I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of the old talents coming back.

[Coldkil]

In an ideal world one spec would be able to offer multiple playstyles that are nearly optimal (not just viable) for multiple types of content. This is not an ideal world though. And WoW is a game that is soon to have THIRTY EIGHT specs. Given the variety in gameplay offered, I absolutely understand why Blizzard focuses on balancing over a single optimal path.

Again agree. I think they're designing the new talent trees exactly this way - you have enough points to get whatever is basically the great majority of you performance by default and then you can play with the situational stuff as much as you like.

[Eurhetemec]

I mean I can see your perspective here, but . . . people bought wow and invested vast swaths of their lives in it because they like what it is. It's not unreasonable for them to ask that the devs maintain what they so heavily invested themselves in. Maybe if players want things that other games focus on they really should just play those other games. It's like me buying madden and insisting that there be dragons added and calling the developers lazy for not giving me a sword.
I say this as someone who hasn't spent more than 20 hours raiding in any expansion since Cata, btw, so I have no dog in this race.

Re: the bolded bit, there are some problems with this line of argument, pretty serious ones.

1) What, exactly, did they invest in?

Because it seems like everyone who is gatekeeping about what WoW could or should have is gatekeeping about slightly different things, or is in fact trying not so much to gatekeep, but to "turn back time" to the version of WoW they had the best time in. Often their reasoning is deeply incoherent, or is post-facto rationalization of feelings, rather than any kind of logic or even just more honestly expressed feelings/sentiment. You can see this with stuff like "LFD destroyed WoW's community!", which is a rationalization. WoW's community had been on life support for a while in Wrath, as compared to its state in TBC, and even in TBC, it was hospitalized and in the ICU compared to how healthy it was in Vanilla, and even in Vanilla, WoW's community was objectively worse than virtually any other major MMO, like say, EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, on a per-server basis. Yet people know something went wrong, so they blame LFD, when it's more like they'd been walking around on a broken leg, accidently banged it on a sofa, dropped to the floor in agony, and blamed the sofa, not the skiing where they broke the leg (almost a true story lol but it works as a metaphor here I think).

There's never been this utterly consistent WoW that people "heavily invested" in. The two most-consistent periods of WoW are probably Late Vanilla to Wrath, and Legion to SL. Earlier Vanilla is kind of its own thing (I say this having played from open beta), and Cataclysm, MoP, WoD were not really consistent with either the earlier periods, nor with themselves, just a sort of weird transitional era.

And again, the same "heavily invested" logic applies to changing absolutely anything about WoW, but change has to happen if WoW is to survive long-term, rather than to merely malinger like, say, EQ does.

2) If we're talking solely about a tight focus on raid tiers and raiding, how many WoW players actually participate in it?

Blizzard haven't released figures for a very long time, but we could look at how TBC seemed to be on the forums and in how people talked about it, and how it actually was, with their older figures. According to Blizzard what was it, less than 1% of players saw the inside of the Sunwell when it was current content. Yet the way it was discussed, the way people acted about it on forums, and so on, you'd have thought it was more like 50-90% of players. LFR exists because Wrath failed to fix that, despite definitely making raids drastically more accessible than TBC. Blizzard, just by their own metrics, had to justify the amount they were investing, in terms of money and time, and they couldn't, because it clearly didn't matter to most players. So they introduced LFR. Which is much hated but together with flex raiding seems to have kept participation in raiding just about how enough to continue. However I strongly suspect it's still a pretty small minority of the community.

If WoW wants to survive long-term, I think it's going to need to diversify a bit from the raid-tier-after-raid-tier approach, particularly the way older content is entirely discarded. And fanatical gatekeeping about what WoW "is" by the small minority who do raids above flex (even flex is probably a pretty small percentage at this point) is not helpful. All that said, I feel like the gatekeeping and raid-obsession has somewhat died down in WoW.

Finally, the Madden with dragon analogy is pretty unhelpful and misleading. No, it's like saying you'd like a feature from another NFL game by a different company in Madden.

[VinceVega]

Why are you acting like you know how the talents will work when we haven’t even seen them? Also I would like for you to look at the last 7 years and tell me with a straight face that those talents are complicated and they aren’t insanely copied as well.

At least with talents there is SOME form of flavor

Why would i tell you it is complicated. It is not. Obviously. (that was sarcasm in my post, thats because i wrote "such" and "*sigh*")
And they told us a decent bit about the talents. Able to share them for example. An no talent tree ever in the existence of gaming is really complicated.

Sure you can theorycraft the shit out of PoE system or FF10s advanced system but in the end it is just: Look what i want at the end and click my way through with maybe one or 2 not extremly impactfull choices in the middle.

I would like them to make the system actually complicated. So you can think about what you take. As it looks right now it is not much more different from what we had before the current system.

Still better from what we have right now so i am ok with it.

An copied from what? Talent systems are nothing new and existed since forever. You don't have to invent the wheel for a system. If every developer would only be allowed to do new stuff you would not have FF14. Nor Wow or Everquest.

[Eurhetemec]

Why would i tell you it is complicated. It is not. Obviously. (that was sarcasm in my post, thats because i wrote "such" and "*sigh*")
And they told us a decent bit about the talents. Able to share them for example. An no talent tree ever in the existence of gaming is really complicated.

Dude. They've actually repeatedly said you will NOT be able to share talents at launch.

So keeping saying you can share them is flatly wrong. You can go back and check interviews etc. if you want. So you're already claiming as a "fact" something that isn't true. They haven't even confirmed that they're going to add that AFAIK, just that they've heard its something people want.

[Thes]

The issue with the current system is that it doesn't allow for silly hybrid specs

The good thing about the current system is that it doesn't allow silly hybrid specs

I think the new thing will be sort of in-between, not really all the way back to how the old system was often broken

[Dioporco]

You don't understand how every DPS in a pug mythic+ group not talenting into an interrupt because they hoped someone else did is an issue?

and those DPS will sit on their crappy score until they understand that BRRRRRR DMG isnt the key of M+ or CE content

[Nymrohd]

Dude. They've actually repeatedly said you will NOT be able to share talents at launch.

So keeping saying you can share them is flatly wrong. You can go back and check interviews etc. if you want. So you're already claiming as a "fact" something that isn't true. They haven't even confirmed that they're going to add that AFAIK, just that they've heard its something people want.

I fully expect you will be able to share them via addon though. If anything I expect addons that prompt you to switch talents will become far more popular and they may even come with some suggested loadouts.

[m4Zzo928]

I never really cared much for compelling talent play. I mean of course I love abilities, but what kind of system can they possibly create that would keep talent picking compelling for a long while? The only thing would be pvp where it dynamically changes quite quickly. I'd rather them focus on the world and enemies that we need to use these abilities to actually progress in the world and in dungeons. You make that content trivial, aka, it doesn't matter what ability you really use, and those talents become irrelevant.

A lot of people discussing a ton of things about Wow, and the accessibility argument isn't correct imo. Look at Elden Ring, did the accessibility and difficulty steer people away from that game? No, you have to make the game engaging, or it becomes a bore.

[Wyshbonez]

They seem confusing, and I feel like I'll be stressed out by them, I've played Classic and have quit as the talents seem too extreme and such.
I prefer the WOD era talents as I started in Late MOP and boosted a fury warrior in warlords of Draenor, and I might miss the pick a talent, and boom, you read the thing and you pick a talent. That seems easy, but with this other system, I don't understand I'm not sure.

If a video game stresses you out, im sorry you got bigger problems lol..... it's a good thing entertainment can and is subjective, If you dont want to figure it out find a "The best XX Class XX spec" guide and move on like 75% of the player base will probably do lol

[Diaphin]

All of the content in FF14 is evergreen. WoW deprecates content as soon as the next patch hits. You aren't being honest, especially when you talk about "legacy raids" in wow being a feature compared to FF14 where all of the raids can be run as current content.

Its everygreen to a certain degree, but there isn't really any reward to run most of the old content synced compared to just running it synced, especially since class changes and ongoing pruning make replaying the content alot more clunky than they originally had been. It speaks more for FF14s lack of any current content, that people praise levelsynced raiding as a grand feature, as players in WoW for the longest time before the level squish could creat alts just as easily and run the current at the appropriate level, it was actually done to get the Algalon archievment. And outside of the specific circumstances of getting a group to do savage raids or ex trials unsynced, the levelsync feature is more of an obstacle for the most part, as it usually forces you to play most roulettes, which make up the majority of daily content of this game, with a highly restricted skillset for your class. Does anyone have actually fun doing labyrinth of ancients or ARR dungeons when you get them in your daily roulettes?

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In WoW, you have one content stream: playing the patch. Everything else is just the leftover mess that the developers cease to care about the moment that the next patch hits. You will never be able to experience Ulduar, or the Isle of Thunder, or any other content in the game how it was intended to be experienced unless you play it while it's current. WoW creates an ongoing microcosm of itself to be treated as "legitimate" content.

But again, if you choose to view FFXIV through the lens of a WoW player, in that only current patch dungeon and raid tier are "legitimate" content, then of course WoW wins. WoW does WoW best. It always has, and it always will. And nothing will change a typical WoW player's mind that content outside of the endgame loot treadmill can be considered "legitimate." And who can blame them? The developers think the same. When they suggested that certain new features would cost a raid tier with the implication being that no one would be crazy enough to pay that price... games like FFXIV and ESO gladly make that sacrifice all the time to broaden the scope of their games beyond simply an endless cycle of raid tiers replacing raid tiers.

Actually you can experience lots of content in a state like it was when it was current, thats what classic is doing. And actually, no you won't be able to experience levensynced content the way how it was originally supposed to be either, because of ongoing class changes and pruning which make the experience in synced content ever worse. And I would argue its a luxury of WoW to be able to abandon old content as easily, as it is one of the few MMOs that can creat a swath of new content both outdoors and in terms of instanced raiding every single major patch. FF14 doesn't has that. FF14 struggles to creat eureka-esque zones in a decent pace, which are more grind-heavy and less single-player friendly compared to the usual outdoor zones and activities WoW offers with each patch. Not to forget that if you think Class Balancing in WoW is bad, whats with FF14 then? I played a DRK for the longest time in that game and it took literal years and multiple expansions for SE to fix as simple issues like rewamping Living Dead and it took a major patch to change Blood Price, not to forget the very vocal DRK Playerbase that is highly dissatisfied with the current state of DRK and wish for it to return more to a playstyle similar to HW, which are just simply ignored. Or Healer Issues, with the WHM community being regularily ignored and the class usually being at the bottom of the healer classes for most expansions and the community in its entirety being fully ignored when it comes to the core issues of the role, them being the very low healing requirements even to the highest level of content and very bare dps toolkit that forces healer players to basically just spam 1 for the entirety of often more than 10 minutes long encounters. FF14 does many things rights, thats why its survived and became a competitor to WoW, but it is far from actually catching up to the level of content WoW offers and the professionalism that it has in terms of class design. The things where it is clearly ahead are writing and music, but the story is basically just 1 hour of content you get every few months.

[Aedruid]

They seem confusing, and I feel like I'll be stressed out by them, I've played Classic and have quit as the talents seem too extreme and such.
I prefer the WOD era talents as I started in Late MOP and boosted a fury warrior in warlords of Draenor, and I might miss the pick a talent, and boom, you read the thing and you pick a talent. That seems easy, but with this other system, I don't understand I'm not sure.

Don't be stressed about it and just have some fun. It's really cool to be able to pick your playstyle on what seems cool. For example, back in the day I could choose to be a Demo lock that tilted more towards fire damage OR shadow damage, which changed gameplay (incinerate was stronger than shadow bolt). Don't let meta BS get in the way of having fun with this stuff.

[alturic]

I don't understand why people think talents add any sort of flavor, complexity or what have you.

There has, and always will be, right and wrong picks. Sure you can min/max it and choose the right and wrong talents for specific fights, but at the end of the day, there is no "flavor" in talents.

They are basically gear but in button form. You don't choose sub-par gear 'just because'.

[Aedruid]

Its everygreen to a certain degree, but there isn't really any reward to run most of the old content synced compared to just running it synced, especially since class changes and ongoing pruning make replaying the content alot more clunky than they originally had been. It speaks more for FF14s lack of any current content, that people praise levelsynced raiding as a grand feature, as players in WoW for the longest time before the level squish could creat alts just as easily and run the current at the appropriate level, it was actually done to get the Algalon archievment. And outside of the specific circumstances of getting a group to do savage raids or ex trials unsynced, the levelsync feature is more of an obstacle for the most part, as it usually forces you to play most roulettes, which make up the majority of daily content of this game, with a highly restricted skillset for your class. Does anyone have actually fun doing labyrinth of ancients or ARR dungeons when you get them in your daily roulettes?

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Actually you can experience lots of content in a state like it was when it was current, thats what classic is doing. And actually, no you won't be able to experience levensynced content the way how it was originally supposed to be either, because of ongoing class changes and pruning which make the experience in synced content ever worse. And I would argue its a luxury of WoW to be able to abandon old content as easily, as it is one of the few MMOs that can creat a swath of new content both outdoors and in terms of instanced raiding every single major patch. FF14 doesn't has that. FF14 struggles to creat eureka-esque zones in a decent pace, which are more grind-heavy and less single-player friendly compared to the usual outdoor zones and activities WoW offers with each patch. Not to forget that if you think Class Balancing in WoW is bad, whats with FF14 then? I played a DRK for the longest time in that game and it took literal years and multiple expansions for SE to fix as simple issues like rewamping Living Dead and it took a major patch to change Blood Price, not to forget the very vocal DRK Playerbase that is highly dissatisfied with the current state of DRK and wish for it to return more to a playstyle similar to HW, which are just simply ignored. Or Healer Issues, with the WHM community being regularily ignored and the class usually being at the bottom of the healer classes for most expansions and the community in its entirety being fully ignored when it comes to the core issues of the role, them being the very low healing requirements even to the highest level of content and very bare dps toolkit that forces healer players to basically just spam 1 for the entirety of often more than 10 minutes long encounters. FF14 does many things rights, thats why its survived and became a competitor to WoW, but it is far from actually catching up to the level of content WoW offers and the professionalism that it has in terms of class design. The things where it is clearly ahead are writing and music, but the story is basically just 1 hour of content you get every few months.

You shouldn't have to play an old copy of the game to experience content. I'm a big fan of forcing players to get geared through the tiers up to current content. Nowadays we make patch "9.x" irrelevant with the new content. Why would a new player being forced into older content suffer? They literally never completed the old patch/raid yet; thus, it is new content. Meanwhile, those who completed the old content are geared enough to progress forward. All we need is super good catch up mechanisms for alt characters.

[Vampyrr]

There's still cookie-cutter builds out there now, especially with the limited talents. At least with the old system, it felt like you were getting something more than just a noise and some other stupid little thing when you leveled. Even if it was just a talent point to stick into a talent so you got 4% extra crit chance instead of 3%, you still felt you were growing in some way.

That was a BAD system though. It is not good to bring failed systems back for nostalgia sake.

[Aydinx2]

That was a BAD system though. It is not good to bring failed systems back for nostalgia sake.

The system didn't "fail", and the new talents were not any better when they were implemented.
Also it's an RPG. Growth is important.

The idea that talents need to be a "I choose how I want to play" system has never been correct. Blizz has stated it being a problem but that was only until they invented borrowed power systems. After that suddenly it was ok to have 1 specific build work for a specific scenario (which is the same how it was with old trees).

Now we don't have borrowed power because people keep telling them it sucks and suddenly they have time to change the talents.

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Go play a mobile game because even FF14 and BDO would be to diffult for you to understand.

Lucky them in ~40 minutes.

[Firefall]

That was a BAD system though. It is not good to bring failed systems back for nostalgia sake.

From what extremely little we've seen, it looks like it's more that they've repackaged/skinned the current talent system to resemble the old one, and given it a bunch of new passives like azerite. So I'm actually not too concerned, the nostalgia pandering looks like a trick.

[Diaphin]

You shouldn't have to play an old copy of the game to experience content. I'm a big fan of forcing players to get geared through the tiers up to current content. Nowadays we make patch "9.x" irrelevant with the new content. Why would a new player being forced into older content suffer? They literally never completed the old patch/raid yet; thus, it is new content. Meanwhile, those who completed the old content are geared enough to progress forward. All we need is super good catch up mechanisms for alt characters.

Because that was the biggest factor that gatekept people out of content back in the day, thats why Blizz introduced catch-up methods in wotlk, the pool of people who will do the old content with you to gear up becomes ever smaller.

[VinceVega]

Dude. They've actually repeatedly said you will NOT be able to share talents at launch.

So keeping saying you can share them is flatly wrong. You can go back and check interviews etc. if you want. So you're already claiming as a "fact" something that isn't true. They haven't even confirmed that they're going to add that AFAIK, just that they've heard its something people want.

I just read over the interview and watched the spotlight again. I did not catch anyone say this will no be available.
Also this:


Directly from the presentation. Maybe i missed something but please show me where then because i didn't find.

If they said that. Ok. Then i was wrong. But i don't see anything pointing in that direction for now.

Even if it is not sharable and this was just a red herring for whatever reason. It is 9-11 rows.... open a tab click without reading. Done.

[NineSpine]

Its everygreen to a certain degree, but there isn't really any reward to run most of the old content synced compared to just running it synced, especially since class changes and ongoing pruning make replaying the content alot more clunky than they originally had been. It speaks more for FF14s lack of any current content, that people praise levelsynced raiding as a grand feature, as players in WoW for the longest time before the level squish could creat alts just as easily and run the current at the appropriate level, it was actually done to get the Algalon archievment. And outside of the specific circumstances of getting a group to do savage raids or ex trials unsynced, the levelsync feature is more of an obstacle for the most part, as it usually forces you to play most roulettes, which make up the majority of daily content of this game, with a highly restricted skillset for your class. Does anyone have actually fun doing labyrinth of ancients or ARR dungeons when you get them in your daily roulettes?

Actually you can experience lots of content in a state like it was when it was current, thats what classic is doing. And actually, no you won't be able to experience levensynced content the way how it was originally supposed to be either, because of ongoing class changes and pruning which make the experience in synced content ever worse. And I would argue its a luxury of WoW to be able to abandon old content as easily, as it is one of the few MMOs that can creat a swath of new content both outdoors and in terms of instanced raiding every single major patch. FF14 doesn't has that. FF14 struggles to creat eureka-esque zones in a decent pace, which are more grind-heavy and less single-player friendly compared to the usual outdoor zones and activities WoW offers with each patch. Not to forget that if you think Class Balancing in WoW is bad, whats with FF14 then? I played a DRK for the longest time in that game and it took literal years and multiple expansions for SE to fix as simple issues like rewamping Living Dead and it took a major patch to change Blood Price, not to forget the very vocal DRK Playerbase that is highly dissatisfied with the current state of DRK and wish for it to return more to a playstyle similar to HW, which are just simply ignored. Or Healer Issues, with the WHM community being regularily ignored and the class usually being at the bottom of the healer classes for most expansions and the community in its entirety being fully ignored when it comes to the core issues of the role, them being the very low healing requirements even to the highest level of content and very bare dps toolkit that forces healer players to basically just spam 1 for the entirety of often more than 10 minutes long encounters. FF14 does many things rights, thats why its survived and became a competitor to WoW, but it is far from actually catching up to the level of content WoW offers and the professionalism that it has in terms of class design. The things where it is clearly ahead are writing and music, but the story is basically just 1 hour of content you get every few months.

Class balance is objectively better in FF14 than in WoW. It's just a fact. It comes at the cost of customization, but it is factually better. The difference between the best specs and the worst specs is significantly smaller than it is in wow, let alone the difference between the best specs and the worst specs *with the wrong talents*.

It's not that your criticisms of FF14 are invalid. I agree with them almost entirely (please no more ARR dungeons in queue, at least give me level 50 abilities for all of them), but the alternative to those things that wow has (throwing content in the trash every patch for example) is so much obnoxiously worse that it is silly to point out these minor quibbles with FF14.

The idea that FF14 doesn't put out content at the pace WoW does is simply false. FF14 has a much more aggressive patch schedule than WoW. FF14 is putting out 2-3 patches (arguably more because of end-expansion droughts) for every single patch WoW puts out. Let's see what we get for 2 patches in FF14:

6.1
Ultimate raid
Alliance raid
Unreal Trial
New MSQ
Dungeon
A significant amount of side story content
New housing district
New rep
New PvP mode (equivalent of a new BG)
Adventurer plate system
Overhauls to ARR dungeon systems

6.2
4-boss raid
Unreal trial
New dungeon
New MSQ
New criterion dungeon system
New island sanctuary system
More that hasn't been announced

Each of these patches is something like 66% - 75% of a wow patch, but we get two of them in the time it takes wow to deliver one. Most notable is the constant introduction of new evergreen content, like ultimate raids or new pvp modes or the island sanctuaries or new deep dungeons. Even if we put aside the idea that roulettes represent evergreen content, the fact that in three patches we are going to see all of the following evergreen content is crazy: island sanctuaries, new housing district, criterion dungeon system (this is presumed evergreen), a deep dungeon, two ultimate raids, a new pvp mode....

To say this is incomparable to wow is flatly dishonest, just like it is dishonest for you to talk about Eureka (blech) and ignore the absolutely massive amount of content that came with Bozja, which is yet another evergreen system.

[Royru]

The system didn't "fail", and the new talents were not any better when they were implemented.
Also it's an RPG. Growth is important.

The idea that talents need to be a "I choose how I want to play" system has never been correct. Blizz has stated it being a problem but that was only until they invented borrowed power systems. After that suddenly it was ok to have 1 specific build work for a specific scenario (which is the same how it was with old trees).

Now we don't have borrowed power because people keep telling them it sucks and suddenly they have time to change the talents.

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Lucky them in ~40 minutes.

I don’t agree with this being true with the old systems. One thing that held back and changed a TON of specs was one resource that isn’t AS important or at least it’s not as much of an issue today, which is mana.

For casters specifically you had a ton of different specs you could lean toward, and depending on your gear your build would go after a ton of different talents you wouldn’t normally specifically based on your mana.