Proof that old Talents promoted more originality from players

[cparle87]

Your statement would be accurate where it not for the fact that wow's lead developer is exactly the type of person that min-maxed the fun straight out of the game when he was a player, and still does so as a developer.

However, now he's optimising the game for engagement metrics and token sales while catering directly/indirectly to an incredibly small section of the playerbase.

Slow claps for blizz, dragon Isles isn't going to change this one bit and it'll continue to go downhill if they don't change management style.

So here we have someone passing off their negative conspiracy theories about devs as "fact" followed by even more conspiracy theories, and finished off by a passive aggressive attack that unless things are changed to be done his way things will continue behaving in the way he presented his opinion as fact earlier.

Top classy post.

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I remember numbers like 90% of players picking the same covenant, because it was optimal/some website claimed it was optimal.

If that is true, I think the only important thing a talent system has to offer is to feel rewarding during leveling, because everything else is just a one time copy paste job (old trees) or a once per encounter chore (new talents) that doesnt add any value to the vast majority of players.

That's true. Take druids. 90% of them were night fae. Most of the remaining 10% were tanks first and foremost so they took kyrian. I'd wager most of the other tank classes looked the same. Huge sum of the best covenant, most of the remainder kyrian, then tiny percentage the other two.

[sam86]

and most of those sucked

no, all of them were broken in specific play, for example healing protadin (before stamina to spellpower removal) was broken in arena, but nothing in pve
infinite combo rogue build is broken in 25 men raid, but has no dps in any other playstyle (a build that get combo point whenever a player crit in ur raid)
MM hunter with prep was broken in arena too, and so on
so depend on what u mean by suck, yeah some of those builts are total crap in other play, but so is everything, if u spec pure pvp as holy priest with reduce dmg and crit talents, how exactly that is good in pve?

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I remember numbers like 90% of players picking the same covenant, because it was optimal/some website claimed it was optimal.

If that is true, I think the only important thing a talent system has to offer is to feel rewarding during leveling, because everything else is just a one time copy paste job (old trees) or a once per encounter chore (new talents) that doesnt add any value to the vast majority of players.

exactly
we aren't free pick at all, a priest talent tree has 99% only 1 option pick, the 1% left is probably forgotten alts or misclick (yes 99%, no typo here)
current 'pick' ur talent is same as before, except now we have actual no option so we can't make weird broken talent builds like wrath era, where every minor patch blizz had to adjust lot of talents (check prep hunter talent, by end of wrath its list of 'denials' was longer than what it actually reset that it became a meme), with actual freedom players created so much hybrid weird builds that became instant broken in specific playstyles

A couple of people have mentioned the reason this won't promote the same kind of originality that it did back then: you could build AP and SP separately in different ways through different stats (and you can't now because your spec determines which stats even function), and ability coefficients were not unique by specialization but universal.

no the reason is actually very easy to guess and obvious: balance, while ppl think balance now is crap (did they ever think game was balanced anytime in wow?), it was a total beast pre-talent change, it was normal to adjust talents on weekly bases even, and not for balance, but for stop broken builts for any class that some creative player can pull out of nowhere
blizz made the 'new' MoP style talent so they don't spend every day waiting for one crazy player find a broken talent that catapult him to broken status