REALLY bored by the new talent trees :(

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It's almost as if these were Alpha talents, and that they could go through several iterations before the expansion releases. Perhaps, maybe, a vast majority of changes will comes in something I'd like to call a.... a beta test! Yeah! Where Blizzard and their players get the chance to do things with the game, like try out the talents and encounters!


People need to stop making posts like this, its not clever at all and it just tries to stop discussion. These trees were released to get feedback, then we give feedback and guys like this come in with this ignorance.

I think the post you quoted is much more helpful than the ones that say "The talent trees are 90% done or they wouldn't release them and nothing we say will influence change anyway."

It's probably fair to say that we have focused more on individual talents than builds at this point. We had to remove a lot of talents and slide things around because of the levels at which skills are available has changed, in some cases dramatically. As players start to explore actual builds, we can start adjusting positions of talents on the tree further.

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Because of that how do I give feedback other then "It still needs work and feels imcomplete"?

Empowered Shadow Orbs and Shadowy Apparition are brand new talents and Mind Melt has some different effects. Start with those.

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So those of us who want to give feedback are stuck in this space where saying "The released tree previews are really disappointing." isn't enough feedback apparently, but saying "here is my idea for what you should do" is too much feedback and gets equally dismissed.

So here is my attempt at something in the middle, I stray into design from time to time but I try to just give feedback on what is. In regards to my original post the following are specific things I take issue with (note that anything I ignore I either have no comment on or like, I'm not going to fill this with "Blackjack, nifty idea!" lines):

First off, I think your actual feedback hit the right mark. I try and advise players when giving feedback to imagine that we are making bullets on a list of things to discuss in a class design meeting (because honestly that is often exactly what happens). If I go into a meeting and say "Some players said they were bored by the talent trees," the other designers might ask "What do they mean by that?" and I would have to answer "I don't know." On the other hand, if I go into a meeting with a 20-page list of someone's redesigned talents, we're not going to make a lot of progress either. If I say, just to give a couple of examples, Subtlety rogues are worried that the tree is changing focus, or Combat rogues think they don't have any cool, new mechanics, then that's the kind of thing that can launch a brainstorming session.

Here's a secret about game design: ideas are cheap. Coming up with something clever isn't really the hard part. The hard part is thinking of all the ramifications of your idea, including how it will impact various parts of the game, whether it will be understandable by players, whether it's consistent with the rest of the game design, how difficult it will be to implement and maintain, its propensity for bugs and so on. That's a long way of saying many times we can't use the actual suggestions, but from the suggestions we can tell what problems the player is trying to fix, and then we can decide whether we think the problem is legit and explore ways to address it.

As far as the actual Cataclysm talent trees, they are early. We are exploring some new ideas now but I'd be very surprised if the shipping versions look anything like this. We still want to remove more passive talents and we want to make sure there are more meaningful decisions. Now, sometimes meaningful may mean slightly painful when there are two things you really want and can't afford both.