The new talent system will fail, miserably.

#1 - Oct. 23, 2011, 10:05 p.m.

I posted this originally on the comments of the talents, and due to the huge support of the comment i decided to move it here to hopefully get the same result and maybe a dev will see it.

To me, this is common sense.

Blizzard, you dont understand.

No one will ever be 'custom' someone will always find which skills to take which will provide the most DPS or healing and everyone will copy that. Dont you understand? There is no solution. There always will be that one path that provides more DPS or Healing or whatever that will become common knowledge and everyone will take it. The only differences will be like there are in the current talent system. If your raid comp is different, you might take one here or leave one there. Otherwise it wont work.

At least with the old system there was a lot of flexibility where you could really chose talents to suit your playstyle. At the end of every spec there was always 2,3, or even 4 extra points which you could put where you want. Now we don't even have that. This will be basically 100 percent cookie cutter. There is no possible mechanic to make people 'special' Always. Always there will be that one path which is slightly better than the others. Why dont they realize this?

EDIT: To those who are saying 'i used to have 2 points to play with, now i have a huge array of skills to chose, therefore its more customization' this isn't the case. Someone will find which skills you have to take to do the most damage. Right now, you have 41 points to play around with. You chose to spend the vast majority of them where other players have found is best. You can do whatever you want, but you will be considered 'fail' if you do. You are more or less forced to take the basic core talents. This will be the same.

Bashiok

Community Manager

#92 - Oct. 24, 2011, 2:02 a.m.

The difference is that right now there's a way you spec your character, and then there's maybe a handful of "Ok now you can do whatever you want with these 4 leftover points." Those points are leftover because they ultimately don't matter. You don't really even need to spend them to do well. It's not a good system, and the few leftover 'choices' don't feel awesome because... well they aren't, they aren't awesome, which is why they're unimportant points.

With the new system we give you everything you really need automatically, and talents are going to be more interesting 'style' and utility choices than a bunch of stat and damage increases. The choice comes, hopefully, from choosing talents that appeal to how you like to play or what you think would be particularly useful for a specific boss, fight, or encounter, and the ability to swap around points freely while out in the world help reinforce that.

I still fully expect for people to devise optimum builds for specific situations, but there's a difference between optimum and no choice at all.

I think once you see the majority of talent choices you'll understand a bit more why these choices aren't really going to be bombarded by optimum build mentality. The choices just don't have a clear optimal because most of the choices don't lead to direct output increases.

If that doesn't seem to be the case then we need to work on it more.