections basically dedicated to other specs. If you want some of the more powerful defensive options in the Druid class tree, you're going to have to spec through a section of Bear druid talents to get there. It makes sense.

Hybrid classes are always going to have more "useless" talents than classes with only one role because part of the fun/flavor of a hybrid class is being able to do multiple things. You could spec Feral druid and then take a whole bunch of resto related spells and abilities from your class tree and be a melee DPS/backup healer.
Or you could go Feral and take a lot of the boomkin stuff and be able to deal damage at range. Or you could go Feral and Bear and have more defensive abilities to keep you alive.

I don't see how it's really that much of a problem tbh.

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I mean, it kind of is.
I toyed around with the Shaman talent tree, then i realized at the end that i have picked up neither Chain Heal, Earth Elemental, Tremor or Cap Totem.

I don't care much about CH as Elemental, but Earth Elemental, Tremor and Cap totem yeah that's kind of a loss and i would have to invest talent points into because the talents at the bottom are also quite solid.

It can apply to any ability that Blizzard puts into the talent that has a very basic function.

Take a defensive CD's, you don't wanna hear "oops, forgot to spec AMS" when your DK gets targeted by some ability, simply because a previous encounter didn't have involve any magical damage.

Nevermind that "designing the game around" is also a bit loaded, it's more to illustrate that putting those basic abilities into a talent tree can lead to negative player experiences.

If you feel like there are abilities you are missing and you think you might need them for an encounter, you can swap talents.

There will probably always be a hypothetical best build in terms of raw damage output, but that doesn't mean much if the fight requires you to use certain abilities for mechanics that you can't simply overcome with raw DPS.

That's why they have saved talent builds and give you the flexibility to adjust them pretty easily it sounds like. If you realize that you need to take Cap totem, you can swap to Cap totem.

[Segus1992]

I don't think having to choose between through put and utility/defensives is bad; in fact I think it's great design. I really hope they are able to push people out of the min/max mindset and instead realize that they can chose another path and still be an effective raid member because they bring something else than just pure damage or at the very least it allows raids to sit down and customize what they want/need for the fights. But hey just my thoughts, this will probably have the most affect in PvP which I think is also fantastic as it has the potential to bring a lot of build diversities to PvP.

They won't. Especially defensive CDs will be a VERY hard sell since you almost never NEED them (in the case of a soak mechanic, a Disc Priest can just put Pain Suppression on you and you can have more DPS).

In PvP it works just fine, I might even agree that it's great design there - but that's because in an optimized fight (no such thing in PvP, really, but still) a defensive CD will increase your chances of winning.

I mean, it kind of is.
I toyed around with the Shaman talent tree, then i realized at the end that i have picked up neither Chain Heal, Earth Elemental, Tremor or Cap Totem.

I don't care much about CH as Elemental, but Earth Elemental, Tremor and Cap totem yeah that's kind of a loss and i would have to invest talent points into because the talents at the bottom are also quite solid.

I haven't looked much at the Shaman tree yet but the early (pre-8) Shaman tree does have a fuckton of talents that could probably use some truncation.

It can apply to any ability that Blizzard puts into the talent that has a very basic function.

Take a defensive CD's, you don't wanna hear "oops, forgot to spec AMS" when your DK gets targeted by some ability, simply because a previous encounter didn't have involve any magical damage.

Nevermind that "designing the game around" is also a bit loaded, it's more to illustrate that putting those basic abilities into a talent tree can lead to negative player experiences.

I agree that it can, my argument is that that's not NECESSARILY a bad thing - if an encounter is 100% a wipe if one person doesn't change their build to accommodate for it, that's ofc bad outside of cutting edge raiding, but I don't think "oh speccing Deterrence (not a talent strangely) here is probably better" is bad.

The way it can work in my mind is that straight defensive CDs (say Dispersion) are either A) baseline or B) lead to talents that are strong for DPS so it's not a DPS loss to take them, whereas utility that leads to DPS (AMS, DH Interrupt) can be talents if they're balanced in such a way that using them optimally is always going to be the ideal choice for DPS. Ideally I'd just have both cases be baseline though, or work as option B for defensive CDs.

[Sparklelord]

I thought the old system was trash and the new system following a trash design is also trash. Do something different for leveling but the current pick only what you want is better. Then the pick things that will never get used or are boring to get what I really want is a bad design.

How are more options a bad thing? Again, what's the difference between Picking A, B and C (now) vs having to "waste points" to get A, B and C?

Spoiler: There is no difference for people like you outside of having to click a few extra buttons. However it means people like me, that actually like having a choice in where are "useless points" are going, can make those decisions ourselves.

As it is, your class gets what stats/passives the devs decide your spec/class needs and don't often change it. The meta/stat prio never changes or anything, never mind maybe wanting different stat prios for different activities, right?

With this system, that budget is allocated somewhat to your talent trees, so you can often pick up additional stats (you want) or something else that might be more beneficial. Having to choose between 4% vers or extra Combo Point(s) from your Ambush for example, verse is always a raw damage increase but maybe you wanna do something using ambush more. You have that option now. Other people have that option. It creates a divergence in the player base where not everyone is exactly the same.

People like you can (and will) always just cookie cutter the build anyways, you don't want choice (or even need it) and that's fine. No need to shit on other people having more options when you're not losing anything. If those points are 'wasted' then no one is gaining anything. So where is the problem?

Let me end with a question, cause I've outlined a few positives and argued my case as to why I like this system. If this system is so shit (and the current system is effectively still intact with fluff in between) then which new and exciting system would you design to fixt this? Or would you just remove all remnants of choice and force everyone to have the same builds, no talents at all? What would YOU do to fix this? I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer cause someone like you won't have an answer for that nor would you ever try to.

Again, for people like you, who don't care about fine tuning things, there is no difference in this new system vs the current. You'll be okay. And if you're not careful, you might just accidentally enjoy yourself.