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New WoW Talent Trees = Common Sense or Dumbing Down?
Qazz
Member Posts: 577
Here's my take on the new WoW talent trees:
R, S, T, L, N and E....everybody used to pick those letters for the final Wheel of Fortune puzzle...why? Because they are the most popular letters and show after show, contestant after contestant picked them. So they started giving those letters automatically at the end and let the contestants pick from the rest of the alphabet.
The new WoW talent trees basically did the same thing...they built in the talents that everybody took anyways, and now you get to pick from what's left.
What do you think?
Comments
Voted improvement bc they removed so many talents you took "just get to the good stuff" nothing bad with that.
Still enough talents to f. around if you want but most of us use cookie cutter anyways.
and so much simpler for new players to understand. I remember my first time I got talents. Did not dare to use it before level 50 or so since I was sooo afraid of speccing wrong(came from AO )
Since the majority of the player base cannot see how these trees perform at level 85 until the release of Cataclysm, I say its too early to tell.
I personally disagree with the popular opinion that 4.0.1 has removed only "useless" talents, and I also disagree with the idea that many hybrid builds were not as viable as these new streamlined, cookie cutter, builds players are now forced to take.
As I said in another 4.0.1 thread, After playing the game off and on since release, Wow to me now feels like this:
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, riddle 'em with bullets
Its kinda both to be honest.
It is an improvement in that it did remove the 'filler' talents that were either hardly used, flat out ignored or as some people said 'just in the way of what you really wanted'. It made the talent trees seem less cluttered.
It can also be seen as dumbing down because it basically makes you pick a sub class the whole way through till the last few talent points. If anything they might as well have had the player just pick the class they wanted and then the subclass and then just do away with the talent trees. If people wanted to try a new subclass, they could go to the trainer and pay to swap.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
I feel there is a little bit of both in the new changes. Removing the bloat was fine as there were a lot of talents that were just filler or insignificant compared to other choices.
Aside from that I was hoping for more in the way of meaningful choices. My initial impression is that there is not much in the way of choices when building a characters talents now.
Its a good change I think. Some complain that it limits choice but we all know that most people play with the same, considered to be the best and most popular builds.
The talents are more streamlined now, but at the cost of destroying what little customization the game offered for your character's skills.
Let's be honest, there are really three reasons for this change:
Get rid of useless talents, streamline the trees
Make the trees easier to use to further broaden the game's pick up and play nature
Make it easier for the dev's to balance by letting them not have to worry about unusual, OP builds that they didn't think of.
Personally, I've never been a fan of the talent tree type system. I much prefer something like LotRO's system, which gives you horizontal customization, rather than vertical.
I have to ask..
So many of you are defending WoW's change in talents as "getting rid of the meaningless stuff and only keeping the good stuff"...... OK.. I can understand that.. So..... Cant' leveling 1-80 be considered meaningless, when end game raids is what most of the game is about?.. Seriously.. Lets just let everyone option to start at 80.. or soon to be 85.. Because the meaningless leveling to some is the same as the meaningless talents to get to the good stuff.. While we are at meaningless stuff.. Should Blizzard even bother with achievements.. Afterall, aren't they meaningless?
Something to think about..
Going to be up-front in that I left WoW shortly after the release of Wrath, but I did play around with the calculator (primarily fiddling with Shaman since that was my favorite...played all 3 specs pretty heavily, so was very familiar with it).
The answer to your question is "Yes". It is both. In process of continuing to make the game more accessible (i.e. easier) they have simplified the trees and drastically reduced what you can do.
I do agree that some of the talents in the trees ended up being fillers, but I think that is disingenuous view. The "filler" talents may have had minimal contribution to a min/max character, but they did serve a purpose. With most of my characters, I did use cookie-cutter builds...but I modified them to suit my play style better. With the new calculator, I noticed that you will get forced into cookie-cutter builds (at this time at least). This is a dumbing down of the game such that pretty much everyone will end up with the same builds without asking anyone to think about it (or read up on it).
The common sense side of the question comes due to the fact that there are so many "1337" players out there, that if you didn't have reasonable gear or your build wasn't optimal, you tended to have a hard time getting into a group. While gear may or may not continue to be an issue, revising the talents trees removes the concept that your build isn't optimal...there really aren't many ways to make a build anymore. Obviously, it also has the effect of reducing the time it takes Blizzard to have to test and balance the effects of the trees.
More interesting to me is that the simplification of the talent trees seems to stand in stark contrast with the return of cc and aggro (which tends to require more attention by the players). Not entirely sure what to think of Cata at this point, and I will watch with interest to see how things shake out in the next couple of months once players understand the impact of the changes.
Contrary to the hype and the justification for this change, there are still plenty of useless and "filler" abilities to go around. They're just spread out more. Progression is completely screwed up. Prior to this patch, you could plan on going to your Trainer every other level and having a Talent Point to spend every level. It kind of gave you something to look forward to, even if it was a gradual building to what you want. Now, you have to constantly check to see when your next ability or Talent can be applied.
Also, being locked in to a Talent Tree until you can choose the top level Talent further displays Ghostcrawler's desire to control how you play. If you step back and look at it, that's what most of the gameplay changes are, shoehorning players so the game is easier for GC's team to manage. This was done for Blizzard, not for the players. Nice spin job, but it's just a smokescreen. Players are so busy managing the new class layouts, Blizzard is hoping you won't notice how little you're really getting when Cataclysm finally hits.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
To be honest, they could have just done like 3-6 builds depending on a class and got rid of talent trees all together. Now we have a system that retains the illusion of choice (not much different from before), but in reality we have very little and a lot less than before.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Notice how people who complain WoW is being dumb downed are also the ones complaining about how hard it is to play their class now and how they have to relearn the class over again and how that sucks. That to me doesn't sound like dumb downed at all but people who can't adapt to the slight change in game play getting their panties in a bunch.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
This is a good assessment. From what I've seen, each tree now basically basically 1 optimal pve setup and 1 optimal pvp setup. There's pretty much zero flexibility in the new system.
They could give players the best gear available in game, the best specs for everything, an order in which to press the buttons to max their DPS/Healing/Threat and most still wouldnt go past 6/12 in ICC and some would even complain that Blizzard is wrong. It's common sense.
Well, I do not think it is much different from before. Just takes sometime to get used to it. Like it did after all the major class upgrades in the past. Guides have already been out, but it takes sometime for the mass to actually read them.
Talents are a lot simpler now, not that the cookie-cutter builds were that complex in the past. However, I found that rotations are also simpler once you familiarize yourself with the new concepts. So yes, it did make playing my class easier...a lot easier in fact.
All in all, it will all be back to normal in few weeks.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Cataclysm = NGE.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
The "minor" customization used to be major customization. Sure, the little kids might be just fine because they always used a cookie-cutter spec anyway, but the more sophisticated players who developed their own spec that matched the playstyle they found to be most fun or effective just aren't going to be happy with this.
Major customization? Going onto the web and finding the best build? Yeah pretty deep customization. Im sure your game is much deeper and very hard.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
It is funny seeing people defending the changes to the trees. Blizzard is a game lobby company (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo)... WoW was nifty and different from that when it first came out. They have spent the intervening years making it more of a game lobby MMO.
It is likely during Cata that they will just go with the subclass idea or with the next xpac.
Looking at the Warlock trees... I just had to lolwut.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
Again, show me a better game and I will take a look. I want one of these hard, challenging MMO's I keep reading about. Funny how those that, never played or no longer play (so they claim) cant seem to stay away, be it ingame or on the forums.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
I agree with the OP, virtually no change....no change for the better tbh. I'm really unhappy they removed certain stats- armour pen, defence.
The game just seems extremely shallow (barely covers the toes now
)
... This ...
It's funny that above that they post "There's no way to tell when I get an achieve, or talent, or spell" and when I point it out, they say "Well yea, but you have to go into such and such screen". (rolls eyes) Let's just slap everything onto the main screen so that it covers up the material of the game shall we? Ludicrous. Just like I can go to my spellbook now and see EXACTLY when I will have access to certain spells, I can go to my glyphs and see EVERY glyph available to me and at what level. Then you complain that it's nerfing yet you don't see anyone highlighting the fact that you can NOW carry stuff so in the MIDDLE of the Raid, you can respec your glyphs to give you whatever play advantage you need and it DOESN'T destroy the glyph in the process.
"Cat's gunna fail" "LOL Blizz Sux" "You guys are fanbois who don't know anything" ... and just like Philby posted, WoW will slowly drag you back into the game. THAT'S the reason it's still around. THAT'S the reason that Blizzard hasn't needed to make WoW2 or succumbed to garbage like SE and Cryptic. THAT'S why Blizzard holds such a huge market. Blizzard simply does not release BAD stuff. That would be historical fact. The only group that could even remotely hold up to that outside of Blizzard would be Bioware/Black Isle.
Quit if you don't like it. Take your money so that the company only then has 11,999,998 subscribers and maybe they'll listen to you.
Every game is not for every one. I'm happy they brought life back to toons I haven't played in a LONG LONG time.
The problem with patch 4.0 is that there are multiple glitches. Yes, eventually we will re-learn the new WOW. Meanwhile the game is messed up. Microsoft did that with Vista... put out a product that didn't work well. It hurt them and WOW is hurting itself. I think they believe, like a lot of teens, that WOW is indestructable. One of these days they willl grenade, if they don't get their quality control beefed up.
Of course the game is dumbed down. Whats the point of talent points when you are forced to put 75% of them into one tree? They should just come out and have you choose a subclass and be done with it. Thats what the devs want anyway. Enough of this illusion of choice. Thats like saying you get a 100 dollar shopping spree at best buy as long as 75 dollars goes toward one of 3 items.
They have been redesigned for fun, just fun. Go play, have fun, screw the experts who want to squeeze dps and nothing else out of the talent trees. Have fun with the new talent system.