Radiant Dark

In a move that is a pretty awesome smokescreen for the RealID debacle yesterday, Blizzard has released updated information on the talent overhaul in Cataclysm.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626290449

The goal for Cataclysm remains to remove a lot of the passive (or lame) talents, but we don't think that's possible with the current tree size. To resolve this, we're reducing each tree to 31-point talents.

Wow. This is huge. This is a 40% reduction in EACH TREE. I'm pretty excited about this. Hopefully this means more opportunities to customize our characters in the overhauled glyph system.

We are also taking a hard look at many of the mandatory PvP talents, such as spell pushback or mechanic duration reductions. While there will always be PvP vs. PvE builds, we’d like for the difference to be less extreme, so that players don’t feel like they necessarily need to spend their second talent specialization on a PvP build.

Another welcome change. I love PVP, but it's always been difficult for me to know which talents I *had* to choose to be viable there.

We want to focus the talent trees towards your chosen style of gameplay right away. That first point you spend in a tree should be very meaningful. If you choose Enhancement, we want you to feel like an Enhancement shaman right away, not thirty talent points later. When talent trees are unlocked at level 10, you will be asked to choose your specialization (e.g. whether you want to be an Arms, Fury or Protection warrior) before spending that first point. Making this choice comes with certain benefits, including whatever passive bonuses you need to be effective in that role, and a signature ability that used to be buried deeper in the talent trees.

SO COOL. Let me say that again. This is VERY cool. Talents used to be something that Blizzard felt added something to the class, but they actually DEFINED the class. This seals the deal. Awesome stuff this.

While leveling, you will get 1 talent point about every 2 levels (41 points total at level 85). Our goal is to alternate between gaining a new class spell or ability and gaining a talent point with each level. As another significant change, you will not be able to put points into a different talent tree until you have dedicated 31 talent points to your primary specialization.

Also very cool. I always felt that it was strange that a "fire" mage would put points into frost or arcane, or that a "combat" rogue would put points into assassination.

All in all, these are AWESOME changes and I'm pretty excited to see how it works out.

I'm intrigued, but I'm not liking the idea of being locked into a single tree until I spent 31 points. The final trees will make or break it.

Usually what we delve into other trees for are the passive talents that they're talking about getting rid of anyway. As a combat rogue, the only points I have in assassination are for passive stuff like increased crit chance or more poison damage.

I am liking the idea of a signature spec move right away at 10.

I am liking spec declaration.

Not sure I like that you only get 41 points total at 85.......unless of course they are removing the multiple points in single tallents....or at least keeping it FLUID. With the passive talents being removed, it makes sense......but every 2 levels.....I guess it all falls down to game flow as you level. Streamlined good, harder to make progress bad.

Dedicated specs is a good idea. More and more you have to go all in and mutt builds work less and less. I like to FEEL like a Fury Warrior, or a BM Hunter, or a Fire Mage, or a Combat Rogue. And this goes hand in hand with their expressed plans to make all specs equally viable for what you want to do, be it raid or pvp of just bang around. A BM Hunter being able to stand side by side with an MM hunter in the raid and not feel completely gimped for DPS, for instance. Each CHARACTOR bringing something to the table in their role, be it DPS, Healing, or Tanking. Now.......if only Fury Wars got stealth.......

Man, am I going to have a lot of respeccing work to do come expansion.

So....can someone with better math skills than I tell me how many talent points a level 80 will have come this new system? I see 31 talent points at 70 listed....41 talent points being the max at 85...so that's 10 more points spread along 15 levels...gah, I'm lost, my brain just blew up. I hate math.

Shay

Either 38 or 39 depending on when they give you the points. 39 since it sounds like they're going to hand out the points on the even levels.

Not to be the turd in the proverbial punchbowl, but the more I read/hear about Cataclysm, the more absolutely convinced I am that it's going to be a godawful trainwreck of epic proportions. This news is just grist for the mill.

The reality of the situation is that Blizzard's designers have never been particularly good at complex game balance, and while it's nice to hear that they've (finally, after five years) realized that every talent tree contains a bunch of cruft ranging from the situationally useful to the downright useless, the historical evidence that Blizzard is competent, even with the assistance of data mining, to distinguish the wheat from the chaff is pretty much nonexistent. These people have repeatedly fumbled talent tree design to the point where only now (again, after five years) do we have something approximating balance and stability. The current situation is explicable as a stuck clock being right twice a day. It strikes me as not only possible but likely that we'll end up losing some crucial talents along with the cruft as Blizzard tries to pare every tree back to 31 points -- and, as a result, we'll all have to endure another five years of fumbling and futzing and fine-tuning.

Furthermore, the idea of locking somebody into a single talent tree until they've put 31 points into it is completely harebrained. It's all well and good to want to make talent selection a character-defining thing, but there's a pretty big difference between, on the one hand, making talent choices character-defining and, on the other, forcing everybody into narrow specializations. This essentially ends any hope that hybrid builds (like, for instance, the elementalist Mage, relying on Frostfire Bolt) will enjoy any sort of renaissance in Cataclysm. Everybody has to fit into pre-ordained little boxes, and if you aspired to try to maximize your character's performance by spending your talent points in a creative way across trees rather than merely straight down one, well, that's just too damn bad. Blizzard doesn't seem to grasp that while some people are perfectly happy to play (for example) a Fury warrior with all that that entails, other people want to play a warrior who can do A, B, and C -- and if overly-restrictive talent allocation mechanics don't permit that, then either (best case) they won't play a warrior, or (worst case) they won't play at all.

Finally, by so drastically throttling back the number of talent points available to characters, Blizzard is -- even assuming that the trees are pared back equally drastically -- significantly increasing the cost of misallocating talent points. I know that one of their aspirations for Cataclysm is to get away from cookie-cutter builds, such that players can spend talent points worrying more about preferred playstyle and less about performance... but come on. No matter how hard Blizzard may try to shovel dirt on cookie-cutter builds, for any given in-game activity there are always going to be a couple of optimal specs. That's just reality. And with fewer total talent points to spread around we'll have that much less flexibility to deviate from whatever the guys at Elitist Jerks have cooked up.

Humbug, I say.

I hear what you are saying, Arindra. Valid points. Trust me, looking for the bad is always a good idea. That said......this DOES look to make the red headed step child specs, like Fury or BM more viable.......though Fury got raiding spotlight for warrior dps in Lich King.....for once......they did it by completely screwing with how the spec traditionally fights.

Cataclysm is being toted as giving WoW back to the average joe. People like Elitist Jerks (Who I have been at war with for years....I think I am STILL banned on their forums after four years because I completely disagree with them 90% of the time) are ONLY good at cookie cutter builds. The give of the average player being able to play how they want and still be viable......unfortunately has the take of the more advanced players dealing with a more simplified and restrictive system to work with.

I still haven't adjusted to the spec changes that came with Lich King. Cata will either help or make it worse. My two highest level chars are BOTH Fury Wars. Kinda ready for a change for raiding ANYWAY.

Whether anyone likes it or not the bulk of Blizzard's income is from casual players. With each expansion they have made very deliberate moves in the direction of simplifying the game and making end-game content more accessible to those casual players.

It's a calculated risk. Even if they piss of all of the hard core players and half of those guys quit the game, there's a good chance that these kinds of moves could end up keeping an equal or greater number of casual players active.

I've been trying for years to get my wife to play WoW. The biggest barrier for her is its complexity. She doesn't like complex games. I reckon there are quite a number of people who would pick up and stick with the game if it were simpler.

I'm not going to pass any judgment on how this might play out at this point. The Holy tree for priests has been pretty broken since 3.0. They pacified me a bit with dual spec because I can run both healing specs and still be nearly as versatile as I once was as a Holy Priest. Now that I'm playing both Priest healing specs I can tell you for sure that Discipline spec just works while Holy still feels "off" a bit. The fact that the Disc tree got revamped in 3.0 and now works better than Holy tells me that they are capable of getting this stuff right when they put the effort in. If they're making a concerted effort to revamp talents so that all of the trees work and they all have a distinct feel and raid utility and they do it as well as they did with the Disc overhaul, it'll be fine. If they don't then we'll all be bitching about it for a long while until they decided to fix whatever they got wrong.

I do, however, find it funny that they're forcing people to spend 31 points in their main spec tree before spending points in other trees and at the same time they're saying they want to get away from cookie cutter specs. Seems like their to one degree or another forcing cookie cutter specs. Everyone will do the same 31 points at first and then the options are somewhat limited in terms of what you can do with the remaining 10 points, unless they removed requirements like "requires 10 points in the Holy Tree" from the "off-spec" trees once you have spent your 31 points in your main spec.

I don't object, per se, to simplifying and streamlining the talent trees. As I said, I'm pleased that Blizzard has acknowledged -- however belatedly -- that many of the trees are bloated with a lot of junk. Pruning that junk would certainly go a long way toward reducing the complexity of the game and making it more accessible to casual players.

I just have very little confidence in Blizzard's ability to do a good job with this. It's one thing to realize that the talent trees are bloated. It's quite another to grasp, on the basis of a broad and deep understanding of how the game actually plays, where that bloat truly lies. And it's still another to be able to cure the bloat without unbalancing the trees or doing violence to the things that give them character, and that people enjoy about them.

I really hope I'm wrong, but I suspect the Cataclysm talent situation is going to look a lot like the Vanilla WoW talent situation: trees that are a mishmash of stuff thrown together without a coherent vision other than "it sounds cool", resulting in crippling balance problems that render certain trees borderline unplayable, and certain character classes underperforming relative to their peers.

agreed, but at the same time I am getting a confidence boost by hearing things like, we have it working, but it just isn't GOOD enough yet. And there have been plenty of those in regards to the talents. They aren't even willing to comment PERIOD on Hunter talents yet. Because they aren't happy with what they have.

Keep in mind that Cata is coming a YEAR later than planned. They had the new content finalized for testing this time LAST year. They spent a year working on the talent system and they are STILL tweeking it. And they will keep screwing with it till it meets their goals. That said, who knows what their goals are and if they are consistant with OUR goals.

I don't think it is a lack of competence where the developers are concerned. I think they have been fighting the marketing people all this time. And finally someone in a well tailored suit told marketing to shut up befor they lose fifty percent of the accounts because casual players make up ninety percent of the game and they keep catering to the ten percent of power gamers. Half of ninety percent leaving the game = death blow. Half of ten percent leaving the game.........hey can you spot me lunch this week? Yeah, the numbers are up to 12 million accounts. Shoot the power gamers and let the fun begin!

I hope.

Eh, we will adapt no matter what. We rock like that.

I think this calls for my favorite term - "cautious optimism."

I look at the changes, and my initial response was positive. There's far too much fluff in there that can be incorporated into the "mastery" portion of the talents. The talents should be more about adding role-defining abilities (mutilate) and bonus effects to existing abilities (blade twisting) than number crunching (precision).

If they came and said that they just nixed all the % increases in each of the trees as talents and just rolled them into the mastery bonuses that you gain when you put x number of talents into a tree, I think most people would applaud them for this.

Playing a class early on is pretty boring. If, at level 10, you make your role decision you get an extra ability that you'd normally have to wait another 10 levels to get (im thinking pyroblast, mind blast, aimed shot, seal of command etc), then that sounds like they've increased the fun portion right there.

We're also forgetting that there's supposed to be another layer of glyphs coming that will hopefully increase the customization that we'll be getting for our classes.

Lets just sit back, relax and see how the beta works out.

Oh, and further in the thread -

Our designers are working through the UI layout and many of the talents right now, figuring out what specialization-defining abilities should be given at level 10, what and where specific talents should be placed, as well as how to balance gaining new talents versus gaining new spells/abilities while leveling. We want to make sure each level still feels very rewarding, even though you're not getting a talent point every time.

I suspect there's a relatively good chance players might see this new system show up within the next couple of patches to the Cataclysm beta realms. We'll definitely be seeking feedback and focused testing at that point to determine how things are playing out with the new system. You might expect to see a lot of tweaking and revisions throughout beta as needed to accomplish the goals we've laid out here.

Once you have 31 points dedicated to your specialization, you'll have 10 points to place wherever you want. Keep in mind, since we're trying to do away with as many 5-point talents as possible, an extra 10 points could yield pretty interesting choices in the other trees.

When it comes to true hybrid specializations though like the Soul Link/Siphon Life warlock build of The Burning Crusade, we feel that such a choice was possible and effective because of talent bloat. It's not really something we intended for. As we're taking each tree back to the drawing board, the goal is to ensure that your specialization doesn't fundamentally feel different than it does now, but we also want to make you want to spend 31 points in your primary tree.

I hate to call BS on a blue name, but for them to claim that pure hybrid specs are just the result of talent bloat, and nothing they ever intended, has a surreal "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" revisionist vibe to it. For just one example, look at the mage Frost and Fire trees: dating as far back as Vanilla, a major part of the evolution of those trees has been in support of a hybrid elementalist build, to the extent that Wrath actually debuted a spell (Frostfire Bolt) specifically geared for that playstyle. During the Wrath beta Blizzard openly stated that its intention with Frostfire Bolt was to make hybrid elementalists viable in endgame raiding, and for a while in early Wrath the hybrid elementalist was the best DPS mage spec in the game.

Now, sure, they're entitled to change their minds, and decide that they don't want to support pure hybrids anymore. But it's a little late for them to be pretending that, while they may in the past have openly supported hybrid builds, they never expected players to actually try to use them.

#2860203 Arindra wrote:

I hate to call BS on a blue name, but for them to claim that pure hybrid specs are just the result of talent bloat, and nothing they ever intended, has a surreal "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" revisionist vibe to it. For just one example, look at the mage Frost and Fire trees: dating as far back as Vanilla, a major part of the evolution of those trees has been in support of a hybrid elementalist build, to the extent that Wrath actually debuted a spell (Frostfire Bolt) specifically geared for that playstyle. During the Wrath beta Blizzard openly stated that its intention with Frostfire Bolt was to make hybrid elementalists viable in endgame raiding, and for a while in early Wrath the hybrid elementalist was the best DPS mage spec in the game.

Now, sure, they're entitled to change their minds, and decide that they don't want to support pure hybrids anymore. But it's a little late for them to be pretending that, while they may in the past have openly supported hybrid builds, they never expected players to actually try to use them.

Actually, Ghost Crawler has LONG wanted to eliminate min/max hybrid builds, there just was no way to without this kind of complete rebuild of the talent system. And Ghost Crawler was in the minority up until recently. GC saying it was never intended.......pretty much valid. Eonyx saying it, pure bullshit. Then you have the in the middle ones like Netheria who have been put into the, it works, this doesn't, shelf it, position. It all comes down to who is talking, really.

I remember GC talking in the TBC beta about removing the mutt builds, but then there was an uproar and Eonyx backpeddling and then.......no more Ghost Crawler talking for the rest of beta. Wrath, they tried to make it viable, and I think it ended up OP and then nerfed. GC is pretty much in charge of the class revamp, and is making a strong stance. I have my issues with SOME of the changes, like not being able to stray from main spec until you max it, but then again......I never have on my wars. I have on rogues and hunters, though. But when all is said and done, it doesn't effect veteran players when respecing their 80's come cata. Drop in the 31 you need in you spec and then put what's left where you need it and move forward. And with so much new in the start up of alts, might as well relearn talent allocation in the process. This is an expansion where this kind of revision is actually viable.

All I know right now is that with the changes that have been announced so far, I'm going to have to completely relearn how to play both of my characters.

#2864435 Cyntaria wrote:

All I know right now is that with the changes that have been announced so far, I'm going to have to completely relearn how to play both of my characters.

This is probably the biggest bummer right here.

This is pretty much why I have shelved my current hunter and am waiting for cata to even play one.

Chaos and Vile will be fine........it isn't like I play them normal to begin with.

I thought the way there were doing it was going to make it so that your rotations stayed basically the same. I guess I am not clearly understanding the situation.