admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I definitely think it's worth acknowledging that a lot of very good work is being done. We've seen an almost unprecedented level of iteration on a system that is already a massive overhaul of class design. There's plenty of reason to be optimistic about the direction of WoW as a whole.
At the same time, there's never been a point in WoW's history where there weren't classes or specs that were left behind. Whether because Blizzard doesn't have an idea for it (Feral) they have ideas but the implementation is a mess (Monk) or everything plays fine but the tuning is terrible (Balance Druid) there have been bad classes even at the peaks of WoW. We can hope this'll be the time they figure it all out... but it's probably not. They're still understaffed for the amount of work that class design demands, as evidenced by the fact that one person quit and multiple classes have been trapped because of it.
(Of course, it's also true that Blizzard could do everything right and there would still be people unhappy that their class/spec doesn't work exactly the same way it did in <expansion>. Both of these facts can be true at the same time.)
tl;dr I understand people on both sides of the argument and the only perspectives I think are truly "wrong" are the extreme doomers and the extreme optimists.
Is that a real tweet? Why is it all in caps? I do not understand what's going on here. Seems kinda unprofessional to come from an official Twitter account.
They’re clearly listening to feedback in how these trees are evolving from build to build. Early trees with awkward decision points and dependencies had these issues ironed out or at least improved in subsequent builds. It’s disingenuous to look at the state of alpha progress and suggest otherwise.
Show me these changes for feral, and to little bit lesser extent, druid trees. I'm sure other specs are in the same boat. And some are getting plenty of attention.
That's all I'm opining about. I'm not chicken littling here. I'm asking/complaining about the lack of any movement at all, for a specific class (and mostly a couple of specs in that specific class), because that's what I follow most closely.
See your issue here is being passionate about Feral. You only have yourself to blame for that one.
I think that a natural byproduct of having different people/teams focusing on different classes, is that some are going to see iterative progress made at different rates than others.
Is that a real tweet? Why is it all in caps? I do not understand what's going on here. Seems kinda unprofessional to come from an official Twitter account.
There's an image that has been floating around recently of a woman yelling very closely into a distressed/uninterested guy's ear, and it has become (yet another) meme about a captive audience having to listen to something they clearly have no interest in.
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
I think one thing that I don't agree with about some of the general feedback on the class trees is people getting upset about having to spend some points to get back things they already have.
If this was some dragonflight only system I would generally agree, but this is a direction that will be the foundation of class design for the entire of this game moving forward. It's not unusual to have the new format involve your talent tree giving you a huge chunk of your characters power overall, rather than it all been given to you baseline or with expansion specific systems like it has for the last five expansions
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
I think one thing that I don't agree with about some of the general feedback on the class trees is people getting upset about having to spend some points to get back things they already have.
If this was some dragonflight only system I would generally agree, but this is a direction that will be the foundation of class design for the entire of this game moving forward. It's not unusual to have the new format involve your talent tree giving you a huge chunk of your characters power overall, rather than it all been given to you baseline or with expansion specific systems like it has for the last five expansions
Also, for anyone who already has a level 60 character it doesn't matter because you should have enough points to just get it all back when you log in, barring a few instances here and there where an ability might be at the bottom of the tree, in which case you'll have to wait 10 levels to get them back.
one of the things that's...ironic? no not quite. idk the word i'm looking for here. about the class trees for me is, right, i'm a warlock. and warlocks have gone into basically every expansion as a full class, who THEN got borrowed power added to us. there's almost nothing from those systems that we've kept outside of little QoL stuff because we've pretty much been Done already. so as a result, the warlock trees have basically no new toys, because our well of existing toys is so deep and diverse that you can pretty much fill the whole thing out just with those. and so i have a certain amount of grumpy borededness with it because it's not really new or flashy, even though factually that puts us in just a great place compared to other classes lmao.
one of the things that's...ironic? no not quite. idk the word i'm looking for here. about the class trees for me is, right, i'm a warlock. and warlocks have gone into basically every expansion as a full class, who THEN got borrowed power added to us. there's almost nothing from those systems that we've kept outside of little QoL stuff because we've pretty much been Done already. so as a result, the warlock trees have basically no new toys, because our well of existing toys is so deep and diverse that you can pretty much fill the whole thing out just with those. and so i have a certain amount of grumpy borededness with it because it's not really new or flashy, even though factually that puts us in just a great place compared to other classes lmao.
Oh you've had a pitlord pet before? And a non-pet interrupt?
...also yes i have had a pitlord because of enslave demon lmao, the entire green fire quest was about enslaving and managing a pitlord :V
I needed anime to post. on
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Dyshow am I even using this gunRegistered Userregular
I still say that warlocks could potentially have a pretty neat tank spec by controlling a big demon like a pitlord. Maybe, like, riding it or something and having it be the main target rather than the player directly.
I guess it's more of a fun concept than good idea, though. That would have to be a pretty radically different play style for the class.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I think one thing that I don't agree with about some of the general feedback on the class trees is people getting upset about having to spend some points to get back things they already have.
If this was some dragonflight only system I would generally agree, but this is a direction that will be the foundation of class design for the entire of this game moving forward. It's not unusual to have the new format involve your talent tree giving you a huge chunk of your characters power overall, rather than it all been given to you baseline or with expansion specific systems like it has for the last five expansions
I agree, but there are some egregious examples like every Paladin spec spending 3+ points just so wings does what it does right now.
But that’s less a problem of “paying for what you already have” and more “mandatory picks that don’t do anything aren’t fun.”
it's silly to get specifically fixated on how many points need to be spent on this or that ability, or what currently inherent abilities were made talents per se. At least on the classes I'm familiar with you almost always can get more 'stuff' than they have now, and in more possible combinations.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I think one thing that I don't agree with about some of the general feedback on the class trees is people getting upset about having to spend some points to get back things they already have.
If this was some dragonflight only system I would generally agree, but this is a direction that will be the foundation of class design for the entire of this game moving forward. It's not unusual to have the new format involve your talent tree giving you a huge chunk of your characters power overall, rather than it all been given to you baseline or with expansion specific systems like it has for the last five expansions
I agree, but there are some egregious examples like every Paladin spec spending 3+ points just so wings does what it does right now.
But that’s less a problem of “paying for what you already have” and more “mandatory picks that don’t do anything aren’t fun.”
And those points are giving you the aspect of it that was a level up rank added to it.
Which is... what trees are. They are leveling up ability gains but you get to choose everything. For every time something is separated into points, its potentially the ability to forgo that part of it for something else instead. That is... the benefit of the trees.
It drives me insane the complaints about "needing to spend points" on getting shit back. Those people are so damned closed minded, and yes I am being overly aggressive about it but like, its killing me. These trees are not the new endgame progression. They are not new borrowed power. They are the new class design. They are replacing level 10+. They flow in a way that you are learning stuff as you go. As was said, you will have something between slightly less than what you have now or slightly more at level 60 and almost always more at 70.
It actually is kind of sad in a way, because people really, really wanted to be rid of borrowed power. But they are so damned used to what it did (which was give the illusion of getting tons of new shit every single expansion) that they have this insatiable need to have "MOAR NEW SHIT".
For me, having combos of stuff we could never combo before is exciting new shit. There were so many talent rows before where you could look at them and think "man how OP would it be if I could get two of these at once?". For a lot of the specs, that is literally happening now. How is that not a new gameplay experience?
Some classes aren't there yet. They still have time to get there, because honestly the only thing it looks like they need to put most of their design work into is these trees. There might be an outlier or two that are kind of a fail. There always is. In any game. Hopefully not but, so far there are a lot more successes than fails IMO.
Which is... what trees are. They are leveling up ability gains but you get to choose everything. For every time something is separated into points, its potentially the ability to forgo that part of it for something else instead. That is... the benefit of the trees.
I fail to see the benefit if I have 23 abilities now (totally made up number for the sake of argument), and I have to spend 23 points to buy all those abilities back. It's not a benefit of a tree. It's just a different presentation of the same thing. And the problem isn't 23 abilities and 23 point spent. The problem is that I've got 23 abilities and I have to spend 45 points to get all those back because of filler nodes, bad pathing on the tree, passives that are currently just in my spellbook, and so forth.) (Again, completely made up numbers for the sake of the argument.)
It drives me insane the complaints about "needing to spend points" on getting shit back. Those people are so damned closed minded
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
These trees are not the new endgame progression. They are not new borrowed power. They are the new class design. They are replacing level 10+.
Right. And nobody is claiming otherwise. I am fully aware that this new talent tree takes the place of the old talent tree and the borrowed power systems at the same time. But that fact doesn't change the fact that I feel it is a worse design to spec into abilities that right now are core class abilities that I get for free just for being a level 60. And in most cases, lose abilities that I get for free just for being a level 60. That's the part you keep repeatedly missing. This tree is not better than the current system, because as I fill out the tree and place points, I am losing things that I have now. My character is forgetting things and getting weaker. That's the heart of the problem here. If ability X is on the far left side of the tree, and ability Y is on the far right side of the tree, and in retail I have both of those right now, it is a lot harder (or impossible in some cases) to have both of them in the future. That's the crux of the issue.
I should be able to fill out the talent calculator up to level 60 and get my character exactly back to where they are right now in retail. Exactly. Otherwise its a nerf. Then, when I reach level 70, those remaining 10 new talent points should make me stronger than I am right now at level 60, since it's a higher level. But that's not what happens. Right now, if you spec up to level 60 and stop (which is where all of us will begin Dragonflight), we are going to be losing abilities and powers because there are not enough points to buy back everything we have right now. Then we spend level 61-70 to reclaim that lost power. And by the time your trees are complete at level 70, your overall power in whatever your primary role is will be slightly higher, but you've also lost a lot of cross-spec versatility along the way because there's just not enough points to get back everything you have right now.
They flow in a way that you are learning stuff as you go.
How is that different from now, where as you level up you get new abilities and learn as you go? They don't dump the whole spellbook on a fresh character right now either. This point is irrelevant because it doesn't do anything they're not already doing right now.
It actually is kind of sad in a way, because people really, really wanted to be rid of borrowed power. But they are so damned used to what it did (which was give the illusion of getting tons of new shit every single expansion) that they have this insatiable need to have "MOAR NEW SHIT".
I'm one of the voices against the new trees and never once have I said "MOAR NEW SHIT." I just would like to keep the shit I have now, thank you very much.
Honestly, I'd be okay with just adding like 3 more rows to the current talent tree and calling it a day. Put the things we're losing from borrowed power onto the current talent tree let that be it. I'm not a rose tinted glasses nostalgia person who yearns for the days of classic. Classic was bad. Now is better (minus the borrowed power.) Classic's trees still had an optimal path and a mathematically correct way to build your character for maximum DPS, and the new trees will be exactly the same. Once people figure out the number tunings on some of the "NYI" abilities and such, there will be a correct path for raid, a correct path for M+, and a correct path for when you need a bit of utility. They're not improving anything at all with this new talent tree. They're just going back to more nodes. But more nodes does not automatically equate to "better." It's still all an illusion of choice, trumped by mathematics.
Edit: I forgot to add that borrowed power is also bad, and losing a bunch of power at the start of a new expansion is bad. Both are bad. Losing power in general is bad. Losing borrowed power: bad. Losing abilities I have right now in my spellbook with the new talent tree: also bad. They are not mutually exclusive. Both are bad.
Blizzard should never have started down the road of expansion-long borrowed power, and also Blizzard should not be taking core class abilities away from me right now in Dragonflight.
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
I am only half joking. Framing everything about your personal power progression is so incredibly stifling as a *long term* design philosophy it can't be taken seriously. This game is ~15 years old. The human body/mind, and the design space both, do not have utterly limitless capacity for new abilities and to constantly get more and more. This also doesn't make for very good games. So you can get every utility ability designed for your class in Shadowlands right now - who cares, Shadowlands is a bad game.
Ability bloat, and lack of build choice and variety, are a big reason why. Think of it this way, if you can access every single utility spell at once, then that is what the game expects of you. The expectation is that you have all those abilities bound, practiced, and ready to use at all times. Not getting to have all of them at once *improves the play experience* because *the expectations are lowered*. There is more mental and physical room for new combinations of different abilities that, even if they were possible before, would have been burdensome because of the lack of space. Having to pick a loadout, wherein the player has to choose which of their abilities to take with them on a case-by-case basis, is an extremely natural system that both solves the immediate problem with the game's scale, and also encourages the player to think, prepare, and make meaningful choices.
Your character does not directly benefit from being forced to make that choice. But the player experience actually does, and I can't really overstate how much of a game changer of fun factor the new system is. Sometimes getting nerfed actually makes things better.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
There's a neat example of an ability that was powerful but problematic in certain circumstances being streamlined by the new tree system in the Mistweaver choice node, Revival // Restoral. Previously, Revival functioned as a mass heal and mass dispel in one button, but certain encounters required healers to avoid dispelling a debuff until a specific timing was met - meaning that a Mistweaver who cast Revival at the wrong time could wipe the group or raid with the press of a single button. The choice node now allows the Mistweaver to select Revival, identical to its current implementation with magic dispel, or select the alternate ability Restoral, which is nearly the same as Revival except it does not remove magic debuffs. So a Mistweaver can go into each encounter and select exactly the right tool for the job. I think that's a nifty bit of design.
I have played affliction since vanilla and I love and hate it at the same time over the history I have played WoW
Back in vanilla I was not geared as many but I would wreck people in pvp like pushing in AV I would dot up so many and watch them fall with shadowburn [I had a macro that hitting it I would emote snapping my fingers}
But in WoD I did not play affliction as I was very underwhelmed by it so I ran around in demo. I figured out how to put out imps galore with a combo of buttons and the talent so in the hellfire raid i crashed half the raid having according to the GM 278 imps out. He told me I was probably one of the handful of players Demo was getting a massive overhaul
I have not played it since as I don't know how to play it {I played it a bit in legion}
Cata was another because I was so undergeared I could not do dailies as affliction and the felguard was decent
I am quite curious how affliction will be in Dragonflight
I have not raided since Legion as I am just not feeling like it anymore since pre this last patch I would wait hours in the que for a messy run walking away often with a repair bill
The talent trees aren't meant to be entirely an addition over what is currently available, so taking issue with having to 'relearn' skills you currently possess through spending talent points is just an incorrect way of looking at what the talent trees are going to be.
You can spend those 23 points to relearn everything you currently have, sure, but you can also use them to learn things that you don't currently have, but maybe wish that you did instead? You're treating the new talent trees like the artifact weapon trees in Legion, when they aren't that.
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
The talent trees aren't meant to be entirely an addition over what is currently available, so taking issue with having to 'relearn' skills you currently possess through spending talent points is just an incorrect way of looking at what the talent trees are going to be.
You can spend those 23 points to relearn everything you currently have, sure, but you can also use them to learn things that you don't currently have, but maybe wish that you did instead? You're treating the new talent trees like the artifact weapon trees in Legion, when they aren't that.
No, I'm treating it as losing things I currently have right now.
Pulling something that I get guaranteed right now out of my spellbook and putting it as an optional node on a talent tree is not helping me. It's forcing me to pick between something I currently have right now by default, and something that I might not, or something that is currently a borrowed power item. This isn't helping me. It's taking something away from me and then giving me a choice of whether I want to keep the thing I already had, or take something new.
Santa Claus: "Merry Christmas, Lucas, here's a new bike. It is yours and you have it now. It is a thing that you own that you got and now it is yours. Have fun."
Next year Santa Claus: "Remember that bike I gave you that is yours and you own it and have been using it for the past year, well now you have to choose if you want to keep that bike or if you want to have this lego set instead."
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
You really have no idea what's been going on with the game recently do you?
Also I... literally never said anything about parceling about abilities to new player. At no point in my post did I even talk about new players, at all. o_O
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
You really have no idea what's been going on with the game recently do you?
Also I... literally never said anything about parceling about abilities to new player. At no point in my post did I even talk about new players, at all. o_O
You said, and I quote: "if you didn't have a character there would be no loss."
If I didn't have a character, I would be a new player, no? If I didn't have a character, that would mean I wouldn't have been playing. It would mean I didn't have a level 60 ready to enter Dragonflight on day 1 as a level 60. But I'm not a new player, and I do have a level 60 (multiple actually) ready to go on day 1 of Dragonflight. So there is loss. This isn't some hypothetical situation where I'm somehow coming into Dragonflight without the existence of a character but also am not a new player. I don't know how one would accomplish such a feat, but it isn't happening, so it doesn't matter. Your wacky hypothetical doesn't exist.
I should probably just fill in with the actual information rather than being flip: WoW is a seasonal game now, most of its players will buy a new expansion, play for a while, and then leave. It also bled a ton of people to FF14 during Shadowlands, but that cohort is likely to come back and give Dragonflight a try. It doesn't get a ton of new players, although Blizzard has been investing a lot of resources into improving new player experiences because it is still crucially important to do so.
None of this really has anything to do with the talent system though.
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
You really have no idea what's been going on with the game recently do you?
Elaborate on this. Because this feels like an attack, and one without any substance since I've clearly been playing the game, clearly been following the Dragonflight alpha, and clearly been actively involved in researching the new talent trees online.
The talent trees aren't meant to be entirely an addition over what is currently available, so taking issue with having to 'relearn' skills you currently possess through spending talent points is just an incorrect way of looking at what the talent trees are going to be.
You can spend those 23 points to relearn everything you currently have, sure, but you can also use them to learn things that you don't currently have, but maybe wish that you did instead? You're treating the new talent trees like the artifact weapon trees in Legion, when they aren't that.
No, I'm treating it as losing things I currently have right now.
Pulling something that I get guaranteed right now out of my spellbook and putting it as an optional node on a talent tree is not helping me. It's forcing me to pick between something I currently have right now by default, and something that I might not, or something that is currently a borrowed power item. This isn't helping me. It's taking something away from me and then giving me a choice of whether I want to keep the thing I already had, or take something new.
Santa Claus: "Merry Christmas, Lucas, here's a new bike. It is yours and you have it now. It is a thing that you own that you got and now it is yours. Have fun."
Next year Santa Claus: "Remember that bike I gave you that is yours and you own it and have been using it for the past year, well now you have to choose if you want to keep that bike or if you want to have this lego set instead."
Okay, so yeah, you aren't comprehending what the purpose of the new talent system is. That actually helps a lot in contextualizing your posts, thanks.
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
You really have no idea what's been going on with the game recently do you?
Also I... literally never said anything about parceling about abilities to new player. At no point in my post did I even talk about new players, at all. o_O
You said, and I quote: "if you didn't have a character there would be no loss."
If I didn't have a character, I would be a new player, no? If I didn't have a character, that would mean I wouldn't have been playing. It would mean I didn't have a level 60 ready to enter Dragonflight on day 1 as a level 60. But I'm not a new player, and I do have a level 60 (multiple actually) ready to go on day 1 of Dragonflight. So there is loss. This isn't some hypothetical situation where I'm somehow coming into Dragonflight without the existence of a character but also am not a new player. I don't know how one would accomplish such a feat, but it isn't happening, so it doesn't matter. Your wacky hypothetical doesn't exist.
This thread is becoming a mess of desynced replies - I explained in a different reply that my hypothetical is a literal majority. Most of the players do have characters, but are not *currently playing them*. So I should have said "currently play a character" to be more precise. This was just supposed to be rhetoric since you insist on framing this shift as *personal loss* in every post. I wanted to flip that on its head and point out how narrow that perspective actually is.
Although again, this was not the really the thrust of my post. Overall I was just pointing to like, how losing some stuff actually makes the game better and more fun to play and creates room for new experiences. I also don't know your class though maybe your tree is just really bad and needs more work.
The new talent system is not an augmentation on top of current progression. It is not a replacement for borrowed power. It is a redesign of the current, extremely linear, class power progression achieved through levelling. If you are comparing a level 60 in Shadowlands, to a level 60 in Dragonflight, and are dissatisfied that the latter characters don't have 'current + 1' things then you are misunderstanding one or more of these things.
You're gonna have to explain your perspective then, because I feel like I understand the new talent trees quite well, and they feel like a whole lot of effort (or outright impossible) to get my character back to where it is right now.
This is what I see:
1) They have pulled spells out of my spellbook and placed them in the talent tree.
2) They have taken the old talents and put them in the new talent tree.
3) They have taken some of the passives out of my spellbook and put them in the talent tree.
4) They have taken things from borrowed power, such as conduit nodes, azerite powers, artifact powers, set bonuses, and covenant abilities, and put them on the talent tree.
It's items #1 and #3 on my list that I take issue with, because that means they are removing things that are a permanent feature of my character, and making them into optional and/or missable nodes on the talent tree.
Right now as a destruction warlock I have both Conflagrate and Rain of Fire in my spellbook. Both spells are a permanent part of my class. In the Dragonflight talent tree, those are not a permanent part of my class, but are instead optional talents. Maybe those specific spells aren't the best example since they're so close to the top that they can be taken with ease. But there are other examples further down the tree that are not so easy. Like Summon Infernal. Now Summon Infernal is not a part of the core class kit. It's near the bottom of the tree, and is much easier to miss depending on how you spec. So in that case, I could potentially be losing Summon Infernal. Losing. As in right now it's core to my class and in the future it is not. Explain to me how this new system is better? Explain to me how this new system isn't exactly my Santa Claus analogy where they're taking something away from me and then forcing me to pick whether I want that thing back or want something new instead.
You're gonna have to explain your perspective then, because I feel like I understand the new talent trees quite well, and they feel like a whole lot of effort to get my character back to where it is right now.
This is what I see:
1) They have pulled spells out of my spellbook and placed them in the talent tree.
2) They have taken the old talents and put them in the new talent tree.
3) They have taken some of the passives out of my spellbook and put them in the talent tree.
4) They have taken things from borrowed power, such as conduit nodes, azerite powers, artifact powers, set bonuses, and covenant abilities, and put them on the talent tree.
It's items #1 and #3 on my list that I take issue with, because that means they are removing things that are a permanent feature of my character, and making them into optional and/or missable nodes on the talent tree.
Right now as a destruction warlock I have both Conflagrate and Rain of Fire in my spellbook. Both spells are a permanent part of my class. In the Dragonflight talent tree, those are not a permanent part of my class, but are instead optional talents. Maybe those specific spells aren't the best example since they're so close to the top that they can be taken with ease. But there are other examples further down the tree that are not so easy. Like Summon Infernal. Now Summon Infernal is not a part of the core class kit. It's near the bottom of the tree, and is much easier to miss depending on how you spec. So in that case, I could potentially be losing Summon Infernal. Losing. As in right now it's core to my class and in the future it is not. Explain to me how this new system is better? Explain to me how this new system isn't exactly my Santa Claus analogy where they're taking something away from me and then forcing me to pick whether I want that thing back or want something new instead.
It's better because not everyone agrees with you on what tools the class should have.
If you like all of the tools that your class has now, you can still have those tools. If you think 'Warlocks should have something else instead of Conflagrate, Rain of Fire, or Summon Infernal, they can pick different ones.
The current 'permanent parts of my class' are themselves a replacement of the original talent system. They're not laws of nature, they looked at the talents that people typically picked for each class/spec, and said 'well if everyone is taking them anyway, we'll just make them baseline.'
If your assessment over whether the new talent system is good or bad is to look at the number of tools that a class has at any given level, and come to the conclusion that because the number is the same in Shadowlands and Dragonflight, that Dragonflight isn't 'better'. The metrics of the assessment are wrong, when the goal is for them to be the same number of tools and perks, but the collection of them is different.
The reason your analogy doesn't work, is that you will continue to get more point from 60-70, so you will still end up with 'more' once you hit the new level cap. So you'll still end up being able to pick a 'new' gift from Santa, while also being able to decide if you want to keep the bike that you currently have, or maybe over the course of the last year, trade in your bike for something else, if it turns out you don't really like riding a bike that much.
There's only a couple of real issues I have with the talent trees.
First are 3 point nodes. They just feel bad regardless of what the talent is. Not only is putting 3 points into a single node that just does slight bumps to the numbers on the talent extremely boring compared to using them on interesting 1 or 2 point talents, but they almost never feel worth it. What you get from putting an extra point into those talents is way less than what you get for putting a single point into a different talent. As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter what the talent is, if it's a 3 point then the dev has messed up.
Second, and this ties into the above issue, you have to max out a talent to get to the stuff below it. You can't just buy one rank of a talent to get to the stuff you care about past it, but if it's a 2 or 3 point talent you gotta commit that many points into it. So now you have situations where even if a talent is good you could very well route around it simply because it requires 3 points and another on the branch only takes 1 even if that talent is garbage for your build.
Third, a lot of trees feel really restrictive. You get locked into certain branches and have few connections that let you cross over to get talents from the other side of the tree. Mage is real bad about this where you build down one side of the tree and if you want something from the other side you have to save up the points to start from the top and go down the other side. It would feel a lot better if the trees were more connected so you could have the flexibility to jump around the tree.
Honestly, I'd be okay with just adding like 3 more rows to the current talent tree and calling it a day. Put the things we're losing from borrowed power onto the current talent tree let that be it. I'm not a rose tinted glasses nostalgia person who yearns for the days of classic. Classic was bad. Now is better (minus the borrowed power.) Classic's trees still had an optimal path and a mathematically correct way to build your character for maximum DPS, and the new trees will be exactly the same. Once people figure out the number tunings on some of the "NYI" abilities and such, there will be a correct path for raid, a correct path for M+, and a correct path for when you need a bit of utility. They're not improving anything at all with this new talent tree. They're just going back to more nodes. But more nodes does not automatically equate to "better." It's still all an illusion of choice, trumped by mathematics.
I also want to dig into this a little more - because I am one of the people who very much helped establish this culture of thinking, way back in 2006, and I am constantly surprised that this philosophy still persists so many years later, when so much about the game is different.
Many games are a lot fuzzier with their tier lists and power rankings. Why did WoW start treating its builds like there was only one perfect, mathematically correct choice? It's really just because for the first ~6 years of the game's life, maybe more, the game was extremely simple, extremely solvable, extremely badly balanced, and class mechanics were completely unchallenging. Most raid bosses were single target, a lot of dps rotations were very slow or just used a single button. Basically everyone is capable of chain-casting shadowbolt, and TBC shadowbolt builds were stupid overpowered, so there was no room for differentiations in player ability when it came to just pressing the buttons. Executing on raid mechanics was challenging, but the game didn't really give you any options there that intersected with how you could do DPS. You had really only one option, and a number of ways to tweak that option - but any gains made by optimizing the build math were distributed evenly across the playerbase, since none of these things had dependency on individual execution, OR encounter design. Easy game, easy life, as they say.
So nowadays, achieving your character's maximum theoretical dps is uh, a LOT harder, to put it lightly. Encounters are more complicated, and there are also more options to work around things. You have mobility spells to cast on the go. More fallback damage abilities to cover gaps and mistakes. You can cast faster spells, or slower spells, and choosing at the correct time to not get interrupted is vital. You have big cooldowns, and timing them well, getting the best number of them in, not getting interrupted are extremely important. M+ meanwhile, is so complex and varied that it wasn't even simmable as of 9.0 Shadowlands. Attempts are being made to best-guess it but they'll be nowhere near as perfectly accurate as the old TBC raid dps models of yore. Because in spite of theorycraft becoming massively better, the increased complexity of the game itself beats it out has made the models weaker and less attuned to real players. There is enough going on that the number of players who can achieve actual perfect DPS is vanishingly small. Roughly if you assume KSM of the expansion's first season as a decent proxy for having excellent mastery of your class and DPS, that's about 5% of players according to stats I could find (as of 9.0 shadowlands). Perfection is an actually higher bar.
Now there is of course still a meta in the modern game. Every game has a meta. However, one of the big things contributing to the stale meta in retail was the massive investment it took to actually use a build. There's a certain player personality type that really likes to innovate and go against the grain, and when it takes a massive sink of gold and covenant rep and grinding to actually do that, that innovation becomes heavily stifled. Just to give you an idea, there is a weird arcane mage cycle involving skipping rune of power and using the barrage execute legendary to get full mobility for phase 3 Denathrius that was arguably the best possible mage build for that fight. It wasn't discovered until several months into the expansion because any serious player had to quickly lock themselves in to the established fire mage meta early on, but the build would have been extremely useful for high end Mythic raiders, as phase 3 Denathrius was a big choke point. Progression raiding, by the way, tends to favor different types of builds than the warcraftlog dps contests that occur after things are on farm. Just to further point that the game is not really mathematically solved anymore.
Anyway, the game doesn't really have "mathematically perfect builds" anymore, there are just too many factors. It definitely has a meta though! Every game has a meta, but if the balance team does a good job, it won't be nearly as rigid or as stale as you think. One thing Dragonflight has going for it, by the way, is since the players aren't investing a bunch of grind into their skill loadouts anymore, Blizz will likely be more aggressive about making small balance tweaks. Or at least they should be. Since material player investment was their reasoning for mostly holding off on balance updates during Shadowlands patches.
If the preference is to just have little/no choice, have the game give you the tools, say 'use them precisely in this way' and have that be the end of it, then sure, yeah, the talent trees aren't going to feel good, if you're just going to be focusing on the talents that are still grey rather than building the kind of character that you want. And I'm sure there will still be 'best builds' that smart people will figure out, and 95% of players will run with 100% of the time.
But the whole idea of classes 'losing' core parts of their kit is a notion that doesn't really bare fruit based on any of the trees that have been revealed so far. It's possible based on tuning I guess, but I doubt it.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
I cannot imagine, for example, doing Windwalker DPS while having access to the entire available tree. My brain would melt.
Brewmaster, which is what I play most and have looked at the trees, really only loses the 4pc tier bonus from its current state - because that ability is just not represented in the 10.0 builds so far - but other than that I can build my current loadout and have leftover points for: diffuse magic (!!), dampen harm, healing elixir, charred passions, shadowboxing treads (imported from torghast powers) and some new brewmaster-specific abilities like anvil and stave. That's a lot of new toys to play with on top of what I already had available! That's cool! And I can build out completely differently for different encounter types or requirements. The talent trees being structured the way they are gives me access to combinations of former legendary powers that I couldn't ever have had prior to 10.0. That's fun to me and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do.
Tynnan on
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Right now as a destruction warlock I have both Conflagrate and Rain of Fire in my spellbook. Both spells are a permanent part of my class. In the Dragonflight talent tree, those are not a permanent part of my class, but are instead optional talents. Maybe those specific spells aren't the best example since they're so close to the top that they can be taken with ease. But there are other examples further down the tree that are not so easy. Like Summon Infernal. Now Summon Infernal is not a part of the core class kit. It's near the bottom of the tree, and is much easier to miss depending on how you spec. So in that case, I could potentially be losing Summon Infernal. Losing. As in right now it's core to my class and in the future it is not. Explain to me how this new system is better? Explain to me how this new system isn't exactly my Santa Claus analogy where they're taking something away from me and then forcing me to pick whether I want that thing back or want something new instead.
As someone whose played Warlock for whole months longer than you, Summon Infernal is... not that interesting of a button. It does big dam but only part of it that actually changes your gameplay is the soul shard generation and that's not a very big effect for a 3minute cooldown. The tier set makes it nutso but no one expected that to come back... except it actually kind of did and you can take both the combo abilities for an AoE build, which is actually insane.
I dunno... I can see where you're coming from and it's not unreasonable, I just think you need to focus a lot less on what entries in a spellbook you're potentially losing and more on how the class could potentially play. Dragonflight Warlock is looking pretty damn good -- Destro in particular carries a lot of the tier set bonuses forward, which is pretty insane as that's very much an "end of expansion" style ability set.
Anyways, fundamentally the thing you want isn't going to happen because Blizzard hasn't expanded classes like that since Cataclysm and it only worked back then because classes were... really, really boring. WoW class design between expansions has always been transformative rather than iterative.
the new system is better because it incorporates most of the stuff they've come up with in the last few expansions; it's impractical to let players have all of it (especially in perpetuity), so now rather than having most of those abilities just be lost to time you can choose between them.
summon infernal is now a talent; if you want to take it then great. If you don't, well, you've got other options in that part of the tree to pick from instead. You can't currently have (say) soul rot and decimating bolt at the same time; you might like to, but we understand that part of making 'building' a character interesting is having tradeoffs.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Honestly, I'd be okay with just adding like 3 more rows to the current talent tree and calling it a day. Put the things we're losing from borrowed power onto the current talent tree let that be it. I'm not a rose tinted glasses nostalgia person who yearns for the days of classic. Classic was bad. Now is better (minus the borrowed power.) Classic's trees still had an optimal path and a mathematically correct way to build your character for maximum DPS, and the new trees will be exactly the same. Once people figure out the number tunings on some of the "NYI" abilities and such, there will be a correct path for raid, a correct path for M+, and a correct path for when you need a bit of utility. They're not improving anything at all with this new talent tree. They're just going back to more nodes. But more nodes does not automatically equate to "better." It's still all an illusion of choice, trumped by mathematics.
I also want to dig into this a little more - because I am one of the people who very much helped establish this culture of thinking, way back in 2006, and I am constantly surprised that this philosophy still persists so many years later, when so much about the game is different.
Many games are a lot fuzzier with their tier lists and power rankings. Why did WoW start treating its builds like there was only one perfect, mathematically correct choice? It's really just because for the first ~6 years of the game's life, maybe more, the game was extremely simple, extremely solvable, extremely badly balanced, and class mechanics were completely unchallenging.
I'd argue it didn't take that long for things to become challenging, at least for some specs. Hell, the Feral Druid John Fucking Madden meme was birthed in WotLK, which was only about 4 years into the game's life.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Feral Druid was probably the most complex WOTLK spec by far though, which is why it became a meme.
Cataclysm is where the game starts to look more like modern WoW, where classes like Ret Paladin gained a resource and mana was de-emphasized, and from MoP on it starts to look like variations on a theme.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
There's a reason why Wrath is generally seen as the end of the 'classic' wow aesthetic.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
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At the same time, there's never been a point in WoW's history where there weren't classes or specs that were left behind. Whether because Blizzard doesn't have an idea for it (Feral) they have ideas but the implementation is a mess (Monk) or everything plays fine but the tuning is terrible (Balance Druid) there have been bad classes even at the peaks of WoW. We can hope this'll be the time they figure it all out... but it's probably not. They're still understaffed for the amount of work that class design demands, as evidenced by the fact that one person quit and multiple classes have been trapped because of it.
(Of course, it's also true that Blizzard could do everything right and there would still be people unhappy that their class/spec doesn't work exactly the same way it did in <expansion>. Both of these facts can be true at the same time.)
tl;dr I understand people on both sides of the argument and the only perspectives I think are truly "wrong" are the extreme doomers and the extreme optimists.
it's a new meme format
See your issue here is being passionate about Feral. You only have yourself to blame for that one.
There's an image that has been floating around recently of a woman yelling very closely into a distressed/uninterested guy's ear, and it has become (yet another) meme about a captive audience having to listen to something they clearly have no interest in.
If this was some dragonflight only system I would generally agree, but this is a direction that will be the foundation of class design for the entire of this game moving forward. It's not unusual to have the new format involve your talent tree giving you a huge chunk of your characters power overall, rather than it all been given to you baseline or with expansion specific systems like it has for the last five expansions
Also, for anyone who already has a level 60 character it doesn't matter because you should have enough points to just get it all back when you log in, barring a few instances here and there where an ability might be at the bottom of the tree, in which case you'll have to wait 10 levels to get them back.
Oh you've had a pitlord pet before? And a non-pet interrupt?
...also yes i have had a pitlord because of enslave demon lmao, the entire green fire quest was about enslaving and managing a pitlord :V
I guess it's more of a fun concept than good idea, though. That would have to be a pretty radically different play style for the class.
I agree, but there are some egregious examples like every Paladin spec spending 3+ points just so wings does what it does right now.
But that’s less a problem of “paying for what you already have” and more “mandatory picks that don’t do anything aren’t fun.”
it's silly to get specifically fixated on how many points need to be spent on this or that ability, or what currently inherent abilities were made talents per se. At least on the classes I'm familiar with you almost always can get more 'stuff' than they have now, and in more possible combinations.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
And those points are giving you the aspect of it that was a level up rank added to it.
Which is... what trees are. They are leveling up ability gains but you get to choose everything. For every time something is separated into points, its potentially the ability to forgo that part of it for something else instead. That is... the benefit of the trees.
It drives me insane the complaints about "needing to spend points" on getting shit back. Those people are so damned closed minded, and yes I am being overly aggressive about it but like, its killing me. These trees are not the new endgame progression. They are not new borrowed power. They are the new class design. They are replacing level 10+. They flow in a way that you are learning stuff as you go. As was said, you will have something between slightly less than what you have now or slightly more at level 60 and almost always more at 70.
It actually is kind of sad in a way, because people really, really wanted to be rid of borrowed power. But they are so damned used to what it did (which was give the illusion of getting tons of new shit every single expansion) that they have this insatiable need to have "MOAR NEW SHIT".
For me, having combos of stuff we could never combo before is exciting new shit. There were so many talent rows before where you could look at them and think "man how OP would it be if I could get two of these at once?". For a lot of the specs, that is literally happening now. How is that not a new gameplay experience?
Some classes aren't there yet. They still have time to get there, because honestly the only thing it looks like they need to put most of their design work into is these trees. There might be an outlier or two that are kind of a fail. There always is. In any game. Hopefully not but, so far there are a lot more successes than fails IMO.
I fail to see the benefit if I have 23 abilities now (totally made up number for the sake of argument), and I have to spend 23 points to buy all those abilities back. It's not a benefit of a tree. It's just a different presentation of the same thing. And the problem isn't 23 abilities and 23 point spent. The problem is that I've got 23 abilities and I have to spend 45 points to get all those back because of filler nodes, bad pathing on the tree, passives that are currently just in my spellbook, and so forth.) (Again, completely made up numbers for the sake of the argument.)
Sorry I'm driving you insane, but maybe you're the one being close minded? Filling out a tree just to get my character back to where they are right now in retail is not inherently better, and it isn't even inherently more choice. In some cases, the new trees make it more difficult or even impossible to get back to where I am right now. That's not choice. That's actually loss.
Right. And nobody is claiming otherwise. I am fully aware that this new talent tree takes the place of the old talent tree and the borrowed power systems at the same time. But that fact doesn't change the fact that I feel it is a worse design to spec into abilities that right now are core class abilities that I get for free just for being a level 60. And in most cases, lose abilities that I get for free just for being a level 60. That's the part you keep repeatedly missing. This tree is not better than the current system, because as I fill out the tree and place points, I am losing things that I have now. My character is forgetting things and getting weaker. That's the heart of the problem here. If ability X is on the far left side of the tree, and ability Y is on the far right side of the tree, and in retail I have both of those right now, it is a lot harder (or impossible in some cases) to have both of them in the future. That's the crux of the issue.
I should be able to fill out the talent calculator up to level 60 and get my character exactly back to where they are right now in retail. Exactly. Otherwise its a nerf. Then, when I reach level 70, those remaining 10 new talent points should make me stronger than I am right now at level 60, since it's a higher level. But that's not what happens. Right now, if you spec up to level 60 and stop (which is where all of us will begin Dragonflight), we are going to be losing abilities and powers because there are not enough points to buy back everything we have right now. Then we spend level 61-70 to reclaim that lost power. And by the time your trees are complete at level 70, your overall power in whatever your primary role is will be slightly higher, but you've also lost a lot of cross-spec versatility along the way because there's just not enough points to get back everything you have right now.
How is that different from now, where as you level up you get new abilities and learn as you go? They don't dump the whole spellbook on a fresh character right now either. This point is irrelevant because it doesn't do anything they're not already doing right now.
I'm one of the voices against the new trees and never once have I said "MOAR NEW SHIT." I just would like to keep the shit I have now, thank you very much.
Honestly, I'd be okay with just adding like 3 more rows to the current talent tree and calling it a day. Put the things we're losing from borrowed power onto the current talent tree let that be it. I'm not a rose tinted glasses nostalgia person who yearns for the days of classic. Classic was bad. Now is better (minus the borrowed power.) Classic's trees still had an optimal path and a mathematically correct way to build your character for maximum DPS, and the new trees will be exactly the same. Once people figure out the number tunings on some of the "NYI" abilities and such, there will be a correct path for raid, a correct path for M+, and a correct path for when you need a bit of utility. They're not improving anything at all with this new talent tree. They're just going back to more nodes. But more nodes does not automatically equate to "better." It's still all an illusion of choice, trumped by mathematics.
Edit: I forgot to add that borrowed power is also bad, and losing a bunch of power at the start of a new expansion is bad. Both are bad. Losing power in general is bad. Losing borrowed power: bad. Losing abilities I have right now in my spellbook with the new talent tree: also bad. They are not mutually exclusive. Both are bad.
Blizzard should never have started down the road of expansion-long borrowed power, and also Blizzard should not be taking core class abilities away from me right now in Dragonflight.
The problem is that you currently have a character in WoW retail. If you didn't have a character there would be no "loss", this would just be a new system to try out the next time you play.
I am only half joking. Framing everything about your personal power progression is so incredibly stifling as a *long term* design philosophy it can't be taken seriously. This game is ~15 years old. The human body/mind, and the design space both, do not have utterly limitless capacity for new abilities and to constantly get more and more. This also doesn't make for very good games. So you can get every utility ability designed for your class in Shadowlands right now - who cares, Shadowlands is a bad game.
Ability bloat, and lack of build choice and variety, are a big reason why. Think of it this way, if you can access every single utility spell at once, then that is what the game expects of you. The expectation is that you have all those abilities bound, practiced, and ready to use at all times. Not getting to have all of them at once *improves the play experience* because *the expectations are lowered*. There is more mental and physical room for new combinations of different abilities that, even if they were possible before, would have been burdensome because of the lack of space. Having to pick a loadout, wherein the player has to choose which of their abilities to take with them on a case-by-case basis, is an extremely natural system that both solves the immediate problem with the game's scale, and also encourages the player to think, prepare, and make meaningful choices.
Your character does not directly benefit from being forced to make that choice. But the player experience actually does, and I can't really overstate how much of a game changer of fun factor the new system is. Sometimes getting nerfed actually makes things better.
Back in vanilla I was not geared as many but I would wreck people in pvp like pushing in AV I would dot up so many and watch them fall with shadowburn [I had a macro that hitting it I would emote snapping my fingers}
But in WoD I did not play affliction as I was very underwhelmed by it so I ran around in demo. I figured out how to put out imps galore with a combo of buttons and the talent so in the hellfire raid i crashed half the raid having according to the GM 278 imps out. He told me I was probably one of the handful of players Demo was getting a massive overhaul
I have not played it since as I don't know how to play it {I played it a bit in legion}
Cata was another because I was so undergeared I could not do dailies as affliction and the felguard was decent
I am quite curious how affliction will be in Dragonflight
I have not raided since Legion as I am just not feeling like it anymore since pre this last patch I would wait hours in the que for a messy run walking away often with a repair bill
You can spend those 23 points to relearn everything you currently have, sure, but you can also use them to learn things that you don't currently have, but maybe wish that you did instead? You're treating the new talent trees like the artifact weapon trees in Legion, when they aren't that.
So they should design the game for a minority of hypothetical new players who might or might not join an 18+ year old game, over designing for the current players who are here right now and are not hypothetical and will be starting the expansion at level 60?
The whole "new players learn as they spend points" is such a weak strawman argument, because there are a whole lot less new players than existing ones. Plus it doesn't take a talent tree to parcel out new abilities to fresh characters. The game already does that right now just through the basic level up process. The new talent tree isn't doing anything new for the level 10 character.
No, I'm treating it as losing things I currently have right now.
Pulling something that I get guaranteed right now out of my spellbook and putting it as an optional node on a talent tree is not helping me. It's forcing me to pick between something I currently have right now by default, and something that I might not, or something that is currently a borrowed power item. This isn't helping me. It's taking something away from me and then giving me a choice of whether I want to keep the thing I already had, or take something new.
Santa Claus: "Merry Christmas, Lucas, here's a new bike. It is yours and you have it now. It is a thing that you own that you got and now it is yours. Have fun."
Next year Santa Claus: "Remember that bike I gave you that is yours and you own it and have been using it for the past year, well now you have to choose if you want to keep that bike or if you want to have this lego set instead."
You really have no idea what's been going on with the game recently do you?
Also I... literally never said anything about parceling about abilities to new player. At no point in my post did I even talk about new players, at all. o_O
You said, and I quote: "if you didn't have a character there would be no loss."
If I didn't have a character, I would be a new player, no? If I didn't have a character, that would mean I wouldn't have been playing. It would mean I didn't have a level 60 ready to enter Dragonflight on day 1 as a level 60. But I'm not a new player, and I do have a level 60 (multiple actually) ready to go on day 1 of Dragonflight. So there is loss. This isn't some hypothetical situation where I'm somehow coming into Dragonflight without the existence of a character but also am not a new player. I don't know how one would accomplish such a feat, but it isn't happening, so it doesn't matter. Your wacky hypothetical doesn't exist.
None of this really has anything to do with the talent system though.
Elaborate on this. Because this feels like an attack, and one without any substance since I've clearly been playing the game, clearly been following the Dragonflight alpha, and clearly been actively involved in researching the new talent trees online.
Okay, so yeah, you aren't comprehending what the purpose of the new talent system is. That actually helps a lot in contextualizing your posts, thanks.
This thread is becoming a mess of desynced replies - I explained in a different reply that my hypothetical is a literal majority. Most of the players do have characters, but are not *currently playing them*. So I should have said "currently play a character" to be more precise. This was just supposed to be rhetoric since you insist on framing this shift as *personal loss* in every post. I wanted to flip that on its head and point out how narrow that perspective actually is.
Although again, this was not the really the thrust of my post. Overall I was just pointing to like, how losing some stuff actually makes the game better and more fun to play and creates room for new experiences. I also don't know your class though maybe your tree is just really bad and needs more work.
This is what I see:
1) They have pulled spells out of my spellbook and placed them in the talent tree.
2) They have taken the old talents and put them in the new talent tree.
3) They have taken some of the passives out of my spellbook and put them in the talent tree.
4) They have taken things from borrowed power, such as conduit nodes, azerite powers, artifact powers, set bonuses, and covenant abilities, and put them on the talent tree.
It's items #1 and #3 on my list that I take issue with, because that means they are removing things that are a permanent feature of my character, and making them into optional and/or missable nodes on the talent tree.
Right now as a destruction warlock I have both Conflagrate and Rain of Fire in my spellbook. Both spells are a permanent part of my class. In the Dragonflight talent tree, those are not a permanent part of my class, but are instead optional talents. Maybe those specific spells aren't the best example since they're so close to the top that they can be taken with ease. But there are other examples further down the tree that are not so easy. Like Summon Infernal. Now Summon Infernal is not a part of the core class kit. It's near the bottom of the tree, and is much easier to miss depending on how you spec. So in that case, I could potentially be losing Summon Infernal. Losing. As in right now it's core to my class and in the future it is not. Explain to me how this new system is better? Explain to me how this new system isn't exactly my Santa Claus analogy where they're taking something away from me and then forcing me to pick whether I want that thing back or want something new instead.
It's better because not everyone agrees with you on what tools the class should have.
If you like all of the tools that your class has now, you can still have those tools. If you think 'Warlocks should have something else instead of Conflagrate, Rain of Fire, or Summon Infernal, they can pick different ones.
The current 'permanent parts of my class' are themselves a replacement of the original talent system. They're not laws of nature, they looked at the talents that people typically picked for each class/spec, and said 'well if everyone is taking them anyway, we'll just make them baseline.'
If your assessment over whether the new talent system is good or bad is to look at the number of tools that a class has at any given level, and come to the conclusion that because the number is the same in Shadowlands and Dragonflight, that Dragonflight isn't 'better'. The metrics of the assessment are wrong, when the goal is for them to be the same number of tools and perks, but the collection of them is different.
The reason your analogy doesn't work, is that you will continue to get more point from 60-70, so you will still end up with 'more' once you hit the new level cap. So you'll still end up being able to pick a 'new' gift from Santa, while also being able to decide if you want to keep the bike that you currently have, or maybe over the course of the last year, trade in your bike for something else, if it turns out you don't really like riding a bike that much.
First are 3 point nodes. They just feel bad regardless of what the talent is. Not only is putting 3 points into a single node that just does slight bumps to the numbers on the talent extremely boring compared to using them on interesting 1 or 2 point talents, but they almost never feel worth it. What you get from putting an extra point into those talents is way less than what you get for putting a single point into a different talent. As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter what the talent is, if it's a 3 point then the dev has messed up.
Second, and this ties into the above issue, you have to max out a talent to get to the stuff below it. You can't just buy one rank of a talent to get to the stuff you care about past it, but if it's a 2 or 3 point talent you gotta commit that many points into it. So now you have situations where even if a talent is good you could very well route around it simply because it requires 3 points and another on the branch only takes 1 even if that talent is garbage for your build.
Third, a lot of trees feel really restrictive. You get locked into certain branches and have few connections that let you cross over to get talents from the other side of the tree. Mage is real bad about this where you build down one side of the tree and if you want something from the other side you have to save up the points to start from the top and go down the other side. It would feel a lot better if the trees were more connected so you could have the flexibility to jump around the tree.
I also want to dig into this a little more - because I am one of the people who very much helped establish this culture of thinking, way back in 2006, and I am constantly surprised that this philosophy still persists so many years later, when so much about the game is different.
Many games are a lot fuzzier with their tier lists and power rankings. Why did WoW start treating its builds like there was only one perfect, mathematically correct choice? It's really just because for the first ~6 years of the game's life, maybe more, the game was extremely simple, extremely solvable, extremely badly balanced, and class mechanics were completely unchallenging. Most raid bosses were single target, a lot of dps rotations were very slow or just used a single button. Basically everyone is capable of chain-casting shadowbolt, and TBC shadowbolt builds were stupid overpowered, so there was no room for differentiations in player ability when it came to just pressing the buttons. Executing on raid mechanics was challenging, but the game didn't really give you any options there that intersected with how you could do DPS. You had really only one option, and a number of ways to tweak that option - but any gains made by optimizing the build math were distributed evenly across the playerbase, since none of these things had dependency on individual execution, OR encounter design. Easy game, easy life, as they say.
So nowadays, achieving your character's maximum theoretical dps is uh, a LOT harder, to put it lightly. Encounters are more complicated, and there are also more options to work around things. You have mobility spells to cast on the go. More fallback damage abilities to cover gaps and mistakes. You can cast faster spells, or slower spells, and choosing at the correct time to not get interrupted is vital. You have big cooldowns, and timing them well, getting the best number of them in, not getting interrupted are extremely important. M+ meanwhile, is so complex and varied that it wasn't even simmable as of 9.0 Shadowlands. Attempts are being made to best-guess it but they'll be nowhere near as perfectly accurate as the old TBC raid dps models of yore. Because in spite of theorycraft becoming massively better, the increased complexity of the game itself beats it out has made the models weaker and less attuned to real players. There is enough going on that the number of players who can achieve actual perfect DPS is vanishingly small. Roughly if you assume KSM of the expansion's first season as a decent proxy for having excellent mastery of your class and DPS, that's about 5% of players according to stats I could find (as of 9.0 shadowlands). Perfection is an actually higher bar.
Now there is of course still a meta in the modern game. Every game has a meta. However, one of the big things contributing to the stale meta in retail was the massive investment it took to actually use a build. There's a certain player personality type that really likes to innovate and go against the grain, and when it takes a massive sink of gold and covenant rep and grinding to actually do that, that innovation becomes heavily stifled. Just to give you an idea, there is a weird arcane mage cycle involving skipping rune of power and using the barrage execute legendary to get full mobility for phase 3 Denathrius that was arguably the best possible mage build for that fight. It wasn't discovered until several months into the expansion because any serious player had to quickly lock themselves in to the established fire mage meta early on, but the build would have been extremely useful for high end Mythic raiders, as phase 3 Denathrius was a big choke point. Progression raiding, by the way, tends to favor different types of builds than the warcraftlog dps contests that occur after things are on farm. Just to further point that the game is not really mathematically solved anymore.
Anyway, the game doesn't really have "mathematically perfect builds" anymore, there are just too many factors. It definitely has a meta though! Every game has a meta, but if the balance team does a good job, it won't be nearly as rigid or as stale as you think. One thing Dragonflight has going for it, by the way, is since the players aren't investing a bunch of grind into their skill loadouts anymore, Blizz will likely be more aggressive about making small balance tweaks. Or at least they should be.
But the whole idea of classes 'losing' core parts of their kit is a notion that doesn't really bare fruit based on any of the trees that have been revealed so far. It's possible based on tuning I guess, but I doubt it.
Brewmaster, which is what I play most and have looked at the trees, really only loses the 4pc tier bonus from its current state - because that ability is just not represented in the 10.0 builds so far - but other than that I can build my current loadout and have leftover points for: diffuse magic (!!), dampen harm, healing elixir, charred passions, shadowboxing treads (imported from torghast powers) and some new brewmaster-specific abilities like anvil and stave. That's a lot of new toys to play with on top of what I already had available! That's cool! And I can build out completely differently for different encounter types or requirements. The talent trees being structured the way they are gives me access to combinations of former legendary powers that I couldn't ever have had prior to 10.0. That's fun to me and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do.
As someone whose played Warlock for whole months longer than you, Summon Infernal is... not that interesting of a button. It does big dam but only part of it that actually changes your gameplay is the soul shard generation and that's not a very big effect for a 3minute cooldown. The tier set makes it nutso but no one expected that to come back... except it actually kind of did and you can take both the combo abilities for an AoE build, which is actually insane.
I dunno... I can see where you're coming from and it's not unreasonable, I just think you need to focus a lot less on what entries in a spellbook you're potentially losing and more on how the class could potentially play. Dragonflight Warlock is looking pretty damn good -- Destro in particular carries a lot of the tier set bonuses forward, which is pretty insane as that's very much an "end of expansion" style ability set.
Anyways, fundamentally the thing you want isn't going to happen because Blizzard hasn't expanded classes like that since Cataclysm and it only worked back then because classes were... really, really boring. WoW class design between expansions has always been transformative rather than iterative.
summon infernal is now a talent; if you want to take it then great. If you don't, well, you've got other options in that part of the tree to pick from instead. You can't currently have (say) soul rot and decimating bolt at the same time; you might like to, but we understand that part of making 'building' a character interesting is having tradeoffs.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Cataclysm is where the game starts to look more like modern WoW, where classes like Ret Paladin gained a resource and mana was de-emphasized, and from MoP on it starts to look like variations on a theme.