Do you think talent trees will be cookie cutter?

[Ielenia]

Again, you're reading the lines. I said read between the lines.

"Read between the lines" means nothing more than "put your own spin and interpretation that differs from the actual context of the sentence(s)." You knew exactly what the OP was talking about, but decided to answer a question that wasn't asked.

Get a better grasp at English

Says the guy that intentionally avoided the context of the conversation to inject his own "personal interpretation" of the question.

[Rusken]

People will always find what's "best". The key is for Blizzard to balance the difference between "best" and "interesting" to not make interesting builds worthless. Something I don't like is having core abilities like interrupts as talents. No one is going to take a DPS class without an interrupt and no one is going to make a build without one, it's just wasted points and frankly lazy design.

[Triceron]

avoided context of the conversation.

Not your fault if you don't understand nuances in languauge, but there's no reason to be stubborn about it

[VinceVega]

Been looking over the talent trees for Dragonflight. They sure look like they are going to be cookie-cutter/Spec-This-Way-Or-Denied-To-Group like it was back when they had talent trees before.

What do you think from what you've seen (and what you know about the playerbase)?

Are the new talent trees going to usher in a new era of flexibility? Or is it going to be a one-spec disaster in the making?

Yes. There will be a perfect build for AoE/ST/PvP... there always was and always will be cookie cutter builds.
Perfect balance is impossible and not game ever had that in the history of gaming and never will have.

You can play what you want. As long as you are not dead weight i have never met someone in any raid who told someone else to skill a certain way. Unless you are playing to be on top you do not need to be optimal. If you are not a very good player you should use the best build to get that bit extra.
But as long as you are basically average no one cares if you skill a certain way.

Hell you could argue even chess is biased by not starting at the same time.

IF you are pugging.... well yes. That is a choice you made. So someone is putting in quite a bit of time to organize a group to clear something together. And one indicator of a... not as good or desinterested player is a stupid build. So why would i as a Pug leader take the risk of taking you over someone who does take the optimal build. You could be better. But how would i know?

Pugging is basically like tinder. YOu decide on what you see not on the ability/personality of the person in front of you because you cannot know that.

[Kumorii]

Of course, whenever there's choice, there's an optimal one.
It's naive to think otherwise.

It's up to you if you want to follow the optimal route or not though. Most important thing is having fun, but there will always the optimal talents.

Always. In all games. All through time.

[Lawlhero]

I sure hope theres cookie cutter builds. I dont play the game to think for myself or experiment. Just give me the list of talents to get so i can move on with my life

[Aydinx2]

Been looking over the talent trees for Dragonflight. They sure look like they are going to be cookie-cutter/Spec-This-Way-Or-Denied-To-Group like it was back when they had talent trees before.

What do you think from what you've seen (and what you know about the playerbase)?

Are the new talent trees going to usher in a new era of flexibility? Or is it going to be a one-spec disaster in the making?

Yes just like the current talents, but that isn't a problem.
The point of talents is not to let players choose different options in a single piece of content. It's to add flexibility to specs so they can perform at on ok level in different forms of content.

[MoanaLisa]

Pulling your weight and not being garbage doesn't mean you are "following the herd", it means you respect your other group members and arn't a piece of shit.

I'll be kicking anyone from my m+ group (if we have to pug) that tries some special snowflake build because they think they are above working as a team.

Do what you want for your wqs or whatever though lol

I don't play with people I don't know so you're safe from me. And due to that, thank God, I'm safe from you. Well played.

It's a player problem that if you don't exactly follow a meta then you are considered "garbage." Just like now, there will be different builds for different kinds of fights and how easy it will be to do builds to cover all of that and switch between them remains to be seen. I have a ton of respect for the people I generally group up with solely because having fun is a higher priority than anything else. Good luck.

[Aydinx2]

Not your fault if you don't understand nuances in languauge, but there's no reason to be stubborn about it

Buddy I don't know what you're smoking but the OP is clearly talking exclusively about Talents, even if you ignore context or read between the lines.
There exists no alternate dimension where language is messed up in such a way that you can even think he's talking about anything else.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't play with people I don't know so you're safe from me. And due to that, thank God, I'm safe from you. Well played.

It's a player problem that if you don't exactly follow a meta then you are considered "garbage." Just like now, there will be different builds for different kinds of fights and how easy it will be to do builds to cover all of that and switch between them remains to be seen. I have a ton of respect for the people I generally group up with solely because having fun is a higher priority than anything else. Good luck.

Having fun is my highest priority, which is why I don't take people with underperforming builds. Having my time wasted is not fun. Having to put in extra effort because someone didn't take interrupts is not fun. Just straight up not timing simple keys is not fun.

In the current system talent choices are pretty impactful, so if someone makes a wrong choice it can be the difference between high damage and no damage. Maybe the new system lets people play around a bit more, but if you go into M+ without the best impactful talents (final nodes or utility most likely) then you're ruining the fun for other people and deserve to not play.

There are people who find numbers fun, or performing well fun. Whenever someone says something like "I care about fun first so doing well doesn't matter", they're really saying "You can only have fun the way I tell you to and I don't respect your time/effort".

[klaps_05]

They will be, as usual. The problem is with the class trees, cookie cutter will be focused on what your raid/group leader needs, not what makes you pump the biggest numbers.

[Triceron]

Buddy I don't know what you're smoking but the OP is clearly talking exclusively about Talents, even if you ignore context or read between the lines.
There exists no alternate dimension where language is messed up in such a way that you can even think he's talking about anything else..

You realize I'm not talking about the OP right? I'm talking about the guy who responded to the OP with 'What was ever non cookie cutter?'.

If it was specific to Talent Trees, it would have been 'When were they ever non-cookie cutter'. Saying 'What was ever' was a jab at everything in WoW being cookie cutter. If anyone missed that, they weren't reading between the lines

[Thunderball]

Doesnt look that way so far. You could be denied a spot in a raid/key due to not having some key cooldown/utiltity you get through talents but I dont see being forced to spec the exact same way.

You're always going to some some abilities being stronger/more useful than others until they're not same abilities with a different name. Optimal/meta builds will always exist, there's no getting away from it.

[Caerrona]

I don't play with people I don't know so you're safe from me. And due to that, thank God, I'm safe from you. Well played.

It's a player problem that if you don't exactly follow a meta then you are considered "garbage." Just like now, there will be different builds for different kinds of fights and how easy it will be to do builds to cover all of that and switch between them remains to be seen. I have a ton of respect for the people I generally group up with solely because having fun is a higher priority than anything else. Good luck.

You obviously don't respect the people you play with if you are willing to be a selfish cunt and not play for the group.

And yes... there will be different builds for different activities but if you are build C for content A instead of build A for content A you are infact garbage and don't respect anyone around you.

Straight up looking for a carry while sitting on your virtue signaling high horse.

[cparle87]

Professions.

JC cause it gave 1 more main stat than the other crafting profs, then one of the others. That was the cookie cutter when profs gave stat perks.

[Itisamuh]

The same thing will happen that always happens:

Real cutting edge players will play the meta because they have to.
Casual players will play what they think is fun.
Average meta slaves will play the meta because they tell themselves that they have to even though it doesn't really matter for them, and then they will take their frustration with that out on everyone else.

This sums it up nicely. No reason to think anything will change on that front.

You obviously don't respect the people you play with if you are willing to be a selfish cunt and not play for the group.

And yes... there will be different builds for different activities but if you are build C for content A instead of build A for content A you are infact garbage and don't respect anyone around you.

Straight up looking for a carry while sitting on your virtue signaling high horse.

Could just as easily say you have no respect for others if you refuse to play with anyone unless they do things exactly like you want. Could also just as easily say only garbage players would rely on cookie cutter builds to have any success. Min maxing makes very little difference in the vast majority of cases so forcing it on others just makes you look bad.

[Biomega]

I think that for most classes/specs the talent trees will be 95% set, and there'll only be 2-4 talents that you swap around based on fight demands - AoE vs. ST, interrupt vs. no interrupt, that sort of thing.

The idea of there being distinct "builds" with significant playstyle differences and reasonable competitiveness is probably a romantic notion only, and likely will not be an actual reality.

[Vakna]

Its impossible to not to have cookie cutter talent trees in games that are as datamined as wow. Ofc there will be optimal trees and most players will be forced to use them just to be accepted to some party.

Datamining has literally nothing at all to do with cookie cutter talent builds, and even less than nothing in this case where Blizzard are releasing the info themselves. If everything was unknown until release it would just take people a couple of weeks longer than usual to get hold of the cookie cutter meta, which will always exist when there is a best choice.

Inserting your dislike of datamining into this situation was not only irrelevant, but also made you look like you don't even play the game at all.

[melzas]

Unfair comparison.

PvP, especially arena, has way too much variance between what you can face and also there are talents that are literally useless vs certain comps.
For example you are not taking disarm against casters.

In PvE the variance is non-existent.
The biggest thing you got is Fortified vs Tyrannical weeks, and even then, you don't build your character for 1 boss fight in a 30+ min run.
That's why even on Tyrannical it makes more sense to bring your general M+ aoe build on 90% of classes.

There will be minimal wiggle room in the new talents.
It's utterly stupid from this point of view and I bet even Blizzard knows this.

They are selling it as a "we are going back to the good ol' days" which was the exact same thing: you had like 1-2 meta presets and that's it, you never changed those.
This is more of a PR move than an actual gameplay focused one.
I'll give it 2 weeks after DF S1 start and everyone will be using the same shit. As always.

It's kinda true, but even if you just go random battlegrounds to have fun, there still isn't one setup of PvP talents that's overall best for everything. You never know what you gonna face, maybe you will have strong healers on your team so self sustain talents won't be so crucial, or maybe there will be a lot of casters so anti caster talents would get a lot more value etc. Unlike pve you don't just go with whatever gives you best DPS so I would say it works pretty well in terms of freedom of choice.

The problem is, pve is a lot more one dimensional (for DPS it pretty much goes down to take whatever talents will give you more damage) so unless they change philosophy about pve encounters i don't think we will ever get a true spec talent freedom.

[Vakna]

I really don't understand why you project what you think I said on me and why you are being so rude and aggressive. I never said I dislike datamining this is a delusional conclusion that you reached for whatever reason.

The fact remains that datamining/parsing whatever the fuck its called leads to having cookie cutter specs that players will copy. Since you don't disagree with the core argument that I made, everything else that you said is completely redundant.

As for what my argument made me "look like" thank God I don't give a fuck what I look like to people like you.

However you want to spin it, your post was very clear on what you meant and was also completely wrong. Datamining is not correlated to games having cookie cutter builds at all, they will always exist even if we know nothing about the game apart from the name until it releases. If you want to think I was being rude and aggressive I genuinely don't care, all I was doing was dismantling your ridiculous reasoning.

[NineSpine]

I can't estimate but you should also take into account the pvp people who will choose the "best spec" and then accompany it with "best talents".

Extremely few people do rated pvp. I think the last numbers I saw were like 5% and since some percentage (probably most) of them also do M+, they are already accounted for to some extent.

I like the term "meta slavery" though and I hate that WoW punishes deviations from it. In some cases it even blanket killed specs that were fun to some people I mean its been over 15-16 years but I am still left to wonder why they killed slow weapons and hemo spec for rogues since it was always a niche thing that very few people played and required very specific gearing linked to 40 man raids to play it successfully.

Because they started an unwinnable arms race with their own content. When you make the game harder from a numbers perspective, you necessarily reduce the tolerance for imbalance. Combine that with the obsession with exports and adding arena to the game, which forced them to balance around deathmatches, and it's just a mess.