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  Least favorite 3 talent trees by design? |
07/14/09 02:49:22 PM
Patch 3.1.3
Baloff |
I usually don't like starting
poll-like threads like this because they usually end up turning
into "my class is the worst ever" pity parties. I just want to see
what people believe are the worst talent trees in the game from
a design standpoint. So I'm not talking simply about a talent
tree that sucks because of bad performance, because those can be
fixed simply by adjustments to numbers. I'm talking about bad
talent trees because the concepts behind them are bad/not fun/don't
make sense.
Just a rule for this thread: you can only list one spec of your
main class. I KNOW there's going to be mages, warriors, and shamans
coming in to say all three of their talent trees are the worst in
design. Sorry to say, but if all three of your talent trees are
ugly to you by design, then you're playing the wrong class.
Anyways, my three least favorite talent trees by design:
1. Demonology/Beast Mastery
I group these two together because the concepts behind them are
similar. Both talent trees make sense given the lore of the classes
they belong to. That's about all they have going for them in terms
of design.
Pets in WoW, especially in raid PvE, are not a very interesting
mechanic. You hit the "pet attack" button once in a fight and it
does damage through auto-attack and autocast abilities. Once in a
while, you need to call it back or heal it, but overall, the pet is
a one button-push deal. Both BM and Demonology are talent trees
filled with talents to improve your pet's autoattack DPS, which is
very boring.
The result of these talent trees is that they play like 0/0/0
hunters/warlocks except with a cooldown each, and a pet that hurts
a lot. It's even worse for warlocks, because they have to trade pet
utility for a mostly one dimensional pet. I won't even discuss the
abomination of a talent that Metamorphosis is.
How can they be fixed? I'm not sure. The problem with these talent
trees is that they primarily improve the part of their respective
classes that is the least interesting, in terms of raid/PvP DPS. It
wouldn't work just to have reactional procs from pet autoattacks,
because it's still working off of a boring mechanic. They would
somehow need to make the pet/master interactions stronger while
DPSing.
2. Sublety
The developers can't seem to decide what they want this talent tree
to be. Unfortunately, this talent tree was sort of doomed from the
beginning: a talent tree that spends many of its talents improving
only the first attack you make in a fight isn't going to be very
effective unless that first hit cripples the mob outright. That
simply wouldn't work in raid PvE and makes for frustrating
PvP.
It became the "utility/mobility" talent tree in BC, which
put forth another issue: utility in this form is either worthless
or completely necessary. Not to mention the talent tree focuses on
improving crappy Hemo or the really crappy Backstab. Its 51 point
talent looks impossible to balance. Its PvE damage is based on one
highly specific talent that requires unconventional raid
preparation to be competitive.
How can it be fixed? It would require quite a rework. Blizzard
needs to decide if they want Sub rogues to use daggers or
sword/mace/fist/axes. IMO, Backstab would be given a
cooldown and Hemo would be changed (or a new attack added) to
actually be effective with daggers. Once they have that figured
out, they can work on giving Sub an actual rotation.
3. Retribution
It suffers from one dimensionality. It definitely took the wrong
direction with the "I bring retarded amounts of burst damage!"
philosophy that the developers took with PVP early in WotLK. In
PvE, it's become a mostly whack-a-mole game, with
rotations/priority systems not contributing nearly as much to their
DPS compared to most other specs in the game.
Retribution has always been about having a few completely
ridiculous abilities to prop it up. Once these abilities fail, the
Ret has very little to fall back on. Giving them ridiculous amounts
of damage in WotLK sort of helped them out in the sense that at any
moment, your teammate can die, but that's just frustrating.
How can it be fixed? If Blizzard wants to give Ret a role in PvP,
they need to emphasize on their utility abilities. They also need
to find a way to seperate their PVP and PvE forms of damage output.
Once they do that, they can give them a role in PvP that isn't
insane burst damage. I always thought Retribution should have
gotten a deep talent that made their defensive utility talents much
more usable. Something that greatly reduces the mana cost of
Hands/Cleanse/SS, for example. Art of War went in that direction at
the start of WotLK, but it's been changed a bit.
(Dis)honorable mentions go to:
Fury: 51 point talent changes little about their gameplay but props
up the tree, which has to suck to make up for it. TG screwed up
itemization. Balance requires Fury and other specs
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07/14/09 10:42:22 PM
Patch 3.1.3
Ghostcrawler
<Lead Systems Designer> |
Q u o t e:
Does a Talent tree have a majority of passive percentile increase
talents? 3% to this, 5% to that, 10% over here, 15% over there and
70% chance to prevent here etc.
If Yes, it's a boring tree.
If No, it's a fun tree.
I love talents that DO "stuff". It doesn't necessarily have to be
an actual new spell or clicky, but it should have some actual
gameplay changing effect. Speccing XYZ should mean I alter how I
would play compared to if I didn't spec XYZ.
It's when you dump dozens of points into a tree just for raw
throughput, that's when things get dull. When the only difference
between speccing and not speccing the tree is a mere increase or
decrease in the numbers.
We agree with this to a degree. We have put a lot of passive
increases in for a few reasons, including:
1) It's the main way for hybrids to distinguish themselves
(otherwise Elemental heals as well as Resto).
2) They are popular in a wide variety of situations (other than "Oh
that's a PvP talent.")
3) They are no-brainers, which to be honest, a game as complex as
WoW could stand to have a little of.
4) They are very easy ways to tweak healing, damage or tanking when
a particular spec is underperforming or overpowered.
But while all those are laudable goals, in the end we're not sure
it's worth it. We wonder if the talent trees would all be more
interesting with fewer passives and more interesting talents.
Consider that even the situational talents wouldn't feel so
expensive if they weren't competing against a 5% damage talent.
Cherry picking talents in another tree wouldn't be so scary either
since you wouldn't be sacrificing pure dps etc. to do it.
I'd actually look at the warrior Prot tree again, especially
comparing it to the BC version. There are still several passive
talents, but we combined many of them and got rid of really lame
ones like Defiance (+ threat). We have ambitious plans to get more
talent trees in that vein.
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