Do you think a talent system revamp is in the future?

[neik]

there is no backing to this other then anecdotes and the same anecdotes have shown up for every Mmo.

The list of wow killers is long and ever expanding.

It's not about releasing the game that would force blizzard to close down it's operations, and thus kill the wow. People leave wow to play different games all the time. Wow killer is a fairly dishonest expression in my opinion, but it surely makes some people feel all fuzzy inside.

[baskev]

Title pretty much sums it up.

Classic and BC have had me recently browsing the talent systems though the years. In LK we got glyphs stapled on and Cataclysm was the first big change when the number of available points were squished. Then came MoP where we switched to the proto version of what we have now but you could borrow from each of your class specs fantasy powers. Then finally WoD brought the version we still have today. My point being every few expansions we seem to get something new, I'm wondering if after what's being suspected as an 'interlude' expansion(before some weird changes happen to the wow universe) we aren't due for a different take on talents again.

pfff hard to tell. some of my alts/main have great talent tree's and they work. others are trash and are pretty much cookie cutter builds. I think they first need to think about what they want from a talent system before a overhaul.

[RemasteredClassic]

I think WoW desperately needs a per spec multi-path talent tree system combining the best of both worlds.

[FossilFree]

I'd prefer it if the old talent trees and prime glyphs were returned. That was the best design, they shouldn't have fixed what wasn't broken.

[bledgor]

Them adding the old shitty talent system that literally was worse cookie cutter than the current system is something I would fucking hate.

I do think we will get another row next expansion that consist of the covenant class abilities. I do think some talents need some touching up as well.

[Alkizon]

I'm not a fortune-teller, so I have no idea what "will be" there. But as to how it should be, this is already another thing... Topic duplicates this one and many such others, therefore I'll not going to write anything separately here (link has basic information).

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Not a chance. A talent revamp is a huge game wide under taking. Instead you will get little systems that breaks everything for a full expansion and in the last patch it will work right. But then they will throw that away to work on the next dozen small systems go do it all over again.

That way you can tell investors lots of innovation and additions are coming instead of rebuilds.

[NineSpine]

There is no difference FF isn’t the only game people claim to be going to a couple years after launch with no backing hell people have been claiming every one was leaving for Ffxiv for years.

There’s just nothing to back up these ideas no info from wow Ffxiv or any other game just meaningless anecdotes.

We have solid evidence that retail wow has a retention problem.
We have solid evidence that retail wow has seen an exceptional loss since the launch of shadowlands.
We have solid evidence that FF14 has consistently seen growth every year, including between expansion releases.
We have solid evidence that wow is not being given the resources it used to have.
We have solid evidence that large community figures for wow are becoming more and more interested in FF14.

Is all of this a rock solid case that wow is declining and FF14 is picking up those losses? No, but it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to come to.

- - - Updated - - -

seeing how much development retail seems to get i hardly doubt it.

Saying this during an insane content drought is a little weird.

- - - Updated - - -

Wow needs to adopt a system more like the pvp talent system for all talents, so that they can continually add more talents every expansion without bloating the classes.

[scubi666stacy]

As long as we will not get the Classic talents back - I learned to hate the tree system. Too many meaningless choices.

Also, current content draught is partially due to COVID.

[justandulas]

they should just open up every single talent tree, and talents EVER put into the game and let the players pick/choose which ones they prefer per class. Who cares about balance, it's all about FUN and i've got specs that were FUN that no longer exist in game (meta lock for example)

I have no faith in their ability to redo the talent trees after cata and legion, but they could just open them ALL back up and say "pick whichever system and talents you preferred best"

It would be a hell of a lot better than the covenant system, or the diablo 3 talents we have now, and would offer near infinite replay ability.

[scubi666stacy]

hopefully so. theres barely any decision to be made in regards to talent builds... and havent been able to make hybrids in a long time.

Dont get me wrong you can have different build styles these days but it just seems too forced into... its either AoE build or a single target build, and alot of the talents are just clearly worst in their tier.

Classic has taught me that ultimately our characters have far more freedom to work with (no preset specialization), you dont all need to be the exact same build either... sure there are the meta builds and what performs the best but there are still a few talents you can swap around if someone else has them, more teamwork there.
I played a warrior and we had a warrior dps group in the raid so we all didnt need to have improved battleshout for example, and not everyone needed piercing howl... i bet almost all of us had slightly different builds in that regard but still we were competitive with eachother in dps, gear was the main reason for our dps differences and not talents.
Even fire mages could have one person with improved scorch while the rest do not, i dont know about the rest of their choices tho but all i know is only ONE of them has to put the debuff on and everyone benefits... same with warlocks and their curses for optimum raid dps (although those dont get buffed from talents but the teamwork is there)

Ofcourse classic has its own issues but teamwork and build variety isnt one of them.

Well what I have learned from Classic talents - if you did not have the cookie cutter build, have fun sticking to roleplaying and welfare raids.
So no thanks, I don't want Classic talent trees to return.

[Saltysquidoon]

The system isn't an issue it's the execution.
There are too many dead branches where you set and forget for multiple expansions
Too many PvE, PvP and never branches
Too many AoE, ST and never branches
Too many 'utility' trees where you set and forget for 99% of fights (even on mythic prog raiding) or the 'utility' is so negligible as to not matter.
Too many branches where you need a talent for a spec to feel complete (looking at you Whirling dragon punch) that should have been made baseline ages ago.

All of this isn't helped by blizzard wanting talents to be in a place where they are 'good enough to not have to touch them much and distract people with the new borrowed power system.

[Crimson Spears]

The system isn't an issue it's the execution.
There are too many dead branches where you set and forget for multiple expansions
Too many PvE, PvP and never branches
Too many AoE, ST and never branches
Too many 'utility' trees where you set and forget for 99% of fights (even on mythic prog raiding) or the 'utility' is so negligible as to not matter.
Too many branches where you need a talent for a spec to feel complete (looking at you Whirling dragon punch) that should have been made baseline ages ago.

All of this isn't helped by blizzard wanting talents to be in a place where they are 'good enough to not have to touch them much and distract people with the new borrowed power system.

You also have to pretend more then a minority of a minority interacts with talent trees at all and even then only to change what does more single target or aoe damage.

People don't want talent trees.. they want to go back to when they were new to gaming and didn't understand how anything worked and just picked what sounded cool to them. Changing the talents won't take us back to that those days are in the past.

[justandulas]

You also have to pretend more then a minority of a minority interacts with talent trees at all and even then only to change what does more single target or aoe damage.

People don't want talent trees.. they want to go back to when they were new to gaming and didn't understand how anything worked and just picked what sounded cool to them. Changing the talents won't take us back to that those days are in the past.

Disagree. Many other games still offer talent trees, including the classic wows, and it is a timeless system. Getting a talent point to pick and choose every level is more exciting and more rpg than picking every 15-20 levels and never again at max lvl. One resembles an online dungeons and dragons game, and the other is Diablo 3 talents hiding in WoW

[Lorgar Aurelian]

We have solid evidence that retail wow has a retention problem.
We have solid evidence that retail wow has seen an exceptional loss since the launch of shadowlands.
We have solid evidence that FF14 has consistently seen growth every year, including between expansion releases.
We have solid evidence that wow is not being given the resources it used to have.
We have solid evidence that large community figures for wow are becoming more and more interested in FF14.

Is all of this a rock solid case that wow is declining and FF14 is picking up those losses? No, but it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to come to.

There isn’t any solid evidence of a retention problem, we know that there are spikes around an expan launch and losses after that but we have no idea how the retention is on average.

We have no evidence of exceptional loss, we know it peaked to a new high and then supposedly fell back to normal numbers but also had a huge influx of new players which lead it to its earnings growing.

There is no evidence that Ff14 has been growing in subs we know that it has been going up in created accounts but that includes trials bots ect. For reference wow had grown to over 100m accounts in mop while on a downward trend in subs ff14 is at about 22m with no reported sun count.

There is no evidence that wow is being given less resources the team has been growing year over year and is twice as big as it was in say wrath.

You tubers don’t mean any thing.

[Saltysquidoon]

Disagree. Many other games still offer talent trees, including the classic wows, and it is a timeless system. Getting a talent point to pick and choose every level is more exciting and more rpg than picking every 15-20 levels and never again at max lvl. One resembles an online dungeons and dragons game, and the other is Diablo 3 talents hiding in WoW

A dopamine hit is not a justification for a system where you will spend at most ~21 days (this is being as generous as possible using vanilla as a metric, we both know its measured in hours now) leveling a character but hundreds of days at max level. Beyond that, in DnD you don't get 'talent points' (or the equivalent) every level and a great many campaigns stop at level 10.

[Crimson Spears]

Disagree. Many other games still offer talent trees, including the classic wows, and it is a timeless system. Getting a talent point to pick and choose every level is more exciting and more rpg than picking every 15-20 levels and never again at max lvl. One resembles an online dungeons and dragons game, and the other is Diablo 3 talents hiding in WoW

Its the covenant debate again. It is already painfully clear only a minority of a minority interacts with talents this way. Everyone else picks the exact same talents. People don't spec out of the meta so it begs the question why bother?

[valky94]

The problem with the current talent system is they cut a lot of core class abilities and then reintroduced them via the talent tree. Classes all feel the exact same currently. With that being said I don't know how they'd change it

they only did that because they gave us too much in legion with artifacts and legendaries, idealy they should have given us a new talent row at lvl 60 (or 55)

[Eliot123]

I always kinda hoped they'd build on the current talent system with "filler" talent points and glyphs. Basically the same interface that we have now, but at every row you could open a sub-section where you'd add extra filler points similar to the old system that would improve the current talents, and add glyphs to them as well (e.g. for each row you'd have 5 points that you could place as you wish, for example as a holy priest you could improve mana regen from Enlightenment by 1%/2%/3%/4%/5%, or Trail of Light healing by 2%/4%/6% et cetera, or some combination of those).

It'd give you something to look forward to while leveling and also make it possible to fiddle with specs more on a micro-level.

[aceperson]

god, i hope not. the revamp in mop took a bit of tweaking for things to finally get to an acceptable place and that was with devs i trusted. the current team only has the trust of the white knights from what i can tell.