Breakfast Topic: Did the talent tree reboot work?
by Daniel Greene 
May 14th 2011 at 8:00AM
Here we are, many months and now nearly two major content patches since Blizzard took the radical plan to completely redesign the talent trees across the board. As someone who's played since vanilla launched, the entire concept kind of felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. There was quite a vocal opposition from the forums (like the forums ever do anything except voice opposition) of the "death of the multi-spec," and I admit, I always wanted to get a really good mage elementist build.
Fast forward to now -- for the most part, the pure DPS trees are relatively well balanced (sub rogues aside). I like the overall design around the hunter trees. All do similar DPS with a reasonably skilled player, but each has its strengths; BM is good for movement fights, survival is good for adds/AOE, and marksman does exceptionally well if they can stand still at the start. The hybrid classes are substantially harder to balance, as their target is not across their own tree but across other trees. The tank specs are measured against each other, the healers against each other, and the DPS trees are kind of out on their own, as balancing them against different classes is much more difficult than a separate tree within the same class.
Is the verdict finally in? Did the talent tree reboot work or not? Do you miss your multi-tree builds? Did the simplification of the talent trees really create more or fewer cookie cutter specs?
Filed under: Guest Posts, Breakfast Topics
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Udderpowered May 14th 2011 8:02AM
I love the change, making things simpler (but not too simple) whilst making things easier to balance for the devs can't be a bad thing.
Scott May 16th 2011 3:39PM
Simpler? Yes. Less daunting for new players? Definitely. More fun? Eh...possibly.
For the most part, I like the talent tree streamlining. What I don't like is the "lockout" method the trees use to keep you from confusing yourself until you put 31 points in it.
Take frost mages, for example. Pre-4.0, "Torment the Weak" was actually a far more powerful investment of talent points than some of the deeper frost tree talents because of how it worked. I remember leveling my mage through Northrend and topping out TtW long before I ever picked up Deep Freeze because it was just far more valuable for leveling. What would you rather have, a permanent 15% damage increase or the ability to freeze a mob in place for a few seconds?
Lockout-based systems prevent that level of creative evaluation, and its a shame. Perhaps in the future Blizzard will implement an "Advanced WoW User" mode that won't lockout your talent trees. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Scunosi May 14th 2011 1:00PM
Yeah, I kinda agree with Scott here. I mean I'm glad I'm not seeing any more stupid builds that're a three-way split (like my first toon; admit it we all did it at one point!) and I'm also happy I have the freedom to get "PvP" talents in my PvE build, but I do think it took a lot of choice and flavor out of the matter.
I mean, these days every moonkin will have about the same spec, plus or minus maybe Solar Beam and which mana talents they took. Back pre-Cata there were a number of talent builds, especially when it came to PvP, as we could dive into Resto for the famous Restokin build, or maybe into Feral for more armor and I think Surv. Instincts. And Feral Charge!
Maybe it's just 'cuz I play a Druid so I don't like being tied down to one thing, but by taking away a lot of our choices talents are kind of boring now. I only ever ask for help about talents when I need to know which mana-saving talent I can ditch first (since they all are kinda lame); I guess this is a good thing for newbies, but once you get the hang of it it just seems too strict.
Skarn May 14th 2011 2:23PM
Though part of it is certainly "helping new players," another part of it is just balancing. If you aren't locked to a tree then you could grab a spec's signature ability and other bonuses, but put all your talents into another tree.
For example, start Survival, but put all your points into Marksman and pick up Chimera Shot. That might be a very strong combo that would skew PvP balance. Or it might not be that great since some talents in Marks support Aimed Shot (skip Master Marks for sure). On the other hand, you could start BM and then go down Survival's tree. That would be a pretty anemic spec. Losing Explosive shot to pick up Intimidation probably isn't gonna work well.
I'm absolutely certain that there are several people out there that would have a blast trying to figure out which of these spec combos would be best, but it's a balancing nightmare. So Blizzard locks you to a spec to make balancing the specs a lot easier.
kingoomieiii May 14th 2011 11:29PM
I understand the issue, but I don't mind the lockout so much. The problem with having 30 points' worth of attractive talents at the top of all the trees is, you're level 40 and you STILL don't really know how a talent tree "should" look. I had that problem with my first deathknight- 10p into frost, 15 in unholy, 10 blood... STILL don't have a rotation.
Now, with a granted ability for each spec and a talent lockout, you're forced to look inside this little window for your choices. It really forced me to look at how to put a spec together in each tree, rather than making me min-max each point out of 10-15 choices.
Cathon May 14th 2011 8:12AM
I'd say, by and large, they were pretty successful. As a protection warrior in bc and wrath, there was the right spec, and all the others were wrong. In cataclysm it feels like you have a legitimate choice to make those last few points.
I'd say they're still in need if another revamp. When I was speccing my holy pally for cataclysm, there were alot of pvp specific talents that would be "bad" for a pve player to take. That's not a real choice
MusedMoose May 14th 2011 8:11AM
Hell yes.
To be less succinct: I think the best thing the talent tree reboot did was to make each spec feel different, really feel like that's what you're playing. Getting an ability at level 10 that the other specs don't get really sets each spec apart and adds to how the class is played.
In other words, there's no more "Well, at level 10 I'm now a fire mage, but that just means I crit 1% more than before." Now it's "I'm level 10, and now a fire mage! I can hit you in the face with a giant flaming boulder!"
MusedMoose May 14th 2011 8:14AM
To add, because I forgot:
Streamlining all the talent trees also took out talents that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place. To use the mage trees as an example again, the arcane tree used to have a talent called Wand Specialization, and another that gave the mage more armor based on their Intellect. They were, quite simply, bad talents that had no place in a class that's based around spell DPS, and I never heard of anyone using them. (Someone might have, but I never heard of it.) Taking out stuff like that and making all the talents useful in one way or another was a great step on Blizzard's part, and I'm really glad they did it.
loop_not_defined May 14th 2011 8:16AM
Absolutely. Hitting level 10 and actually *becoming* your spec right away is amazing. Having each talent point actually feel like a big deal (instead of increasing total mana by 1%...) is also very nice.
exogenesis. May 14th 2011 8:41AM
I'm of mixed feelings, but "yes" comes out on top. I enjoy, as someone above me stated, "becoming" my spec immediately, and it's a lot easier to choose talents these days, when only 4-5 in your main tree are left unused.
On the other hand, I miss having new points every level, and I miss having such a big array of different talents to choose from. For me, I had a lot of fun mixing and matching points from the three different trees. I often enjoyed playing "Hybrid Spec" characters, at least until my focus was turned onto damage and raiding.
Definitely mixed feelings, really.
Katherine May 14th 2011 9:09AM
Ah yes, but you level waaay faster, so really you're getting your talent points faster than in the past :P
exogenesis. May 14th 2011 9:32AM
Yeah, but sometimes, you level, and you don't get anything. No talent points, no new abilities ... just a shiny announcement on your screen. Not sure I like that.
Lissanna May 14th 2011 9:57AM
It would have been really impossible to deal with having longer talent trees and tons of talent points. So, while these talent trees still have flaws, they're much more new-player friendly (and more points has never meant more flexibility).
Sanitycrusher May 14th 2011 11:06AM
Even at levels where you don't get a talent point or a new ability you still gain proficiency with your known abilities and increased damage across the board.
To me the fact that my abilities level with me rather than having to constantly switch out the newly trained (rank 2) ability with ones that have not increased in ranks for a few levels more than makes up for any restrictions to the talents.
Skarn May 14th 2011 4:00PM
I think the revamp was a success overall. It met a lot of Blizzard's goals, though there are obviously some elements that some players are not happy with.
One of the bigger things Blizzard was shooting for was making talent trees easier to balance. In this respect, they absolutely succeeded. The most difficult thing for Blizzard to balance was the hybrid-tree specs that some players so mourn. While certainly a fun element for those players, these sort of specs often caused balancing issues. I'm not sure the idea was ever to support going halfway down two specs, even in Vanilla. So when players often came up with a viable spec that dominated PvP or was too strong in PvE they had to scramble to fix it. Probably quite the headache for Blizzard's team. These specs are obviously a thing of the past, so that balance nightmare is no longer a problem.
The passive spec bonuses also making balancing the specs a lot easier. Instead of needing to play with how abilities work, they can just tweak the passive agility boost or healing boost or whatever. Abilities sometimes still need tweaked and in fact, there's been more of that than passive tweaks, but that may be because the passive boosts have already evened things out a lot.
As mentioned, the new specs also largely succeed in helping leveling players feel like their spec right away, which was a design goal.
Where I think the spec re-design failed was in giving players more "floater" talents. Maybe it's better in PvP, but there's not that many floater points in PvE. At least not for hunters. There's still a lot of talents that are damage boosts and thus necessary for PvE. They usually are not flat 5% boosts, but are things like Lock & Load or Master Marksman. Much more interesting than a flat boost, but no less mandatory. This does mean that specs are often still very cookie cutter. This isn't much different from how it was before the revamp, at least for raiders. Even though there were tons of talents and points, there was always a specific "best raid build." Not very much flexibility if you wanted to raid. The revamp hasn't changed that much at all. Oh there ARE some floater points, but only 2-3, which is similar to how it was pre-revamp. It sounded like the revamp was supposed to give you more than that, closer to 5-6. Flexibility in talent builds hasn't changed much, at least for the PvE scene. PvP is obviously a different story with the death of the hybrid builds.
So I do think it met a lot of Blizzard's goals and was a good idea. It could still use a bit more flexibility and floater points though.
Lheim May 14th 2011 8:53AM
I'm simply not sure. For lower levels the talent changes are great..
But for a large number of specs, the amount of free points and choice is as little and as meaningless as ever. This talent revamp thing was hyped as getting rid of 'all your points must go exactly HERE or your spec sucks' type builds.. and it only accomplishes that to a minor, unimpressive degree - it's only alleviated somewhat.
It's awesome and disappointing at the same time, for different reasons. Great for newbies and alts, same old same old for grizzled raiders.
cansylove May 14th 2011 9:52AM
I think raider's having one true spec for each tree is pretty much inevitable. For raiding, there will always be three types of talents: talents that almost always improve performance in your role, utility talents that are useful due to fight specific mechanics, and talents that do nothing. Every spec will take the fight specific talents that they want/need, and then take the basic performance talents in order of decreasing power.
Tanks probably have the most leeway, especially warriors, since for all four specs there are not enough survival talents to absorb all of the points, dps talents can easily be skipped without hurting your raid, and utility talents are not as encounter specific.
Res May 14th 2011 10:21PM
Exactly.. It would be impossible for Blizz to create trees that avoid the whole spec-this-way-or-you-suck mentality just because mathematically one spec will always be more DPS, HPS or mitigation. The new trees simply make it easier to decipher between stuff like PVP and PVE builds rather than trying to figure out if 3% static bonus damage overall or 15% chance to crit on one of your nukes will be more overall DPS.
That said, I am also a little disappointed that by streamlining the talents so much, the choices are pretty much a foregone conclusion. I have no idea how you could fix that though. :)
Deathknighty May 15th 2011 9:12AM
See, the thing that I think they did wrong was that they vastly reduced the number of talents, but they kept roughly the same number of required talents in each tree. I personally think they should have made more rows, but have progressing to the next row of talents only take, say, 3 points spent. The way they have it now makes you need to take most of the talents in a row.
They need to make the trees a little longer. It'd really help the bloat and leave more space for choice.
Ishamaru May 14th 2011 8:56AM
Partially. In one aspect, they succeeded. The new talent system is a godsend for leveling. You actually feel like your spec the moment you hit level 10 and pick one, and you feel unique right away too.
On the other hand, a lot of the talent trees still have a lot of bloat and so called "boring" talents to them. A Druid's Feral tree is an excellent example. So they haven't completely succeeded in that aspect.