Mists of Pandaria Talent Clarifications, Blue Posts, War College, The Curse Word

[Okacz]

It's great that Blizzard decided to discuss changes with players. But their approach is kinda bad. They have one statement, and they know whatever players are going to say, there will be no changes. PvE rewarding was made a problem in current patch, when LFR came up and "pvp tards", afkers and ninjas proceeded to gain EXTREME tier bonuses. For free, for 0 effort. Doing normal dungeons is more challanging. Blizzard closed thier eyes on players who wanna feel rewarded. Im starting to feel like in childengarden, where after a small painting contest the caretaker just says "You were all great!". Come on, even the feeling of wearing current tier on your character shall feel like an achievement. Seeing all LFR scammers wearing the same things as you makes this feeling worse.

And things are going to get worse. LFR stays, and is probably going to expand. I wont be suprised to see it replacing normal mode, leaving only HC for better players. Challenge mode provides a challenge (as it says), but does not give appropriate rewards to effort put. Transmog items like cowboy hats may be a reward in world events, not challenges. Is WoW trying to change into community of children, enthusiasted that they can look like cowboys in game?

And talents... Well, some of them are neat. I really like hunter changes. But again - how is Blizzard even considering that there wont be 1 build for PvE, 1 build for PvP? Each of offensive abilities can be easily measured, checking which provides best dps gives you a perfect tree. Some talents are simply bound to spec. And those "utility talents"... come on. To begin with, they dont matter at all. Great choice. Secondly, in current trees you nearly always have some spare points that cant be spent in PvE - efficient way, and need to be put somewhere else. And moreover, even they look sometimes simply more OP than another. Builds are going to be more copy-paste from the internet than in any expansion in WoW.

To sum up, im quite dissappointed by Blizzards approach. Im not a "hardcore raider". I just enjoy being rewarded, feeling that I've achieved something in game. And so is any other player. It may sound like I'm a bad person, but seeing the same model of armor on somebody, who does not know how to play his class, or simply afks on encounters puts me down. And it's the main reason why I don't like current patch.

[Kaleredar]

It's great that Blizzard decided to discuss changes with players. But their approach is kinda bad. They have one statement, and they know whatever players are going to say, there will be no changes. PvE rewarding was made a problem in current patch, when LFR came up and "pvp tards", afkers and ninjas proceeded to gain EXTREME tier bonuses. For free, for 0 effort. Doing normal dungeons is more challanging. Blizzard closed thier eyes on players who wanna feel rewarded. Im starting to feel like in childengarden, where after a small painting contest the caretaker just says "You were all great!". Come on, even the feeling of wearing current tier on your character shall feel like an achievement. Seeing all LFR scammers wearing the same things as you makes this feeling worse.

And things are going to get worse. LFR stays, and is probably going to expand. I wont be suprised to see it replacing normal mode, leaving only HC for better players. Challenge mode provides a challenge (as it says), but does not give appropriate rewards to effort put. Transmog items like cowboy hats may be a reward in world events, not challenges. Is WoW trying to change into community of children, enthusiasted that they can look like cowboys in game?

And talents... Well, some of them are neat. I really like hunter changes. But again - how is Blizzard even considering that there wont be 1 build for PvE, 1 build for PvP? Each of offensive abilities can be easily measured, checking which provides best dps gives you a perfect tree. Some talents are simply bound to spec. And those "utility talents"... come on. To begin with, they dont matter at all. Great choice. Secondly, in current trees you nearly always have some spare points that cant be spent in PvE - efficient way, and need to be put somewhere else. And moreover, even they look sometimes simply more OP than another. Builds are going to be more copy-paste from the internet than in any expansion in WoW.

To sum up, im quite dissappointed by Blizzards approach. Im not a "hardcore raider". I just enjoy being rewarded, feeling that I've achieved something in game. And so is any other player. It may sound like I'm a bad person, but seeing the same model of armor on somebody, who does not know how to play his class, or simply afks on encounters puts me down. And it's the main reason why I don't like current patch.

Commenting purely on challenge modes, what, then, should they reward? They can't reward real gear, as that's pointless towards progressing further in challenge modes. It'd be like high-end arenas rewarding top-tier HM raiding gear, or vice versa, and then disallowing you from using them in the other, just because "you tried real hard at something and did real well."


As for the talents, the only thing that would eliminate cookie cutter builds, allow everyone to play how they want, AND be comprised solely of extremely meaningful talents that change how you as a very person function in every single battle would be to develop a talent tree set up that allows players to choose a certain number of any ability they want (relevant to their class/role) from a massive tree that will immediately fit into a rotation/priority system with any and all other potential talent choices, ALL of which (every single possible combination of talents) are all equally balanced to PvE, PvP, and with all other potential combinations from all the other talent trees of all the other classes of all the other DPS, healing, or tanking specs, depending on which role you yourself have chosen and then crafted a rotation for.

....

I probably don't need to point out that this would, very literally, be a nightmare to approach designing.

[proutek]

We've mentioned adding a few PvE gameplay elements in Mists.

What does this mean? Less 5m dungeons? Less raid content?

[Okacz]

Commenting purely on challenge modes, what, then, should they reward? They can't reward real gear, as that's pointless towards progressing further in challenge modes. It'd be like high-end arenas rewarding top-tier HM raiding gear, or vice versa, just because "you tried real hard at something and did real well."


As for the talents, the only thing that would eliminate cookie cutter builds, allow everyone to play how they want, AND be comprised solely of extremely meaningful talents that change how you as a very person function in every single battle would be to develop a talent tree set up that allows players to choose a certain number of any ability they want (relevant to their class) from a massive tree that will immediately fit into a rotation/priority system with any other given talent choice, ALL of which (every single possible combination of talents) are all equally balanced to PvE, PvP, and with all other potential combinations from all the other talent trees of all the other classes of all the other same roles.

....

I probably don't need to point out that this would, very literally, be a nightmare to approach designing.

About challenge rewards: Yes, gear can't be a reward. If it is on the same level or a bit higher than the instance, it will be outdated in next patch. If it's on the same level as patch, challenge modes lose their reason to exist.

But what about items players are USED to consider reward? Pets or Mounts, totally useless, but still loved by community, may be somewhere higher on reward list. On lower reward tiers? My idea is simple. Mats. Gems, ore, leather, cloth, fishes, all that kind of stuff, in bags, bigger on every tier. Why? If you can complete these modes you are probably in a guild that really appreciates such a gift, and those mats may come useful while raiding. Cauldron and Feast can't be done from air. And players will still be trying challenge mode to reach the chance to win a great looking mount, or unusual pet. This system beats cowboy hats in as I see it.

And talent trees? Make them bigger. More talents, bigger choice, less internet searching, more thinking. Make important choices, like on current tree, but not between OP ability and 2 lame, but eg. stat conversion. Would I like to empower my mastery, so while increasing a chance to get a Wild Shot, it has also a chance to make Wild Shot have a small dot? Or maybe I'd prefer a talent, where EVERY crit gives you Piercing Shots? Those choices may change the way you play, if they are balanced.

[Ruck]

These Blue Posts just further reinforce that I have absolutely 0 desire to play the game in 5.0 or beyond. I don't even understand the logic that they are trying to use to justify some things anymore. They want it easy, because it was too hard, and too uninteresting, but then they change it, and say that it should be all about "flavor" and then start backtracking from that when it's brought back up?

The new talent system isn't even a talent system. its more like a spell system you would see in a FF Console game. /yawn.

couldn't of said it better myself

[Bahska]

Looking over at the Druid tier, how many of the tier actually have you making a hard choice for healing in raid?

For healing in most tiers there are two choices for pve

Tier 1 Feline swiftness and wild charge

Tier 2 could be all 3 based on the situation

Tier 3 Mass entanglement or Typhoon depends on the situation (I guess if you have no other class to kite improved faerie fire could help you do that)

Tier 4 Soul of the forest or Incarnation

Tier 5 Vortex or mighty bash (Vortex was changed from pulling enemy's to your location to can be placed at any location within 30 yards)

Tier 6 sucks i wont lie: Disentanglement pvp Heart of the wild pve. The other talent is crap.

Almost to the T. Many posts and people I spoke to were convinced the cata changes would fix the cookie cutter specs, and make it to where you can make fun choices and not lose dps by choosing what you want.

How do you lose (or gain) healing by taking or not taking any of these talents? Only one i could see is tier 5 if you took treants instead of one of the other two but then your trading healing for extra damage.
Even if you took the crap talent in tier 6 you wouldn't lose healing cause the good pve choice is utility.

You wont need to go to a site to see what you need cause its all based on your playstyle, the strategy and what your group has/needs for utility.
Point is if you have two resto druids spec'd into totally different talents one isn't gonna out heal the other based on there spec. You'll just have more utility to use.

[Kalx]

Dark Soul is a replacement for Demon Soul

I see what you did there, Blizz...

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

For healing in most tiers there are two choices for pve

Tier 1 Feline swiftness and wild charge

Tier 2 could be all 3 based on the situation

Tier 3 Mass entanglement or Typhoon depends on the situation (I guess if you have no other class to kite improved faerie fire could help you do that)

Tier 4 Soul of the forest or Incarnation

Tier 5 Vortex or mighty bash (Vortex was changed from pulling enemy's to your location to can be placed at any location within 30 yards)

Tier 6 sucks i wont lie: Disentanglement pvp Heart of the wild pve. The other talent is crap.



How do you lose (or gain) healing by taking or not taking any of these talents? Only one i could see is tier 5 if you took treants instead of one of the other two but then your trading healing for extra damage.
Even if you took the crap talent in tier 6 you wouldnt lose healing cause the good pve choice is utility.

I'm not a druid, but I have healed as a Pally. But Ill look at the tree and see what I think.

Tier 1-Most likely Felines Swiftness. MAYBE Wild Charge.
Tier 2-In PVP, this would be a tough choice, in PVE I would go with Cenarion Ward. I just can't see any instances I would say to myself, MAN THAT WOULD BE GREAT!
Tier 3-From a healing aspect I see none of these as that amazing. Your tanks should have aggro, so knock backs and roots shouldn't be important. FF? I think a tank would benefit more from it.
Tier 4- Incarnation
Tier 5- A Slow, a stun, and a root......
Tier 6- Puke.



Unless the way raids will work are changing, I just can't see most of the talents being applicable to healing at all. MoP isn't here yet, so who knows. I'm not hating on the talents so much as how people seem to think the choices they make are as tough as they say. For the most part I think on my characters trees, I will be keep the same ones unless they counter a very specific mechanic.

[Deadanon]

So let me get this right.... There is no stat on gear that icreases mana pools for casters (including healers)? And his is an RPG game? omg omg omg. Thats it Blizzard. Goodbye

[Mekh]

Rogues are fine. Always were.

Still these changes make me happy. I hope they can make good on that dual-wield swords for combat thing.

[Charo]

For healing in most tiers there are two choices for pve

Tier 1 Feline swiftness and wild charge

Tier 2 could be all 3 based on the situation

Tier 3 Mass entanglement or Typhoon depends on the situation (I guess if you have no other class to kite improved faerie fire could help you do that)

Tier 4 Soul of the forest or Incarnation

Tier 5 Vortex or mighty bash (Vortex was changed from pulling enemy's to your location to can be placed at any location within 30 yards)

Tier 6 sucks i wont lie: Disentanglement pvp Heart of the wild pve. The other talent is crap.




How do you lose (or gain) healing by taking or not taking any of these talents? Only one i could see is tier 5 if you took treants instead of one of the other two but then your trading healing for extra damage.
Even if you took the crap talent in tier 6 you wouldn't lose healing cause the good pve choice is utility.

You wont need to go to a site to see what you need cause its all based on your playstyle, the strategy and what your group has/needs for utility.
Point is if you have two resto druids spec'd into totally different talents one isn't gonna out heal the other based on there spec. You'll just have more utility to use.

Why not Displacer Beast? A druid vanish would have been very useful in fights like Lady Deathwhsiper, if it agrro dumps like Vanish.

[Bahska]

So let me get this right.... There is no stat on gear that icreases mana pools for casters (including healers)? And his is an RPG game? omg omg omg. Thats it Blizzard. Goodbye

You'll have a set mana pool yes that's the way it was in Vanilla wow. Once your spellpower goes up and spirit you wont notice the difference.
I can only speak for resto druids but we have internal mana regen talents based off of are max mana an right now there op as hell you can pretty much just reforge spirit.

Healers get a passive talent that increases there mana by 400% so a pally for example wont have 24k mana like ret does.

Casters normally have there own way of gaining back mana i.e. mages have evocation along with other talents there getting in mop.

[VanishO2]

Again, giving excess of power to classes that shouldn't need such extras...

Then they say the old "if OP class loses control and etc. we will compensate with more damage" and in the end, they will just give both as they usually do and screw game balance.

They also always say before a new expansion "we're looking to chill out some of the passive, automatically-applied snares on some classes get because there's no real gameplay to them beyond just I touch you and you're snared." (at least this time they only talk about snares instead of all CCs, like the excess of stuns/fears). Again they won't chill it out and the unbalanced distribution of said CCs between classes/specs screws the pvp in this game. A few specs with way too much and all the rest with so few, on top of that these few classes/specs with so many tools and all of them on their each DR. So much wrong going on at the same time that it sucks...

And still 8 seconds for cc in pvp... lol... still too much. If we had a better distribution of tools between classes/specs, then ok. But the way it is 8 secs is a lot when one class can go 8+8+8+8..., most of it with short CDs... while the other can just 8 (if they can...) then sit and watch waiting a long time for that CD to come off so they can go "8" again... and considering that things like healers, are balanced around those few classes/specs that can lock a player out of combat for that much time, you can imagine how much it does suck to be on the "8 and wait a lot" side against healers and etc.

If they really wanted to balance the pvp, they would have removed most of this "proc while you press your high dmg buttons" crap, auto-attacking application and reflective procs of debuffs, so ppl would need to think more about what to do with their resources and GCDs.

Other than that, the rest is also crap, it's sad that they are "open for discussion", but most of the time, just mock players, showing that they're not that open for discussion.

The LFR vs. heroic raids is total BS, in a game that is moving as fast as they can, heroic raiding is useless as it's rewards are totally destroyed by the few months later drops from easy modes (we're talking about the most of the user base that Blizzard catters to, not the few players that do it for the challenge), most players won't want to waste time and effort to down a heroic just to use the little better drop for a few months and then get something better in the next LFR. Is just like the waste of time in doing the raid achievements for the tier's mount instead of just roflstomping it a few months later (or as soon as someone killed the last heroic boss like it was in FL).

Only the guilds fighting for a realm's 1st actually have use for the current system as it helps them go heroic mode 1 week later with less drops needed from the normal mode. The system would be interesting for way more players if the current heroic gear could be on par (or even a little better) with the normal mode gear from the next tier, it would made sense for every player to try and get heroic gear as they could really use it for the next heroic tier instead of dropping most of it (except for those few OP pieces) for new LFR/normal mode pieces. It would make the effort worth way more. Also if they always change drop rates of mounts (like bosses that have 100% drop chance on heroic) on the next tier, would make ppl more interested in keep going (or even trying) before they would have to farm in a lower drop scenario thanks to the nerfs or new tier making it easy. Even removing the achievement mount like they did with T7 drakes, so there would be a reason to try it instead of waiting just 2, 3 months (or a new tier) to get it. But that's is something that they don't want because they prefer to see players still going to things like ulduar, icc, etc. at 85-90 just for the mount.

And the challenge modes? Ok... it's nice on paper, but since they need to make those cosmetic rewards interesting, they will obviously appeal to a lot of players... but let's be honest, unless it's not a real challenge, not everyone will be able to get most of those since the challenges are supposed to not be outgeared with their gear normalization rule. So, how long before they catter to the players that will demand they lower the dificult of said challenges because making them put effort for it is "stupid", "work at home", "epeen", etc. and they are paying $15 for it, but get "content" denied???

[Bahska]

Why not Displacer Beast? A druid vanish would have been very useful in fights like Lady Deathwhsiper, if it agrro dumps like Vanish.

Symbiosis says hi, you need to have the class in your group like mage gives resto ice block which drops threat (Kitty can take feign death from hunters) but its a nice way around not giving every class every talent.

If every class had everything the game would be even more boring then it already is. honestly a aggro dump is the one talent resto druids don't have atm (that they could use)

They haven't finished what druids get from other classes with this talent but i can see resto getting dispersion things like that.

You could also switch to bear if you took the heart of the wild talent cause switching from resto to bear switches 95% of you int to armor its not a aggro dump but may save your life till the tank picks the adds up. (In theory)

---------- Post added 2012-02-17 at 06:58 AM ----------

Unless the way raids will work are changing, I just can't see most of the talents being applicable to healing at all.

if your looking for dps/healing increase talents, for the most part you wont find them here.
There all utility, i do agree that raids like dragon soul there pointless but Nef and magmaw things like typhoon and a stun would have been nice.

I would love to have renewal for the slime boss on heroic. in dragon soul

[Deleted]

Yes finally! Don't have to worry about symbiosis being a PvE spell anymore, it would be extremely unbalanced on the numbers. And theres so much appreciation i have for that rogue crit boost, I've litterly been crying through all Cataclysm because crit was such a horrible stat.

[Deleted]

Ferals getting Soul Swap? And Warlocks with Rejuv? Holy hell Warlock/Feral/Healer will be fun.

[Aerion]

Omg. My thread, which got a blue post, is now on MMO-Champ. I am happyface :3 Also: Darn, wish I could stack 2 Runes of Power

That would be awesome, wouldn't it?

I assume they are making the double-rune possible just so that if you for some reason have to move, you always find a rune under your feet.

---------- Post added 2012-02-17 at 02:27 PM ----------

So it'll be even more difficult, because we'll have to type in the extra letters required for the individual boss names, instead of just typing in the spec and role once at the beginning of each patch like we do now.

Besides, it's much harder to judge the raw DPS output of "situational" abilities, which almost all of these are.

You do realize most of the talents are utility talents with no or only slight impact on actual DPS/HPS.

Also, you cannot always expect to do the same things on same boss fights. You might have a change in raid roster causing you to have to do things that you wouldn't normally do (managing adds etc.).

However, you are right in pointing out that for a certain purpose where you know exactly what to expect and how the fight will go through, and you know what your role in that fight will be, you obviously can and will find the best suited talent combination for that single purpose. However, any change in that pattern might cause some of the other talents become more desirable changing your talent specialization as whole.

[ipaq]

Love how the editors here pander to Blizzard.

A talent chooser is not a calculator.

PS: Blizzard already stated that their customers was having difficulties understanding the Talent Tree... Snap out of it and said it already.

[Thraenduil]

All this talk about " i just go to elitist jerks the moment i encounter problem in game " makes me really sad. If you first try by yourself to work out your talents and then correct them if needed you become better player. And if you need advice guild members and friends should be first to consult from. Just doing what it says in forums without understanding the purpose and then whine about it on the same forum when it doesn't work won't get you place in the raid.Let me quote what one wise man said : "Anyone who asks "what's the trick" and "how did you do that" right of the bat fails then and there. People who look for shortcuts like that should know their place. Even if you have the right answer it's worthless without knowing the meaning."Well, internet can be used if you are really out of options. No one can criticise you at that point. As for these new talents go, I like some of the changes and think rogues really are powered down a little. But they may get something cool in return. Shamans too finally get some love.BTW, has it been since blizzcon that elemental shamans benefit from spirit? I mean Elemental Precision. This would mean that other class besides priest will roll spirit gear.

[Theodon]

Simple New Talent Trees

Talking with a lot of fellow Pver's and there has been a lot of talk that Blizzard is going to reduce the amount of PvE in the next expansion... We've never quantified the amount of content coming in Mists of Pandaria, much less stated we plan to produce less content in the next expansion than we have in previous expansions. We've mentioned adding a few PvE gameplay elements in Mists.

That statement has me worried. I know it's not a confirmation that it's true, but it was also the typical non-answer you get when it's a possibility.