Blizzard, it's time. Baseline Meditation

#0 - Feb. 10, 2009, 2:32 a.m.

Is it just me or making Divine Spirit trainable is pointless if we still have to spend 13 points in Discipline to get Meditation?

Meditation is a pre-requisite to benefit from spirit and therefore from Divine Spirit. In fact, the actual Discipline tree was designed with this dependency in mind, having Meditation as pre-requisite for Divine Spirit.

It doesn't make sense for me if we get a trainable Divine Spirit, and we don't get a baseline 30% mana regeneration while casting.

I would change the trainable Divine Spirit for a baseline Meditation anytime. Wouldn't you priests?

Extended Clarifications:

One

We are not discussing improved Divine Spirit here. Saying that a priest not speced for Meditation still gets the spell power benefit is not correct cause:
1. We're are discussing here how any priest could benefit from the traineable, base (not improved) version of Divine Spirit which doesn't provide spell power. This is the point of making Divine Spirit trainable, and not talented.
2. Improved Divine Spirit is deeper in the discipline tree than Meditation. Any priest that gets Improved Divine Spirit will already have Meditation. Not every priest that picks Meditation picks Improved Divine Spirit.

Two

I'm not neglecting the fact that spirit still grants you regeneration outside the 5 second rule, but... come on, noone stacks spirit without specing for meditation. Since priests spend the major part of the time inside the 5 second rule during combat, giving them Divine Spirit without Meditation, makes it worthless (ok, not useless as I stated before).

Three

It has much more sense to make Meditation baseline and keep Divine Spirit trainable.
-Meditation is a Discipline talent that doesn't define the discipline tree. Its is just placed in the discipline tree, but it is part of any good Holy, and Shadow build.
-Meditation isn't something that can be shared. It gives no utility to the raid (only for the priest), while Divine Spirit does.
-Divine Spirit is much more spec-defining than Meditation. It is something that defines the Discipline priest, and it has utility.
-The point of making Divine Spirit trainable should be that any priest could fully benefit from it: this wont be true while Meditation remains to be talented.

Four

I'm not saying here that I want both things trainable. I don't. What I believe is that if something is going to be trainable it should be Meditation, not Divine Spirit. Meditation first, then Divine spirit.

Five

Of course i'm consequent and I think that equivalent talents like Resto Druid's Intensity and Arcane Mage's Arcane Meditation should also be trainable.

Ghostcrawler

#65 - Feb. 16, 2009, 8:14 p.m.

If you take all of the good talents and just give them away, then one possible outcome is you are just left with a bunch of mediocre talents and your spec is a lot less meaningful than it is today.

We like players to have options. That is important. But we also like to have some very attractive talents. This second point can be in direct opposition to the first point. We also don't want every talent in the tree to feel mandatory, because players don't have enough points to get them all.

All I am saying is there is no hard and fast rule for designing talents. But you should not conclude that because every priest gets Meditation, that that makes it a badly designed talent.

Ghostcrawler

#249 - Feb. 17, 2009, 10:08 p.m.

Q u o t e:
A very good definition of a bad or poorly designed talent is one that everyone takes or one that nobody takes. It's either too good or too bad.

I don't think Blizzard would agree with that. If nobody ever takes the talent, then yes, there is probably something wrong with it. But I don't know that we would ever want to see say an Arms warrior build that didn't take Mortal Strike. We don't want to make attractive alternatives to Mortal Strike. We pretty much want you to take Mortal Strike. The same is true of Titan's Grip for Fury and Toughness for Protection.

You can come up with examples for classes too. Omen of Clarity is near mandatory for all druids. Ruin is something every PvE warlock wants.

I can understand how logically someone would approach the task of talent design with the goal of making every talent choice optional and equal. But talent tree design turns out to be more complicated than that one simple rule. To consider just a few factors:

-- The cost of a talent often has as much to do with its prereqs or talents in above tiers than in the talent cost itself.
-- The value of a talent has a lot to do with the other talents you choose.
-- We spend a lot of time playing games about what a spec gives up in order to get a particular talent.
-- Bigger numbers (damage or healing) tend to trump utility abilities for PvE and the opposite is true for PvP.
-- The exact same talent may be just fine for one class but overpowered for another.
-- Above all, ask yourself what else you would spend those points on. We don't want to see just a ton of 0 / 0 / 71 specs. We haven't really given Holy or Shadow much reason to sub-spec into each other. Maybe sub-specing into Disc isn't so bad if there is something really juicy there for you.