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

[Caprias]

If that's confusing to you how the frick do you navigate life.

[Video Games]

Ive always hated the mop system, but especially when they abandoned them in legion for borrowed power systems. Some of you forget that some of the talents were dps LOSSES. Like, how did they mess up that badly?

[Khaza-R]

Classic talent system too extreme? WTH...

[klaps_05]

Only downside of the talents is majority of utility and other spells will be removed and you need to select the talent to specifically have that spell. Leaves a bit of WOD taste when they did the big prune, at least this time around you can keep the spell if you talent for it.

[kaminaris]

confusing is the worst argument you could possibly made. How do you play any other games since plenty of them have talents like this or even more complex (not really, the only complex talent tree in game is PoE, nothing else comes close).

[LuxTheGamer]

confusing is the worst argument you could possibly made. How do you play any other games since plenty of them have talents like this or even more complex (not really, the only complex talent tree in game is PoE, nothing else comes close).

Too many things to press and think about. The current talent system in Retail is casual friendly and understandable.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

I think overwhelmingly it will be a popular decision, since a lot of people miss the old talent system. Many players have been asking for them to come back for a long time.

I am not one of them. I like the current talent system -- allthough I wish it had more tiers -- as something I regularly change and interact with situationally, verses the old set-and-forget cookiecutter builds with pre-reqs that limit flexibility to adapt to context. But more than anything is that I'm VERY wary of some of the previews we've seen that seem to show some abilities that are currently baseline being turned into talents.

There will be a lot of positives, like the ability to keep abilities that have been tied to expansion systems, and the fact that this is in place of yet another stupid borrowed power system, but overall, I'm much more cynical about the incoming talent changes than I am excited.

Agreed. Honestly it feels like this is mostly just a bone to get some people to shut up rather than add anything particularly good to the game. Modern talents need a lot of work (well over half are completely dead) but I'm skeptical this will be any better. The live team probably doesnt have the resources to actually fiddle with talents much once they are launched, but that's a requirement to make them interesting/not dead.

But I'll still take this if it means no new BP system.

[Ringthane]

I think overwhelmingly it will be a popular decision, since a lot of people miss the old talent system. Many players have been asking for them to come back for a long time.

I am not one of them. I like the current talent system -- allthough I wish it had more tiers -- as something I regularly change and interact with situationally, verses the old set-and-forget cookiecutter builds with pre-reqs that limit flexibility to adapt to context. But more than anything is that I'm VERY wary of some of the previews we've seen that seem to show some abilities that are currently baseline being turned into talents.

There will be a lot of positives, like the ability to keep abilities that have been tied to expansion systems, and the fact that this is in place of yet another stupid borrowed power system, but overall, I'm much more cynical about the incoming talent changes than I am excited.

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.

[ClassicPeon]

For anyone who is afraid of this new system you will just be doing exactly the same as you are already doing now, go to icy veins and get told what buttons to press.

For the rest of us this is a breath of fresh air. Wow does need more class based(not tempoary) customization

[Teekey]

I'm fine with it, but it just feels like A LOT of work for what's just going to be boiled down to cookie cutter builds in the end. So it's hard to really feel like the juice is worth the squeeze.

Also, while I get that people disliked temporary expansion powers, I mostly found them fun because it allowed them to create incredibly strong and influential abilities because they weren't bound to them forever. I feel like additions going forward are just going to be tame and less interesting. I also personally just kind of like having different avenues of power and progression than just simply levels/talents.

[Ticj]

I liked the MoP talent system too. I don't find "click to gain 1% crit chance" to be fun. The MoP system cut out the fat and boiled down the choices to the ones that actually mattered.

This was true in MoP and to some extent in WoD, but for mages at least virtually every tier has 1 talent that was basically never used for anything. Some tiers (like the one with flame-on for fire mages) have a clear best choice for every situation.

These dead talents have been taking up space in tiers for years, and blizzard hasn't done anything about them. Meanwhile, the game has been railroaded to where you play a spec instead of a class, which is a whole other issue.

[Aurabolt]

There will be guides that have talent trees for you to copy if you dont want to figure it out yourself.

This was princibly the main reason why they phased out the old talent system: Cookie Cutter Builds. They wanted to put a stop to that.

I am hoping they have some things in place to discourage "standard" builds personally.

[Eosia]

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.

I am kind of glad that talents are making a come back. My main fear is what do they do with them when we get back up to level 80, 90, 100 again? Will they be nerfing things when certain combinations are discovered and deemed "too powerful" like the 40/21/0 BM spec in Patch 3.0. This allowed hunters to have two Bestial Wraths every two minutes because we'd pop Readiness (the 21pt MM talent) to reset cooldowns and then hit BW again.

[Cæli]

if they don't add the old talent tree background there's little point to me, but why not

[Lochton]

There will be guides that have talent trees for you to copy if you dont want to figure it out yourself.

Yeah.. Don't worry about the talent tree, OP, won't take more than a few days before there's a cookie-cutter out, and a meta calculated, and everything will be easier for you.

[crusadernero]

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.

We know very little about them

Also, google a guide when its out and you are done.

[Morgaith]

Removing the pre-WoD talent system was one the worst mistakes blizzard did.

[Teekey]

This was princibly the main reason why they phased out the old talent system: Cookie Cutter Builds. They wanted to put a stop to that.

I am hoping they have some things in place to discourage "standard" builds personally.

As long as they balance the game like a competitive eSport, there's going to be "standard" builds.

The only way to create non-standard builds is to create hard choices and playstyles that are psuedo-broken and not super balanced (think like Stealth Archers in Skyrim). But they'll never do that.

[doodle90]

They talked about a share talent just like share outfit which means websites will have links to talent builds you can just copy paste into your own. However not everything is about DPS and crap so the variety is super nice for people who want a build for quicker farming of old raids or more survivability or better aoe. It also gives a sense of progression which is sorely missing from WoW leveling especially with the chromie scaling.

[Aydinx2]

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.

Sorry but if this is the case maybe you shouldn't play videogames? Like how can something so simple be confusing or stress you out?
How is that singular tree more confusing and stressful than current talents + covenant + soulbind + conduits + legendary?

Ignoring that 99% of players will just follow Icy Veins anyways so there is 0 thinking involved.

- - - Updated - - -

...

The reason the old talents were less flexible is only because you can change the current talents free of charge at any point. It has nothing to do with the talents themselves or the structure of choosing talents (tree vs grid).

And let's be honest: nobody regularly swaps talents based the way people make it sound. They pick their M+ vs Raid setup and use that all evening with maybe 1 boss as an exception.

- - - Updated - - -

Really depends on the class. As a Shadowpriest, I despise any design philosophy that brings me closer to the base Priest class. In other words, Legion was ideal and the new talent system is something I'm very much worried about.

Why not just play Affl warlock then? The whole point of a Shadow priest is that it's similar to an affl warlock but with Priest flavor.