About the depth of talent trees

[Bodakane]

Keep current tree amount. Get talent points each level up. 5 points can be spent on each row. You can put points into each talent on each row. Alter talents to be full live power with all 5 points for that row in them and will be degrees less with less points.

You get customization. You get rewarded for leveling.

[swenemy451]

The modern talents are a failure. Why? They ruined the satisfaction we used to have when leveling up and at the same time failed to do what Blizzard set out to do with them: provide meaningful choices. There are no meaningful choices, there are a very limited set of blatanly superior and inferior talents depending on the situation at best, typically one superior talent in all situations.

And in addition to the lack of new talent points to spend while leveling we have also lost the ability to make our own builds. Were there cookie cutter builds in Vanilla for raiding? Yes. Were there alternate pvp builds? Yes. Were there builds for leveling? Yes. Were there builds for grinding or dungeons or whatever the fuck you wanted to do? YES! You had a great variety of choice and the freedom to do as you pleased. And that was fun!

But most of all, back with the old talents I was a Warlock. Not an Affliction Warlock or a Destro Warlock. I was a Warlock. And I felt like one. Nowadays when you play your specialization you play a limited portion of what your class ought to actually be! It feels like playing 3 classes, each one having far too few abilities and stuff going on. As an example: Why exactly has my Warlock forgotten how to use Curse of Agony and Corruption just because I'm specialized into Destruction? It's ludicrous. In Vanilla if you specced into Destro mostly what it did was make your Shadowbolt hit harder and give you Shadowburn. It didn't take anything from you. It gave you stuff!

So yeah modern class design along with the talents: a story of an abject failure.

[Thundering]

Haha no. Resto shaman have atlest 3 viable compettive talent builds.

His statement just shows how little he knows....

And not everything needs to be maxed thats why hybrids are fine.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

I shouldn't have to choose between making my Fireballs bigger or making my Fireballs better.

I should be able to have both.

And I should also be able to just skip the Ring of Fail talent row entirely

[Keilvog]

I think the main hole in the system is that the choice was just to talent/ability that never impact greatly your playstyle.
If they wanna bang the system, they need a playstyle tree choice rather then talent tree.
Talent must let ppl change playstyle, not just rotation.
for exemple, talent can let a single dps specc be played with different playstyle, like burst, sustain, dotter, rng, longcast, shortcast, instant, st, aoe, cleave<=3....
Talent should let more gameplay freedom, blizz role is just to balance all out (mastery should have been the magic lever for balance that but they screw it)
And balance is not even that hard they follow basic rule, like: easy gameplay = low dmg, more punishig gameplay = more dps...
for tank and healer same thing, talent change gameplay, not only rotation

I agree with this.

A good example for MM hunter would be a row to choose from 3 different types of shots:
Frozen Arrow
1.5 sec cast time.10sec CD.
You fire a frost arrow dealing ??% AP as magic damage. Frost arrow has an increased 10% crit chance and its critical strikes deal 200% damage.
It also slows the target by 15% for 3seconds.
Searing Arrow
Instant cast.
5sec CD.
Fires a burning arrow at the target dealing ??%AP and burning it for ?? damage over 10 seconds.
Repeated Searing Arrow's debuff stack up to 5 times and reset its duration.
Damage ticks increased by haste.
Kill Shot
Executing shot like there used to be.

This would provide the hunter with cool options focused on different gear stats, with different playstyles. One more bursty, another with more sustained damage that could be spread accross enemies and a last one more plain

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Other rows could then be added to this that would syncronyze with each other like

Multi Arrows
Instant cast.
1,5 min CD.
For the next 20 seconds, Frozen Arrow and Kill Shot hit 1 additional target.
Searing Arrow hits 3 additional targets.
Improved Quiver
Passive ability.
Frozen Arrow, Searing Arrow and Kill Shot have improved effects:
Frozen Arrow - Slow effect increased to 10 seconds. Increases the critical chance of all hunter's abilities on targets affected by Frozen Arrow by 10%.
Searing Arrow - Applies three stacks at a time.
Kill Shot - Has 2 charges.
Tracker's Mark
Passive ability.
Your Steady Shot applies a mark on the target for 15 seconds. When you cast Aimed shot on a marked target it will ricochet to a maximum of 3 nearby marked enemies, dealing 50% of it's initial damage.

These arrows are inspired on Warcraft 3 heroes' abilities (PoTM's searing arrows and Naga frozen arrow) which would also give the player a choice to play as their favorite heroes! Similar stuff, truth to the classes' original theme, should be implemented

[Doffen]

The old system was never complex, let's not fool ourselves. The only real good thing it gave us was that we could put more points in it while leveling.

The one thing with the modern talent tree is that it focus a bit more on spec fantasy rather than class fantasy, but it seems to be something they are trying to fix according to the last video on Ion. Let me emphasize on the words "seems" and "try" here

[nRes]

The old system was never complex, let's not fool ourselves. The only real good thing it gave us was that we could put more points in it while leveling.

The one thing with the modern talent tree is that it focus a bit more on spec fantasy rather than class fantasy, but it seems to be something they are trying to fix according to the last video on Ion. Let me emphasize on the words "seems" and "try" here

Just because it wasn't complex, doesn't mean it wasn't good. The nice thing about having a big talent tree with stats spread around a lot more, is that it gives people more flexibility in how they want to play their class. There were some bad talents, but most of the talents were useful and worth tweaking. I ran a lot of hybrid specs back in the day.

What I loved the most is that it felt like I had a complete class and I could play it however I wanted to, instead of what we have now where every spec is like a separate class and instead of having a ton of baseline abilities that we can augment with a talent tree, we have a gimped baseline class and boring spec specific talent rows.

Old talent trees had potential, what we have now has none.

[Nizah]

In general. I like playing what seems fun to me. Sometimes those two line up.

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I know I shouldn't respond directly because it's just feeding, but the only thing complex about the old talent system was making sure you put all your talents in the correct spots for your cookie-cutter build. There really was no complexity to it. Modern talents while it looks simpler or dumbed down, gives you much more flexibility and choice. You have to think about the situation you are going into and select the proper talents. Sometimes it boils down to AoE vs ST talent, but sometimes you have three great utility options, or three unique talents. At least you can adjust your build according to the situation. And really most of the old talents trees was mindless fluff, that they built into passives and leveling.

As for me, Not one of my builds is geared for top performance. I haven't rolled that way since ICC and with my DH in Legion only because I needed to use specific talents with each new tier due to bonuses. I play for fun, and choose the talents I think will give me the most enjoyment form playing. I don't care about parses. I don't run meters. I just have fun.

You had to change couse nerfs/buffs and tiers and legendaries, you didnt had to change couse you couldnt perform good, unless you really wanted to min max, or maybe on some boss fights you had to change 1 MAYBE 2 talents who would help for AOE, but lets not lie to ourselfs, the new talent tree its just streight forward. And what satisfaction do you have when leveling from 100 to 120 when you dont get any skill points to invest as you level, 20 freakin levels without unlocking skill points and talents, is that even an RPG game ?

[Hittion]

I think the concept was to make talents more impactful. That said all the change seems to of accomplished is to have raiders count the number of adds in a fight then pick the complementary talent to counter that.

[Drusin]

just as you have multiple viable talent choices right now.

difference is that you don't have to click on the same 30-40 points that are in every build each time you respecc.

There were scripts back in the day you could use to fill in all your talent points. For instance

/run t,p,a={3,12,23,32,53,62,71,83,92,101,111,121,131,143,161,172,183,201,1,12,33,62,2,22,}SetP reviewPrimaryTalentTree(t[1],GetActiveTalentGroup())for i=1,#t do a=t[i]if a<9 then p=a else AddPreviewTalentPoints(p,floor(a/10),a%10)end end

If we still had talent trees like back in the day I'd bet my entire hand that there would be an addon to make swapping between specs take 2 clicks.

[Doffen]

Just because it wasn't complex, doesn't mean it wasn't good. The nice thing about having a big talent tree with stats spread around a lot more, is that it gives people more flexibility in how they want to play their class. There were some bad talents, but most of the talents were useful and worth tweaking. I ran a lot of hybrid specs back in the day.

What I loved the most is that it felt like I had a complete class and I could play it however I wanted to, instead of what we have now where every spec is like a separate class and instead of having a ton of baseline abilities that we can augment with a talent tree, we have a gimped baseline class and boring spec specific talent rows.

Old talent trees had potential, what we have now has none.

Each to their own, and not saying it was worse either, just the notion that it was more complex isn't correct. You can choose your own way to play your spec now, but like always, there are cookie cutter builds. If you want to go a different way, you can do it now as well.

The talent design we have today got potential, and talents giving 2% of this and that like the old design wasn't really interesting.

Both could be better, a mix of both would most likely be a good middle ground. Take some of the abilities out of the current one, make more of them baseline and put some gameplay-changing passives etc in it.

[Super Kami Dende]

Well, WoWs character customization and options are really low. If i remember right, they removed the complex talent system because they argued with the availability of cookie cutter builds, which would make options none existing.

There was literally nothing complex about the original talent system. The current system though more compact actually gives far more varied choices.

People that want the old trees back are mostly idiots that think that spending lots of points somehow meant there being a lot more options.

[kaminaris]

Why are we still having this discussion?

Again - the only thing that could work as a tree or (just another linear talent choices) would be Utility Tree. So remove any utility talent from current talents making it pure dps talents.

Build utility talent tree that does not add any DPS. That could be the only real choice we could have and it could be a solution to garbage utility balance in M+.

[unbound]

This would be a really great idea for killing off the remaining player base.

The remaining player base being roughly 1/5 what it was at peak, perhaps you should consider that the lack of depth of talent trees is one of the reasons for this.

Yes, many people used cookie cutter builds. But many others did not. That is actually an important part of what made the game better in the past. It was accommodating to players of all stripes...not just raiders.

[skumnasty]

The nice thing about having a big talent tree with stats spread around a lot more, is that it gives people more flexibility in how they want to play their class.

You are neck-deep in this illusion. For most classes you had at most 3 viable builds, at high end raiding even less for most classes (either no viable build or 1). People who say "I had more buttons to click = more build paths and customization" are fooling themselves. Half the talents were practically insignificant (1% here, 1% there), 1/4 of the talents were practically useless, leaving maybe 1/4 of them were interesting at all.

All they did was give every class 3 distinct ways to play (2 for DH, 4 for Druid), with slight alterations in each spec in the talent choices. This way it is very clear and easier to choose how you want to play (spec) with small customization for what adjustments you prefer (talents). In the end, if anything there are MORE options.

The ONLY argument I think that has any grounds is the feeling of being rewarded each level while leveling. The main case against that, though, is that retail WoW puts a lot less focus on leveling and more focus on end game content. While they may be able to resurrect some more satisfying feelings about leveling up with a level squish, it really isn't surprising that they've shifted the focus out of leveling in a game that people have been leveling characters for 15 years.

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There was literally nothing complex about the original talent system. The current system though more compact actually gives far more varied choices.

People that want the old trees back are mostly idiots that think that spending lots of points somehow meant there being a lot more options.

I seriously hope people finally realize this when they play classic. Unfortunately if they are so simple-minded that they're arguing that "more points = more complexity/options" they're probably going to continue to feel that way as they eagerly dump points into their "1% bonus damage to humanoids" talents. Lul.

[nRes]

You are neck-deep in this illusion. For most classes you had at most 3 viable builds, at high end raiding even less for most classes (either no viable build or 1). People who say "I had more buttons to click = more build paths and customization" are fooling themselves. Half the talents were practically insignificant (1% here, 1% there), 1/4 of the talents were practically useless, leaving maybe 1/4 of them were interesting at all.

All they did was give every class 3 distinct ways to play (2 for DH, 4 for Druid), with slight alterations in each spec in the talent choices. This way it is very clear and easier to choose how you want to play (spec) with small customization for what adjustments you prefer (talents). In the end, if anything there are MORE options.

The ONLY argument I think that has any grounds is the feeling of being rewarded each level while leveling. The main case against that, though, is that retail WoW puts a lot less focus on leveling and more focus on end game content. While they may be able to resurrect some more satisfying feelings about leveling up with a level squish, it really isn't surprising that they've shifted the focus out of leveling in a game that people have been leveling characters for 15 years.

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I seriously hope people finally realize this when they play classic. Unfortunately if they are so simple-minded that they're arguing that "more points = more complexity/options" they're probably going to continue to feel that way as they eagerly dump points into their "1% bonus damage to humanoids" talents. Lul.

It wasn't an illusion though. Sure if you are talking raiding and dps, there were optimal talents to pick. However numbers weren't everything back then. Say what you will, utility mattered a lot, and in heroics and pvp you could go off the rails with your build. I did it and had fun with it and though it might have not been perfect, it had potential and didn't need to be scrapped.

You say the talents were insignificant, but what do we have now? Almost everything that you could tweak back then is built in and you have rows of abilities that let you pick one talent per row, even though you might want multiple things from that row because maybe that's how you want to play your class. Back in the day I could go deep into Survival and get Wyvern Sting, and still have enough points to go deep into MM and even some in BM and it allowed me to be an utility powerhouse. Dps wasn't great but my dungeon runs were smooth and the spec was godly in PVP. I can't do any of that today. All the cool stuff my class had is splintered into the specs or removed, and the specs themselves only play the way blizzard want them to play. You have aoe talents and st talents, and that's it.

Everything is so fine tuned and pigeonholed there's no true way to express yourself through your class. You're just another drone churning out numbers and going through the motions. Absolutely soulless game and there's no way what we have today is better than what we had in TBC. Not to me at least.

[Shaqthefat]

The remaining player base being roughly 1/5 what it was at peak, perhaps you should consider that the lack of depth of talent trees is one of the reasons for this.

Yes, many people used cookie cutter builds. But many others did not. That is actually an important part of what made the game better in the past. It was accommodating to players of all stripes...not just raiders.

The current talent trees are fine, the reasons why people would quit are because their class is poorly designed. Talent trees are meant to be an addition to a class not the make or break of how a class plays.


A lot of what you said can go both ways. The statistic you made up about the player base being roughly 1/5 of what it was at its peak has the same amount of evidence as saying the player base is currently double what it was in Wrath of the Lich.

There were people back in the day who did not use the optimal build for their class. There are people today who do not use the optimal build for their class.

The talent trees today are accommodating to players of all stripes, you just don't hear and see those builds because those are builds made by the player. When you are looking for talent builds you will always find a meta, if you want to find these weird little builds that only work in certain situations you have to look a lot deeper, because a majority of the people making builds and putting builds out on the internet and creating the best possible builds.

[SirBeef]

You had to change couse nerfs/buffs and tiers and legendaries, you didnt had to change couse you couldnt perform good, unless you really wanted to min max, or maybe on some boss fights you had to change 1 MAYBE 2 talents who would help for AOE, but lets not lie to ourselfs, the new talent tree its just streight forward. And what satisfaction do you have when leveling from 100 to 120 when you dont get any skill points to invest as you level, 20 freakin levels without unlocking skill points and talents, is that even an RPG game ?

You were not performing good in last tier with first tier gear and talents no matter how good you are.