I am talking mostly from PvP perspective, but changing just few talents here and there changed basically whole gameplay plan for me. One most notable difference was my weird take on Warlock.. My Destro build gave up Conflagrate for Curse of Exhaustion. Just changing 5 talents I went from this burst based caster to more control oriented caster. It was like day and night in PvP.
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Problem with WotLK trees is, that hybridization is actually quite limited. IMO, TBC had the best tree. There was enough options but also you were able to hybridization your build. You really can't do that in WotLK in some meaningful way.
Don't forget Shaman, had some fun builds there. I forgot when the Shadow/Disc priest build was... TBC?
That said though, this isn't much of an argument because we just don't have the stats to support this. I don't doubt that the DPS classes or specs with two DPS trees looked back on them more fondly than others. Lets say that's the case though and that is the majority of people enjoying it, wouldn't it make more sense to have the trees of the other classes worked on instead of pushing us all into such rigid classes?
Nope, they didn't, speaking from experience here.
For Elemental, there were no really decent talents buried within Resto / Enhance, same story for Resto, Elemental had decent talents for Enhance, but those deep in Enhancement were just flat better.
Vanilla, died because:
1.SP became viable
2.Both Disc and Holy got more output talents
One of the many things people overlook in this discussion, in Vanilla, talents were way less impactful than they were in TBC / Wotlk, meaning you could still do respectable output just being wearing the correct gear for a given role.
With each tree however getting more and more powerful talents, your "baseline" ability to perform a given role (such as healing) became way worse than in Vanilla, because the game was designed around having all the powerful talents from the healing tree.
That argument kinda goes both ways.
At the end of the day, you have to draw the line somewhere, unless you want to seriously argue over something like a 20/20/21 build on any given class.
Simply because it was possible, doesn't mean it was good, not even close.
Nope.
Last edited by Kralljin; 2019-05-26 at 08:52 PM.
Maybe you would have a point, if they would not gut classes of their core skills. You have Shamans without totems, Hunters without traps and melee skills, Mages without frost spells, warlocks without curses.. but hey, you can choose between 3 different AoE skills..bravo..also, you can change them on the fly - such customization, much wow.
No seriously, new system doesn't provide what the old one. They even said that in their post "Old system is too complex, we can hardly handle that". If you enjoy current system, more power to you, but it's not even close to old system.
As am I, a few builds there. You didn't always take them to whatever content you were doing that day but that was the case for every single class and build.
Enhancement had better talents, yes. Doesn't mean it was the only tree you invested in.
Just like every class to today. Builds come and go, the meta for each classes changes.
That's a half accurate statement. Some of the specs just outright wouldn't function (not that they were super functioning to start) if you didn't invest a certain amount of points into them and picked up specific talents. Druids and Paladins were great examples of this.
That's true, the game began to be built around players investing more points into an individual tree. That was an intentional change though and doesn't speak to what the game would've behaved like if they had built it intentionally another way.
A hybrid doesn't have to be a set amount of allocated points into trees. It doesn't have to be a fundamental change to rotation, that's far too restrictive. It can do those things, or maybe it allows you to tank dual-wielding instead of sword and shield. My standard for this has been a noticeable deviance from the intended play style.
This argument doesn't hold water, I'm sorry. This statement is true of every iteration of every class, spec, talent, glyph, and any way the players interact with their classes and has been true from the start of the game and it will be true until the end of the game. Something not being "good" (in whichever way you're defining it) doesn't mean it's "bad" to let the players have access to or support.
Right now, which classes are good for CoS? What about 3s? What if you're a BM Hunter?
What if your class is behind on DPS on every way we can measure it on live? Should we just cut the class from the game?
Again, as I've said before. Things are exactly the same now as they have been since the beginning. There's a meta, some classes are better than others. Some talents are better than others.
That said, the Wrath trees were large and clunky and unnecessary. If your trees are that large, something is wrong. Could you imagine what they'd look like today? I mean, we're talking 5 MORE ROWS PER SPEC of abilities.
As I suggested before though, I think there is a nice middle-ground that works.
Last edited by Selah; 2019-05-26 at 09:37 PM.
The point is that "variation" or "costumization", let alone impactful one, wasn't a really thing.
...yes?
I don't get what you're trying to say as far as my original post is concerned.
It isn't.
The discrepancy between a not specialized healer and a specialized healer grew with each expansion.
The is problem again that you cannot design every tree with another one in mind, it doesn't work if those trees do not have a common ground as far as playstyle is concerned.
It does, you have to draw a line between viable and nonviable somewhere.
This common ground is at least that every spec is viable within their certain role, perhaps not up to the highest difficulty, but you can play any spec up until Jaina Mythic without lagging extremely behind in terms of performance.
Because Wotlk talent trees did essentially two things:
-They needed the talents in order to develop something resembling a unique rotation towards a spec. (Taste for Blood, Hotstreak, Brain freeze, etc.)
-Dumped basically random beneficial talents deep into the tree in order to combat hybrid specs.
In a way, Wotlk talent trees did what Blizzard has done in Cata but in a soft way, Hybrid specs were for the most part pretty dead because you gimped your character too damn hard by skipping over certain talents.
There is a world of difference between complexity for the developers or for the players.
I am aware of that, but even they said, it's doable, but they just don't want to. So we just went from one extreme, complex customization (at least for developers), to other extreme, no customization at all (aside of pvp talents I guess)..
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It was workable for like 7 years. That wasn't problem at all. That system, while flawed, was still good. It's still used to these days in several other games
What rainbow flag guy said.
Also the only problem I currently have with talents is that the rows or options haven't increased in a while and while we did have a bunch of new "talents" in Legion via the artifacts and legendaries we lost them and the passive azerite bonuses fail to deliver the enrichment and variety the classes desperately need.
Otherwise looking forward to people comparing the old talent trees with the current talent rows when both are live.
"Not wanting" is probably putting it rather friendly, rather that they feared lots of balance and design issues going forward.
It's probably about as doable as classic servers before they announced them in 2017... doable yes, but not without massive issues on Blizzards end and possible downsides for the players themselves.
Personally i think the bigger problem is that Blizzard dropped the ball on talent design.
Especially if they just decide to turn previous baseline abilities into talents, that's just bad design.
That aside, i think the MoP talent design still offers more options as far as playstyle is concerned, depending on the class / spec.
It was in niche ways, they just had limited uses and weren't common. Doesn't mean they didn't exist or weren't worthwhile when applied right.
I'm just highlighting my point here.
Correct, but your claim that you could do your role effectively in vanilla with just the right gear isn't right. They were extremely dependent on those talents in vanilla. Not that gearing made much sense in vanilla to start.
Right, but the classes were built so that you would get your core kit just through leveling and buying ranks. From there you decided how you wanted to modify your class with talents. The problem there is that you were getting the base tool kit for your entire class (base toolkits for all three specs) and then you would pick your specialization, and within that spec you would get the toolkit to enable that play-style.
I'm suggesting a different way of applying the talent trees to the classes so that the core play-style of the specs isn't compromised but allows players to actually modify the class and how it plays.
Raiding isn't the only content in the game. I'm not suggesting making a million different types of hybrids viable for raiding. I'm suggesting leaving the door open for players to find these niche builds and enjoying them. Saying "oh, it's not good for raiding" isn't an argument against something being open to the players. Using that reasoning we should scrap anything PvP related.
Right, exactly. You've just proven my point for me.
Yeah, and the funny thing is, they're still doing as much tuning each patch and expansion as they were before talents left.
Yeah, this is the route Trion went too. Unfortunately for them, when you demolish a massive pillar of your game like that... it tends to bite you in the ass.