Least favorite 3 talent trees by design?

#0 - July 14, 2009, 10:49 p.m.

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

#38 - July 15, 2009, 6:42 a.m.

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.