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I still don't understand why everyone is so up in arms over the talent system, IMO.

I love it. With some tweaks, it could be one of the most awesome things that have happened to WoW in a very long time.

But anyways...

Yes, Cataclysm kinda flopped. That's what happens when you listen to the vocal minority (the elite whining about Wrath being "too easy").

I dunno, I guess I'm the sort of person who is going "how about we lay off Blizz and let them develop their game", because sometimes I really think the players should just cut them some slack instead of being so damned picky all the time. "OMG, PANDAS!?" ... coming from the same playerbase who begged for Pandas in every single WoW expansion to date. They give them to us and then they go "wtf, what is this!?" *rolls eyes* ya ok.

Solves lots of problems:

1). Less chance of failure. I don't like seeing people entering my heroics missing core must-have talents because they either didn't see that talent when they were clicking on the talents, or they just didn't realize how important that talent really was.

2). Less chance of MYSELF failing. Just earlier today, I couldn't figure out why my horde druid was crawling along so slowly in cat form. Here, I somehow forgot to take the +30% movement speed talent in the first tier. Derp. 33g respec fee, go! I took talents to get down to the end of the tree and thought "I'd go back in and fill the rest in" but I somehow forgot while leveling him. This won't be a problem in MoP.

3). In regards to that... I hate respeccing with a purple passion. You sit there going "okay, this this this... oh wait next tier just lit up but there's still stuff I want! I hope I don't run out of points..." or "Okay I just got to the bottom of the tree... time to take those super-duper Tier1s in the other trees that barely even affect me. Do I want +1% healing or do I want +1% damage, gee choices choices"

4). I hate leveling with the current talent system. "I finally gained a talent point! Okay, I can get Hammer of the Righteous, OR, I can lower the chance I receive a crit by 3%! I need both by the end, but I can't have both right now, I gotta wait 6 stinking levels". In MoP, well, they give us all the important stuff at levels we're meant to have it and that's that.

5). Regarding the "choice", there never was any choice, not even back in Wrath. If you had anything BUT the cookie-cutter builds, you were omgterribad. You got laughed at, or kicked. So, if you say that MoP Talents are Cookie-Cutter, then uh... it isn't like they got worse. There's the ILLUSION of choice in Cataclysm talents, but there's not really any "choice" there, is there? Every other tier MIGHT have an OPTIONAL talent you could take, but more often than not, when you take one of those, it is a "meh, I need the next tier to light up but its saying I gotta take one more so I guess I have to" ... that just sucks.

6). Talent tiers suck. Okay, so I filled out my Tier 3 talents, took everything I'm interested in. DING! new talent point. I want a Tier 4 talent, but.. "You need 15 points in blah blah talents to take this" ... I only have 14. So I MUST take another talent somewhere in the tree, even though there's nothing I even want. Let's say I'm a Prot Paladin and I WANT freaking HAMMER OF THE RIGHTEOUS already, but... OMG you MUST MUST MUST have 15 Prot Talents! Grrrrr. What if I took everything I want from the Prot Tree so far? No, you're going to MAKE me take some +2% healing or some-crap talent, and THEN I gotta wait another TWO levels?

7). Most of the Live talents are MUST-HAVES anyways, so why not just give them for free? Again, Cat Form +30% movement speed. Other than accidentally failing to click the button, who wouldn't take it? That should be built into the class, naturally. Or Hammer of the Righteous for Prot Paladins. Or Devastate for Prot Warriors. Those should be given from the get-go, and aren't "choices" at all.

I like the new tree better. You level your class, get your abilities as you level, and every 15 levels, you pick 1 of three new abilities. They just need to do further tweaking. Sure, they might seem "cookie cutter", but it isn't any worse than what we had before.

Edited, Mar 19th 2012 10:06pm by Lyrailis

The problem is, there is no clear "solution" to the "problem".

No matter what sort of talent or choice system you make, everyone who is into serious progression raiding or competitive PvP will number crunch the everliving Hell out of it and they WILL come up with a "cookie cutter" build.

Cookie Cutters are going to exist no matter what you do.

They existed in Vanilla, they existed in BC, in Wrath, and in Cataclysm.

The only difference is that each expansion is slowly whittling away at the "useless" or "broken" build possibilities, which allows a lot less failure. At the end of the day, the last thing you want is for a player to damage his own character to the point they aren't functional, nor should a player be required to look up EJ or somecrap just to figure out how to properly talent his character.

My memories of Vanilla are fuzzy, but I remember BC being a confusing mess of "what talents to take next?" and having to look up classes that I played frequently. Wrath was a little less so, and now Cataclysm gave us that "spec lock" thing which helped out some too.

But when it is all said and done... why make players click buttons when 90% of that is "must-have" anyways? Just give the must-haves, and let people choose the other 10%.

They just need to do further tweaking to the choices that they do have.

Players need to realize we don't need a talent system at all. Just give us a few abilities we can choose. You already have 3 roles/specs for each class (druid has 4), that's more than enough choice.

Never played a Holy Paladin I'll admit, but uh.

For everyone 1 class (well, spec) that could do that, most of the others couldn't.

I'm content with the new system. I like it. It more fits the model of the 'relaxing fun' model of MMORPG that WoW has become. A game you log on to relax and have some fun.

Not something you have to do piles of homework to be functional with. I remember the days of having to look up class forums, EJ, etc just to get an idea of how to play my class in a group setting.

I'd rather just log on and have some fun and not have to do homework, to be honest.

But then I suppose more elite players might disagree. *shrugs*

My point is...

If you could Google the best "Cookie-Cutter Talent Build" and then click the buttons.....

.....

....what's the difference between that and just giving you 90% of that for free without having to click buttons at all?

Same damn thing in the end run, the only difference is that you don't have to click the buttons and it is impossible to click the wrong ones and break your character.

Sure, similar issues arise, but uh. I'd rather have it this way. Better than the old.

Sure, it won't give you a lot of choice and you'll still have cookie-cutter going on, but it is still better than talents are now.




I'm not a raider really, and even I know that saying something is "too easy" without actually doing it is absolutely stupid.

But yes, sadly people do it.

And you say "Okay, where's your Herald of the Titans achievement!?" and they go "Pfft, that's too ridiculous".

*rolls eyes*

Whaaaaaaaatever.

But it is nice to talk to at least one guy who didn't look down his Seattle Space Needle Nose at everyone else. A top-end raider, who Doesn't come across as stuck up in their everyday posts? That's nice to see. Kudos for that.

Seems most of the "old vet" raiders I ever talked to, are the ridiculous stuck up ones. Or maybe I'm just unlucky. Dunno.

Well, there is at least *improvement*.

Doesn't fix the core problem, but yet it at least makes improvements and does fix some side-related problems.

And I'm not convinced that it is "broken" for the reasons you say it is "broken", but then that's just personal preferences I think.


Edited, Mar 19th 2012 11:29pm by Lyrailis

They did eliminate many flaws with the MoP system.

Its just the "core problem" (that you describe) isn't one of them. Check my earlier list higher in the thread for a list of flaws they DID fix with this new system.

You'll have the same problem with the new talent trees and any future talent trees that provide choice. Instead of failing to allocate 41 talent points correctly, you'll just have people failing to allocate six talent points correctly.

The talent trees are also a minor reason why people are failing. When someone is doing 2.5k DPS at level 85, it has less to do with the talents they chose and more to do with them only pressing one button every 10 seconds. I've seen Hunters with a cookie cutter Survival spec use nothing but Arcane Shot and Steady Shot (I kid you not), averaging 4k DPS in a level 85 heroic - and they were wearing raid gear.

At some point, we have to draw a line and let evolution do its thing. If you're too stupid to win, you're too stupid to play the game. It's not like it's a difficult game in the first place. I bet I could take any class into a heroic with a 0/0/0 build and still outperform some people in cookie cutter builds. I say this because my Druid, with a 0/0/0 build, does more than 2.5k DPS with auto-attack alone.

TL;DR: People are stupid and holding their hands won't make them smarter.

We're giving you a new race with lots of classes to choose from!
We're giving you a new class available to many races!
We're only giving you one new character slot...
Yeah, there are going to be more Pandaren Monks running around than there were Blood Elf Paladins after BC launched.

My boyfriend pointed out why it would have been a bad decision on Blizz's part to let you put all 50 of your allotted characters on one server. He said that if they did that then many people with multiple accounts would just transfer their characters to a single account and cancel the others. It would have been nice but I can see the point. Two slots doesn't seem unreasonable though. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing them separate the lists for Alliance and Horde characters and let us have 11 slots for each faction per server. Heh


The whole Siege of Org is a pretty daring concept. I'm looking forward to seeing how they can make the story lead to that without making it seem 'lame' that the Alliance can conquer Org without actually ending the war between the factions. I wonder who else will be bosses in that raid. Gallywix is pretty universally unliked though he doesn't seem the type to actually commit to standing by Garrosh's side if push came to shove. They could take this in so many directions since the announcement was rather void of details. Garrosh and Varian could both be so lost to rage and anger that they both end up getting killed off. Garrosh could succumb to the power of one of the new 'sha' villains and we'd have to free him from it by nearly killing him and then let him give up his Warchief title in utter shame. Syl could stage a coup and end up replacing him setting up an even worse leader situation for the next expansion. It does seem odd that they would try so hard in Cata to show off that he does have honor and is trying to be a good leader only to have him go off the deep end with crazy dictatorial behavior in Mists.

Who will replace Garrosh as the new Warchief? I kind of hope that they don't just give it back to Thrall. As much as I like and respect Thrall, he has moved too far beyond that stage of his life. Saurfang is pretty awesome but he's also quite old and probably wise enough to find a way to avoid taking on the responsibility of Warchief. I'm guessing that maybe they will introduce a new character (or pull one introduced in one of the other expansions) to groom as the new Orc leader and Warchief. They could also go with a non-Orc Warchief but if they did, they would still need to find a leader for the Orcs as well. Syl would be a bad choice unless they have something in mind for her in the following expansion. Baine would be good though he's still young and maybe a bit unsure of himself though that could be fixed with good storytelling in Mists. Vol'jin is a wise leader but I doubt that he would take on the Warchief title unless it was a temporary thing. The other two racial leaders would be poor choices as they would not be likely to get the support of the Orcs or some of the other races.

In one of the developer interviews they talked about how they want to contrast Varian and Garrosh. Both start out in similar places, deeply flawed, but where Garrosh falls Varian will rise. Apparently there are going to be a series of quests in-game (hopefully not Alliance only if Horde's storming Orgrimmar too) where he grows into a character of the quality of Uther and Lothar (character development that isn't in a book? OMG!). Meanwhile Garrosh has some bits of honor but he's going to lose those as the expansion goes on. The mentality the dev used was "Hit them so hard their grandchildren come out dizzy, burn a hole in their race's memory."

It seemed very cognizant that we don't love Varian right now and that their goal is to make us love him, not just tell us he's lovable now or that we can learn why by buying some books. Hopefully this doesn't mean that Orgrimmar's going to be Deathwing 2.0 where we watch him do all the big stuff.

it's sad for you if it's the only thing you like, me I’m happy with all the changes.

I'm looking forward to seeing all the changes.

I'll definitely play a new monk, and race change my main (or would that be a species change?).